Evil-o-ween? Whatever.

At least twice this week someone's Facebook status has raised the spectre of the true origins of the day we call Hall-o-ween, and whether human sacrifice was involved. Here are my thoughts.

I've heard about Hall-o-week starting out as a pagan holiday with human sacrifices, as well as the evil origins of trick or treat, for years. I've heard all sorts of other stuff, with various levels of contradiction. I don't know who to believe, and I frankly don't care. (Gasp!)

I don't care, in terms of what happens today, what it meant to people thousands of years ago. I don't care about the origins of trick or treat. I don't care about the origins of costumes.

I have to admit, I wouldn't mind knowing, because I like knowing things. I like understanding.. But (a) I don't really trust most people writing for the public to really know and be honest, because it's so polarized and (b) it wouldn't impact my view of it today. I expect that somewhere there's historically accurate, unbiased research or records. But that's not what gets bandied about.

I quit worrying about whether the rapture will occur as described in Revelation, and whether it's pre, mid, post, or trans-trib. I get to be with God forever and that's good enough! I quit worrying whether "once saved always saved" is correct. What matters is, "Are you right with God? If so, yay! If not, why not! Get right!" If I don't worry about these "weighty, theological matters", the "true history" behind knocking on doors in a costume asking for a treat isn't going to make me break a sweat.

"But Miles! It's a threat! Give us a treat or we'll play a dirty trick!" Um, no. Sorry. Again, regardless of the origins, this isn't what most people are out doing. You could make a much better case against it based on fostering an entitlement mentality, but that doesn't seem to be most peoples' issue with it.

Just as going to Church doesn't make one a Christian, dressing up and going door to door asking for treats, or handing out treats at your house, doesn't make one a Druid, Satanist, or backslider. Even assuming Anton Lavey was correct in calling Hall'o'ween was the high, unholy day of the year for Satanists. (I'm sure it was for his branch, since he declared himself "high priest.)

Then there's the idea that there are still all sorts of human sacrifices by Satanists today. I don't buy it. And I say that as someone who was, for a while, a Satanist. The devil's biggest weapons are lies, fear and confusion. He's a loser., and we too often credit him with far more power than he has-- thus giving him the power we fear. My God is infinitely bigger than this pathetic, would-be usurper. Would he love to have lots of human sacrifices? Sure. But-- at least in the USA-- I don't know of any real evidence of this.

Let me clarify. There are plenty of human sacrifices. But they're not made directly to Satan, and if they occur on October 31 at night, it's only because that's when they happened to happen. These sacrifices are to subtler, everyday gods such as Greed, Power, and Hatred. You can find these human sacrifices everywhere-- on the MX/US border, in the inner city, in houses of prostitution, in semi trailers with corpses in the desert, on the battlefield,and in children crying, terrified someone they once trusted will come into their bedroom again. These bother me infinitely more than questions around Hall-o-ween.

If they bother you, don't celebrate it! Turn off your porch light. Go to a church having a Reformation Day or All Saints Eve service. Sacrifice a pumpkin and bake a pie or three. Fill up your tub with hot water, get the beverage of your choice, and read a book.

Or, leave the light on, give out treats, along with words from God and offer prayer. You never know. God can use anything, even modernized, costumed, possible pagan holidays for His good, and the good of those who love Him, and the good of those who need to know His love.

Whatever works for you is fine by me. But don't expect me to get too worked up over it; I'd rather take Jesus's approach, and just love on people.

Sky Dance

An eternal chase in slow motion,
Or perhaps a game of tag.,,
Or, as with other denizens of the sky, a mating dance.

Who can tell? For we can only guess their ages.
Today she is ahead; another day he will be.
Some days they are close enough to kiss, to wrap in a lover's embrace,
other days so far apart we see only one at a time.

But they race joyously, content and unconcerned about "winning" or "losing".
When they draw close, she seems lost in his glory;
Apart she may hide or dominate the view according to her whim.

