Room to rent, fifteen cents.

Do you remember that scene in the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come when Chris Nielsen begins his journey into hell and finds himself walking across a sea of faces that talk and talk and talk but don't make much sense? He sees faces he thinks he recognizes, but once he stops to talk to them he realizes they aren't who he thought they were. The more time he wastes talking to these faces he thinks he knows, the more he is diverted from his goal and the closer he comes to becoming insane and being trapped in hell forever. Isn't that a riveting concept?

I feel like Chris lately. I feel like wherever I go I meet people who are shouting at me. I go downtown to the library and come across the last vestiges of the Occupy Birmingham protesters. Their signs don't make any sense and one dogged little man always seems to be waving the Norwegian flag. It's a little Non sequitur-ville populated by a few very passionate people who might as well be shouting about their undying passion for mint chocolate chip ice cream and fluffy bunnies rather than rattling off trader-lingo they picked up from Fox News and don't quite understand. And it takes up space in my brain.

Those of you who are my Bookface friends (which I assume is almost all of you) know that I've been nursing a low-level obsession with Christian blogs lately. I started with the gateway blogs. You know, the Christian Housewife types, but I quickly moved to the hardcore fundamentalist varieties that I think I kept reading for much the same reason I paid to see the World's Largest Horse at the Jefferson County State Fair one year. Some of them (like the one that insists women remove their shoes in the house) have a freakshow aspect that I find completely engrossing. Much to my chagrin, in fact. (The horse, by the way, wasn't really that big. Maybe 18 hands or so. And he bit a plug out of my shoulder.)


I listen to NPR in the kitchen and in the car Voices. Voices. Voices. And while those are voices I can't see myself ever giving up, they often rattle my cage... get my dander up...engage the part of my brain that wants to argue, argue, argue.

I need a break. I think Jesus is probably speaking in there somewhere too, but I miss him because my mind is chewing on all of the other ideas I've allowed to be dumped there throughout the course of my day. My dad said something wise to me a few years ago. He said "Don't let someone rent space in your head." That's what I've been doing. My mom said (while we were pushing my kids on the swings at the park) that I need to discipline my mind and never go to those blogs again.  It's bad news, she said. And she was right.

So I'm challenging myself to be more vigilant about the ideas I entertain. And it's hard for me because I don't often censor ideas. I like to consider every possible aspect of a situation and try to understand how they all fit together.  But I think it prudent (thanks, Dana Carvey) to think my own thoughts for a while. So, I'll chew on that.

Boogity, Boogity, Boogity Amen.