When I first started this blog the posts came out of me in a long stream. All I had to do was turn the faucet and let them pour out. But in the past few days the essays have been getting tangled, all my ideas getting wrapped around one another. Although I’m not fully satisfied with it, this version of “off the grid” is the best thing I could mangle out of all the scraps clattering around my head. “tonari na no ni (but we’re neighbors...)” came fully formed out of my unconscious one night as I stood on the back stairs of my apartment building watching the apartment lights flicker on and off inside. Basically I've straitjacketed myself to only writing these "serious essays", and anything that doesn't quite work out stays a scrambled mess of half finished paragraphs on my laptop until I can bang out a satisfactory version.
Someone (Dad?) said they really liked my post last week about cults in Japan. Which is kind of funny, because I almost didn’t post it, and still have very mixed feelings about it. It didn’t really convey my essential feelings on faith and religious conviction, which is that they are flexible and permeable enough to justify just about anything, evil or good. I would have liked to include a little bit on Toyohiko Kagawa, the Christian speaker, activist and philosopher who practically addressed unemployment and poverty in 1920’s Japan by establishing a massive network of food and work cooperatives. He even went on several lecture tours around the US in the 1930’s and was welcomed enthusiastically by progressive Christians across the country. That’s pretty cool, huh?
One cool thing about blogger is that you can travel in time and date your posts for the past, the future, whenever. I have decided to take full advantage of this and date posts by the time they were basically finished, not when they were posted. So don't call me a liar when you see posts zooming around like Marty McFly.
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