Reflections

The Washington Post just published a seven-question quiz for readers to answer the question: “Am I using too much weed?” The quiz is designed to help you know if you’re developing “dependency” – while adding the reassuring popular platitude: “As with alcohol, most people who use cannabis recreationally are doing so responsibly.”

We seem to live at a time when it’s easier to live with absurd but pleasant theories that contradict everyday reality. We live in a schizoid disconnect between what we tell ourselves and what we see right in front of us.

If Christianity is ever to have any credibility in the future, we are going to need a lot more gentle, persuasive and strong leaders to show a different way of being Christian than the shrill, cruel and politicized theocrats who dominate the news every day.

Holy Trinity Church was a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, PA, outside Pittsburgh, where my cousins grew up in the 1960s. Then the town’s steel mill closed

In teaching writing, we teachers have taught our students all wrong. We’ve taught them to follow dead formulae rather than follow their hearts.

From the Washington Post, May 24,2020. “I’m watching the Coronavirus virus unfold from a Turkish prison. This is why I’m hopeful.”

Jonathan Maberry, the best-selling mystery, fantasy and horror writer, shocks and terrifies the LitCrit Industry with his F… Word!

Today, I boarded an American Airline plane in San Francisco for the cross-country flight to Indianapolis –  and in spite of the hundreds of  times that I’ve flown on a plane, I felt again that special thrill when I stepped toward the airplane door, glancing down at that crack of space opening up below my legs, between the edge of the fuselage and the movable entrance ramp, a crack that will become 35,000 feet deep when we are airborne.

When I hear about freewriting, it feels like … freedom… at last!