my dinner with andre

in the epic film Waiting For Guffman, Christopher Guest showed off his My Dinner With Andre action figures along side his Remains of the Day lunch box. the former instilled wild curiosity in the heart of the young, impressionable mind of one timothy william bedi.

that curiosity grew into a very mild desire to see My Dinner With Andre, the film of two men (one down-to-earth and the other with head extravagantly in the clouds) simply having dinner and discussing everything from theatre to the nature of reality. i suppose the seemingly bland premise made me want to watch it, 110 minutes of conversation. you see at 15, i could not imagine that an entire movie could be devoted to something which seemed so trivial and, well, boring. thus it was sophisticated and i should watch it. 10 years later it sounds much more exciting for reasons other than pseudo sophistication.

to date, i've seen roughly 7-odd minutes of it, somewhere right smack dab in the middle. it was interesting. i wanted an andre. i wanted to be able to sit and talk with somebody and be completely riveted. and over the years, i've been blessed with many andre's. tonight, i was able to spend a little time with two of them. one of them has a great deal of worth to say, but seems to think i get tired of hearing it. with the other, i had dinner.

my andre for the evening was a close college friend of mine. we've had countless long conversations, most of which occurred over food. tonight we dined on Las Palmas. i need both of those things: good conversation and good mexican food. if i don't get them regularly, i grow uneasy (i prefer to be easy like sunday morning).

we talked about the church, about worship, about woman, about what we were doing with our lives and the deliciousness of a number 4, with chicken. all of these things i'll keep thinking about over the next couple of days. i'll weigh and measure our thoughts and statements. i'll digest them much like my pork chimichaunga. that's what i love about having andre's, about good conversations, they stay with you for a while and become a part of who you are.

i suppose that is what is different about myself now from the 15 year old version. i don't care if people find me sophisticated or intelligent or even completely stupid and asinine. i want to learn, to understand as much as i can simply to learn and to understand things rather than being thought __________. thank God for Andre's.

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quote of the evening, made by my friend during the aforementioned 'women' section of our dialogue:

"i find myself increasingly attracted to the nubian goddess that works in underwriting. mona...... she looks like donna summer, 1974 donna summer."

donna summer, queen of disco/possible co-worker of a guy i know

Merry Christmas '07

"blitzen gets impatient" by t.w.bedi

"paint" has become one of my hobbies. i started this one off with the intentions of making another santa, only this time with a sleigh (which for some reason i modeled after a chili pepper). but by the time i finished the reindeer, i had grown weary of making this. also, the reindeer proved to be much harder to create then anticipated and i don't think i could have made a santa with the same level of "craftsmenship." i also added a lightning bolt to the sleigh for aesthetic reasons.

God rest ye merry gentlemen!

ch-ch-ch-changes

yes, i too have become tired of our cup stacking friend. this is not to say that i don't admire his talent. he is going to make some woman very lucky some day. it just needed to be changed.

i've also decided to change the appearance of this endeavor. the heavily cropped picture behind the title of the blog was used in my very first post ever. it is "four trees" by an artist named egon schiele, seen below in amazing color.

four trees

egon must have painted this somewhere in between batteling a rediculously oversized marshmellow man and saving the city of new york from an overabundance of slime, stemming from their own hate, animosity and general stinkin thinkin. neither ray nor venkman ever really approved of his art.

but from what i can tell, the egon that painted the four trees was not of the most admirable character (particularly in areas of his relationships with minors). truthfully, i've never really seen much of his work outside of this particular painting and a quick image googling. there is something about this painting that gets me.

it's that second tree that does it. unlike his tree brethren, he's lost his leaves and it makes me wonder. has he given up or is he just ready for change? either way, he's different. the other three are still clothed in their fall gown but he is sitting there with his branches exposed to the world.

at times i 've felt like that second tree. i've wanted change. heck, i want it now. i'm ready for something new to come, for a change in seasons. there too are times i feel like i've given up. i grew weary of holding on to my leaves and just let them fall to the ground in hopes that something would grow back in their place. with each set of feelings there is a sense of solitude, a feeling i'd have a hard time describing better than that tree probably could.

for me there is change coming and not just the blog. seminary is on the horizon, which means pulling up roots for a while. i will also spend a few months of the next year doing some writing with ywam all over the south pacific. (ywam=youth with a mission)http://www.ywam.org/

it's coming and i'm ready for it.

so i'll leave you with a few more of egon's tree paintings :

autumn sun

autumn trees

autumn puff

Make it in Moldova

james has single-handedly changed the way i pronounce moldova. i wasn't putting enough force behind the 'dova.' i wonder if these men will make it..........
in molDOVA!

