…or at least I’ve felt like it since Friday. When did I become the Dad and husband sprawled across the top of the car sweating like a pig strapping a carrier to the roof so we can haul more stuff than we need across the United States? Why is the day we pack the car to leave the hottest day in PA since last July? How did we end up traveling through the nation’s capital on Independence Day weekend (along with 3.7 billion other people)? Why am I staring at my laptop through sleep-deprived eyes, trying to think with an overtired brain, and type with swollen fingers?

I don’t know why.

Maybe I’ll clean this up and make it more interesting later, but here’s the skinny for now…

We left Clarks Summit on Friday afternoon and caught our final glimpse of PA as we crossed into northern Maryland. It looked like this:

We spent Friday night with my cousin Matt and his wife Suzanne. Saturday we made the crazy trip through DC and south to Richmond. What should have taken two hours took almost four, and we were late for what was supposed to be lunch with our friends, Doak and Pam Taylor. Doak was our pastor at Deer Creek Community Fellowship, the church we helped plant where I was on staff for a couple of years. Deer Creek is also where Amy and I met. It was great to see the Taylors for the first time in years. It blew us away to see how much their kids have changed in three years, and of course we have one that didn’t exist the last time we saw them. This was also probably the last time we’ll see them for years. They’re in Richmond preparing to leave for three years of mission work in Germany.

From left to right, here’s Peyton, Dylan, Pam, Holden, Doak, and Haven:

After a couple of hours with the Taylors, we headed on to Roanoke, VA and spent the night with Kim and Calvin Smith. Kim and Amy are grad school friends, were in each other’s weddings, etc. Sunday morning we got up and drove to Chattanooga, TN, where we’re spending the night with more family — Tom, Kim, and Laura Norvell. Tom is my Dad’s younger brother. I’ll try to get some quality photographic evidence of their existence tomorrow. For now, here are a few shots of Aiden acquainting himself with butterflies in their front yard (you can see bigger shots by clicking on the photos).

And here’s Aiden playing with Uncle Britt, who happens to be leading at a camp in Chattanooga this week:

I’m now in bed where I’ve apparently hacked into a wireless internet connection. I think it’s Uncle Tom’s, but I’m not entirely sure since I couldn’t get it to connect downstairs when I was actually closer to his base station. I’ve never actually even flipped the wireless switch on my laptop on before, but apparently it works. Pretty wild.

Tomorrow I’m sleeping in to gear up for the long final leg of the trip, then we’ll hit the road sometime after lunch. It’s a ten hour drive from here to the corner of Texas. In theory, we’re leaving later in the day so Aiden will sleep the second half of the trip. We’ll see how that theory holds up.

SPECIAL NOTE TO THOSE NEAR OUR ROUTE: We would have loved to have seen everyone within 100 miles of our route home, but it simply isn’t possible. We have to be in Texas soon to unload our belongings from the truck that will meet us there. We probably love you, and you’re welcome to come visit us.

We’re packing the car and pointing it south in an hour or two. I had designs on a more thoughtful post to commemorate our departure, but the tyranny of the urgent opposed my best intentions with great force. I’ll wax eloquent later, and maybe even blog a bit as we travel. For now, I’ll say a simple goodbye to the Keystone State (after three years I still don’t know what it’s the key stone for) and to all who dwell within its borders.

On to the Republic.

Many of you have heard me bemoan the fact that no existing political party or position accurately reflects the particular diversity of my ideologies and agendas. I can’t bring myself to cheer for the Republicans, Democrats, Greens, or whatever they’re calling the party-formerly-run-by-Perot-now-run-by-Perot-formerly-run-by-Perot these days. I’d all but given up hope of ever finding a home on the political landscape.

Until now.

Tonight I decided to form a new party, which I’m calling the PC party. That’s Pro-Carb (but the double entendre works nicely). If you’re anything like me, you daily find yourself awash in the cancerous growth of anti-carbohydrate sentiment. For all the talk about tolerance in our melting pot of a country, the poor carb has no place to hide. No carb is safe. Not bread carb. Not Coke carb. Not even beer carb. Frankly folks, in the USofA, it’s open season on carbs.

This is travesty and tragedy and trickery. The carb is not evil. The carb has never done anything but just be itself, and the freedom to be one’s self is what America is about, right? It’s put the “d” in delicious in the aforementioned products and so many more. It’s been whatever we wanted it to be – simple, complex, fibrous, starchy, high glycemic, low glycemic. Talk about being flexible and accommodating. The carb has given us energy, fueled our cells, and fed our brains.

In fact, here’s a dirty little secret Dr. Atkins and his storm troopers won’t tell you – carbohydrates are the main source of blood glucose, which is the only source of energy for the brain and red blood cells.

Is the light coming on yet? No carbs. No energy. No brain power. There’s a subversive revolution underway, and the carb conspirators won’t rest until they breed a new generation of lazy people who think they’re getting skinnier but who are really just getting stupider. People with neither the intelligence nor the inclination to resist the ascension of the Atkins Army to total totalitarian tyranny. It’s terrible.

