IVP - Strangely Dim

Laryngitis Brings Out the Love

How ironic is it that I forgot to enable comments on my latest blog entry about not being able to speak? Nevertheless, a few virtual friends have shot me very kind comments assuring me that their fondness for me is not conditioned on my ability to speak. Isn't that sweet?

Anyway, Damon from central Indiana sent along a song particularly appropriate to my "situation": "Laryngitis" by Katy Bowser. Hope you like it.

--Dave

If I Could Talk I’d Be Whining

by David A. Zimmerman

I finally have an idea of what a vow of silence feels like: it feels like a prison sentence.

I have lost my voice. (If found, please e-mail dzimmerman@ivpress.com.) I was talking to a room full of junior high students about my book, and now my vocal cords are essentially nonvocal. I can still wheeze out a syllable here or there, but for the most part I’m effectively mute.

You’d think that not having a voice would prohibit me from participating in conversations, but you’d be wrong. I sang “Happy Birthday” to my mom (it sounded more like “Abby Earth Day”), I cracked jokes during a break with my colleagues, I directed a sketch for my church’s drama team, I talked about a book idea with a woman from Nashville, and I scheduled two meals intended for catching up with some friends. If my publicity agent hadn’t exercised some restraint on my behalf, I would have talked on the radio about superheroes for half an hour.

What I’ve learned is that I, like U2’s Bono, “love the sound of my own voice.” Right now no one else does, of course, since my voice sounds like gravel scraped across a chalkboard. Still, you can’t tell by looking at a person that their voice is dead and can kill, and people continue to engage me in conversation until I respond. Then they apologize and let me go on in silence—which is, ironically, the last thing I want to happen.

I was told once that I should take a retreat of silence to confront my need for attention. I did, and it was good, but while my mouth kept silence, my mind kept chattering away. I took all sorts of notes so I could talk about my experience with all my friends. My experience of voicelessness is quite a bit different from that retreat, however: whereas I could have ended that retreat at any time, I’m currently at the mercy of my throat. I can’t talk, and I won’t talk well until whatever has taken my voice gives it back.

In the meantime, I’m missing out on a lot. I have tried to acknowledge people in passing and have failed to make a peep; I have tried to make jokes but couldn’t articulate the punch line; I’ve tried to engage my loved ones but have had to simply listen.

You can learn a lot from listening, it turns out. People generally have a lot of stories to tell, and when you’re not jockeying for the chance to take the reins of the conversation, they actually have the opportunity to tell them. But we’re conditioned to practice dialogue, an equal distribution of talk-time, so when your voice is gone your conversation partners don’t know what to do with you. Ironically enough, when you’re best suited to listening without interrupting, people stop talking to you.

So here I sit, at least temporarily voiceless and friendless. At least my mind still works, so to speak.

***

Happy birthday, Chris!

How My Book Got the Better of Me

by David A. Zimmerman

Bless me, blogger, for I have sinned. It’s been several weeks since my last confession . . .

I do look at Strangely Dim as a sort of confessional, in the sense that a confessional allows you to reflect on your missteps and try to calibrate your next steps. I was told once by a professor that the early church practiced open, communal confession until wealthy and influential Christians pushed for more privacy. At that point the church moved the sacrament of confession into booths, and confessing publicly became passé. Eventually, in the name of the “priesthood of all believers,” some Christian movements abandoned the practice of confession altogether.

I have to say, I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of never confessing. I bawled like a baby when I made my first confession—and I’ve been a much badder boy since then. But on the other hand, we lose out on something precious when we decline to acknowledge—to ourselves, at least, but more urgently to God, and arguably just as urgently to the people in our lives—that we have sinned in our thoughts and in our deeds, in what we have done and what we have failed to do.

For example, since my book's release I’ve come to expect anyone who claims to care about me to read it, relish it, follow the links to all the supplemental stuff, and tell everyone they know about it. In my mind, Jesus has told his followers: “Go therefore into all nations and sell people of every tribe and tongue copies of Comic Book Character.”

Since the book’s release I’ve become unusually sensitive to the argument that comic books are lowbrow literature. Some of my defensiveness is understandable, of course, but I tend to take such an attitude as a personal affront, even though prior to and even since the book’s release 99.999999999999999999999 percent of the earth’s inhabitants had no idea that I exist.

Since the book’s release I’ve exploited many of my relationships. I’ve sent free copies to a good number of people in hopes that (a) they’ll tell everyone they know how awesome it is (and perhaps, by extension, how awesome I am) and (b) they’ll invite me to speak at their events so I can look and feel like an expert, sell more books and shore up my apparently quite fragile self-image. I’ve actually, as part of the publication process, categorized the people in my life as either “influencers” or not so that I could make the most “strategic” use of a budgeted “influencer mailing.” Some of the people on my list I don’t even know; I simply know that they’re "influential."

Since the book’s release I’ve been distracted from my job, my wife, my parents, my siblings, my church, my friends, my hobbies, myself, my God. I've googled myself countless times, I've snuck a peek at all sorts of sales data that I ought not have access to, I’ve even forgotten to tend to my cats’ litterbox—and trust me, after a few days that’s almost impossible.

It feels good to give all this some air. Not that I’ve changed my habits at all, but at least I’m not hiding from the truth anymore. And really, once you’ve pranced around on film in a spandex body suit, hiding anything is pretty ridiculous.

