Rascapalian

About me:

I am ancient and ageless. I am simultaneously filled with child-like wonder and time-worn weariness (and it can be exhausting). I have no practical talents to speak of (I write lyrics, but that's hardly practical). I am abstractedly melancholy, but haunted by JOY.

From my earliest memories I've had an overwhelming sense of being out of place here; an alien on my own planet; a stranger in...not a strange land....more like a stranger in my homeland (insert Homeland Insecurity joke here). It's not that it's a bad place – it's just never quite felt like home.

In my lyrics, I've often tried to express the simultaneous feelings of wonder and estrangement that have always been with me. Wrestling with a lyric is sometimes my way of trying to understand or relate to the world around me.

For as long as I can remember, I have had a feeling that the world is haunted. Not by something evil – but, rather, by something good (what the writer Charles Williams referred to as a “terrible good”). I've always had the eerie suspicion that, just behind the thin veil of the world we see, there is laughter. Not a silly, distracted, don't take life too seriously laughter – but a deep, intimate, knowing laughter. It had qualities that I didn't have names for, but later learned were Holiness and Joy. I've only caught fleeting snatches of the laughter, but those briefest moments are breathtakingly arresting.

I am not – nor do I aspire to be, nor have I ever been mistaken for – cool.

I am living proof of the reality of Original Sin and Amazing Grace (I just wish I was more Amazing than Original). I am a cripple, of the muscular dystrophy variety. I am a Christian, of the I-Started-Reading-The-Bible-To-Prove-It-Wrong-And-Oops! variety. I am blessed beyond measure to be married to the lovely and talented Patty Sue.

I've written 99% of the lyrics for our band Van Gogh. I've thrown a few on a playlist, and I hope you like them.

I have a sorry excuse for a blog at: http://www.knotonablog.blogspot.com/

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