Disclaimer/Warning: I write about sex because I’ve found very few people write or talk about it with much honesty. If the topic makes you uncomfortable, go somewhere else. This won’t be titillating, but I try to make it honest. Consider the terms: “angelic temptress,” “holy playmate,” “virtuous sex kitten.” Can there be such a thing?..
I vow to be dragged, kicking and screaming and laughing out loud into the Brave New World. What other choice do I have, pondering the spectacle of Bruce Jenner, trying on his tastefully medium-sized boobs, life in a dress, and the search for the ultimate hand bag? A few years ago, my wife purchased a..
An Ongoing Blight on our Beautiful Land “Vault” as a verb is defined as “leaping vigorously.” As a noun, it can also be understood as “burial chamber.” Anyway you look at it, if you hear someone say a campground features “vault toilets,” start leaping vigorously in the other direction. Start talking about the virtues of..
You’ll have to pardon me if my thoughts appear, in this narrative, even more disjointed, and fissured by mental stress-magma than normal. I’ve been through a horrible experience, the sort of thing I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I’m on the annual RV camping trip with the family. Most people love this sort of thing. I..
This will not stand.. I’m not just talking about the barbarity of African Muslims killing 147 Christian students in Kenya last week. I’m talking about the escapist, incomplete, pacifist bilge you hear from some believers in its wake. If you are the sort of person who considers what happened here — armed zealots, mentally and..
Yesterday, I argued there can be beauty, and even virtue, in tawdry places, but I think I was really wrestling with a more fundamental problem: how to live, when to speak, when to shut up, which jokes to tell, what life-script to pick. God certainly seems something like a playwright. He gave Pharaoh a role..
Confessions of a Worldly Kid, Grown Up Mary and I took a two-day break in Las Vegas last week. As a child, my father’s epic family vacations across the West — water-ski trips, trout fishing in the Logan River, choppy boat rides under the looming Grand Tetons — those were all second fiddle choices for..
You won’t hear scripture quoted very much, over Sashimi in Santa Monica or among biscuit nibblers at the Yale Club in Manhattan; the words of the Bible make the well heeled and the hip look away, awkwardly, as though you were trying to sign them up for a multi-level marketing program. They see scripture as..
“The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk.” At lunch in the tavern, a friend of mine was marveling at our ability to deceive ourselves. “You can blame your golf game..
Ever since Sam Kinison used the term “courtesy laugh,” I’ve been careful to keep track of films that actually deliver at least a little honest comedy, and while Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent isn’t fall on the floor stuff, there’s something sweet and honest about the thing. In the grumpy-old-man, get-off-my-lawn category this delivers. I find myself..