Tag Archives: Happy Days

Hope for Us Losers – Tim Tebow, Advent, and Bitches, Man, Bitches

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At the heart of Christianity is not our souls, hell, heaven, the odd theology about when exactly the bread and wine become the body and blood. And Christianity has nothing to do with cannibalism. You haters.

At the heart of Christianity is the resurrection, a rebirth, life from death. I was dead, and I am reborn. I was blind, but now I see. That is the bottom line, but we humans have to muddy the water with questions like, “Did Jesus really come back to life?” We have been trained to seek scientific proof in realms where science is not the tool to use.

Oh, you bitches, I’m gonna kill you all with blogging about this stuff. You’ll be praying for me to go back to Ayn Rand. Which I have one more post to do. I won’t go into my full Karen Armstrong, A Case For God now, but all of this ties into that wonderful, life-changing book.

Remember in Dead Poet’s Society, where the textbook gives instructions on how to graph a poem? Using science on religion is exactly that. Stupid. So, did Jesus come back to life? It doesn’t matter. What matters is in the truth behind the facts. There is always hope, always good, always God in the world.

Which brings us to our newest messiah, Tim Tebow. Tebow changed the story of the Broncos this year, changed the narrative. We started the season with Kyle Orton, and it was just re-runs of last year. Yeah, this is the Happy Days where Richie nearly gets beaten up, but the Fonz saves him. Yeah, we’ve seen this before. Only as far as the Broncos went, this was where the bullies beat the hell out of Richie. Richie Cunnnigham. Of the Milwaukee Cunningham’s.

Our season was dead. We couldn’t win a game. We were cold with death. Death was everywhere. There were flies on the windscreen.

But lo, a voice is crying in the wilderness. Let despair not into your heart. There is hope. There is life. Roll away the stone. And Tim Tebow changed the story, and the Broncos started to win. And the narrative played itself out in game after game. We were losing. No way we could win. Down by ten points with two minutes to go? It’s impossible. We are dead. Turn off the T.V.

And yet, Tebow played out the resurrection and we won. In prol’ly ten years, we’ll have a T.V. movie about Tebow. Hope On Grass: The Tim Tebow Story. Um, prol’ly not that title, but you get my point.

In this season of Advent, in the Roman Catholic Church, it is a dark time, days are short, it’s cold, and yet, we celebrate the coming of the light, the hope of a new life, change when change seems impossible. In the darkness, in the cold, listen, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Which is just another way of saying, we don’t have to be scumbag losers forever. Even normal, troubled people like us can come from behind and win the big game. God bless you Tim Tebow, where ever you are.

Happy Days Destroyed My Soul

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I watched a buttload of T.V. growing up. Funny, that. Buttload. How much is that anyway? In kilograms? I don’t know. But I would watch around seven hours of T.V. a day growing up. My parents were absentee. I was neglected. Poor me.

A quick google, and it seems people watch around 5 hours of T.V. a day. Ha, I had that beat when I was ten years old and we didn’t have no new-fangled streaming Netflix streaming, or cable, or satellite, or video files on smart phones, none of that. I had four channels. Four. Ha. I dare any of you to watch the same four channels from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. day in, day out, for years on end. And no remote control, so changing channels required a commitment.

So yeah, I’m old.

And my grip on reality? Tentative. I was raised , not by parents, but by situation comedies, and they ruined me forever. Basically, I want my life, every part of my life, to have a nice solid story that takes about 23 minutes to complete and where I always get the girl, figure out the problem, get closure. This, of course, led me to despise the messy, unclosure of real life. I am not the Fonz. Oh, the Fonz, how I long to be the Fonz, in my leather jacket, slicked back hair, tough as nails, easy on the eyes, hard on the ladies.

Alas, I was not the Fonz. When I did venture out into the sunlight of real life, real girls would look right through me. I would snap my fingers. Nothing would happen. Seriously. Nothing. And I would slink back into the basement, turn on the T.V., and get lost in 23 minute chunks of funny dreamland. This lasted through college. Seriously, through college.

Again, googling, how I love to google, in the average 65 year life span, people spend a full nine years of their life watching T.V. Watching things happen to other people. Life lived as a voyeur.
I was not created to be a voyeur. I was created to live, to seize the day, carpe diem, boys, seize the day. But real life is scary, messy; snapping your fingers rarely results in magic. It can be disappointing. On the other hand, the raw realness of it is what makes it so wonderful.

Holding a trembling girl, dancing to music, smelling the trees in the morning, these require a full body, a full reality, to enjoy. And it’s up to me to seek closure, to make sense of the mess, and to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And really, the Fonz lost his cool when Richie Cunningham left. Such is life. Me? Every year, I might lose more hair, but I get a little cooler because the essence of cool is to believe in your own divinity. To live as if at any moment, a finger snap will turn on the juke box, and you’re favorite song will come blasting through, because it does happen. Of course it does.