God is love.

Life has turned out pretty good so far. I am excited for school next month, because I still have post-mission weirdness clinging to me, and I see a Utah singles ward as something like immersion therapy. Every time I talk to a girl I feel like apologizing--something like, "I know I'm being weird and awkward, I swear I'm really a very normal, well-adjusted person"--but of course saying that would be even more weird and awkward, and I end up in this angsty teenage feedback loop inside my head until I feel like breathing into a bag or something.

But who am I kidding? It's so very convenient to blame it all on the mission, as if I was once a man of effortless confidence, and it was somehow stolen from me when I spent two years talking to strangers all day. And the trouble certainly isn't rooted in any stubborn vestigial qualms about flirting or contact with the opposite sex, I promise.

Which leads me to wonder how much this talk of "post-mission struggles" hasn't been concocted by guys like me who were pretty awkward to begin with, wanting desperately to believe that their social ineptitude is a recent and temporary phenomenon, whose conclusion is just around the next corner.

I had a kind of epiphany in this vein earlier in the week--that maybe it isn't my mission, maybe it isn't any one or two circumstances, maybe it isn't going to get any better, maybe it's just me--and the thought was so oppressive and incessant that I felt like going back to bed. I hope you've never had this kind of nagging anxiety; it's like having a neurotic, inbred Pomeranian in your head, just yapping itself breathless all morning; and unlike a real Pomeranian, you can't punt it out a window.

But it was mercifully Stake Temple Day, and a few hours in, I had a very different sort of epiphany: I realized that even if I am an incurably neurotic mess, I am still God's incurably neurotic mess, and he intends me to be happy regardless. It occurred to me that my happiness might be contingent on mental and social normalcy in a "natural" world; but Jesus took care of all that in Gethsemane, so I don't have to worry about anything but obedience and repentance. Every problem in life, no matter how trivial, I can take to the Lord and He will either heal it, or help me to endure it.

As I consider the depth of the Spirit's answer to my problem, it's almost funny; it was a fairly trivial problem in retrospect, and as you can tell, I obviously took it unbelievably seriously, to merit this kind of response from the Lord. You have to marvel at a Being who can succor the beggars and widows and lepers--who has seen and felt the sum of human suffering--and who can still talk to me about my little anxieties without even a hint of sarcasm.

--Kevin

I can make this pencil disappear.

(SPOILER)

So everyone's talking about how fantastic The Dark Knight was, and I've got a theory on that. The more I think about the dialogue, the less impressed I am with it, especially Batman and Harvey Dent's lines; Dent's descent into madness seems like a bit of a rush job, and his conclusion that chance is "the only morality in a cruel world" seems to come out of nowhere (which is why he has to make a strained explanation for it when confronting Batman and Lt. Gordon).

Meanwhile, Batman's affected cigarettes-and-diesel rasp worked well enough when it was scaring the piss out of mobsters in Batman Begins, but it seems incongruous when he's growling about high-minded ideals and all the nice people in Gotham who "still believe in good." He went from a brutal, vengeful, uninhibited vigilante to a Boy Scout who happens to cling to some gothic aesthetic sensibilities.

But, like everyone else, I loved this movie, and I think it's because of humanity's vestigial reverence for Christ. Our favorite heroes are the one who demonstrate what He exemplified, who remind us of what He was to us when we were with Him. He stepped down from glory to walk with us, incognito as it were, soliciting no worldly recognition and shunning it when it was offered, and willingly agreed to endure our ridicule and abuse so that He could save us.

Harvey Dent, then, is our symbol of all the righteous men who confront evil and inevitably fall--not merely failing to overcome the evil, but actually being corrupted by it themselves--who are redeemed by Christ. When Commissioner Gordon's son asks why Batman should take the blame for Dent's crimes, the answer is, "Because he can take it." Any man could be a scapegoat, but Batman could endure the penalty and go on saving Gotham even as it hunted him down. Commissioner Gordon is his lonely prophet, like Jeremiah or Mormon; his only liaison with the world who can't know him yet, the light-bearer, the truth-teller.

