In the last few days, while all the madness, joy, anger and mayhem caused by the Supreme Court's Marriage Equality decision has been swirling, I've found myself repeatedly returning to one of my favorite passages in the Bible, Acts 16:20-34. I've said my piece about how I view the SCOTUS... Continue reading

Perhaps because of my slightly unorthodox approach to my faith, I get myself into a lot of really interesting conversations with people who are not Christians. While those discussions run the gamut of topics and formats, many of the questions I get revolve around how Christians can be so…well…unChristianlike. My... Continue reading

This is a post I shared on Facebook after SCOTUS's decision legalized gay marriage across the Unites States…I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but I will say that I felt I had to from the deepest part of my heart…the part where God tugs at me and pushes... Continue reading

I was a smart kid. (I have no real way to prove that, so you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.) I’ve spent a lot of my life apologizing for that, which is probably a post in and of itself. But, for the purposes of this episode,... Continue reading

Nothing like a good open-ended question to kick off a blog, right? A question people (many far more intelligent and qualified than I) have been asking themselves for centuries? Even better. After all, if it's good enough to kick-start religions, write constitutions and induce dramatic life changes, it should be... Continue reading

An airport is a painful place to be if you're not sure when you're leaving it. I spent seven hours in the Tampa Bay airport on Sunday, waiting to come home. On standby. I got there at 11 a.m., hoping to catch a 1 p.m. flight to Atlanta, thinking if I could just get there, I'd have more options to carry on to Los Angeles. But apparently, Atlanta is a popular option for people with confirmed tickets and, after working through it with a patient woman behind a counter, it became clear my only hope was the one direct flight... Continue reading

October 31st. A day for tricks, treats and bags full of candy. A day for ghosts, witches and all the other bogey men we're supposed to be afraid of the rest of the year. An honest day, a day when most people admit they wish they were something else. Even then, we will not always be what we wish we could be. Our choices will be limited by budgets and time. Some of us will have the choices made for us, and will be dressed up in whatever costumes our parents pick out for us...ballerinas, cute little bumblebees, pint-size vampires,... Continue reading

My last post has me thinking about trophies. Growing up, I collected them. I had at least fifty of them, stacked on top of a filing cabinet in my room, taking up space in the bookshelves. I had swimming trophies, soccer trophies, football trophies and baseball trophies. There was a little one I got for third place in the second heat of the freestyle event at the El Centro Invitational, and there were big mammoth ones I got for being the Most Valuable Player during a couple seasons of Pop Warner. I didn't care much for medals and only slightly... Continue reading

If you were to ask me what atrophy means on a good day, a happy day, I'd probably tell you it's kind of like aprize, one step up from amedal and a little bit bigger than aplaque. I usually invest a lot of energy into smartassery on good days. If you were to ask me on a normal day, a run of the mill day, I'd direct you to Merriam-Webster, where the definition of atrophy is as follows: 1: decrease in size or wasting away of a body part or tissue; also : arrested development or loss of a part... Continue reading

I have been silent for over two months. Perhaps it has been my annual leave of absence, my summer hiatus. Perhaps...no, probably...I just ran out of things to say, or ways to say them that I found interesting. Appealing. Edifying. Or maybe, I just couldn't handle the responsibility that came from the fact people were actually reading my words and finding value in them. Regardless, it has been months since I had the urge to write, to put my thoughts to the test of words and present them for judgment. I have started many a day with a commitment to... Continue reading

I started this because I was ignorant. Because I didn't know any better. In those first few moments of chainsaw and oleander, I was blissfully unaware of how many square feet of wood and debris could spring from thirty odd bushes. My pastor was there to help. If you cut all this down, you'll have to replace it with something, he said. And I ignored it, as I ignore many other things he says, because it was so obvious. So simple. I was making space. Clearing poison. Bad stuff gone, makes good things easy. And then, after years of branches,... Continue reading

There is a gnome guarding the entrance to our garden. Truth be told, there are gnomes everywhere in our garden, but this one is different. This one was first. He appeared on the first night Sharon and I shared the world I was struggling to create, a birthday gift from a woman who was deciding whether to learn to love me again. A peace offering, or at least a promise of a temporary ceasefire. We named him Bob, in honor of our erstwhile marriage counselor, and while the counselor eventually dumped us (we think) and has faded into the past,... Continue reading

How do you measure the distance you've come when you haven't really moved? Every once in a while, you stand in a familiar place and let yourself realize you've never been there before. In two years, our garden has not changed location. But it has come a long, long way. Continue reading

When I first started this blog, I had little more than words. Sentences that began with "sorry". Descriptions of what I'd done and what I planned to do. Dreams spoken of but not lived. They were important. They kept me focused. Positive. But they were just words. Over the past few weeks, I've moved past words. I recognize their value, to me and to others, but I tire of them. Is it any wonder? With all of my education, all of my facility with this silly language of ours, I do not have words big enough for this. There was... Continue reading

Three weeks since my last post. I didn't mean to go this long without writing. I meant to write a jubilant post about how I finally fixed my creek. Two weeks ago. But I was too busy realizing the reason I'd really wanted to fix the creek was because I wanted to get water plants. And fish. And turtles. Most of all, turtles. I really wanted turtles. Maybe it's because my mother told me a turtle was the reason for one of the only times she'd seen my abuelito cry. Its name was Caligula and my mom says it would... Continue reading

I loved growing up in Calexico but, let's be honest, as a kid there was not a whole heckuva lot to get excited about. We were a long way from everywhere except Mexico, and until I was old enough to "club", that wasn't much of a draw. The nearest "real" mall was in San Diego, a good two and a half hours away. There were two movie theaters in the Imperial Valley, the Crest and the Fox but, though you could still catch a matinee for under five bucks, they were more vintage than modern. True, we made our own... Continue reading

I was just looking at my web-traffic reports, because I'm a masochist like that, and I noticed yesterday's post got a hit from Google. Since, typically, the only hits I get from them are from people looking for the chords to "I Come to the Garden Alone", my curiousity was piqued. So I followed the link to the search page and found that my post had come up during a search for "magnolia blooms dying". Just for kicks, I clicked on another one of the search results. And got this picture. Now listen to me, Fate. I'm not going to... Continue reading