[One day in foggy, rainy winter, here in the Ohio Valley, just at the start of the liturgical season known as Ordinary Time, 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. I... Read more
[Note: I’ve noticed that some of the links to my very old two-page blog posts from several years ago no longer work properly, so I’ll be re-posting revised and edited one-page versions of my favorite old blog posts from time to time for the next few months. A version of this post originally ran in 2017.] We went to the beach with my bad cousins. I grew up in Ohio. “Going to the beach” usually meant going to swat... Read more
I apologize for the radio static lately. It’s just that I don’t like January. As Januarys go, 2024’s January isn’t terrible. I am not very depressed; I’m just dull and flat and not very creative. I’m not having panic attacks; I’m just a little bit anxious now and then. Besides the fender bender, nothing has gone terribly wrong since the spring of 2023. I can’t remember another year of my life without a catastrophe. Somehow, it took until I was... Read more
Three years ago, a mob of Christian Nationalists attempted a coup on the United States of America, while I was fixing the printer. On January 6th, 2021, I was on the laptop, trying to write a sermon on Epiphany, but I kept getting distracted. Like most Americans who were on our computers that day, I had a tab open to social media and another to the news. We were all watching a crowd of rabble rousers at the nation’s capitol,... Read more
I can’t sleep. That’s not unusual. I have bouts of insomnia throughout the year, and especially in the dark of January. Everything I do to mitigate it makes it worse, so I do nothing but wait for it to stop. I can’t pray. That’s the new usual. I used to practice my Ignatian meditations all night when it got like this. But ever since about 2021, I’ve been terrified that God can’t love me. He certainly doesn’t care about... Read more
The sun went down on the last day of the year, though we couldn’t see it. It’s a proper Northern Appalachian winter now, a mix of perpetual wet, snow and sleet and sloppy rain but rarely sun. There will be clouds above and slick muddy earth below for about two and a half months. Astronomically, the nights will get shorter bit by bit, gradually but inevitably. Meteorologically, it’ll be night until mid-March. Experientially, it will be night until the... Read more
The end of last year was so brutal, and the end of this one is so gentle. Christmas began with my thinking that I’d never drive my car again. Then the polar vortex set in, so dangerously cold for 48 hours that I couldn’t even sleep upstairs in my own house, so we dragged the mattress downstairs and slept in the living room. Then, out of money and ideas, I accepted an offer from someone I thought was a... Read more
I found myself shuddering with numinous joy, two days before Christmas, in an abandoned storefront in downtown Steubenville, staring at plastic a Nativity scene. I finally got to go to the Nutcracker Village and the Advent Market this weekend. Serendipity is up and running again, with a fresh coat of paint thanks to Jimmy and his boy. My veteran readers know that the Nutcracker Village is a favorite holiday tradition of mine. I’ve been excited to get a coffee at... Read more
It was the second-shortest day of the year, the day before the shortest day of all, the day before the light starts to come back. There was a knock at the door, which surprised me. Jimmy was coming to fix my car when he didn’t forget, but he was so busy with odd jobs around the neighborhood that he’d said he wouldn’t have time to help us for days. But there he was when Michael answered the door. The battered... Read more
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Notes Ahead of an Election Year
I don’t want it to be an election year, but it is anyway. In case you’ve just joined me, I became a writer and somehow got big-fish-in-a-small-pond notorious in an election year. When I got this blog in 2016, I was registered to vote but I don’t think I was registered as a member of any party. I had always voted for Republican presidential candidates before, on the vague idea that they were in favor of unborn babies, and... Read more