this is the harrowing of hell, the parsing process of self-analysis where the wheat and the chaff weren’t as simple as what was for dinner but why this meal was not that meal, and, “Did you finish your green beans, because starving children were starving” whether we were grateful or ungrateful in the cold, careful […]
The Original Belle & Sebastian – the Moroccan and his dog: a Guest Blog by Driss Laayadi
One of the goals of this blog is to capture moments and memories. The older I get, the more I find myself easily lost in a kind of momentary daze – especially if I’m visiting a place like camp or my grandfather’s farm that was a big part of my early childhood or late teens. Sometimes, even out […]
Dark Friday
dark Friday, I always loved a little more than Sunday, always understood the nails a little more than the hands that wore the holes, but I guess, maybe, I was born in guilt and determined to shame not just me but you, too with a holy stigmata to wear around like some truth to shout […]
A Trip to Camp, or Surveying the Remnants of Eubanks Bank
Yesterday, as I was driving to visit the church camp I used to work at, I had a moment where I decided that if there’s a hell (and if I go there), I will probably spend eternity in a continuous loop of being forced to drive Highway 641 North between the interstate and Camden on […]
Reflections of a Lifelong Education
It was the spring of 2002, my senior year of high school, and I’d been invited to Wabash College for the Lilly Honor Scholarship weekend, along with thirty other guys, many of whom were a lot more accomplished than I. Imagine a room full of thirty Max Fischers fighting at a chance to go to […]
Nashville X
Gotham’s Greek goddess of war between those poured concrete columns, gold-gilded and shielded for battle with eyes fixed forward on some plan, she might be Parvati Parthenos with her gift of darshana in nearly any other forsaken land, but we pay homage, in deference to the cold concrete goddess indifferent to silence, and hoping she’ll […]
Debutante
she danced with Death, a debutante who closed her eyes and saw the cotillion under a dimly lit chandelier with no grand decor and otherwise empty save the hardwood floor that heard the click-clack of bones fill a ballroom in utter calamity, but I think she likes it, there on the crevasse believing that death […]
The Forest and Trees
those who never saw the forest for the trees, I never understood, and maybe it was the log in my eye that kept me focused on the wood, but I’m coming back down now, descending on the copse from the clouds, past every leaf and every twig and even to the heartwood – exposed and […]
Juniper
the juniper’s hedge always hid the highway from sight, while the trucks wooshing by were still trucks on their way to something better, something worse, and we just sat in the old hanging swing and let the juniper be enough, all while some would say we let the world pass us by, but believed the […]
Gethsemane
sometimes I think when Jesus knelt in the garden, he was lookin’ for Eden but teared up when Gethsemane was the best he could do, and all round those ole bent-over olives, crooked and deformed as they are, and knowin’ he’d hang on one soon enough, the trees of the field didn’t clap but ached […]
