A Christmas Message

The day is nearly upon us and I have had a very introspective year. Hence the lack of blog posts, although that has become the norm for me it would appear. This is a more informal post, but one of significance I believe: It is Christmas time, that time of year when we hope that our hearts come closer to those divine tendencies that we wish to have and that the world is in so desperate need of. This year my message is found in Alma, chapter 38, which is a particularly favorite chapter of mine because when I was younger, my mother left me some very strong advice from out of this chapter and even marked which parts she wanted me to pay closer attention.

I loved my mother, and her words still ring true today, even though they be borrowed from Alma, they are still relevant to us today. My focus is drawn to verse 10 of this chapter, in particular the line that reads: “I would that you would be diligent and temperate in all things.” We all understand the word diligence, or at least we think we do. However, many times it seems that we seem to mistake diligence for fanaticism. Diligence is defined as “having or showing care and conscientiousness in one's work or duties” meaning that we care about what is going on around us and we are drawn to do those things that are right. Diligence is a trait that is cultivated and bought through laborious years of finding the right balance, which is shown in the other word used in Alma's exhortations to his son: temperate.

Temperate is defined as “showing moderation or self-restraint”. This extends to the Gospel as well. Part of having diligence is knowing the proper application of time, place, and loyalties. Too often I think we find ourselves feeling that we aren't doing enough, or that Heavenly Father must be displeased with us because of his comparative silence in our lives as to what we perceive his guidance in the lives of others. Such is not the issue. The Lord is constantly warning us through his modern day prophets to avoid comparison, that is a very deadly form of pride, and at this time of year it can be an even easier trap to fall into if we are not careful.

This is a season of love, in particular the love that God has shown us in the gift of his son, “for God so loved the world...” such an iconic scripture that it would be quaint if its message weren't so true. God loves us, and in this time of year when we are so focused on giving and others, sometimes that action of looking to others can have a negative rebound when we see others who have more of one virtue or thing that we ourselves wish we had more. Hard economic times have forced many of us to situations that we wouldn't have thought of just a few short years prior. Yet it seems that in his infinite love for us, it is still possible to feel the love of the season, if we but put our minds to it. Apply that diligence and temperance in those things that are needed to be controlled, and do not fret when our fears or worries overwhelm us, this storm is over us and yet there is nothing to fear. Elder Ballard remarked to the youth “Remember, you can be exalted, young people, you can be exalted without having a college degree, without a successful career. You can be exalted without being rich, so focus the best you can on those things in life that will lead you back to the presence of God, keep all proper things in balance.” Again we are lead to another definition of temperance, keeping all things in balance.

Perhaps this would be a good goal for the upcoming year: balance, temperance, and diligence. The Gospel of Christ is such that, as Elder Maxwell pointed out, every detail has been forseen to by Him. The star of Bethlehem had to placed in that precise spot thousands of years before Mary was visited by Gabriel and the life of our Saviour was begun. God knows the details, we simply must focus on finding that balance in our own lives. Thankfully, we have our whole lives to figure that out. Unfortunately, it'll probably take at least that long. In the meantime, let us forget our troubles for a few days and focus on the important things that this season has to offer: Love, family, friends, good food and good memories. For those of us so blessed, I say God bless and here's to a new year. For those who are struggling, know that it will all “work together for thy good”. God has not abandoned any of us, and he will not leave you bereft of comfort. He is mindful, and He loves you, “so focus the best you can on those things in life that will lead you back to the presence of God, keep all proper things in balance.”

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Waldo's Dirty Little Secret

Where’s Waldo? is a childhood classic dating back several decades, with its intricate drawings of crowded scenes, and the ongoing pursuit of a man who wears the same, red-striped outfit regardless of temperature or climate of his current location. Yet evidently, lurking beneath this innocent demeanor is a somewhat smutty secret. In the search for Waldo, you may be surprised to find in the original publishing of the book that there is indeed a topless lady sunbathing while lying on her stomach. I know! I know! The scandal, right!? The miniscule indiscretion depicts a small boy pouring water on the back of a topless sunbather, who is in the process of yelping in surprise and arching backwards as the cold liquid makes contact with her skin. This involuntary movement exposes her chest to an on looking man who, judging from his expression, is evidently enjoying the view. The reader’s vantage shows a profile shot of the offending woman and turns the search for Waldo into a twisted game of eye-spy the nipple!

Now, the debate continues as to whether or not this is inappropriate for our children in public schools. Some critics argue that the indecent exposure is unforgivable and should thusly be removed from the average child’s reach, at least in public schools. Other critics shake their head in exasperation. Anna Quindlen, an author and columnist for the New York Times, replies, “Winnie the Pooh does not wear pants. Just a warning.”

