untitled, 2013
hi my name's jake and i'm a buffyholic
activities: bicycling, writing music, writing poetry, reading, hiking, meditation, yoga, urban exploration, cross-country skiing, longboarding, woodworking, napping, drinking tea, drawing, making video, praying, exploring, watching buffy.
philosophies: pantheism, polytheism, sōtō zen and theravada buddhism, classical stoicism, skepticism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, myth as metaphor and still valid today.
music: indie folk, indie rock, freak folk, post-rock, dream pop, ambient, experimental, psychedelic, shoegaze, pop, psychedelic pop, indie pop.
I make music as Herons Wake. This is my Bandcamp page. Please check out my tunes. Everything is free for download! Criticism and comments are greatly appreciated. Contact me at jacobbornheimer@gmail.com.
MY MUSIC
MY POETRY
MY ART
• What's on your mind?
With all the Christian Bashing I’ve been seeing lately I want to tell you all a few stories…
About one man, who was probably the driving influence that lead me to paganism.
Growing up I was a very very devote Catholic. I went to mass twice a week, prayed every night, observed a ton of saints days, I was even an altar server. When I was a server I worked mostly with our head priest, let’s call him Father Mike.
Father Mike was the only person that I told about the voices I heard and the things that I saw and felt when I prayed. I was nine when I first told him in confession, I had been terrified that there was something wrong with me, but Father Mike just listened to me. He didn’t tell me that I was crazy, or that I was possessed, when I said that I heard saints and angels, he believed me, and told me to practice listening to them. We talked about the man in brown with the deer and the birds, who I thought was St. Francis of Assisi, kept appearing in my dreams. We talked about how when I prayed I heard answers from voices that weren’t my own.
Father Mike was the person who told a ten year old me that I shouldn’t take Holy Orders and become a nun, because it would be a waste of my gift if the best I became was a Mother Superior. When questioned the Church and its teachings we talked it through. I felt that I couldn’t worship a god who let people say such things in his name, tell lies in his name. When I told him that I didn’t feel connected to God anymore Father Mike looked at me and said, “You have the light of the divine around you, but maybe not this divine.”
He was my mentor, and my friend, and then one day when I was 11 Father Mike stopped in the middle of his homily and said, “This is my last Sunday as a priest.” He was leaving the church, “I’ve fallen in love,” he said, “I know I will have eternity to love God, but I only have one life time to love this person. And I can’t stay in an organization that tells me that the love I feel is a sin. Because I love a man.”
I was serving at that mass, and as we cleaned up Father Mike took me aside and said, “I think it’s time for both of us to moved on. Remember you have the light around, you just need to find the source.”
brilliant story.
still chipping away at this poem, getting closer and closer to what i’d like it to say. :)
manifest
stretching out across red bridges
sending out regular puffs
of cherry smoke to the glittering city
observing visionary young men
with eyes locked and shining for the horizon
and bitter-bums bowing
blowing streams that sink through cedar
hands clasped in fervent prayer
and noses to the concrete
Swiggity swag the Emperor is in the bag
no stop reblogging this again
(Source: john-egboobs, via onlyfoolsandvikings)
Thranduil Embarrasses His Kid By Showing Up To Pick Him Up On His Elk: Part 2
(via bregma)
More on the smartness of the Hannibal meta: it’s not pretentious if you’re not pretending.
(Sorry to keep ranting about the worth of people’s writing about Hannibal, but it’s touched a very big nerve for me.)
A thinky thinky person just wrote to me: “Haha, actually I just discovered Deleuze last spring through Jasbir Puar, but it was one of those things where I had already been trying to articulate a lot of the same ideas, so it just gave me a language to talk about them. That happens to me a lot. Now I’m kind of obsessed. But I feel shamefully pretentious bringing it up on Tumblr, because even in academia sometimes it’s pretentious.”
I fucking hate the word “pretentious.” Yes, a lot because it’s been used about me (defensive some), but also because it can be a way for people to put down thinking. And sometimes it can be a way for people to stop thinking. It can be a way for people to tell you not to take your thoughts seriously. But let me tell you a thing: it’s not pretentious if you’re not pretending. Sure, sometimes you can fail at a Big Thought, and some people use Fancy Thinkers as a way to cover their own ignorances. But if you’re using those thoughts and thinkers as tools for understanding, then it’s fucking legit. If you’re writing in good faith, if you’re thinking honestly and expressing it sincerely, if you’re not pretending, it’s not pretentious.
Here, lemme give you an example of a Fancy Thinker who says exactly what I mean, in his case about people self-conscious about studying The Matrix:
“The anxiety isn’t about the real, but about what our relationship to the fake should be. Another way of intitiating the same curiosity would be to ask why, exactly, superstar postmodernists like Slavoj Žižek come to devote themselves to speculating about a popular movie? Because they have been sent an invitation.”
Hannibal sends an invitation, a big glorious engraved invitation, to every viewer, an invitation to think. An invitation to reflect and respond and interpret, and better than that, an invitation to enjoy those thoughts, and other people’s thoughts, and the very act of thinking itself. Because that’s what the show’s about, right? Thinking, and interpreting, and figuring shit out. And I for one am gonna RSVP the fuck out of that.
oh my god YES.
SYD! This is what I was talking about! YES
