Wendell Berry’s book Life is a Miracle is very good: clear and to-the-point. The book basically takes on modern scientific ‘certainty’ and reprimands it for its arrogance and reductivism. Much of the book is a response to the book Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, which is an alleged ‘blueprint’ for reconciling the sciences and the arts or ‘non-sciences’. I’m about 50 pages along now.

The magazine Regeneration Quarterly is one of my top three favorite journals. It has a website at www.regenerator.com on which you can buy subscriptions and read a few of the articles on-line. I found a link on the site to a panel discussion on postmodern Christianity that was sort of interesting. I think there was more out there to be read about the event at which the panel discussion took place, but I didn’t actually get around to finding it.

For some reason this weekend I dreamt that I saw my friend Lark Hutchinson (nee Brown), who I haven’t seen in eight years. The strange thing is that I dreamt that she was nearly eight feet tall. I made the social faux pas of showing visible surprise and then had to apologize and then remembered that I’d heard something about her being inadvertently affected by a strange growth hormone. Silly me, I should have remembered that. All nonsense, of course. For what it’s worth, my own dearest lover is substantially taller than I am.

For the last two months or so I’ve been trying to complete, for once, a computer role-playing game. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, and it’s a very beautiful, detailed and intricate world. There are nearly a hundred various subplots and mini-quests, and it’s quite involving. Problem is that I’ve been putting between 4 and 8 hours a week into the game (usually on weekends and after 10pm) and from what I can tell I may not even be half way through. I was thinking that as soon as either a) my tech-editing work starts coming in or b) Heather goes into labor, I would give it up for good, but being responsible for meals and shopping in addition to my normal work schedule (which involves getting up at 5am) is really making me think it would be silly to continue. Heather wouldn’t mind as much if it was just a series of fantasy novels I was reading, but to have me cloistered in the workroom and to have the repetative and irritating battle cries of my characters punctuate my little battles is a bit too much for her. She’s never looked fondly on computer games, they were a major part of my adolescent and teen development. I learned to type playing Zork and Adventure.

Last Friday night, while I was off running my bi-monthly Dungeons & Dragons campaign, Heather stayed up watching TV. We average about two hours of TV a month, so this was an unusual event. She told me that she flipped channels for a while and that everything was awful. The only semi-decent thing she found was on VH-1 or whatever music channel it is that does those 3-hour documentaries on the lives of rock stars. She was watching this documentary on the life of Dave Mustaine, who I’m sure she’d never heard of before. For those of you that don’t know, he was the former lead singer of Metallica in the early/mid 80’s, before he was kicked out of the band for excessive drinking, drug use, and general destructive excess. He went on to sing for Megadeth for the decade following. I never could stand them. Anyway, she said that he, like many of the 45 year-old metal lords, had ‘gotten his life together’ and was talking about how stupid he’d been. There was a clip of an interview with Alice Cooper who said that when Megadeath had opened for them on one of his tours, they’d been a real mess. Anyway, I got a kick out of the idea of my metal-dissing punkrock grrl mommy watching a documentary on Dave Mustaine. She said he was also really good looking, which is something I’ll have to let slide for another Dave.

Dang, did I just out myself as a D&D playing, metal listening, computer-game playing man-child?