The question behind the banning remains, though; with all the racy material found in other books today, and the sensual overtones of some of the greatest literature of the past, is it truly consistent to ban a children’s book simply because it hints at the presence of female anatomy? In fact, the only way to find the practically hidden picture is either completely by accident, or if one is looking for it and knows where to find it. That sound like anything else that children are forced to interact with almost on a daily standard? Say the Internet, maybe? At the same time, the idea of censorship is to protect our children from the perceived evils of the world, and pornography is definitely to be included in that group. But would this indiscretion truly warrant the label of pornography? Where’s Waldo does not contain sexual themes, but the indiscretion of the artist begs the question: what was he thinking? What purpose would putting that minor detail in the book accomplish? It’s obviously unnecessary, and it isn’t like the checklist of items to search for at the top of the page includes: “a female sunbather indecently exposing herself in public.” So why does the artist include it?

Thankfully, no matter what side of the debate that you happen to fall on, the new anniversary edition of the beloved childhood classic is updated with a now clothed sunbather. This time she is appropriately garbed for her UV bath, although it is likely to give her an uneven tan.

Confessions of a Gamer

Everyone is a nerd if you look close enough. The sports nut during his Sunday ritual of turning on the big game will usually involve some form of superstitious formula for turning the TV on, or which snacks he eats. The beauty queen has a precise idea of how she has to keep up on the latest trends and decides the ways of going about keeping up on those said trends. Some forms of nerdiness are somewhat more tangible. I am a gamer. Not just any gamer, either, I am a tabletop gamer, which is one of the more despicable and unforgivable kind in society it would seem. It would be a lie to say that I am not a little bit resentful of the disdain the community that I live in shows towards the hobby that I participate in, yet still I continue to play. There are a number of reasons why, but the thing that constantly amazes me is that how humanity is so pre-disposed to judging something like gaming as a condemning sin when in reality it can be something wonderful.

My earliest memories of gaming come at a time in my life that everyone looks back on with a sense of dread, and perhaps a little bit of nausea: Junior High. I met a friend during that awkward stage of my life, the transition from childhood to post-childhood-pre-teenager-I-don’t-know-what-the-heck-I’m-supposed-to-be stage. In our conversation of constantly cracking voices that ranged from basement deep drops to window shattering spikes, he first told me about the game Dungeons and Dragons. Here was something that made sense to me in those tumultuous years, I could play as one of the heroes that I had read about in my books, seen in my favorite movies. I was accepted in this world, unlike the harsh social setting of the cruelty that only children are pre-disposed to showing one another in such a fearful time of growth. Dungeons and Dragons became a playground for my imagination from that day on, and this carried me throughout my adolescent years. The adventures that I experienced as a mighty warrior delving into caves, slaying dragons, saving villages, towns, and even the world on several occasions, these defined my personality in the real world as well. I became a paladin in the real world, striving to be that hero that I was in the game. While, thankfully, I was able to separate the events of the game from those in real life, my choices in the game were reflected in my real life situations. My character was a defender of all things good and lovely, so I strove to be worthy of that character in many instances, I wanted to actually be that hero. People began to know me as an honest, integral, and generally good person, and I reveled in the fact that I was a modern-day equivalent of the hero that I wanted to be. Yet oddly enough, when people would learn of my hobby, their noses would unconsciously wrinkle and they would talk to me in short, quick sentences so that they could quickly run off, as the idea of being around someone so nerdy would usually fill them with discomfort. So it was that I learned to hide my hobby from the world.

Since then, I have been what you call a closet nerd. Someone who plays the game in quiet locations, with a close-knit set of friends. People never learn of my hobby until they reach a rather high level of trust. It seems that we as a people are afraid of anything that even remotely requires us to use our imaginations. We call hobbies like this frivolous, tiresome, childish, and even a little bit scary, perhaps because we don’t understand them. People like to stay with things that are comfortable, which is perhaps what drove me to hide my hobby, telling people about it made me uncomfortable because of the reactions that it invoked. I have loved gaming, and over the years my characters and roles that I have taken on as a nerd in my hobby have come to reflect the person that I am. My incorruptible, paragon of good character has become a much more jaded and complicated person. The twists of my life are mirrored in my character’s views on his world and how he deals with the problems that are facing it. It is interesting to look at the evolution of my characters over the years and see where I have come. I still have all the character sheets and story outlines from all of my campaigns, and I can show you which characters I was playing at different times of my life, the types of characters can really show you the emotions and difficulties I was experiencing at those moments. People are afraid of anything that requires that deep of an emotional connection with anything, which is perhaps why they feel this deep worry whenever I tell them that I am a “DnDer”. Who knows, but it isn’t stopping me from my hobby.

