I am, yet again, struggling to form coherent words on the catastrophe in Israel, Palestine and the surrounding countries. Yet again, I keep writing and deleting over and over again because I can’t bear the thought that I’d misspeak about a situation so complicated and terrible and make somebody’s trauma worse. I’ll get this out of the way first: I have no solution for the conflict, and I’m not going to pretend I do. I don’t think anyone reading... Read more
There was a chicken wandering the block. The first people to see her were Jimmy and his boy. The boy ran into my yard with Jimmy in tow when I wasn’t there a few days ago, and Adrienne heard them talking about seeing a chicken. I thought Jimmy’s boy was just playing a game. Yesterday night was Beggar’s Night. As I handed out lollypops to a gaggle of zombies, I head one of them say “This is where we... Read more
I feel like I should say something about Britney Spears. There are so many things I need to write about just now. This is what happens when you catch your middle schooler’s head cold and take a couple of days off. There are a million and one important news items I have to catch up on for the blog, and I have other writing projects going on as well, but I keep coming back to Britney Spears. I knew next... Read more
I’ve been trying and trying to write about the new developments in the case of Father Rupnik. In case you haven’t heard, we now know that Slovenian priest Marko Rupnik, formerly famous for googly-eyed church icons and now famous for the most disgusting spiritual and sexual abuse of religious sisters, has quietly been incardinated in a diocese in Slovenia. Rupnik was exposed as a sex abuser of monstrous proportions; his victims were mostly religious sisters in the 80s and 90s,... Read more
I came across one of those pious-sounding tidbits that fascinates me lately: the kind of exhortation that sounds bad enough at first glance but gets worse the longer you re-read it. They came from a random X/Twitter account, but the source was cited so I read the whole thing. It’s about everybody’s favorite topic: modesty. This is the passage in full: “Listen to the voice of Saint Padre Pio, Stigmatist… Given special guidance from Heaven, Saint Padre Pio the... Read more
October Saturdays are soccer days. Adrienne is doing well at school and on her soccer team; she still wants me to respect her privacy and not tell many funny stories about her for the time being, because she’s growing up. I’m thankful for all the people who keep asking if she’s all right. She’s very happy. Five days a week she goes to school, and one day a week I have to drive her out to a field in the... Read more
My friend told me that the worst thing she ever did, was take the chest plate off a turtle. This happened a long time ago, when we were both teenagers in Columbus. She lived out in the country and I did not. She said she once found a box turtle sunning himself in the yard. She’d always wanted to know what the belly and chest of a turtle looked like underneath the shell. So she turned the unsuspecting creature... Read more
I went on another October hike. I wasn’t supposed to be hiking today. I have deadlines and there isn’t any money. I woke up at nearly noon and had plenty of writing to do, but the first thing I did was jump into my stained hiking clothes and make sure my muddy hiking shoes were still in the backseat of Serendipity. Then I was on the road, across the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge that I call the Brig o’ Dread, through... Read more
I didn’t think the news cycle could get more horrendous, but it has. Besides all the unimaginable suffering in Israel and Palestine, there’s been an anti-Palestinian hate crime here in America. It’s been reported that Joseph Czuba, a landlord in Plainville, Illinois, stabbed his tenant, Hanaan Shahin, and then murdered her six-year-old son, Wadea Al Fayoume. Shahin had emigrated from the West Bank to escape the violence twelve years ago. Al Fayoume had not been afraid of his... Read more
On Sunday I went to Mass, but I didn’t get out of my car. Adrienne had brought home another head cold from school, and I caught it a few days after she was done with it. The head cold meant I had a good excuse to stay home with no Catholic guilt, but I didn’t want to. I also didn’t want to go inside, and make people sick, and have a panic attack to boot. I have had panic attacks... Read more
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