I’ve dabbled in lots of charitable efforts. Food banks, orphanages, meals on wheels, mission trips, non-profit thrift stores, “pay-what-you-can” cafes, Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc. And I don’t say this to paint myself with a saintly brush- Most of these I’ve done exactly once, and you’ve probably done more than me.

But Help Portrait is different than all of these, and I’ve been mulling for weeks trying to find the words to express why.

I think it’s because it forced me to see people.

There never really was a homeless problem in Dallas. There were a few here or there, but laws required police to pick them up and cart them away. Everything has to look perfect in Dallas, don’t you know. In Austin they’re everywhere. I think that was the first place I noticed them. But they’re everywhere in Denver too. It was here that I learned to ignore them. And that’s the whole story.

If you make eye contact, you’re responsible. You have acknowledged that they are there, that they are human, that you are human, that you are in a nice warm car, that they are out on the street, that you are clean and well fed, and they are dirty and probably hungry, and you have to make a decision as to how you are going to bring justice to that unspeakably huge gap.

Because I had the latitude to do so back in Texas, I developed a belief that the homeless were there by some unknown fault of their own. They had trusted obviously horrible people and should have known better. They had drunk away all their money. They had become drug addicts and couldn’t keep a job because they were high all the time. Without seeing the reality of their humanity, it’s easy to imagine problems that take the responsibility off your shoulders.

In Denver, you learn to not read signs, not notice men and women standing inches from your car. Eyes forward, don’t let them see you see them. But you know they are there. And they know you know. And you both play a tableau, the moral of which portrays you as someone who isn’t required to notice.

But they are people. You should notice.

I don’t think I fully understood this until a year ago, when I first volunteered for Help Portrait. It just sounded like a good idea to me. Taking pictures of the less fortunate? Spiffy.

But through the course of the day, I found myself tearing up multiple times. Not because there were sob stories that were being shared, or because these so-called “lower class” people were muttering “God bless you” as they shuffled off with a plate of food. It was because these people were being seen to a degree that they were not used to, and they were blooming under the light of simple gazes. They were seen, and they were seen as people, and they were worthy of being captured on film to be shown to whoever for eternity. That made for incredibly beautiful pictures, and tangible equality.

Everywhere you looked there were smiles and flash bulbs. Everything sounded of laughter and shutters, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever had the privilege to be part of.

If you have any ability whatsoever to do so, I can’t push you hard enough to join in with your local Help Portrait group. Go here to see if there’s a group in your area. Most places have 2 hour shifts, so you don’t even have to commit your whole day. If you’re in Denver, come to Our Savior’s Lutheran Church on 9th. Set-up starts at 8:30, with plans to be out by 6.

If you can’t or choose not to go to Help Portrait, I beg you to at least try to take notice of those who you’ve been avoiding. No matter who they are. And let me know what you see.

Hello Occupiers.

You make me happy. You really do. I love your passion, I love your growing numbers. I even kinda like your incessant honking and refusal to wear deodorant. Most of all I love that you are doing SOMETHING. Action in democracy is vital, and boy howdy. You are acting.

But seriously. Let’s sit a minute and take a look at what is going down. You’re against the inequality in America, yeah? How 1% have it all and the rest of us poor shmucks are the remaining 99% who have to work for whatever levels of success we have? You want the rich to be taxed, and corporations to be held to the same levels of financial responsibility as the rest of us. I get that. In part I strongly agree with you.

But if that is what you want to change, this is not the way to do it.

The more I hear from, and read about, and speak to you, the more I’m convinced that you are very much like a group of peasants from the middle ages who are declaring a castle to be under siege by grouping in the middle of said castle. Commerce is swirling around you and you are stopping nothing.

Try this:

Step 1: Take your 99%, and boycott a single company that you feel most exemplifies the oppressive policies that you despise. Make a short but plain list of demands (health care for their workers, a percentage of their profits given back to communities and/or charities, a commitment to hire X number of fresh college graduates or those who have been unemployed by X date, whatever you feel would be most beneficial). Boycott their stores, shame their biggest buyers, inflict a financial hurt on the machine.

Step 2: Once your demands have been met, move on to a different company and start a new boycott. But not until you have compliance from Company #1. Don’t spin your wheels.