As I look over even these past few years, I’ve seen the way my characters have changed. My current character is a dark, brooding figure that has lost a lot of faith in humanity. He struggles to have faith in the grand design of the world and holds out for something better, but he’s been jaded by his experiences. He is a far-cry from the knight in shining armor that I played during my high-school years that had a firm faith in humanity and that the world had meaning to it, that he was destined for great things. Perhaps someday I’ll return to playing that character, but for now, I keep my hobby secret, and continue on waiting for the next level, the next encounter, and hoping that my faith in humanity will someday be restored just a little bit more.

A Broken Requiem

I am actually submitting this article to be published in a couple literary magazines, let me know what you think of it, and wish me luck!


Near my childhood home in Saint Anthony, Idaho, there is an unremarkable path that we locals affectionately refer to as “the Dirt Road”. There’s nothing special about this old road, no plaque sits at its head declaring its history, it doesn’t connect any two locations, in fact it’s only about two miles long from one end to the other. Nobody knows its origins, it was probably made by Mormon settlers trying to cut through their fields and maintained more out of tradition than any type of formal declaration or law. Some locals use it for exercise, some have even built small homes along its dusty course, but the majority of its length is dedicated to a potato field and an irrigation ditch. Nobody would think anything of this remarkably unremarkable place.

The furthest back I can remember about this place was back before my brain had figured out how to capture memories in a way that’s logical for an older mind to make sense of, but I do recall the sound of the irrigation sprinkler with its rhythmic thumping as it watered the dirt in preparation of the coming harvest. My mother picked some wild raspberries and a couple of farmers drove by in their old beat up trucks, probably giving us the two finger salute from their steering wheels as they passed us by, leaving a dusty trail in their wake. I don’t remember a great deal about the very first time, but this type of place wasn’t about specific memories.

A stone bridge sits in the middle of this stalwart old road, a strong base for the sandy extensions of this officially non-existent highway. There have been endless nights that I spent on that bridge, staring up into the stars that shined all the brighter without the competition of man-made lights around them. The bridge sits over an irrigation ditch as it winds itself around the various patchwork fields that make up the quilted countryside of my childhood. My dad used to take our dogs for walks down to this very bridge and then lure them to the edge before throwing them in. “It’s their bath for the week!” he would say. The dogs would quickly swim to the bank and squirm with joy as they shook the water out of their coats and come pounding back up to the road with their tongues lolling out of their mouths in simple contentment. This point is where the potato field stops and the houses begin. Just beyond the bridge, however, and right before the houses begin, there lies a pasture framed by willow trees that catches an autumn sunset capable of turning any man religious. Even the mosquitoes and flies seem to understand the sacred nature of this place and pay it the reverence due by avoiding it altogether. A couple farmers place a select few horses and cattle in the field, just enough to give it a perfect picturesque setting like something pulled from the dreams of an idealistic painter.

One particular memory of this road was as I walked the down its familiar stretch on my eighteenth birthday, my mind reeling from the news of my mother’s recent diagnosis: Cancer. The hard reality couldn’t find me here as the kindly old trees reached out to me in silent hugs as I walked with my troubles down this old sentinel of a road. I puzzled through the reasons behind why my mom was dying. My young brain pressed to figure out what I had done to deserve this. What my mother had done to deserve this. I felt sick inside. My mother couldn’t die! She was supposed to see me married. Approve my future wife and tell me how wonderful she is. She was supposed to help me with my own kids. She had to rock them to sleep with the lullabies that had carried me off to dreams so often in her arms! I choked on the injustice. The road tried desperately to give me solace, drawing me into its dusty comforts and displaying the brilliant sky before me in an attempt to distract me from my troubles. For a time it worked, and I sat a long time on that bridge fighting my way through understanding and acceptance.

I revisited the road the night of her last conversation with her children. Her pale face seared into my memory, accompanied by a hated cacophony of hissing tubes and staggered breathing. The quiet sobs of my stern-faced brother as he held Mom’s head close to his and cried out “Mama!” in whispered gasps. A steady plunge of the monitor as the doctor calmly declared time of death. These were the memories of that day. The quiet inhabitants of the road’s sandy lengths seemed silent as if in mourning itself. Tired feet fell on treacherous and shifting dirt that had at one time seemed soft and playful, the echoes of my footfalls muted in the sandy foundations. My familiar trees twisted into strange faces that loomed around me with shallow tears in their eyes. Looking around my sanctuary I began to see cracks emerging. The road wept in forlorn silence. The night sky held no wonders for me that evening, the stars glistened mutely in their stationary places in the sky. The betrayal cut all the deeper when I arrived at the blessed pasture and found only darkness there to welcome me. Stillness wrapped around me like water on a drowning victim.