This morning she races several hours ahead.
Smiling serenely down from the lightening sky
As he prepares to peek over the horizon,
Moon and Sun locked in an eternal, blissful race.

Across the sky, stars run and hide
As Lord Jupiter refuses to wane, ruling an empty, western sky.

Rough Night in Jericho

Out of nowhere, there was this horrific, loud, deafening blast. It was like a few hundred rabid elephants in heat being tortured, like every last song with tubas being played at once. By the time I struggled up from the depths of sleep and staggered out into the yard, most of my city was in flames. The walls had collapsed. Thousands who lived in or near them must be dead. The invading hordes seemed intent on destroying us to the last man.

I got off a few short bursts, wounding a few of the infidels. Then my AK jammed. Before I could free it mortar fire hit all around me, and I had to eat dirt. Flames were springing up everywhere.

Fire behind me, to my left, and to my right. No idea where my regiment is. I stand alone with a jammed AK-47 in my Batman boxers to defend a few women and a goat from the invaders.

Twelve of them come at me. Judging by their colors, there's one from each division. Great. They'll all be trying to outdo one another. Mightiest man of God and all that.

I pull the pin on my last grenade, count, and throw it. They dive, I dive, we all dive for cover. Nothing happens. One of them laughs as they get up. He picks up the dud grenade and heaves it into a nearby burning comm shack, where it explodes, knocking us all back down.

Nobody is hurt by the blast, but the women are screaming behind me as the invaders approach, confidently. Smugly, even. The Kalashnikov is still jammed. Despite all the kids and infidels I've sent to Baal, it looks like he's deserted me now.

The goat butts me from behind and breaks for freedom. As it runs into the enemy ahead, one of them tosses an empty magazine at it. The tall guy in Benjamin's Division throws a satchel charge around the distracted goat's neck and swats it off in the direction of what's left of Abdul's Terrorist Camp.

One of the women, a joy girl I recognize, is screaming something about this all being Rahab's fault. I don't know what she means and I don't have time to worry about it-- the enemy is closing fast. The guy wearing the colors of Dan's Division is grinning like a thief.

I throw down my rifle, reaching for my pistol. I realize my belt, like my uniform, was in the room burning so brightly off to my right. I throw up my hands, but the grin just gets bigger and the Uzi comes up. I suspect they remember my face from TV a few years back after we torched that hospital in Tel Aviv. I have a sinking feeling surrender is not an option...

---

The first version of this wandered into cyberspace in 1989. Inspired by Dreams So Real's song of the same name. it drew from the (hopefully obvious) Biblical references and the tension in the Middle East, especially between Israel and Palestine. While there were terrorist events in 1989, to the best of my knowledge nobody torched a hospital in Tel Aviv. This is NOT a political statement of any sort. It's simply an ancient story in a modern setting, told from a different vantage point.

Copyright 1989, 1994, 2011 Miles O'Neal, Round Rock, TX. All rights reserved. Please contact author regarding republication or distribution.

Man vs Muse

The Tropics of Hutto

I just bought my third Tropical Blend sports coat; they're made from a mix of fibers-- hemp, sugar cane, those vines Tarzan swings from and whatever kind of straw goes into Panama hats.
Most of my clothes are edible in a pinch and some of them are rather tasty. As a Boy Scout and a geek, I try to be prepared for everything. They laughed at me for my (admittedly inedible) asbestos and lead underpants until flaming nuclear waste from the Russian space station landed here in Hutto. Then they just screamed in agony as I carried them to safety.

---

People ask me (as they ask most creative people, but especially those of us they see as more "out there") where I come up with my ideas and stories. My answer often amuses, befuddles or disappoints them. "Everywhere." Yes, it's that simple. I live life, dance, run, swim, mosey, race, float through it, dwell in it, taste it, hear it, see it, smell it, feel it.