We must rise up. We must resist. Listen up, you haters of carbs – we will not go quietly. We, the founding members of the PC party, will fight. We will prevail. The world will be restored to its carb-friendly beginnings, and we will all be bubbling with energy and brilliance. And you will be banished to a dingy basement in rural Iowa where you’ll be fed a steady diet of bread and carb-loaded water.

You can have my carbs when you pry them from my cold, fat, healthy fingers.

I’m not. As I mentioned before, I find myself with less of a political orientation all the time. I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with people all over the ideological map. I often think the Christian Right is neither and that the Secular Left is both. But that’s neither here nor there.

What I know is that Michael Moore has suddenly risen to hero status among many of my generation who have become disenchanted with the machine. I understand that inclination, as I have no use for the machine myself. Moore seems like the perfect unlikely hero — a white guy against all the white guy causes who also happens to be unkempt, witty, and…well, fat. I’ve seen his first film, Roger & Me, and it was smart and funny.

Now comes Farenheit 9/11, the cinematic outworking of his 2003 Oscar rant at the current President. Apparently he’s blaming everything from 9/11 to the Kennedy assasination on the Bush family’s secret alliance with the Bin Laden family (oversimplification intentional…I assume it’s about more than that). And people are eating it up, of course. My favorite pub bit so far is the TV ad I saw last night which explained that F-9/11 is the only film in the history of Cannes to receive a twenty minute standing ovation. Stunning. Who would have guessed an anti-Bush reel would be so warmly received by a room full of rich French elites and Hollywood types? Tough crowd.

Anyway, Christopher Hitchens can handle this all far better than I can, and he’s done so here: The Lies of Michael Moore. Read it. Hitchens is a writer without a filter, and he’s also well left of center on virtually everything. The most scathing critiques of Bush political policy I’ve ever read were born at Hitchens’s keyboard. This ain’t Rush Limbaugh picking at a liberal. Not even close. This is a serious liberal (former Socialist even) completely exposing Moore’s theatrics for what they are — theater.

So it’s probably not news to anyone by now, but we’re moving back to Texas. Maybe at some point I’ll take the time to tell the story that precipitated this move at this time, but not tonight. For now it’s sufficient to say that we’re sure that we’re doing the right thing. We’re not running from anything, which is nice. We’ve had days here when we’ve wanted to run from certain things, but we didn’t. We’re glad. Our time in Pennsylvania has been no accident. No mistake. It was a season of purpose populated by wonderful people and a fair number of knuckleheads. But now it’s time to go.

This all unfolded pretty quickly, and it wasn’t really possible for me to feel much excitement at first. It’s not that I was unhappy, I was just overwhelmed by the weight of the decisions and the craziness that accompanied the decisions. Once the decision was made to move, the first thing I began to feel was relief. I’m telling the truth when I say we’re not running from anything here, but there are some circumstances in our lives here that we’ll be relieved from when we move. Nothing terribly tragic or oppressive, but the kind of stuff that weighs you down after a while. Even where there’s the sadness of departure, there’s also relief. I feel relieved. But then relief began to become something else.

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I watched some of President Reagan’s funeral procession and then most of the memorial service in the Capital rotunda. Despite my increasingly apolitical tendencies, I’m still pretty interested in these historical moments. I’m one of those guys who buys newspapers and magazines when real history happens. I tape things like state funerals and Michael Jordan’s retirement press conference(s). I have some stuff that I think I’ll be glad I have down the road — tape from the first day of the first Gulf War, magazines from McGuire and Sosa’s dramatic race to break Maris’s record, newspapers from all over the world after 9/11 and hours of tape from that day. I even inherited a pretty amazing original newspaper covering the second continental congress when we lost Amy’s Dad a few years ago. Some people have no use for this stuff, and that’s fine. I like it.

Anyway, I’ve already heard some people complaining about the excessive coverage of Reagan’s death. Everything gets covered excessively these days, but I welcome the change from the daily blah of Bush/Kerry non-happenings and tragic reports from the Middle East. You can like or dislike Reagan’s politics, but there’s not much disputing that he possessed something that none of today’s players do. He had a presence, and people trusted him. Most people felt good about him being the guy, even if they didn’t vote for him. Some of his approval ratings were absurd they were so high, even among Democrats. For me and folks about my age, Reagan dominates our memories of becoming acquainted with the ceremony and public face of American democracy. I vaguely remember Carter, which I think is pretty impressive since I was five in 1980. Yeah, I’m like that (but no, I didn’t save any papers from Reagan’s first election).

This is also interesting to me because this is the first state funeral for a President since LBJ died in ’73 (I was born in ’75). Nixon died in ’94 (and yeah, I have his funeral on tape too), but he didn’t get the full treatment for obvious reasons. All the living presidents showed up for that one, but the show went down out in Yorba Linda. This is history, folks. Give it five minutes.

All that said, there’s always reason to raise an eyebrow or two and laugh a little when these self-important events unfold. At the conclusion of tonight’s ceremony, the Senate chaplain, Barry Black, offered a prayer that included the following phrase: “…[Reagan] lifted the lamp of liberty to topple totalitarian towers.”

