bierkergaard

When I was down in Florida, I had the opportunity to see and hear the band Switchfoot who have one foot in the Christian market and one foot out there in Pop Culture. Surfing Evangelical U.S.A. I first became aware that  Switchfoot was going to be playing in Tampa the same time I was in the vicinity visiting my Madre in Sarasota down the road. The fates smiled upon me. The iPhone app Bandsintown made me aware of the overlap. There was a snag. The tix were free but one had to go to a ticket drop at local establishments in order to score a pair. I was heading in the opposite direction to Key West on the day of the drops so I sent an email to the promotions manager at the sponsoring radio station a week before inquiring how I could score the tickets. No reply. I know it was the holidays but seven days to reply should be enough time. I had started to waffle about going to the show until the day of where I was about 50...

Just returned from the land of sunshine and little lizards. Sarasota, Florida. Little scurrying lizards are everywhere. Being a Pennsylvania boy, something is quite unnatural to me to be sporting shorts and a tee-shirt in late December, At night, no less--as well as seeing lizards skirt about. It feels like a different planet. Florida is as flat as a sizzling on the skillet pancake and the roads are linear and square. One feature of Florida that I do quite enjoy is the ability to run without layers of clothing and gloves in "winter." Here in the Northeast, it takes a double-commitment to run in the winter months. Hard enough to get motivated and that much harder when it is freezing cold.  I almost felt like a nudist streaking about scantily-clad on my 8 mile trek to the beach and back, made two miles longer by my inability to find a public access path to the ocean. Those condos interlock like Lego's and keep the non-1% pieces people out. After one of my exercise ...

"Being a writer is a bit like being in a war sometimes. Careers are strange, with unexpected gains and losses. People are on your side until they're not. The blank page can feel like a battlefield. It's good to have an ally to talk it through with, and Ned Vizzini was the best kind of ally to have in that particular war. You wanted him in your literary trench."  Writer Cecil Castellucci  in a tribute in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Ned Vizzini Ned Vizzini has committed suicide. He had written poignantly about his Depression. I think we do a disservice in some ways to call Depression a mental illness. For Depression is a reasonable response to an unreasonable world. Watch out who we call mad. We all are madder than we think. Perhaps the mentally disturbed only are affected more profoundly by a broken world. The banality of evil. The normalcy of the abnormal. We have to legitimize Depression in order to face it squarely. Usually, people have ...

John 10:22 Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter. I came across this verse as part of my morning devotional. I have made it a practice to go back to the Bible and read the verse mentioned in my morning readings and try to get the context of the verse as one would a star in the sky or a jewel in a crown. I don't know why I found the mention of it being winter to be so poignant. Seeing Jesus in my mind's eye in the winter weather and seeking shelter in Solomon's Porch/Temple has both prosaic and profound layers. We had four snows in the last week so I had been primed for wintery reflections. On the practical level, Jesus in His humanity, is cold. Jerusalem, due to its elevation, experiences colder temperatures than most of Israel. It is truly a "City on a Hill." And it snows. With the profound layer, the Temple was the epicenter of Jewish culture and the ground zero of Jerusalem. About a century and a half before, the Maccabee...

Is. 53:2 He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. I am a Levi's blue jeans man. With the rivets. Always have been, the epitome of coolness. I have gradations in blue jeans for different uses--like a caste of clothes. I have work blue jeans for internal and house use when I am chilling and working, outside blue jeans for public viewing and interaction with fellow humans, and the elite "Skinny" blue jeans when I am attempting to be a Hipster, minus the explosive and expansive facial hair. What beards! I think Jesus would wear blue jeans if He was in the flesh walking around in the world today. He was a blue-collar carpenter, doing His final and best work on the wooden Cross. Nails, wood, work unto redemption, sweat of the brow, and anguish of the soul. Wearing blue jeans to Church on Sunday is an act of Sabbath. For some, wearing blue jeans on Sunday wou...

It is a snow day from school, thus I am watching Nelson Mandela's Memorial Service being beamed from South Africa into my living room through CSPAN. CSPAN is my favorite television station minus the pontificating politicians and panderers, Left, Right, and in-between. Cut them out like a piece of gristle from the steak on the plate. I would can Comcast if it were not for CSPAN. I read the autobiography of Nelson Mandela a couple of summers ago. I have always preferred non-fiction and real stories versus the make-believe. The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings finally broke through my resistance to fiction, for they had much facts in them. I gained a greater appreciation for the man, his story, and his struggle. He was not a perfect man, far from it. Yet, he made many decisions that steered South Africa away from a Zimbabwe-like end where the oppressed became the oppressor like that ugly and violent man Robert Mugabe. European Imperialism and its mo...

I am one who dreams significantly. My psyche texts me videos when something momentous is at play. Basketball, the source of some of my greatest frustrations, tends to be a court for my nocturnal imagination. I have some victories in basketball, but more defeats. I recall when I was working on my Dissertation Proposal, I had a dream that I was playing in a five-on-five basketball game and Kobe Bryant was on my team. He was getting ticked at me because every time I tried to grab the ball it became like a feather and would float away from me. I would try to grab the ball and I just couldn't get a grip on it.  A greased and floating pig. Yes, it was a true revelation. Seemingly, the harder I worked, the more the prospects of completing the Dissertation would bounce and drift away from me. My Kobe advisor essentially demanded more and more when I gave more. Being a hard-worker, this academic catch 22 was really messing with my head. It ...