where on earth?

speed stacking

yesterday i watched this sport on espn. when asked about this 10 year old german competitors performance the year prior, the commentator stated: "well, all i can say about his performance last year was that he cried a lot."

now this sensitive young man owns a wssa world record in the individual cycle proving yet again, that tears will heal you and also that germans are efficient.

tales of nashvillian encounters: volume 2-a man at wendy's

during a slower week of reconstructing, a majority of the summer staffers met at a wendy's on gallatin road to partake in the ritual we have come to call lunch. it was a lovely lunch on a lovely day which will be forever remembered thanks to a complete stranger and his ordering technique.

i had just taken one last gulp of my beverage and knew that i would like more mountain blast powerade to take with me. like in many other wendy's restaurants, the beverage dispenser was located in between two registers.(1) as i approached the counter, i noticed two men studying the menu.

these gentlemen were rather tall. i did not get out a tape measure but i think it would be safe to say that one of them was probably close, if not above, seven feet tall though he couldn't have weighed more than 113 pounds. when telling this story, jan (a fellow reconstructer), will typically interject that he was wearing a tall-t. his friend, though not freakishly tall, was a solid 6'5" to 6'7" and probably very close to the century mark as well in terms of weight. he also dawned a tall-t. these were skinny lads. from this point on, we will only be concerned with the shorter of the two.

this man had set up shop leaning on the drink machine. he studied the menu with the concentration of a monk deep within some form of transcendental meditation. for the entire time i was waiting for my drink, he studied. finally, as the wendy's employee handed me my drink the man made his order.

"let me get..... two chicken sandwiches, BUCK-BUYCK!" (the 'buck-buyck' was made in a very high-pitched, chicken-like voice)

the man actually made the noise of the animal he was about to eat. this brought me great joy. to this day, when i'm feeling blue i will think of this man and his masterful ordering acumen and all sadness dissipates. if only all my experiences at wendy's were this memorable, i would be a complete man.

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(1) does anybody else feel like wendy's is a little stingy with their beverages? it seems to me like they have always been that way. i feel like they were way behind on the free refills wagon too. i can remember having to ask my parents for change so i could go get more beverage. even now they have yet to release control of their fountain drinks, unlike so many of their competitors. frankly, they are lucky they have their 99 cent menu or my dad, and many like him, would not eat there. and for pete's sake wendy's, cut back on the ice.

tales of nashvillian encounters: volume 1-darel

it was like any other day this summer. how was i supposed to know that i would have a conversation with a man that would change my life, not to mention the entire medical community, forever?

my services were needed for the repair of a rotting deck. i had just finished replacing some deck boards and rebuilding a few sets of stairs. finding myself tired, yet feeling rewarded, i took a cup of water and left the site only to move on to my next job...... or so i'd thought.

loading my car, i viewed a man walking toward me. he inched closer to me and i began to make out the writing on his green t-shirt. it stated, "I CARRY NO CA$H." i found it interesting that the maker of the t-shirt used a dollar sign for the s in cash.

after a minute of $tudying the man, i had no doubt$ in my mind that he, indeed, carried no ca$h.

now only a few feet from me, i asked the gentleman how is day was going. drawing out every syllable, the man declared the following:

"maaaaan, people been riding my assssss alllllll daaaaay lonnnggg."

the sentence took such a long time to exit his mouth that i had to rotate my body 180 degrees just to hear him finish. he was about five feet in front of me when i asked him about his day and a good ten feet away from me when he finished his reply.

let me go ahead and say, that i will never avoid a conversation that starts off this way. in fact, i will often times seek them out. on this occasion i feel it safe to say that we both wanted it.

i told the man to "hold up" and "get back here." darel, as i would come to know him, happily obliged. i told him i needed to know the story behind his answer and he began to tell me about his morning.

it was fool of disappointments. he was trying to make a buck or two and people had been ripping him off alllll daaaaay lonnnggg. he asked me if i would give him a job. i told him i couldn't do that. we talked a while longer. i gave him my cup of water. we talked a while and became quite close. at that point i asked if i could pray for him. he said he would like that very much. so.... he hugged me.

embracing darel back, i began to pray for him. as i closed, darel gave a very heartfelt "amen." we closed our hug and darel stepped back to examine me. he looked me up and down and i could tell something was going on in that mind of his. after about 15 seconds of silent observation, darel chimed "i want to show you something."

this is going to be good, i thought to myself as darel faced his back to me. as he began to lift up the back of his shirt, i became less convinced that this was going to be 'good' and more convinced that this was going to be quite bad.