It's the difference between driving with your windows up in perfectly climate controlled comfort, noticing nothing outside your Volvo but what's necessary to get you to your destination in your pre-determined time frame, and riding along with the top down in your Miata, tasting the wind, sunshine on your face, hearing the frogs in the stream beside the road, smelling the brook beside the road. In one, you simply do the minimum necessary, arrive at a destination, having experienced and perceived nothing, learned nothing, enjoyed nothing. In the latter, you experienced every glorious second of your trip; it becomes a part of you, you know your world more intimately. (This isn't to say you can't have fun or experience life with the windows up. Don't read more into what I said than I meant, but feel free to be inspired to write a story, paint a picture, sing a song, make a movie about something awesome happening in a Volvo with the windows up!)

Another major contributor is free associating. Despite my geek side, which loves to understand and classify, I also love to let my imagination go wild, with random associations leading me places nobody else thought to go. While this means I occasionally say things that garner odd looks, or even get me in trouble, it also means I can write things nobody else has written.

The last thing I want to mention now is simply that I write. I'm always writing, even if it's just in my head. On the one hand, that doesn't count since there's no "permanent" copy of it. On the other hand, it's good practice. The trick is to put the words onto a physical medium whenever possible, but to still let your mind flow all the time. And I write a lot on paper and the computer.

I always thought constraints on my writing were bad. They can be, but on the other hand, the discipline can bring out things you never had in you. Timed exercises ("write for five minutes and stop, even if it's mid-sentence") and length exercises (a page, under 100 words, exactly 100 words) are things I find not only useful, but to my surprise, a lot of fun. One of the results of doing a variety of these is that you quit worrying about length (unless required for an article or something) when you sit down just to write, or when something suddenly pours out.

The piece with which I opened this blog is a perfect example of all of this. Someone posted something about a "tropical blend sports coat" on Facebook. I thought, "What the heck does that even mean?" I immediately answered that question with some tropical fibers (Free Association), which led to the idea of edible coats (more FA), which reminded me of asbestos underwear (discussed long before Dilbert came out, more FA), and so on. Because I typed this all onto Facebook as I thought of it (write it down!) I had a copy. I squirreled that way in my ideas folder on the computer. Today I ran across it, tweaked it, realized it was close to 100 words, and fertilized, watered and pruned it til it was exactly 100 words.

For informational purposes, this blog is roughly 850 words. But I checked simply from curiosity. I don't really care.


We speak of The Muse, Inspiration, and related names as if some elder goddess walked among us. We say she comes and goes, conveying brilliance or shutting off the flow of words (music, images, whatever) at her will or whim. Frankly, I don't believe it-- whether we speak of a Person or Force. Rather, we either learn to live a life inspired by what's around us, in us, flowing out of us, or we don't.

I do believe in a God who inspires us, and at times even shuts things down. But we're made in God's image, meant to create, If we give ourselves to that, trust God, trust ourselves, then create we will.

The choice is ours.

Thanks to Sally Hanan for re-introducing me to timed exercises and length exercises. I'd forgotten both how much fun and how useful those are.

British Haiku

A friend of ours, Traci Vanderbush, commented today about watching her son drive off to work and how weird it felt. Suddenly it seemed they'd gotten there all too quickly. Britain (her son) seems to be moving toward a career as a stage magician. Here's my attempt to ensconce the moment in haiku.

    The car disappears
Like a teenage magic trick
   Speeding at my heart

(I really like this definition of ensconce from dictionary.com: "to settle securely or snugly". It's how I think of myself settling down to read, and fits beautifully with what I was trying to do here. I love our language!)

Facebook: Specific Beefs

Dear Facebook,

I tend to rant and complain when you change things so I feel it's only fair to tell you specifically what's wrong. It's not like we have a relationship (you are, after all, either a corporation or a web app, depending on how I'm dealing with you at the moment), but at least I can clear the air.

My biggest beef? I do not want you (or anyone else) doing my thinking for me! I pick my clothes out in the morning, I drive myself to work in MoPac traffic, I function well in a high tech environment. I am confident I can decide when I want to update what appears on my web page.

