the Adventures of John Doe

So John Doe rocks! let me just say that for starters.

I got together with this kid named Jon Back who I went to high school with and because he's such a character (more interesting than what the usual person would expect when you say "character"), but yeah, this guy is a trip. I asked him if I could make a mini-series about him that we could call "The Adventures of John Doe" and post on youtube and make millions of people obligate themselves to delve into the crafty dramatic sequences of his life--being lived out of a dugout for a home and who never leaves the baseball diamond. He encounters certain people who try to interfere with his normal living but he dauntlessly puts them in their place without so much as a grunt and a "ehhh" noise.

We sat down and I typed out this script on my lap top while asking him what he'd say in these specific situations. He fed me lines that he'd say and I madly recorded them all and we ended up with three written episodes. Last week Tuesday we got out there to Field of Dreams and began haphazardly shooting from my church's Sony HD in a cinéma-vérité style which is gonna kill me to edit. I wish I could throw up a clip preview but I know they'll come soon--very soon!

We shot the last of it last night while doing a night shoot (which I had never done). I brought out a lighting kit with a blue gel and about a thousand feet of extension cords. This guy named Randy Hendrikse who is in his mid-sixties and who has a killer deep voice (I've used him to do voiceing for some other projects) came out and played the security officer who confronts John Doe on his living on city property. I was laughing so hard I could barely hold the camera. Oh well, now I've got to get to work on this thing. Kevin (the Bully) and I got together yesterday morning to write music and lay down a mucical soundtrack. We plugged in his guitar and a keyboard and went at it. should be fun once this thing's out! this is how I spend my time! Making mini-series like Marvin O'Connery and so on and so forth. I'll probably end up like one of those 5o-year old unshaven men who live by the river parks and wear Goodwill pants, smoke cigars, ride a rusty bike, and do community theaterfor a living--or at least I hope not.

Coming soon: The Adventures of John Doe

So I had all these ideas of things I wanted to write about. No lie, all these ideas and now I can't think of any. I go to this thing Monday nights at some people's house called The Prayer room and we just hardcore worship and sing and dance and pray with everyone all together. Why is it my favorite thing of the week? Well when you put a bunch of people in a room who for the most part want desperately to see God do something powerful, well he ends up speaking and i end up leaving feeling really loved and filled up again.

i told my sister to get her crew over there and sure enough her Bible study that she leads now comes and it is so cool to see them there. I really like playing the piano and i like to sing and i like how we just make up songs as we go constantly keeping the flow with ins and outs and continuations of other songs intertwined with fresh new ones. i can't think of a more fun way to worship God.

just a few more weeks and I'm going to go and get off to school. that i am really excited for. I'm not so pumped up about working at freshbrands and doing the same thing over and over and over--the same thing since february and at a breakneck 14 hour shift! it's gruesome! but with my bad performance as of late, i may end up just getting fired at the same time i would end up leaving for escuella! Whatever, either way God's given me a great way to make ends meet and i praise him for that. i still believe he's going to do great things before i leave and that's all that matters! my heart's in this thing for him so let the games begin (english accent).

yeah, i did this show thing at church called What's the Buzz? in the new TV studio I built in the basement. it was fun making all of it. it was fun writing up the show and getting it to be incorporated into the worship service where it would inform people of what's going on. brent, my media guy boss decided it wasn't going to fly to much longer though. (not because i swore during it and told dirty jokes)---(no i didn't do that either)...but because he thought it was too long and got things off track. i was offended. I thought my work was overlooked and i felt down about the whole thing...then i decided a few weeks later to talk to him and when we talked i totally felt so much better, like i meant something. he was like Zach, I know you put in a lot of hard work into these things. And he told me how he liked how I did this and that and i told him I forgave him and we moved on. Anyway, here are some clips...

(more more) Blue Like Jazz. part III

Okay, so it started downpouring just this morning and I was just going to go shower...but something about lots of rain coming down and usually your not supposed to have fun like that in the rain all by yourself, but I did. I ran out there to the street which was filling up with water and then bolted back inside to dry off. Yes, I am going to actually take a shower b/c I forgot my shampoo out there.

Here's the last of my favorite BLJ quotes here!

Blue Like Jazz quotes

And that's when I realized that believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon. (104)

Here is the trick, and here is my point. Satan, who I believe exists as much as I believe Jesus exists, wants us to believe meaningless things for meaningless reasons. (100)

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. (107)

I had this idea once that if I could make Christianity cool, I could change the world, because if Christianity were cool then everybody would want to deal with their sinful nature, and if everybody would want to deal with their sin nature then most of the world's problems would be solved. (107)

If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you. People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. I told the radio host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. (115)

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained. (115)

For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religions system as a whole, but it isn't a religious system, it is people following Christ, and the important thing to do , the right thing to do was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus. (118)

The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness... The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus. (132?

I think there are artists at a lot of churches who don't have an outlet, and by creating an outlet, the church gives artists a chance to express themselves and in return the church gets free stuff to put on their walls. Relationships are like rubber bands...when one person pulls away, the other is attracted, and when the other person pulls away, well, that just draws the other one even closer. (140)

I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you liker her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep ridding your bike by her house either. (142)

People really like me a lot when they only know me a little, but I have this great fear that if they knew me a lot they wouldn't like me. (143)

Marriage is amazing because it is the closest two people can get, but they can't get all the way to that place of absolute knowing. (146)

When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse. (151)

No drug is so powerful as the drug of self. (182)

Because I grew up in the safe cocoon of Big-Christianity, I came to believe that anything outside the church was filled with darkness and unlove. (209)

The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in the Christian community, but it was conditional love. (215)

I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. (216)

If a person senses that you don not like them, that you don not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say. (220)

I loved the fact that t wasn't my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God's, that my part was just to communicate love and approval. (221)

I have come to understand that strength inner strength, comes from receiving love as such as it comes from giving it. (232)

I think the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus. (237)

I know our culture will sometimes understand a love for Jesus as weakness. there is this like floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. (237)

I think Christian spirituality is like Jazz music. I think Jesus is something you feel. I think
it is very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful. (239)