“She was the kind of woman whose absolute support was freely and completely given, until it gave way like a saturated California hillside. Then it was mostly at the bottom with a car or two underneath. The final event that would cause the hillside to give way might be completely trivial—perhaps a robin landing too heavily—but once the business was underway, well, it was all mostly at the bottom. Chad had clearly and unmistakably lied to her daughter. This was a breach of trust not to be endured. It was clear. It was unambiguous. It was a fat robin. It was clearly time to act.”
Confessions of a Toxic Boy
Introduction: This will be one of those posts that will necessarily be a bit self-referential from time to time, but I will keep all that to a minimum, at least as much as possible. As edifying as it might be for me to write at length about myself, I have a nagging feeling somewhere in …
Like Dew on the Roses
“What a tangle! Pastoral snarls are like the mercies of God—they are new every morning.”
Subtle. Understated.
Helps Them Keep Well
“Robert walked out of the 7-Eleven with an order of cheese pump nachos, a hot dog, and a couple of packets of those chocolate thingies with a half-life of seventy-five years”
In Big Letters on the Heel
“Because the lead attorney in that firm—Joe Shattuck, Esq.—spoke with a thick Mississippi accent, this always put urban sophisticates off their guard. Shattuck had made a lot of money that way . . . Not that they knew it at the time, but Shattuck had pulled all their shirts up over their heads and rolled all their socks down, creating a little black wool bead around the tops of their expensive Italian shoes. Shattuck, for his part, during a weekly lunch with his partners at a local catfish emporium, was fairly expressive in how he explained what had happened: ‘Those boys couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.’”
What They Call Good Television
“With that, Radavic swiveled his head and looked straight at Rourke with what he thought was a steely, gray-eyed gaze, like in those TV legal-office drama shows, at an especially tense moment when one of the handsome actors rivets another handsome actor with an unshakeable and hardened resolve and says, ‘Dammit, Trevor, this is our job!’”
Letters! Incoming!
Letter to the Editor: Erasmus said of Luther, "God has sent in this latter age a violent physician on account of the magnitude of the existing disorders." We still celebrate Luther, that ...
Some Have Two
“‘Those there that do have brains—and of those there are more than a few—are running a game that would make a cardinal’s mistress envious’
Bradford raised one eyebrow slightly. Cardinals had mistresses?”
Donald Trump, the March for Life, and Your 2020 Vote
Introduction: In many ways, the ground appears to be shifting beneath our feet. We are not only alive in tumultuous times, we are alive in very strange times. Given how bizarre things have become, ...