Paycheck

I'm watching the movie Paycheck right now. It's actually not all that bad. It's about an engineer who builds incredible devices and then gets his memory erased, so that he doesn't know what he's done. On this assignment he ends up building a machine through which people can see the future. Only he sees terrible things, and after his memory is erased he finds himself running from death with only clues and little items that he had the forsight to send himself from when he saw the future. It's kind of cool. But somewhere along the line, they figure out that the future telling machine will actually make the world worse. They see pictures of the future, and they realize that knowledge of the future heightens all the world's dilemmas. Knowledge of war leads to preemptive strikes. Knowledge of economic failure leads to stock market panics. Through knowing the future. the people lose their choices. Take away the mystery, says Ben Affleck, and you take away hope. You take away drive, you take away strength and bring despair. I dont' know that this would be true, but I can imagine. If you knew what kind of failures awaited you, perhaps you wouldn't even try. But where would not trying get you? Absolutely nowhere. But trying and failing, that is not the end. It is merely a step along the path. It reminds me slightly of Minority Report. The attempt to change the future vs. the complacent acceptance of what will be. They're some interesting ideas.

The fountain-head

On the way home from work (We did a store about 2 1/2 hours away, up in Idaho, and we carpooled up there) I was reading Civil Disobedience. It's a small enough book that it fits in my jacket pocket. I was struck by something Thoreau said about truth.

"They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more,and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."

At first reading, this statement merely strikes me as some pluralistic admonition against bigotry. But I had to reread it a couple of times, and when I did, I did not feel any righteous indignation at people who cannot reach further than the standards and strictures that they know. But I experience conviction for myself. God forgive us for the times that we have replaced him with ideas and creeds, when we have bypassed his presence in favor of definitions and strategies. It is so easy to get into the rut of trying to "figure out" this life, that I often get caught up in the how and the what. After finally coming to understand that this life holds no strict formula, no step by step instructions or three point lecture answers, I yet find myself able to slip into the same old mentality. I somehow convince myself that the "answer" is out there, as if there is some unrevealed "Bible" that we just haven't found. But there isn't. There is only this lake or that pool, and they all come from the ultimate source. You can name any number of great pools of wisdom and spiritual riches, be it the Bible or others, and they are all good places to drink. But they are not the source. I know it is all analogous, all figurative, making it difficult to appropriate. But how else can one come to know the mysterious, the otherworldly, the spiritual, if not by analogy, poetry and song.

Anyway, this is all just to say that I wish to set aside my obsession with figuring it out, and I want to "gird up the loins" and strike out to seek the source of those pools I've been gazing into. I hope that makes sense. But I wish for my faith to rest on the power of God himself and not on human arguments.

Another Civil Disobedience qoute I found quite profound/unsettling:

"We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire."

How true is that of our society today? How true is that of me?

Jobs

I'm thinking of picking up another waitering job. My current inventory counting job is too sporadic, and it might be worse once I take off for nighttime rehearsals at the Grand. I need something more regular in the morning or afternoon hours, and I realize that the serving schedule I used to have would fit in perfectly with my time frames, and it would still be fairly flexible. I have been trying to avoid going back to that, but it seems like it might be necessary. And now that I'm cast in a play and I've finished my second draft to my novel, I feel like I'm still pursuing my dreams and making them a priority. I just need better money. It's not like the pay is terrible, but the hours are bad, and I won't even be able to do many of the ones that I do now. The thing with serving jobs here is that they don't pay minimum wage. It's one of those states that pays less than that because you're making tips. with means I won't be making five or six bucks an hour. It would be more like two to four. So I wouldn't be making as much as I was in Minnesota, where minimum wage went up a few years ago to 6.15, and servers were entitled to it. But anyway, I think it would still be better than what I'm doing. Especially if I worked a lot. We'll see.

I started working on my sequel some more. I started it a while ago. But the other night I was really fleshing out what was going to happen to whom and where and how, and I was coming up with a whole bunch of ideas and it was really fun. I really hope I can get my first one published, and I hope it sells well enough that they'll want another one from me. Creating the story is exciting.