What I'm Reading 2021: Loose Gravel by Ginny Fanthome

I received a random email from the author in which I was invited to review this book in the hopes of producing some positive press.

Here's what I came up with:

Loose Gravel by Ginny Fanthome – A Punk Band’s Blood, Sweat and Tears

Few fictional stories are written about the nightmare of being a musician in a band doing one nighters touring across the continent in a van. If you have been there and done that my guess is that it’s a memory you try to blot out of your mind. Also you are probably in your fifties by now.

Breaking news: the music business changed. Now there is no cash for anybody. Small and mid-sized town bars are poor. No money is left to pay bands doing one-nighters. Even back in The Day, ie. the era in which Loose Gravel takes place, there was barely enough money to cover the band’s gas, meals, and a poor performance fee. Accommodation was out of the question, hence sleeping in the van. And yet, bands could make a go of it if they didn’t self-destruct or kill each other.

We paid our dues, but very few actually made a career out of music. Hardly anyone even made a living wage.

To add to the suffering, the pandemic has kicked the music biz while it was already down. Beginning bands, one nighters, touring … the dream is dead.

We of the “older generation” have forgotten how bad life on the road was, and what we were willing to put up with to play. A fucking grind, it was. 

But I wouldn’t change a thing, because in the midst of all the idiocy there were life lessons. Loose Gravel has brought it all back. Therefore it is a worthwhile read.

Loose Gravel by Ginny Fanthome is a brutally honest, realistic yet fictional look at touring and playing in a punk band doing one night stands. The band’s name is Spooge. The four members are Steve: super-talented gay guy of Asian race who happens to sing and put on a good show; Marcus: A super smart, witty, closet writer/asshole and womanizer who happens to play guitar; Lion: A tall, tough dude from a poor and shitty childhood who thinks he’s Sam’s boyfriend who happens to play bass; and Sam: The chick drummer who has a heart of gold and a clear mind despite wrestling with her own demons.

The story is told from Sam’s perspective.

Loose Gravel thoroughly explores the personalities and relationships of the four bandmates. To sum it up: There is always much brokenness, but hope springs eternal.

Spooge is on an odyssey, an entry-level opportunity where the musicians will travel and sleep in the van to save money. They will sleep with their gear unless they can scrounge some sort of better sleeping arrangement. As they drive to the next gig they pray that the driver will stay awake and that the van will keep on running. They will try to give each other space. Of course, people will be inconsiderate; tempers will flare. Mix in some booze and fists will fly.

There is never a dull moment in Loose Gravel. It is a fun read, but it is much more than just the craziness of life on the road. Fantholme in telling the story through Sam’s eyes has carefully woven a thread of hope into the story. It’s all about relationships.

I enjoyed how Sam’s hopeful and reflective nature, particularly her compassion, developed as the tour’s chaos churned on, and I was happy to see how she did not stay down when knocked over emotionally. And believe me, there were some hard knocks! 

Loose Gravel is a reminder that every person has their own struggles and backstory, and how being on the road makes it possible to meet and even try to help all kinds of needy people.

Each of Sam’s bandmates show some growth, providing a few more glimmers of hope as the story developed. Loose Gravel didn’t have a perfect happily-ever-after ending, but I was left feeling satisfied.

Kudos to Ginny Fanthome. Loose Gravel is a gem of a story and would be a welcome addition to the musician lore section of any book collection.

Dehumanized Humanism aka “Flatland”

Some thoughts from Ken Wilber’s book “A Brief History of Everything” p. 244 

My own words: 

The modern and post-modern world has crippled itself because it has become overtaken by a mechanistic, science-driven, “seeing is believing” mindset. The author refers to this as the fallacy of simple location. The cost of our culture being driven and owned and sculpted by this mindset has been enormous. 

Quote begins. 

The fallacy of simple location:

If something can’t be simply located in physical space, then it isn’t really real. You can locate Gaia, so it exists. You can locate cells, so they exist. You can locate the brain, so it exists. You can locate the biosphere, so it exists.

