Forgive the radio silence, my friends. Every time I go to write, the thing I planned on writing is already old news five minutes later, not to mention so depressing I don’t want to talk about it. Still, we really do have a duty to keep abreast of what’s happening if we can. Let me try something different, and see if I can re-construct the events of the weekend in an itemized list, with commentary if I can muster any.... Read more
It was my lover at the door. I heard his voice so low I could not make out words. I saw his hand at the latch dripping myrrh. When I opened for him, he was gone. I went out to search for him, street after lonely street, the whole world being at rest. I saw the city watchmen, and foolishly I asked, “Have you seen the one my heart loves?”  The watchmen beat me they raped me they took... Read more
So, remember a couple months ago when I mistakenly thought that then-President-elect Trump had taken down his pro-life policies from his campaign website just after winning the election, but it turned out that he’d never had any pro-life policies listed there begin with, we all just figured he had? And I looked incredibly foolish for trusting that he’d ever claimed to be pro-life, and indeed I was very foolish? Well, now that he’s the Commander in Chief, he’s got a new website.... Read more
I have before me the transcript of President Trump’s inaugural speech. I didn’t quite have the stomach to watch it live, so I waited to read it. I don’t regret my choice so far. There’s a lot of hot air in this speech, plenty that sounds threatening; and, surprisingly, there were a couple items at which I nodded my head. It would be great to have good infrastructure, and I also hate abandoned factories (which are abundant in this part of... Read more
I have two notes for my readers, ahead of this nightmare inauguration. First of all, there is a photo circulating the internet; it was shared, when I saw it, by someone named Kelly Devlin but I don’t know if she took the photo. I can’t share it here because I don’t know who took it or who holds the copyright. It isn’t a fake photo, but I want to caution my readers that it it’s not what it looks like. The photo appears to... Read more
 Author’s note: One day in foggy, rainy winter, here in the Ohio Valley, I was walking through my neighborhood on a poor street. I saw some houses standing and occupied, some houses abandoned, and some that had been torn down and were nothing but piles of splinters. “It looks like a bomb went off here,” I said. And I decided to bomb it, as writers do, in a story. The Winter came at the end of the Christmas season—not the... Read more
You Carried Me: A Daughter’s Memoir  is the memoir of someone who is inconvenient. She doesn’t fit anybody’s narrative. Because she was an inconvenience to her biological grandmother, Melissa Ohden was nearly killed by a saline injection abortion forced on her mother. But, after three days of labor, Ohden was born alive. She was transferred to the NICU, thrived, and was eventually adopted; she had a perfectly normal childhood with none of the physical or mental disabilities usually associated with... Read more
Whenever one discusses healthcare in America, one runs into all kinds of interesting people with diverse opinions. Some of these opinions are ill-informed. Sometimes I’m at a loss as to how I can inform people, and then I remember that I have a blog. Here are three tips: 1) “Communism”refers to a classless society (that is, a society without division into social classes, not a society that behaves like Donald Trump) where there is no private property, the means of production... Read more
Here’s a tweet we could all stand to remember right now: Let’s all compare John Lewis’s decision to permit himself to be beaten into unconsciousness in peaceful protest on “Bloody Sunday,” with what TV’s Donald Trump has called his “personal Vietnam.” Let us remember that any real greatness America has ever had has been because of those who courageously stood up against the abuse of power,  and never because of the money and privilege of the powerful. Willingness to stand up... Read more
All my friends are posting lists of “ten albums that influenced me as a teen.” Sounds like a fun project. I want to play along. The trouble is, I didn’t really have any “albums” as a teen. Most of my teen years were spent on the Planet Charismatic and its satellites in the world of homeschooling, and I didn’t like contemporary music much anyway. I listened to all kinds of other things, though. We listened to the radio. At first... Read more
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