Justin Johnson's Personal Blog

Wisconsin Week

So, I had my birthday on Monday. It began with a power outage at around 2 in the morning, just totally randomly. Everyone within a 10 block radius, or more, lost all power. The great thing for me, was that I was just finishing up my work for the night, and was literally SECONDS away from uploading it to the server when it all conked out. Slightly stressful.

I ran upstairs and saw that my sisters were still awake - I got Kristin to drive me to Barry's house, where I found Hardcore Dan and others causing a great amount of trouble. They ran off into the darkness swinging sticks around and screaming "APOCALYPSE!!!" - Dago and I just hung around near the house, called them and found they were tossing rocks at street lights. Eventually they returned and I asked Colin if he could drive me to Dago's, where power was seemingly unaffected.

I had to grab my laptop and some cords, and as I was retrieving the latter, the power majetically came soaring back to life. I came outside to a world less scary than the one I had just left.

Tragically, the outage didn't last long enough for Hardcore Dan and some minions to burn a couch in the middle of the road, but it was a nice thought.

My family got me a very tasty ice cream cake from Coldstone - all red an rich and delicious. As for presents, I had my sister buy me a $1 shirt from Savers, and I got a card from her and my mom. Doesn't really matter to me - 23 is an age that needn't go celebrated. I'm already to the point where I don't give a crap about these things - I'd much rather still be 21, at least that's an age more removed from something horrible like *shudder* 25 ... which is basically 30.

Later that day, Barry Dago and myself trekked to an area theatre to see "Unleashed" (what a horrible name for the movie) which was pretty good. A little too sugar-coated for my tastes, and the actress playing Morgan Freeman's daughter was rather annoying, but Jet Li was a cute little asian, and he kicked the living shit out of everyone. Can't go wrong with that.

Tuesday I had to drive my mom to WWIB, a Wisconsin-wide Christian radio station, since she was doing some little blurb about Vacation Bible school. I know she also wanted me to have a discussion with the DJ who I had known in my young and formative years. I discussed my experiences travelling across this great nation, and eventually he mentioned that I was 'questioning the faith' or something along those lines.

We got into a nice debate about the validity of the Bible, which I found envigorating - I don't go looking to discuss this stuff with people, but it seems like they always want to throw down. He suggested a couple books I should read and even offered to give me an extra copy of one of them that he just had laying around his house. It was weird being in such a frank discussion with someone I had looked up to as a sort of 'local celebrity' in the past.

He said he felt 'quite challenged' by me, not in a bad way, and now it appears as if I'll be joining him and others in the studio for his morning show tommorow. I guess the discussion is in regards to "Creative Christians" of which I wasn't entirely sure I applied to. He said not to worry, so we'll see what kind of antics go down. I've just got so used to speaking my mind in these last couple months I find it hard to hold back on occasion.

My mom and I had breakfast Wednesday morning, she wanted some one on one time with me since our schedules aren't always compatible.

She knows I've been dissecting and basically shredding apart the standard Christian faith in the last couple years that I've spent doing research into the matter, so she's always a little concerned about my 'walk with god' and other things like that that people say. Hard to know which god she expects me to walk with - Yahway? El Shaddai? The Great Mountain Lord? Eloheim? Jesus?? Oh, just so many choices in the Bible.

I let her know that Marissa and I are getting a place together and she seemed to take it pretty well. I was very happy that she was letting me take my own path in life.

Later on, she seemed much more concerned, started crying, seemed to think this was the last bastian of my Christian upbringing that was seeping away, even though we've basically been living together for the last year and a half anyway. Just seemed silly to me, but no son likes to see his mom in tears because of him. It's moments like that that I know why I keep so private most of the time.

Moving forward to last night, Kyle had a CD release show for his band "The Softrocks" - I had heard selected tracks that he had sent me in the past, and hadn't actually seen Kyle play live and in concert since a small-scale show back in Wisconsin at a coffee shop.

They played quite well, and I got to see a bunch of friends, and aquaintances that I hadn't seen in a while, including the very sexual Dan Diehn, who I'll soon be watching get hitched.

I drank quite a bit of beer, but never felt much of the effects, it was an odd day. Just kind of makes me feel quite fat right now.

Fat like this blog entry, it seems. I'm nervous about the radio show tommorow (it'll be live on WWIB.com from like 10-11 am central time) but it should be an experience. This whole damn trip has just been weird as hell, as being on a radio station should certainly be the weird as hell capstone to this little adventure.

posted by Justin Johnson @ 12:32 PM