But you can’t simply locate values and consciousness and beliefs and morals in the same way. You can’t point to them with your finger. You can’t see them or find them anywhere in the great web of sensory nature. They become rambling and ridiculed ghosts in the machine, pathetic illusions in the organic system. They are merely personal tastes and subjective fantasies. The interiors don’t count in a disqualified universe, the universe you can put your finger on.

The irony, of course, is that the universe you can put your finger on is the meaningless universe. So although consciousness and value and meaning are intrinsic to the depth of the Kosmos, they cannot be found in the cosmos. That is, they inhere in the Left-Hand dimensions of the Kosmos, not in the Right-Hand surfaces. And thus, if you are intent on only allowing the sensory surfaces, then you scrub the Kosmos clean of consciousness and meaning and depth, guaranteed.

And so it came about that the Great Holarchy was abandoned, essentially for the first time in history, because you couldn’t put your finger on it. The ghost in the machine was indeed a ghost, because it had just committed suicide.

Men and women have become subject to monological madness: They are objects of information, never subjects in communication. That is, human beings, like all holons, were studied only in their empirical and objective dimensions, and thus were reduced to mere its in the great interwoven web, with no depth and no intentionality and no personhood to speak of. The brutal world of the lab technician, slabs of meat and all.

This is the science of reduced humanism where humans are simply objects of information. Also called “dehumanized humanism.”

There is no translogical Spirit, no dialogical mind; there is just monological nature. Surface nature, mononature, the world of sensory and material forms––this is the “God,” this is the “Goddess,” of the modern and postmodern world.

Space Girls a movie short on Dust

 

Book and Podcast: Jesus and John Wayne – How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

I admit that my training with the Navigators is right in line with this. Navigators founder Dawson Trotman was touted as a tough heroic figure. His drowning was shared like a legend. The key leaders of the campus Nagivators movement that were our guest speakers at Glen Eyrie Discipleship Training were of the same ilk. They were tough dudes. Many of them military vets. The were guys guys. 

Let me tell you, if one of the young women at those training sessions argued for equality in leadership the whole leadership team would have come down all around them. They could have brought the entire fucking discipleship training to a screeching halt. Those young women could have had those old Navigators running round holding their dicks. 

How sad, that many of them did not see what was happening. And how sad for me, that at the time I didn't think it was okay for a young woman to be lesbian, or for guys to be gay. Hence my complete and utter confusion and my pathetic inability to process what was happening when I learned that some of my co-leader young women were, in fact, gay. Or they were struggling as leaders. They were "having trouble" or they were "struggling" in some way. But lots of hush hush, etc. 

For fuck's sake, one of our new young leaders in Sudbury ended up being convicted of child molesting.

My leader of my Lessons On Assurance bible study (BS for short) as a new believer was a Navigator staff member. He ended up being unfaithful to his wife and got divorced. Same thing happened to another long time staffer; his wife had an affair.

The failings and weakness, hell the outright humanity, of Christian leaders and workers in my Evangelical circles were like warning lights on the dashboard. But I wasn't ready to take it in. I was complicit because I was getting something helpful out of the church. 

But it wasn't God. 

It was an authoritarian, male-centred, comfort community.

It would be another twenty years before the scales fell away from my eyes and I was able to see things as they were. Just a bunch of useless, stupid people acting like they care for other people and acting like they love God and Jesus while in reality they were just full of shit.

Here is the podcast link:

https://lukejjanssen.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/48-kristin-du-mez.mp3

The Evangelical Christian church has become unplugged and detached from the theological basis for its existence and has replaced it with a cultural/political identity that is basically a lie and a distortion.

How can a believer in an evangelical church stay there when they realize that they are being sold out in terms of their standing as human beings?

For example, women in evangelical circles women are absolutely barred from holding ministry leadership roles. They can't take leadership roles where they would take authority. Women find it that they can't bring their whole selves to church. And they are okay with it. They swallow the kool-ade.

Boys and Girls clubs. Cadets for boys and Calvinettes for girls. The girls learned how to pick fashionable colours that match their hair, and do crafts. The boys would go out a learn survival skills. They would march into their meetings, etc. Structure, authority, expectations and gender distinctions ruled the day.

