the older son has a healthy disrespect for religion, he rejects it in all its forms, whether that be someone at school trying to get him to pray, or me trying to drag him to a sunday school that's full of nice kids but makes him do sports and various things he's sick of anyway. he moved here just at a time when, if mandatory praying is part of what texas is about, part of your graduation, part of all sports events, etc., then it comes to represent that part of texas that he really would rather trade for illinois. so it goes.

the younger guy goes to church willingly on sunday, because he feels that a crowd of kids like himself, determined to cause trouble and have fun in a non-school setting, where benevolent adults will look the other way when you steal a cookie, why that's his idea of fun, and there's lots of room to run and nobody really cares how you dress or even if you take your shoes off. he'll gladly sing a song or listen to whatever the pastor has to say to the kids, because most of the time it's pure wildness and nobody really tries to control him very much. i do, but i also leave him with other adults when i can so as to participate in any other religion i can get for myself, though that sometimes just turns out to be a quiet moment by their labyrinth there at the church. the church is in a nice middle-class lubbock neighborhood, blocks from a busy part of town. but on sunday mornings, it's really nice.

online i seek out the bad quakers - quakers with attitude, the association of bad friends. since all quakers are basically dropouts from the mainstream spectrum - what defines them really is desire to have religion and have god, but not have dogma, or structure, or a boss - most quakers are "bad" anyway in the eyes of the world, and then for them to be bad in the eyes of each other, that's really a challenge, and some succeed occasionally. i mostly watch but participate occasionally. to me it's nice to have a crowd & my crowd here is mostly the presbyterians - at the church - but my crowd online kind of makes up for it. this actually is another kind of escapism. it's keeping me from finishing the stuff i've started writing.

more rain tonight, maybe hail. we're boarded up though, it probably won't hurt us like the last one did. i feel like i'm in the hold of a ship. we have only one window in front now, but we leave that one uncovered, and i like that, because the sun here is like kansas, sharp, piercing, all-encompassing, way too hot, and there's no way i can really get used to it. my wife is halfway used to it already, she's from california, apparently blue sky and lots of sun is just the way. and you look out into the ocean, lots of sky there too. but i'm still not used to it. i was walking tonight and looked up, hoping to get a clue on when it would rain, and maybe ho hard. wild clouds were sailing over and the pattern was unreadable. a mass of clouds off to one direction but unclear as to whether this mass and what i saw skittering above me were even remotely related. finally, a couple of random drops here and there, as i walked. and a smell of dog wallow coming up gently from the park, where that water has sat, maybe a couple of inches deep at most, for several days, mixed in with dog poop, got up quite a smell, and begins wafting, as soon as you get upwind. a strong wind doesn't mean everything blows away...it just means it blows. and it might just as soon blow right under one's nose, as one walks. chou