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The Second Edition of My Book is Now Available

A significant update to my book — I Know You’re Dead, But I Still Worry About You – is now available. The book is currently available in ebook and paperback format at Amazon, and in paperback format at Barnes & Noble. It will be available in ebook format within the next few days at iBookStore. I’ll update this post when it is available there.

A description of the book is provided below:

Written…

The United States Supreme Court, LLC

Proposed Wikiepedia entry: A for-profit corporation operating solely for the benefit of other corporations.

If you ask many bloggers and even many writers of novels why they write, you will hear them respond that it is to persuade. That doesn’t sum it up for everyone of course, but it is a sensible reason for most writing.

Pater Edmund recently reminded me, though, that writing is especially useful for helping us clarify our own thinking:

But when I think about why I began this blog it seems to me that…

Annie Dillard Quote from The Holy Firm

When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

Annie Dillard, The Holy Firm

You know, Gary, I’ve been thinking about becoming a priest. The world is such a frightening place for so many people. They know our little planet is traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour through space, contained within the gravitational field of a galaxy that’s traveling like a bat out of hell, and that our journey is from x,y,z,t of nowhere to another x,y,z,t of nowhere. They know that…

Annie Dillard Quote (from Total Eclipse)

There are a few more things to tell from this level, the level of the restaurant. One is the old joke about breakfast. “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the long run he was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world,…

Think!? (a short story)

I was tooling down the road and saw a sign saying, “Think!” and I started thinking, That’s a good point. I don’t think enough. So what should I think about? Well, how about Mary’s ass? Man alive! I can see it swishing now. But she doesn’t seem very interested in me. Maybe I am too pale? That’s it, I suppose. I don’t get enough sun. I probably look like a ghost. I wonder what it feels like to be a…

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the…

Talking with the Universe

I was chatting with the universe and asked it when tickets to the Apocalypse would go on sell, and the universe told me the Apocalypse had already happened. The universe said the whole thing had been so overplayed and oversold that some backlash would no doubt occur. I said, What a pisser, and the universe replied, I hear ya.

Tolstoy on Judging People

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way — said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man…

Carl Jung on The Duality of Life

“In the same moment that you are a protagonist in your life making choices, you’re also a spear carrier or extra in a much larger drama. You are doomed to make choices.”