Step 3: Educate yourself regarding the mentalities of your current politicians, and the policies of your Federal, State and Local governments. Vote your butts off.

Money and votes are what will affect change. Chants and signs will not. You are not using your voice, you are making a statement. Statements are easily ignorable. Ask the fashion industry.

But you’re on the right track, I think. You have people standing up, and that is a very big and exciting thing. Now get them moving in the right direction and you will change the world.

Mel.

P.S. Comparing yourselves to people in Egypt or Libya or the like is just insulting. Please stop that.

I got deliciously wound-up at my Foreign Policy class last night. And, since I had a long lunch, I started writing a replacement speech that I wish would have been delivered instead of Bush’s “Hear you” speech. I kinda like how it came out.

My Fellow Americans.

Like you, I stand here today, with a wealth of very strong emotions. I am primarily outraged that so many innocent lives were taken on our own soil. I am grieving for and with the families of those who lost loved ones in these senseless actions. I worry about what this means for the future of our world.

But with these emotions I am also exceedingly proud. Proud of the men and women who have worked around the clock to bring order to the chaos of Ground Zero here in New York, proud of the passengers of Flight 93, who took it upon themselves to bring swift action to bear in the face of evil deeds, and proud of the American people, who have put aside all differences to support each other in so many numerous and beautiful ways.

It is human nature to want to strike back immediately, decisively, and make such a statement that any rational creature would not think about
perpetrating an act like this against any nation ever again.

If the acts on 9/11 had been the organized act of a sovereign nation, I would not be standing here before you today. I would be in a war room, tracking the movement of our troops as they brought swift justice to our aggressors.

It pains me greatly that we are not afforded that option today. There cannot be clean military retaliation, because we were not subjected to a clean military act. Those who attacked us have no flag. They have no specific geographic location.

We were attacked by an idea. An idea that Americans and those who ascribe to our ideals are deserving of nothing but death. The people who hold that idea as truth are cunning, disperse themselves amongst the innocents of both foreign and domestic lands, and do not care if they or those around them die, save to use deaths as fuel for the fires of their hatred. They are most certainly expecting us to use our esteemed military to come down upon them even now.

As much as our hurt would drive us to retaliate, I would like to assert that we, as Americans, are better than that.

It is not my intention or desire to start a war where hundreds of thousands of people, with an unknown ratio of guilty to innocent, will die by our guns, or by our bombs. Such actions should haunt us more than yesterday’s actions ever could.

That is not to say that I will move forward without decisive action. We will use guns. We will use guns to protect our borders, we will increase the numbers and the quality of our intelligence units, and perhaps most importantly we will create a panel of experts, in both military and civilian fields to find a way to wage war against this idea that seeks so desperately to do us harm.

We will not, I repeat, WILL NOT, lay down our identity in response to the actions of a handful of evil men. We will promote justice. We will keep our freedoms no matter what. We will maintain the moral compass that has served us so well during the course of our statehood.

And more than that, we will not be afraid. For we too, are an idea. We are an idea that all men are created equal, and that when equal men stand together, nothing can tear them down. It is an idea so powerful, that those who do not understand will fight against it.

But our idea cannot be marked by theirs. It is too pure, too real, too inspiring to even be touched by any level of hate.

And so, fellow Americans, I look forward to standing together with you. I look forward to a reality where evil deeds are not met with emotional response, but with the power that comes from clear and forward thought. For that is who we are, and that is what we will do.

We will be stronger because of this.

Thank you.

A good friend recently told me to write so I would know what’s in my heart.

I don’t really want to know what is in my heart. When in I get into these places I become convinced that I am as rotten and vile as they come. I believe it more than I believe that this stuff in my lungs is air, and that air keeps me alive. I am broken, I am a blight upon the world.

But I’ve been mind-writing just the same, because I don’t know what else to do.

And it has helped. I wrote about hope, I wrote about a well crafted meal, I wrote about passion. Because as much as this season sucks, and as much as it’s my fault, it is driven by the same passion that makes me care about the state of the world around me. It’s the same passion that makes me fight over and over again for what I believe. The same heart that explodes when I’m at the top of a mountain is the same one that implodes when I’m stuck in a valley. Gotta take the bad with the good. I am passionate, ergo, my highs are excruciatingly beautiful, and my lows are soul-crushing. So be it.

