From the website of the NAACP: Today, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches. The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vial, antagonistic racial slurs & images. (more…) Read more
Remember my post “Waffles?” Me neither. Weirdly enough, hitting my blog’s “Publish” button triggers a corresponding “Delete” function to go off in my head: on my blog means out of my memory. But I see that “Waffles” generated 135 comments, so it must be awesome. My guess is the hot picture of Virginia Woolf is what got everybody all excited. (more…) Read more
This weekend Huffington Post published my “When Bad Emotions Happen to Good Christians.” Publishing anything on The Huffington Post having to do with Christianity is like strapping raw steaks onto your body and jumping into shark-infested waters. You’re gonna get hurt. “You have seen the face of god, but, being a deluded Christian, you cannot recognize the obvious.” “What is a good Christian, anyway? I have lived in Texas for 12 years now and I have yet to see a... Read more
This morning I was working on my book when my wife Cat came bursting into my office. She was wearing her flannel tiger-fur-pattern pajamas, which are just a little too big for her. “We’re having a vacation day!” she cried. “We are?” “We are! Yes! I have it all planned out! It’s gonna be great!” Then she dashed back out of the room. (more…) Read more
By way of some work I’m doing on All In … Almost (or, “Wow, Obnoxious Much?”), I went and found this poem, which I wanted to (and will) include in the book. It was written by my wife Catherine seven months before she and I were married. San Francisco Once, we lived in an old summer house and you could open the windows and in would slowly blow happy ghosts wave tossed, sunburned smiling and tired and every so often... Read more
Here’s the (so-far) opening to “All In … Almost,” the book I’m just now writing that I wrote a bit about in My New Book Has Taken Over My Head: I was thirty-eight years old. I had a job a trained monkey could do, if it could be taught to shave and tie a tie—which I could pretty much never manage without cutting or choking myself half to death. (more…) Read more
In the comment thread of yesterday’s What Book Publishers Want Most, But Can’t Have, a reader wrote, “John, this is probably really rude of me to ask, but how do you make a living writing? I know it’s what you spend your time doing– thank God—but who pays you? You blog for Huffington, right? I know, it’s not polite to ask people about their money. So if I’m being too obnoxious, just ignore me.” So … I’m not sure how detailed... Read more
A continuation of the conversation I started with yesterday’s My New Book Has Taken Over My Head. Here are a few random thoughts floating through my head as I take a break this morning from working on my new book: What kind of stupid business am I in, anyway? Giving your book to an agent, so that she can sell it to a publishing house, so that eighteen months later they can deliver hard copies of it to bookstores, is so... Read more
What I should do is kill this blog. It’s about my only hope for finishing the book I’m now writing, which is so important to me I can’t think about anything else anyway. Then again, stop blogging? Nayeth! I sayeth unto your eyeballs. The working title of my new book is All In … Almost: My Life Between the Sanity and Insanity of Christianity. (more…) Read more
Ah, the Fourth of July. It means apple pie, fireworks, and a surging sense of patriotism. For you, probably. For me it means remembering the time I went deaf in one ear for about a week due to the trickery of one Pee-Wee Bumbleberry. (more…) Read more
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