The Joker, of course, is corruption itself... one of the most apt portrayals of Satan you could find, because he loves to murder, but what he loves more is to tempt; and even at his most sinister and psychotic, he's likable. He effortlessly fabricates "reasons" for his physical and mental disfigurement to humanize himself, and just as casually calls himself a "dog chasing cars" to conceal his motives. In claiming to be utterly directionless, pleading insanity, so to speak, he convinces Dent that he isn't the real enemy (even as he is deliberately corrupting Dent to the bone); but just like the adversary, the Joker is utterly consumed with a compulsion to prove that we're all just as depraved as he is, if you scratch deep enough. "It's just like gravity," he says, "All you need is a little push."

But even watching him do it, with the litany of contradictory lies all laid end-to-end before you, he's still almost sympathetic. His gruesome appearance and wild brutality aren't nearly as chilling as the fact that you laugh at his jokes.

We loved this movie because it's a parable of a true memory, even if that memory is nameless and buried in some. It's the war in Heaven, the Atonement, the Church's flight into the wilderness... it means something to us because it happened to us; and there's still some part of us that remembers it.

--Kevin

A whiff of hope?

Read an article about how some soldiers in Iraq are getting restless because it's too quiet over there, so they want to go to Afghanistan where the "real war" is. It's almost too much to hope, but what if we're almost done over there? Like, actually done, not just leaving because we've had enough. And I met a girl I like, and Batman comes out tomorrow. Life is so good.

So it looks like I'll be going to SLCC after all... and I need thirty credit hours to erase BYU's memory of all my vagarious teenage misdeeds. They tell me that's a whole year. Anybody know a way to make that quicker?

--Kevin

Fireworks is cool.

We didn't have the most iconic, Norman-Rockwell Fourth of July... it was just Mom and I, and neither of us takes very naturally to this sort of thing. I patriotically worked eight hours, and we spent most of the day in the house, watching movies. Mom felt like we "ought to try to mingle, shouldn't we?" so we did attend the parade (the last half hour of it, anyway), bounced around to the different parties we'd been invited to (because everyone knows Dad), made conversation, etc.

All I have ever seen around this town are severely sun-oxidized hippies and lesbians in their fifties; but for some reason the parade drew a crowd of shockingly beautiful women with navel piercings and lower back tattoos, and those big ugly sunglasses that girls like nowadays. It's remarkable how someone can be so attractive and simultaneously so repellent... like how a moth would feel about an electric bug zapper if he was smart enough to see it coming.

The town is small, but they say ten thousand people come to see the fireworks show, and I believe it. The streets were lined with bumper-to-bumper DUI offenses as far as the eye could see; I can only imagine the pandemonium on Route 285 after the show. God bless America.

--Kevin

Give me the modestly-hot one

I'm starting to get a little claustrophobic in these mountains. I miss driving in a landscape that will leave you alone and let you think. Driving in Texas was like an out-of-body experience; you suddenly realize you've been going fifteen minutes and you have no idea how you got where you are. My life in general was like that in Dallas, lost in my head most of the time, and I would wonder vaguely whether all those daydreams were worth the inattention. Or the car accidents.

The natural beauty here is crushingly omnipresent, towering overhead, demanding to be noticed. It huffs at your failure to constantly and adequately appreciate it as you pass by on your prosaic errands. And of course it also demands that commuters drive around it instead of through, so every journey becomes a 25 mph scenic cruise. Texas' beauty was like a tasteful perfume, or that girl in the teen movie who is only "ugly" because she wears glasses and overalls. It was Biddy to Colorado's Estella, Betty to her Veronica. Always available, but never obtrusive.

Or I might just be pissed off because I've got allergies. Yesterday I woke up at 4:45 AM (on accident) and climbed up my mountain one-handed, so I could read my scriptures at the top while the sun came up over Denver. It sounded more majestic and profound in my head than it actually turned out to be... the pages kept blowing around, and the sun was rising directly in my eyes (which was sort of the point, I guess), and I was coated with all kinds of plant spawn from the brambles I'd waded through to get there. Naturally my paranoid and xenophobic immune system began forcibly expelling all the tourists from my mucous membranes, resulting in a rather symbolic emergency flight from all that nature to the nearest Wal-Mart (thirty scenic minutes away) for some Claritin.

When American civil order inevitably collapses and bands of roving paramilitaries sack that Wal-Mart, I will no doubt have to trade my dried venison and gasoline for allergy medication.

--Kevin