Thanks. I feel better now. Buy my book.

Ducks & Cover

By David A. Zimmerman

You hear some stories and you feel compelled to comment. Forgive me . . .

Arkansas attorney Ben Lipscomb decided recently, as he is given to do, to spend the day duck hunting with his friends and his beloved dog. Eventually he separated from his friends to find more ducks to shoot. He hit the gold mine—ducks to his left, ducks to his right, ducks above and all around him. He just kept turning in circles, shooting and reshooting, while his dog retrieved his bounty for him. By the time he hit the legal limit of dead ducks, however, he had turned so many times that he couldn’t tell where he had come from.

He couldn’t find his friends, and they couldn’t find him. All he had was his dog, some dead ducks, a rifle and the clothes he was wearing—camouflage hunting gear over bright white unmentionables. He ate a duck raw to stave off his hunger, he sloshed through the ice-cold waters to find some indicator of the way he should go, his dog barked intermittently to draw someone’s attention to his plight. But no luck—they had been left behind.

The hunter’s friends, realizing the problem, had returned to their car and called emergency services for help. So began the manhunt. Helicopters flew overhead in crisscross patterns trying to find this solitary hunter somewhere in the expansive hunting grounds. They actually flew directly over him a number of times during the search, but they couldn’t see him, despite his jumping, waving and shouting, for, you see, he was wearing camouflage.

The purpose of camouflage is to conceal its wearer so that no one can see him (or her, I suppose, although I don’t recall ever seeing a woman decked out in cammies from head to toe). In this case, the camouflage did its job too well: Ben Lipscomb was in danger of being hidden to death.

What would you do? Our hero came up with an idea that sounds as insane as it was pure genius: He took off his clothes.

Underneath the camouflage, as I mentioned, was a pair of bleach-white underwear. Lipscomb dropped his hip waders, ripped the underwear from his waist, tied the undies to the barrel of his rifle, and waved his makeshift flag as the helicopter was making another pass. Presumably he paused to pull his hip waders back up.

His trick worked. The Arkansas State Police spotted his flag and made a beeline for his briefs. Shortly thereafter, he was out of the woods.

Fortunately for Lipscomb, he was smart enough to wear white at night; camouflage underwear, while undeniably stylish, serves no real purpose and, as we learn from this story, could very well kill you.

If that moral to the story doesn't do it for you, try following one of these two paths:

1. At a certain point, concealing your true self becomes counterproductive.
2. When you’re wading through the muck, and you’ve had your fill of duck, stick close to your friends or you’ll be out of luck. (That's about as far as I've yet been able to take this soon-to-be-famous country song. If you have an idea for another verse, post a comment; note that I have yet to use the phrase "pick-up truck.")

***

I've had the opportunity recently to talk to a lot of people about my book Comic Book Character, although people seem quite a bit more interested in talking about my spandex body suit. If you want to talk comic books or superhero movies or how someone who believes in God could waste their time on such silly fantasy stories, shoot me an e-mail at dzimmerman@ivpress.com.

Do-Be-Do-Be-Do

by David A. Zimmerman

“So, how was your New Year’s Eve? Whadja do?”

That’s a relatively safe question for casual acquaintances to ask one another, which means you’ll likely be hearing it a lot till the statute of limitations runs out—probably shortly before February 1, when the default question switches to “So, whatcha got planned for Valentine’s Day?”

Whatcha do says a lot about you. In my case, I went to a New Year’s Eve get together with some friends. They played cards upstairs while I played Spider-Man II on the X-Box downstairs. Shortly before midnight I was utterly destroyed by Rhino, so I went upstairs to play what is essentially the Star Wars version of Yu-Gi-Oh! while my wife cleaned up after me. An hour later we went home. Five hours later I woke up to finish preparing a couple of short talks to introduce two of the three Lord of the Rings films during a New Year’s Day marathon.

Spider-Man II, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. What’s that say about me? All three of these brands—not to mention playing video games or card-based war games—are the domain of the supergeeky. And I suppose that’s a fair brand to label me with; I did, after all, write a book about comic books. I and a group of friends took an online quiz once to determine how geeky we were, and I scored lower than some but higher than many, so I don’t have much of a nongeeky leg to stand on.

But from another angle, my actions over the New Year might convince some people that who I am is something less forgivable. I’m not generally known as someone who sits aloof from other people playing video games or watching movies or otherwise indulging in sedentary, passive entertainment. I like to be around people, mixing it up in noncompetitive play. But for forty-eight hours I was aloof, competitive and sedentary. So I suppose one thing my New Year’s experience says about me is that I’m easily distorted.

Fair enough, I suppose: I am, after all, human, and to be human is in a sense to be distorted, if you take the biblical account of the Fall to be descriptive of the human condition as I do. Two humans—the only two, for that matter—are made perfect and given a perfect creation but find a way to screw the whole thing up. And being part of the whole thing, they get screwed-up themselves. In the subsequently distorted reality, as Job puts it, “man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.”

Even Job is distorted: it’s pronounced “jobe,” and it’s a guy’s name, but on first glance everyone pronounces it “jahb,” like whatcha do. Which is almost appropriate for the whole, distorted lot of us, since we tend to think that whatcha do is who you are anyway.

Happy new year, by the way. Whadja do? Post a comment!