The two biggest components of this are:

1) Don't select what you think I want to see. Let me decide.
2) Don't take away my choices.

As it turns out, these interact quite a bit in what you have done with your user interface. For instance, until recently I had the option of selecting "top stories" (you do my thinking for me), or status updates, or photo updates, or links, or various other things. You had previously made that easier to select, but at least most of the options I cared about were still there somewhere prior to the last overhaul. Now, I have them on my phone, but not on my computer.

99% of the time, I just want to see status updates. NEARLY ALL OF THEM. When there are exceptions, I can hide the posts or even hide the individuals for a while if they were being annoying. At least, I used to be able to do this. Now I'm not so sure. I can either hide individual posts, or I can "Unsubscribe from posts by [someone]". What does that last part even mean? Is it different from hiding them? Hiding them made sense without having to go look up your definition. You took something simple and made it complex. Bad move.

Don't decide when I want things to move. I will decide that by clicking on "more" or "older posts" or whatever you choose to call it this week. It really annoys me to be trying to read something, and suddenly it jerks away. Or my web browser freezes while God alone knows (because I doubt even you know) what your javascript, PHP and CSS/HTML is doing to decide how to update my screen. It's even worse when it does this WHILE I AM TRYING TO COMMENT. I spent years in software development and user interface design and implementation; this is as broken as it gets. Even Microsoft is smarter than this. (Did I just say that? Yes, I did.)

The same thing applies to the scrolling news feed. If I wanted a scrolling news feed I'd have asked for one. Not all of us have Blue Gene systems, or multiple 6 core i7 based computers. We want less animation and background processing, thank you.

In with all of this is something I especially loathe, the tendency to update the page every time it's uncovered or exposed in some fashion. I can decide for myself when I want to update, remember? If you really, really think that is absolutely a necessity, then please give me some control. Preferably an opt out, but at least a minimum update frequency.

Then there are the lists I never created, that you decided I must have wanted but was too stupid or lazy to create. I already have groups. I am quite capable of putting people in the groups I want them in. I don't need you to invent them for me. In the process of creating the lists, you (yet again) took away screen real estate.

Speaking of groups, that's beef #3.

3) Don't destroy what I've done!

You not only decided to turn group pages into something completely different, you decided that some groups would be archived instead. The lucky ones who got converted instead of archived would still lose all their members unless you jump through hoops. What screwed up government program inspired this?

4) Do not require my entire screen (or even more than some people have).

Your default layout wastes a lot of screen space. Please use proportional widths, not large fixed widths based on today's sales figures for flat panels. Lots of folk are still happily using screens that are several years old, far narrower than today's state of the art standard.

Merge this with the whole concept of choices, and you could make life sooo much better for your users. Feel free to keep coming up with cool widgets. But let the users pick and choose which widgets they want, and (within reason) where they go. While they don't do it perfectly, blogspot at least gets the concept, and they really do a rather good job with it (other than some width restrictions).

5) Enough with the popups and overlays!

Just use the tab or window that's already in use! And links should go to another page, period; no javascript or other weirdness is necessary. That way I, the user, can decide whether I want things in the same window/tab or another one. Now, when I middle click to open a birthday in another tab, I get a massive fail because you wanted a left click to create a popup. But the way I do it is how every other thing I use on the web works. Get over yourself. Your mission is not to redefine how people mouse click. (I know, your mission is to sell ads. But the social network is how you accomplish that, so please at least pretend it's the mission!)

There's more, but these are my big beefs at the moment.

Oh, wait. There's one more.

6) Don't make it so difficult to communicate with you.

It's almost impossible. This is true whether it's UI feedback, a technical problem, or trying to find out why one is locked out for some mysterious, secret concept of misbehavior. I'd have been happy to discuss this privately. But since you not only insist on breaking things but on making it nearly impossible to speak directly with you, I'll just tell the world.

Have a great day, Seriously. But please, help your users have one, too.