Life continued marching, the passage of years pounded by like the old trucks of the farmers on that tired dusty road. I pushed through my grief with my mother the only way I could think of: dogged determination. That’s the way of us country folk, or at least that’s how I saw it. I didn’t know anything else that I could do, and neither did anyone else for that matter. I found a beautiful young woman and fell in love; such is how the story is supposed to go, right? I thought so. I remember taking her to my sky view pasture that I loved. We sighed contentedly as we watched the dying light slowly diminish in the growing calm of a summer evening. I kissed her there. Not our first, but one of our more important kisses. I showed her the point where my dad would always throw the dogs in the ditch, and where to find the raspberries when they were ripe. I let her use my leather jacket, swelling in pride at my chivalry as she warmed to me on those cool Idaho nights. We would stare out across the potatoes and talk about our future together. She was beautiful.

I remember kneeling in that hallowed dirt and holding out my mother’s ring to her, asking her to abandon reason and trust that I could be her companion forever. She smiled in her radiant way and hugged me close, whispering silent “yes”s in my ear. The ring fit perfectly, without having to be re-sized or anything. The trees along the ditch bank creaked in quiet applause. My sanctuary gleamed in wonderful glory, restored from its grief and forlorn abandonment. If this were a fairytale I would stop now: having slain the dragon of grief and found the beautiful princess, I should ride off into the proverbial sunset and live out the rest of my days in relative bliss, right?

She left me. She gave me the ring back and said that I wasn’t the man that she wanted after all. She said in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to see me, talk to me, or have anything to do with me ever again. The woman of my dreams, whom I had pledged myself to, had decided that I wasn’t worthy of her and left me holding a ring and a broken will. I ran to my safe haven.

I staggered down the road, the trees were silent as I passed. No comforting sounds echoed through their branches or rebounded off of the normally talkative irrigation ditch. The dirt yielded to my passing without any salutations. I longed for some respite to the aching of my circumstances. I was given visions of her, instead. I saw the post that I had been resting against when she had leaned close to me and kissed me in the fiery light of a sunset much like the one that mocked me even now in my pain. It felt as though God was mocking me. I thought I could hear his laughter at my pain echo through the stillness of that dark sunset. I felt the piercing gaze on my shoulders and I staggered under the weight. The floodgates opened and my sanctuary washed away in a flood of bitter tears.

That dark night stretched into days, then months, then the better part of a year and still there was no end in sight. Dragons I had long thought slain reared their heads and bore down on me. I felt the passage of time slow to a crawl. The sunlight seemed something forgotten. Sunless days crept over the horizon with their lecherous beams appearing only to break resolve rather than encourage. The broken bulwark of my confidence was open as the wracking contaminant of fear spread through me. And I was sick with it. The infection filled my brain with a fever of silent demons. In the few times I walked the road, the trees pointed their fingers in disgust at me, and the wind shook the leaves in disapproving swishes. The shame of disappointment is a bitter disease. Only someone who has been through a dark night like that can understand how the morning finds its way through, and to those that have yet to experience it, I can only describe it as a subtle thing. For me the turn upwards was so gradual and quiet that I almost didn’t notice it.

It happened one day as I was driving in to work. The quiet solidity of my car mixed with the comforting surroundings and the reassuring feeling of movement and control created an environment that had echoes of my old dirt road. I felt a surge of something I had almost forgotten: excitement. I felt something akin to a marathon runner crossing the finish line. These difficulties that I had faced would not end me. I was not helpless, nor was my failure permanent. There had been reassurances of my revelation before this moment, but that afternoon I actually found the strength to believe them. There would once again be moments of excitement. I found myself thinking back to a conversation I had had with a friend once. She had been suffering with a divorce and the demons of defeat were snapping at her heels. I told her one simple thing: there is always one more good day. We all have those days in our memories when the sun was just the perfect amount of brightness, the food was the tastiest we could remember, and the laughter of friends and family echoed in a picturesque setting that is etched into our minds. Remembering those days is part of the promise that I had told my friend: there is always one more good day to look forward to, and that should give us hope. In the meantime, we just have to keep pushing on. Dogged determination, we country folk really don’t know any other way of doing things. Eventually determination becomes conviction as hopes become experience.

I have since re-visited my old friend the dirt road. While it is a beautiful walk, this place is no longer the home that it was before now. I walked its length, stopping every so often to look for wild raspberries even though I knew they were out of season. The trees and water seemed indifferent to my passing; the stone bridge was silent at my approach, no signs of recognitions shouted out to me from the now inanimate dirt that had once been my friend. I sat awhile on the bridge and stared out across the magical pasture and was overwhelmed by the cool apathy of the surrounding countryside at my return. After a sufficient amount of time had passed I got up and walked back the way I had come. On my way I passed a mother with her child. The toddler was giggling in the curious fashion of infants as he threw rocks into the irrigation ditch and the mother watched over him protectively while trying to hide a smile. I almost laughed at the ironic poetry of the moment.