The concept of obedience is central to Evangelicalism but it is abused. There is a flawed power dynamic. The idea of submission to authority is a big deal. If you don't submit to the (men) in charge, then how can you be respecting God's authority? goes the saying.

Who gets to wield authority? Only men. The evangelical church is authoritarian and sexist.

So what then is the lifeline to faith for an honest and "woke" evangelical church-goer? How do we deal with a new awareness of our own complicity in going along with so many lies and distortions? Why would anybody be so comfortable in an obviously historically false institution? 

Where are the evangelical leaders who are trying to make corrections as leaders? Where are the introspections where leaders explore their complicity?

Can evangelicalism be saved or reformed? Not likely.

"Powerful evangelical men giving each other cover. When they really need to use their leadership to call things out, they don't. The tension between the mainstream leadership and the fringe is huge."

Evangelicalism is not christianity. And yet evangelicals have been taught to defend the institution. Why the effort to save a denomination that clearly has lost its way?

One solution may be to travel to where christianity is flourishing, whether it is in the same city or another country.

"Jesus doesn't need your protection, nor does your denomination."

Why do we even need to have this special category of christian believer called Evangelical? 

I say it's time for the evangelicals to walk away. Leave the fucking church empty just like the pandemic.

Photograph by Ed Sheeran

We keep this love in a photograph 

We made these memories for ourselves 

Where our eyes are always open 

Hearts are never broken

And time's forever frozen, still

Inside theses pages you just hold me

And I won't ever let you go

When I'm away I'll remember how you kissed me

Childlike Curiosity is Important in all Scientific Work

Our brains are incapable of grasping a full understanding of the universe.

Don't be too sure of what you don't know. Rigidity may become your weak point.

It is too much to arrogantly state that others who believe differently than me are arrogant or deluded.

If you begin from a worldview that there is no god, then you have no reason to expect that the universe would produce beings such as ourselves, beings who are intelligent, able to understand and enjoy the universe, and who are seeking to build relationships on all kinds of levels. You also wouldn't expect the stunning beauty in all the living things around us; the colours, the sounds, the smells, the complexity. We might just be living on a planet full of algae and scum. On the other hand, you would totally expect these types of things if there was a creator who was interested in relationships on all levels and delights in beauty.

So, in summary, what you allow as a possible belief will affect your point of view. It is inescapable.

Scientists are finding levels of precision in nature that are overwhelming. In a universe that sprang into existence by accident you would not expect that kind of fine tuning.

Science only works because the universe is rational and makes sense.

None of these are proof that god exists. But it puts it as not unreasonable to allow the possibility of belief. It helps me keep an open mind.

Why are atheists critical of those who believe? In many ways, the world is difficult to explain if you are an atheist. For example, horrors of injustice, disease, murder, hate, vengeance.

Where does loving yourself fit in? What is the basis for learning to love and accept myself?

Serious christians and non-christians alike share a dislike for cheap and easy believism.

Sounds about right

"All These Things" by Bertrand Russell

• Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that 
• His origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that 
• No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that 
• All the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that 
• The whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...

all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that

• no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." - Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

A strange mystery it is that 

Nature,

omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, 

has brought forth at last a child

subject still to her power

but 

gifted with sight, 

with knowledge of good and evil, 

with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

In "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday" ("Postscript" in his Autobiography), Russell wrote: "I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken".

Building a Passive Home; an Earthship

My stream of thought these day, in the early winter months of 2018-2019 is building a passive house on a rural lot.

I'm also looking into tiny house design. I got this funny idea of setting out to build a tiny home in my back yard, and then in a few years being able to move it to a location on a property somewhere. Let's explore these ideas over the next little while and we'll see where my mind takes me!

The Conscious Builder
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRHQqTsE4FcEGfm5mF15zUJrtpMaiUQ2-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvfWHx1SKMs&list=PLRHQqTsE4FcHnNKY0p1am80EqmvlNsluo

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRHQqTsE4FcEeMa2wYn8laUaw2fl78-CI


Websites:

https://ekobuilt.com/ontario-passive-house/

https://evolvebuilders.ca/

https://www.gni.ca/insulation-101/passive-house