Okay, here’s where we’re at with my neighbor’s dog:
There’s mostly good news, not the least of which is the dog himself has matured somewhat beyond the puppy stage, which doesn’t really mean he barks less, per se, but that the episodes do not last quite as long. What I mean is, when he first got here, he’s see another dog pass by and woof at him. Now, your average dog will woof for awhile and stop. Not my friend. 20 to 40 minutes later (I once clocked him, no kidding, at over 70 minutes) he’s still complaining about this passing dog, who was, by then, long gone. Cody does that far less frequently now. He’ll usually shut up after five to ten minutes, only railing on on those rare occasions.

Another neighbor, tiring of our childish bickering, called the dog’s owner (who is offended by my referring to him as Dog Man, and for winch I apologize as he now reads this blog; I meant no insult by “Dog Man,” other than, literally, shorthand for “The Man Who Owns The Dog”) and I to a summit where this neighbor negotiated a peace treaty between us. I made the guy what I considered the ultimate deal: if he would keep his dog quiet—not inside, I never asked him to keep the dog inside, just keep him quiet—on my two days off (Saturday and Monday), then he could do whatever he wanted for the other five days of the week.

Five days for two, I thought was a god deal. And, for many months, it was. If I was going out on those days, I’d call my neighbor and tell him he didn’t need to keep the dog inside that day since I wouldn’t be home anyway. We did the courtesy call thing and time management thing, and life was good. Then, over the course of some months, little by little, the armistice began to splinter.

I did a Google search for something or another and turned up a message board comment referring to me as, “Well-known crackpot Christopher Priest said thus and so…” Crackpot? *scratches head* When did I become a crackpot? I wasn’t so much insulted as I was puzzled. I mean, of all the insults to hurl at me, “crackpot”? I did snicker, though: at least I was “well-known.”

Well, every place except here. Here, I am a piano player. I am a minister. That’s all these folks really know about me. I gave copies of my Green Lantern novel to my neighbors, they still don’t get what I do. All of which actually works for me, except that, now with a local ministry developing an independent film, they’ve pursued me to work with them on the film while, at the same time, not treating me as a professional. It’s a little hard to explain, but, it’s like, I’d do a first draft of the screenplay for little or nothing. Then when financing started to come in, the group looked to Hollywood and New York for a “real” writer, offering him $25k to do a re-write of my screenplay, for which I’d charged them less than one-fifth of that rate to do. And, I wondered, is this fellow they were talking to was five times better a writer than me. Or if his re-write, a couple weeks’ work, would be five times as good. Or five times as fast.

It just occurred to me that these folks, these wonderful, great church folks whom I love like family, just have no idea that I am, in fact, a professional writer. I’ve also discovered that slashing your rate to the moral equivalent of five bucks and a ham sandwich only reinforces that thinking. They thought the 25k guy was five times better because he charged five time more, rather than thinking the opposite, that we are likely peers, but Priest is all but donating his services while the other guy is not.

Working for almost nothing is a time-honored Christian tradition. It’s all about ministry, all about your tithe to God. The reality, however, is churches that actually *can* afford to pay you a decent rate but who choose to let you work for next to nothing, to always be broke and late on your bills. Dude, I can be broke and late on my bills working at Wal-Mart. I don’t have to write your movie to do that.

Last week I had the honor of speaking at the 14,000-member New Life Church here in Colorado Springs (yes, *that* New Life Church), where I prayed for the media (well, for everybody except Lou Dobbs) while explaining my limited role in it. Which, of course, made me realize just how long I’ve been gone from this site and this blog. I could explain where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but, of course, then I’d have to kill you. Let it suffice to say I’ve been far busier than I can adequately explain, which doesn’t much make up for the fact I’ve been AWOL from many people in my life whom I dearly love. I don’t want to start naming names because I’m sure to leave somebody out, so I’ll just say I really do miss you all, and now that I’ve finally found a few days to clean up my house (both the one I sleep in and my virtual house here on the web), I’m going to take another stab at showing up around here more often and (gasp) actually answering my email.

Speaking of which, I kind of have upstairs email and downstairs email. All the comics-related and business stuff is downstairs email, and I haven’t booted up that PC in many, many months. So, again, I apologize to folks who’ve been trying to email me. All the more so since this weekend’s coma awakening found me switching the site to a shiny new hosting company. They are, like, 25% cheaper than my old company and provide, no kidding, like 10x the space and bandwidth. I’ve been using them for about a year over on the PraiseNet, so I’ve decided to move the less-praiseful Digital-Priest thing over as well.

Which means expect glitches and things moved as I’ve changed some directories and updated some other things. This week, I’m hoping, will be reasonably slow, which should allow me to get my lawn cut (my neighbors are forming a lynch mob) and to get into the Movable Type code, which I’m sure I screwed up. It seems to be working from my end, but enough of you have complained to inform me that something is probably wrong. I think my ultimate goal is to simply fork over the bucks and let them, Movable Type, get in and fix my installations and trouble-shoot my templates. Honestly, a programmer I am not.

The other unfortunate consequence of switching servers is I forgot to pull the mail off of the old one. I’m going to try and go in and grab it, but, to be safe, if you’ve emailed me in, gee, the last four to six months (man, that’s embarrassing) and got snubbed, I apologize. As I said, I have a bevy of good reasons (no, I wasn’t in jail. Yes, I was very sick for awhile, but me all better now). You can go ahead and re-send those messages, I’m doing both the upstairs and downstairs now and trying to streamline the whole email matter.