Wow.

But it makes sense when you read about Barry Black. He has three Master’s degrees and two doctorates. That’s five post-graduate degrees, if anyone’s keeping score. That’s a lot of education, which I guess makes your prayers sound, well, really educated. Oh, and there’s this — Barry Black is married to Brenda Black, and their three sons are Barry Black II, Brendan Black, and Bradford Black.

Wow.

I grew up with a feeling of fear about people because I had been told over and over again, “Don’t make friends with people who aren’t Christians because they’ll pull you away from your faith.” In general, as the church, we seem to grasp the “Don’t be of the world” part pretty well, but the reality is we’ve moved to a place where we’re nowhere even near the world. Instead of carrying God’s grace into our culture, we’ve created our own little subculture. And when the world pokes fun at our subculture, we think it’s persecution. It’s not. Persecution happens when someone’s reacting to the person of Christ. What we see is usually people’s reacting to our little subset of laws and rules and connections and commerce—how we do our stuff. I, personally, feel a need to begin to break free from that in whatever ways I can. I think it’s time to think differently about how we approach our faith in the world. We have to find a way to be human and let our faith express itself in our humanness while we’re involved with other human beings.

– Chris Rice, freelance nice guy, songwriter, and philosopher

I promised I’d gradually pull the curtain back on what I mean when I say I want this site to be (in part) about “exposing the big ubiquitous thing.” Consider this the first of many glimpses of the wizard. He’s little and, ultimately, powerless, but he puts on a big show as long as he has the curtain for cover.

[NOTE: For those who struggle with metaphor, Chris Rice is not the wizard. The Big Ubiquitous Thing (aka the BUT) is the wizard. Don’t worry, we’ll keep working on this.]

…but I’ll live with it. That’s not really the point of my post, and hopefully you’ll believe me. If you don’t believe me, just remember that I’ve never revealed the name of the supermodel I dumped to marry my ultra hot wife.

(I should clarify that the supermodel part is a joke. An average guy wouldn’t have to clarify something like that, but I know some of you might think I actually dated a supermodel. I didn’t. No, really. I didn’t.)

Anyway, my good buddy Michael Armstrong (whose website I would link to if he had visited it himself in the last ten months) is on the road playing acoustic guitar and keys for a new country artist named Julie Roberts. Her debut album released this week, and I’ve added it to my collection (and to my album list on the right). I’ve probably bought five country cds in the last five years, but I really like what I’m hearing so far. She’s the real deal — a smoky, soulful voice singing songs without a lot of the glitz and cheese that make most modern country go down like a shards o’ glass freeze pop.

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The next time you’re wandering around Blockbuster wondering if there’s been a worthwhile movie made in the last ten years, walk on past the latest offerings from Steve Martin (who just ain’t the same), Eddie Murphy (see Steve Martin), and Ben Affleck (who, let’s be honest, is just lucky to be Matt Damon’s friend) and pick up a copy of In America.

Despite critical acclaim and several awards (including three major Oscar nominations), you may have never heard of it. That’s mostly because there’s a conspiracy in Hollywood to get you to spend your money on really bad movies that eat away at your brain and act like novocain for your soul. I’m not some film elitist – I watch my share of stuff that leaves me feeling stupider than I was two hours prior. But I’m trying to watch less of that, and I’m urging you to do the same. So give this one a shot.

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I don’t vote for American Idol. I don’t call Seacrest or text message him on my AT&T wireless phone. I’ve never auditioned for Survivor, though I did give about two seconds of thought to applying for The Benefactor. I’ve never even found my way to a local Jeopardy casting call. I’m typically not one for reality TV or for game shows. But I have this one vice…

Back when Who Wants to be a Millionaire? made its first run, I got curious and made about four attempts to qualify by phone. And I did qualify, at least as much as it was up to me. If you don’t know how it works, you call a toll free number and a robot guy asks you sequence questions, much like the fastest finger part of the show only without Regis or the national television audience. The questions have four answers, each one corresponding to a number on your keypad (1,2,3,4). You have ten seconds to correctly answer each question. Once you get one wrong, you’re done. To qualify, you have to get them all right. It seems like it was only four questions on the first run of the show, but I may be wrong about that. Now that it’s Super Millionaire, it’s five questions. Anyway, a few years ago I made it through all the questions and advanced to the next round. As it turns out, that just meant I got put in a pool with all the other eggheads who got through the questions. They never called my number, and I’m not a millionaire.

So as you may have guessed, I’ve been sucked in again this time around. I think it’s worth saying that, for me anyway, the draw really is as much the competitive (even self-competitive) aspect of the game as the money. I still love and want money more than I should, but not as much as I used to (or at least I hope that’s true). I’ve never had much money, so I don’t think I seriously entertain the prospect of winning a million bucks, much less ten million. I just watch the show and rant about how I could school most of the folks in the hot seat. Oh, and I absolutely thrash on the fastest finger questions. Really. My wife thinks I’m an uber-genius based on this fact alone. Which is a fitting segue to —

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