Sweet and Low

"What good is a dead bolt when the enemy is in residence?"

Her husband said nothing and proceeded to kill the porch light, turn the lock on the front door, and look at his wife still sitting on the kitchen floor.

"Can't we just go to bed?"


(By the way ~ I really overcooked the bit about the olympics. "Rancid heaping forkfuls" was an unfortunate overstatement. I sincerely hope the IOC will accept my apology and unfreeze my bank account already.)

Down Bubble For Me

Look askance at me if you will but I can't stand the olympics. The broadcast plate set before me will have a few wholesome morsels of sport and competition but who can keep his appetite while picking through the rancid heaping forkfuls of controversy, humanism, mythology, and anticlimax. "Look! Look!" I'll be told. "See here - this is important! You can hardly grasp the significance!"

My life has enough stress as it is. I mean - I don't go trawling through hospital emergency rooms looking for more burdens to bear. So why become emotionally invested in an athlete's hopeless attempt to find meaning and redemption in life by winning a medal? I mean really - come on - it's so spent and wearisome already. I don't know - do I need a hug or what's going on?

Lord Willing

After church tomorrow I'm off to the airport to take a jet plane to New England. I'd appreciate any prayer you can spare - I'll be ministering to the students at the Berkshire Institute for Christian Studies in Lenox, Massachusetts during their Spiritual Emphasis Week. Chapels, dorm devotions, dinners at Friendly's, and other opportunities will be given me, I hope, to challenge, charge, and encourage those people up there. Thanks

A Pundit Crying in the Wilderness

Harry Reid shouldn't be seeking forgiveness from the president but rather from all the dark-skinned Americans speaking with a "Negro dialect" who he apparently sees as unfit for a candidacy to the land's highest office.

Postive Aggressive

When the American male exchanged his gray flannel suit and derby for a hoodie and a baseball cap he most certainly was not trading up. As an aside (this whole blog's an aside actually), Rutland seemed pretty post-American to me this last trip home. A walk around downtown was like stepping into a Radiohead music video or something. Any Vermont natives, expatriates, or visitors agree?

I hope he was able to play a couple rounds today

I sincerely miss having George W. Bush in Washington - quote's like the one he made about the proposed TARP funding and the state of the U.S. economy back in September 2008 make him my most beloved public servant: "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down." I get tickled every time. I really miss that man. . .

The Lucy Bull in me

Maybe it was the desert ~ maybe it was a tent without stakes ~ maybe it was just me; but as I lay in the dark in a room with but a bed, a single song slew me. On loan from the Tempe Public Library was a recording I was playing of one of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion programs. Providing a musical interlude that evening at the Fitzgerald Theater in Minnesota was Iris Dement. She sang her song "Our Town" and my heart filled my head with all the memories of my Grandma McCuen it kept hidden within. I loved the Saturday nights in Benson when Grandma would have us hush and she would tune in the Prairie Home Companion on the stereo. With daylight and the day's static fading - I'd sit enraptured by the storyteller and his guests. Well ~ I heard that song again today and I lay happily haunted once more.