{"id":604,"date":"2010-09-12T08:31:59","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T16:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikevarley.com\/?p=604"},"modified":"2010-09-25T10:50:43","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T18:50:43","slug":"the-mike-varley-plain-dealer-the-ordination-of-montgomery-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/?p=604","title":{"rendered":"The Mike Varley Plain Dealer: The Ordination of Montgomery Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Friends, <a href=\"http:\/\/mikevarley.com\/?p=595\">MUMs<\/a>, and all in between,<\/p>\n<p>A question for you to puzzle: How do you transmit intention through email?  How do you show conviction with an Arial font?  How do I get you to understand what you&#8217;d know if you saw me in the eyes?  This is the question at the core of the internet.  Emoticons don&#8217;t cut it, my friend &#8211; we can do better than this.  Break convention yet respect formality.  Clean up your act and loosen that tie.  And for the love of God, no more FWD&#8217;s!<\/p>\n<p>This is the first in a series of emails you&#8217;ll be receiving over the next few weeks.  To be more precise, you&#8217;ll find them in your inbox every other Friday for the next 2-3 months.  Between the art shows, finally recording some long-delayed short stories and the culmination of some other projects, I have a glut of content ready to share that I&#8217;m pretty happy about.  But I know if I were to share it all in one email, it&#8217;d be too much for any reasonable person to handle, including myself.  If I wouldn&#8217;t want to sort through it, why should I force you?<\/p>\n<p>As a result, I&#8217;m releasing these creations to you serially in the hopes that you will give them more consideration than you&#8217;d typically give email communication.  The style and content will change accordingly, as you&#8217;ve likely discovered already.<\/p>\n<p>One more thing before &#8220;The Ordination&#8230;&#8221;: There are a lot of really fantastic people on this email chain &#8211; about 300 of you by this point.  I&#8217;d like to find a way to encourage connections not only between the 300 of us but between me and all the incredible people you know in your lives that I&#8217;ve never met.  If anything, I&#8217;m a compulsive hunter for new personalities.<\/p>\n<p>So if you think you know anyone that might be interested in these next few months of storytelling, please FWD this email!  Either way, don&#8217;t stop breaking the rules.<\/p>\n<p>Mike Varley<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*****<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Ordination of Montgomery Jackson&#8221; was written from March to April 2007 while I was living at Sasona Co-op in Austin, TX.  It&#8217;s a comedic-fiction piece about an artist trying to rediscover his muse.  It is about surrendering to benevolent chaos.  It captures the yearnings of a 23rd year.  It is about seeing your destiny and taking a rain check.  it is about watching a poet&#8217;s dream realized in full.<\/p>\n<p>There are three ways to experience this story, all available on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mikevarley.com\/varley\/stories\/jackson\/jackson.html\"><strong>&#8220;The Ordination&#8230;&#8221; page at MikeVarley.com<\/strong><\/a>.  The first is an audio version, available on the site as a stream or an mp3 download.  The second is a printable, downloadable PDF version.  The third is the text version available right on the page.  The author&#8217;s preference is the audio version, but I leave the choice to you.<\/p>\n<p>The photos that decorate the page were taken in an October 2007 photo shoot and feature Mike Varley, Shawn Sempowich as Ernesto, Rick Sempowich as school offical #1 and Gerry Albers as school official #2.  All photos were taken by Yun Gen Yang at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yangphoto.com\/\">www.yangphoto.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Regards and Enjoy,<br \/>\nMike Varley<\/p>\n\t\t<div style=\"float:right;margin:10px 10px 0px 0px;\">\r\n\t\t\t<a class=\"DiggThisButton DiggCompact\" href=\"http:\/\/digg.com\/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmikevarley.com%2F%3Fp%3D604&title=The+Mike+Varley+Plain+Dealer%3A+The+Ordination+of+Montgomery+Jackson\" ><span style=\"display:none\">Dear Friends, MUMs, and all in between, A question for you to puzzle: How do you transmit intention through email? How do you show conviction with an Arial font? How do I get you to understand what you&#8217;d know if you saw me in the eyes? This is the question at the core of the [&hellip;]<\/span><\/a>\t\t\r\n\t\t<\/div>\t\t\r\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Friends, MUMs, and all in between, A question for you to puzzle: How do you transmit intention through email? How do you show conviction with an Arial font? How do I get you to understand what you&#8217;d know if you saw me in the eyes? This is the question at the core of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n\t\t<div style=\"float:right;margin:10px 10px 0px 0px;\">\r\n\t\t\t<a class=\"DiggThisButton DiggCompact\" href=\"http:\/\/digg.com\/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmikevarley.com%2F%3Fp%3D604&title=The+Mike+Varley+Plain+Dealer%3A+The+Ordination+of+Montgomery+Jackson\" ><span style=\"display:none\">Dear Friends, MUMs, and all in between, A question for you to puzzle: How do you transmit intention through email? How do you show conviction with an Arial font? How do I get you to understand what you&#8217;d know if you saw me in the eyes? This is the question at the core of the [&hellip;]<\/span><\/a>\t\t\r\n\t\t<\/div>\t\t\r\n\t\t","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46],"tags":[170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions\/613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikevarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}