against my better judgement, i continued to look as darel lifted his shirt to display a gigantic tumor or growth or something. i have searched and searched for an adequate description of this thing and the only comparable thing i can come up with is a butt cheek.

darel had a third butt cheek directly above his left one. it literally froze me for a while. i couldn't find anything to say. darel tucked the superfluous cheek back under the shirt and turned around waiting for me to say something.

the only words i could muster were "wow, darel, that's really impressive" as if it were some type of award given out very seldomly.

he looked almost as confused as i did and said that the doctors wanted to remove it but that he couldn't be in no wheelchair. this also confused me because it wasn't like the tumor was what propelled him down the street. he did have both of his legs. i'm assuming it was a high risk procedure because of its closeness to the spine. i told him i understood nonetheless.

we closed our encounter with darel asking me again for work and me sullenly informing him that we just didn't have a way of providing him with any. he persisted and said that if we did, he was one street over, adding: "if you see a white cadillac-blue rwoof, that's me."

i asked if he lived in the white cadillac with the blue rwoof. he only answered "white cadillac-blue rwoof, that's me. i gotta go."

and with that i bid him Godspeed, and we went on our ways. i'm not quite sure what happened to him after that. but i'll tell you this. every time i see a white cadillac with a blue rwoof, a part of me, heck all of me hopes that it is darel and that people are no longer riding his ass during any part or duration of the day.

pollution

driving home this afternoon, i witnessed an old, rusted out truck spewing pollution from its tailpipe roughly equal to the annual emissions of a moderately sized industrialized nation. on both sides of the tailgate, al gore bumper stickers were proudly on display. the irony made me smile.

coming soon

i've decided to write out a few of the more interesting encounters i've had on the mean streets of nashville this summer. this will be a 4 volume set. they will be much like the tales of the marshrutka from august of 06 (feel free to look at the archives). i'm still working on a name for them. one will involve bob seger, another will include two chicken sandwiches, another will have a george forman grill/high school reunion photos and there will be one with a white cadillac with a blue roof. i hope they will bring you as much happiness as they have me.

AHHHH! COUCH!

while traveling down the interstate sunday afternoon, i had an unfriendly encounter with some furniture. i found myself behind a pickup truck which just happened to be carrying some furniture. this furniture was not tied down to its fullest potential.

in fact, i approached the truck cautiously from behind and thought to myself: "that stuff doesn't look like it was tied down to its fullest potential." at about the time i finished that sentance the couch began to shimmy. i then said "it looks like that couch is about to fly out of the truck, possibly killing me."

not soon after i said that, the couch began to fly out of the truck, possibly killing me. the whole thing was quite prophetic on my part. i would say something and then it would happen.

the couch began to work itself off of the back of the truck and came after me like a ninja-vigilante. as it started its attack my first defense was to yell: "AHHHHH! COUCH!"

the screaming did nothing to deter the rogue couch. it continued its advance upon my ranks, adding to its forces by recruiting a few cushions and what appeared to be some type of chair or an ottoman.

it was me and the furniture now, soaring down the interstate at 70+ miles an hour.

i acted on instinct, weaving through the first wave of attackers. freedom was only a couch away. this was my great and worthy enemy. i dug deep and remembered the advice of emilio estevez from the mighty ducks.

looking over to my passenger seat, i swear i could see gordon bombay instructing me on how to perform a triple deak. he walked me through the steps and a few swift moves later i was past the spinning death the couch was ready to deliver.

safe and unharmed, i looked behind me only to see the couch find its way to the side of the road as my fellow road warriors passed safely. but as i looked upon the couch one last time in the rear view, i swear i saw it mouth these words:

"i will get you."

from now on, i will live in fear. somewhere out there, a couch longs for my demise.

opryland

without a doubt, one of the greatest travesties to befall not only middle tennessee, but possibly the world was the closing of opryland, u.s.a.

during the reconstruct camp week, teams are given wednesday night off and are sent off into nashville to do whatever their collective little heart desires. there is always a group or groups that venture out to opry mills, a shopping mall built upon the broken utopia that was our theme park.

instead of the hangman, we now have bass pro shops.
instead of chaos, we have glow golf.
instead of the screamin delta demon, we have the rain forrest cafe.
instead of fun for the whole family, we have various outlet stores.

it saddens me.

i know people will tell me that it was a necessary financial move, that the park was profitable and that a mall would bring in more people. to those people i say: you have no heart and are probably dead on the inside. we could have found a way. it just happened so fast. i didn't even get to say goodbye.

this is a strange post.

i really miss opryland.

beths

jan, jillian, karyn