Hopefully I’ll get more mileage out of this season of shit than just “Mel is passionate,” but it’s enough for now.

And my dog Bro just planted his cold, wet nose into my elbow and wagged his tail like mad. I guess that counts for something too.

I had a wonderful time with friends today. Took my raft out on Clear Creek and whooped and hollered and got a frickin’ nasty scrape from my knee to my ankle. There is something that is entirely invigorating about getting wounded doing what you love. But that’s an issue for another time.

After we were back tucked into Dane and Ben’s apartment, telling stories through the steam of our hot cocoas (yes, cocoa. It gets cold in Colorado when the sun hides), I got a really unjust text. It left me feeling alone, untrusted, angry, abused. The clouds outside came through the windows and flooded into my mind and my spirit.

A few hours later I was able to sit in a little nook of my church, in a smelly little basement of an old baptist sanctuary. God was able to remind me of who He is. People are jerks. He is not. People abandon. He does not. People love with limits. His affection pours out boundlessly.

It started raining right before we took communion. The smell of it washed through the stink of the basement and everything felt fresh again. The clouds felt worth it.

Drought, clouds, rain, green things. Repeat.

There’s a kiddo staying with us. His name is Alex. He is two. Just starting to form sentences.

I was playing with him and his mom comes up. “Did you make a new best friend?” she asked.

“This is Mel.” he said. Only it was in two-year-old-ese so it was more like “This Mayol.”

Crazy how kids can set the world right just by knowing your name. I exist, and what’s more, Alex knows my name and likes to play with me. Whoa.

Yesterday I was asked if faith comes easy to me. The word “no” came flying out of my mouth almost before the question was fully voiced. Faith does not come easy for me. Not at all. My stupid brain screams for logic and reason in all things, and the idea of a good, all-present and giving God is often completely opposed to situations I’m faced with. Faith does not make sense.

Somewhere between “occasionally” and “frequently” I go to church, pray, worship purely as an act of will, pushing through the dead things in search of things green and living. I go in hope that direction and worth and peace and the power to get the world undamned will come seeping up through the floorboards and from the words that are spoken and everyone there will splash around in it until we are soaked to the bone and radiant, entranced with and hungry for God, and driven to take Him to anyone else who hungers. Anything less than that feels like a thin Christianity.

But that hasn’t happened in a very, very long time, and I don’t know why. It’s hard to keep holding out for something expecting something cool to drink when it feels like you’re only ever offered dust.

Agnosticism whispers in my ear. When I’m worn down, stressed and frustrated, the only logical options available to me are “God is good” or “nothing is good.” I’m not so blind that I can believe that nothing is good, ergo, God must be good. I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. Over and over again. And that keeps me from giving up and jumping ship. Somewhere deep down I am tied to the mast. In that regard, faith is easy.

We all have to work with what we’re given, no? Water or dust, easy or hard, living or dead, we are built up and broken down, and every day we choose what we believe. Does faith come easy for you?

i will not be everyone’s cup of tea.

some people will annoy me greatly.

god help me be gracious to all,

steward well those relationships i have been granted,

and till under the ones that die so better things can grow.

I lost my words yesterday.

There was a chemical imbalance/vasoconstricition/shit storm in my brain, and while words could go in, they could not come out. There were letters available, and I had ideas to convey, but Part A would not form Part B to create language.

It was creepy as the idea of Perry for President.

But today I’ve been reveling in words. Writing and re-writing, admiring a well-turned phrase, and getting slightly annoyed at people who didn’t choose their words well. Words aren’t a right, they’re a luxury.

In a few days I’m going to cut ties with the world and head out into the pseudo-wilderness with a notebook and pencil and nothing electronic. Should be very healthy.

Back in the day, I wrote cause I thought I was a writer. Reality: I could spell.

Nowadays I only write when I feel poetic. Immolation makes me feel poetic. Pithy status updates to fill the gaps and remain in the consciousness.

Other people write. But they can’t spell. I am better than them.

But I have a glass of cheap wine and I’m a writer again.

“Let us sleep deeply and well, friends, and when we wake up we will have hammers for feet and we will beat the world back into submission again.”

I’m not really a writer.