. . .

I kind of feel like shit today. I woke up with a headache and have felt just kind of 'crunchy' all day. A little depressed.

I'm on Facebook now. It's a mixed bag and I've thought about just quitting after only a couple of weeks. I got my mom hooked and have made contact with a couple of old friends through the service. The one problem is that that connection comes with a price: the past.

I don't have a bad past. There are no horrors or terrible regrets. It's mostly the looming judgment that I fear. You see, until I was 19 I was part of a fundamentalist Christian church. I'm a pagan now. So every time that I sign in to FB I have this fear that someone from my past is going to 'friend' me, and then I'm faced with the choice of either saying 'no' and offending people that I bear no ill will to, or I say 'yes' and have to explain myself to people that are convinced that I'm going to hell. I'm tired of that. I have had to defend my spiritual path to my parents for the last 20 years and I'm tired.

Well, it happened last night. My best church friend from nearly 30 years sent me a friend request. I looked at his profile and found that he graduated from seminary and is an associate pastor. goody. I wrote him and explained my dilemma. I said that as long as he didn't bring up religion, I would add him.

He surprised me by saying it wasn't his place to judge me and that he would honor my conditions. It was a relief.

I still feel like shit.

Friends Near and Far

I won't bother with the "I'm back" entry.


I've recently made contact with a couple of friends. Contact. it's a funny word. Actually, more vague then funny. For one friend it means that I have recently been in communication after a long period of non-communication. Not a big deal, really. We were best friends in high school, lost contact, re-established contact, lost contact, and recently found each other on Facebook. I don't really think we will do much more than give each other brief descriptions of what's been going on in our lives, and probably lose contact again.

With another friend it's different. We have been forum pals for a while now and have kind of skimmed the surface of our deeper states of emotional reality now and then. Recently, an offer was made to establish an email correspondence for the purpose of venting our internal frustrations and the things that we didn't want to have on a public forum. I think we have made a kind of contact that goes into the realm of connection: something a bit deeper than just touching base.

I don't have a lot of friends. I have A LOT of acquaintances, school chums, and people I talk to regularly. Apart from my wife, my best friend, I have no friends in the small town in which I live. My nearest school chum is 75 miles away. My nearest friend is over a thousand miles away and we connect through keyboards and wires.

There is something here, some deeper concept that I'm trying to explore, but I can't quite make it appear on the page.

Maybe later.