Thanks, as usual, to my wonderful friend Elayne Riggs and husband Robin for being the Only Persons On The Planet To Send Priest A Christmas Card, an honor they’ve captured two years running, now. Merry Christmas everybody!!!!

Sorry about the ongoing blog glitches. I’m going to comb thru the code over the weekend and hopefully get this thing running properly. And, of course, Movable Type just released an upgrade that now requires I rewrite all my templates… grrr…

Anyway, if you register with TypeKey (see link in comments section), I can add you as a “trusted” commenter, which means your comments will publish immediately. I’ve added all of the authenticated commenters who’ve posted here, and will add anyone else who registers with TypeKey, so that should reduce some of the headache. Beyond that, hopefully by next week we can spend more time complaining about stuff and less time struggling with the blog.

Also note *any* hyperlinks in your comment will get you detained by homeland security (IOW: held for my review; it's a spam lockout thing). Not saying don't use 'em, just unnderstand they may not post right away. Thanks!

The cookies don’t seem to be working on this blog (i.e. “remember me” and so forth). I’m trying to figure out why, but the code looks right Re-typing that info over and over is really annoying. I took the blog out of frames and tried again—no dice. I believe this cookie problem is also what’s screwing up the TypeKey handshake. If anybody has a suggestion, I could use the help.

Yesterday the rip cord on my lawn mower snapped. The mower is about, oh, seven years old, so I suppose it’s time, so I’m not terribly mad about it. Looks simple enough to reattach, so me and my handy Phillips head went about the task of reattaching this cord after the break (did you know most things in life can be dealt with with a mini MagLite and a Phillips had screwdriver? No, seriously, try it. Clip ‘em to your belt and take ‘em everywhere you go. You’ll see).

The plastic housing came apart easy enough—Phillips head! But then you get to the metal inner housing around the motor—which is attached by custom screws. You need either an Allen wrench or a custom driver of some kind to turn those screws.

This is why I hate everybody.

Why, oh, why couldn’t they just attach the housing with regular, Human Being screws?!? My backyard looks like Guam in August, and my neighbors are shunning me. I’ve contacted four different landscaping companies to come out and cut the backyard and been stood up four separate times. Finally, my will broken, I just drop everything and make the time to pretty things up here, and this is how the world rewards me: custom screws.

I went to Wal-Mart looking for a wrench or something and was told this custom screw business is a common practice to force you to do one of the following: (1) bring the mower into the shop (sure, I’ll get it back by October) or, more likely, (2) get so frustrated I’ll just buy a new mower. Honestly, if I had the cash, that’s what I would have done. I’m much more invested in getting the yard done than in fighting city hall. It just amazes me that a 50-cent rip cord could cost me $150 for a new mower just because these geniuses at Briggs & Stratton decided to use these idiot screws. Life, as I know it, has come to a screeching halt because of four screws.

My Christian convictions notwithstanding, there’s a special place in hell for the guy who thought up this crap.

And, so, what are we to say about Pastor Jerry Falwell, who passed away yesterday of apparent heart failure? We are, I presume, to celebrate the enormous good he did for the Kingdom of God, while not over-looking or white-washing the enormous damage he did to the cause of Christ. A model of Christian conservatism, Falwell’s laudable activism energized a diminishing American moral conscience, harkening this country back to God’s values and Biblical principles. The unfortunate side effect of his Moral Majority movement, however, was to marry a conservative culture to conservative values, and a equating of morality and spirituality, blending these qualities into a kindly Ronald Reagan-Ozzie and Harriet vision of moral purity that insidiously placed white, middle-class Americans at the top of the food chain while omitting blacks and other minorities. Falwell’s palette for Christian purity kept us waiting tables, voiceless and faceless, our cultural accents eliminated as most Falwell-approved blacks looked and sounded a lot more like Wintly Phipps than Cornell West or Jesse Jackson. The easy-going, soft spoken, rounded-edge blacks of Falwell’s world were the only ones seen within his many years of faithful service to the religious right.

Falwell’s movement was an unabashedly white movement, a white moral rights movement which eclipsed the black civil rights movement as our great civil rights leaders moved off the stage, replaced by minstrels like Jackson and Sharpton. Left virtually unopposed by the fractious political doddering of the Democratic party, Falwell rode the political corpses of scandal-plagued televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart to national attention and power. In so doing, he so polarized his conservative message that many people, to this day, cannot separate Falwellian philosophy from the simple message of truth in the Bible. Christianity, most especially fundamentalist Christianity, has become socialized into a vision of the double-chinned conservative wack job, a stigma I and many pastors have to constantly combat when we seek to engage people with the message of Jesus Christ, a message Falwell distorted and a work he and like-minded conservative clones like him has made all the more difficult. The “moral” Christian right has made it exponentially more difficult to share the message of Jesus Christ.

I’ve completed a clean install of Movable Type 3.35, using a new My SQL database instead of the default Berkley one. MT seems to operate more stably on My SQL, so I figured I’d give this a shot. Those of you using RSS should log onto the new site: http://www.phonogram.us/blogs2/dpdc/. This blog will be going away by the end of the week. See you over yonder!