Preoccupation with the apocalypse doesn’t seem so odd this week. Frankly, I’m feeling just a little bit ahead of the curve. One friend has purchased an AK-47. For target practice, I suppose. Sam’s Club, as it was in the days of Noah, has run out of toilet paper.
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Apocalypse Now
In my dreams I return to the fever swamps of End Times prophecy. It was 84 degrees yesterday in Archangel, Russia, at the edge of the Arctic Circle. That’s about as warm as our pool this May morning in central Florida.
Memories of Heaven
There is a perfect mountain stream in heaven. I know this because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s near the intersection of Orange Grove Boulevard and Green Street.
Chernobyl
If it’s true that education is wasted on the young, it must be doubly so for educational field trips. My first trip overseas was to Russia in the summer of 1986, a high school graduation present from my mother. She fretted when, just a few weeks before we left, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl dominated […]
Remembering the Sabbath
The Sabbath smells like AquaNet. In my earliest memory, Saturday morning in Pasadena smells like Old Spice and dry-cleaned polyester. It smells like shoe polish and musty wingtip loafers. It has the luxurious scent of an Oxford wide-margin King James Bible, its pages of silky India paper bound in supple calfskin leather.
One Hell of a Scout
I slept that night on a pile of backpacks in the rear of a rusting Oldsmobile station wagon as we drove south through Owens Valley with a wall of mountains beside us and a firmament of stars overhead. It was my finest hour. Earlier in the day my scoutmaster told me, in a surprising bit […]
Waiting on the Hurricane
The hurricane in that year was also 700 miles wide, twice the size of the state of Florida. It barreled toward us as if shot from a gun, unwavering in its path. We were in the bullseye. In a rare moment of decisiveness, I didn’t hesitate to flee. We packed up our Saturn station wagon […]
The Last Days
An apocalyptic pamphlet written by a radio preacher (and illustrated by a Mad Magazine cartoonist) lit up the imagination of the man who would become my father. The message of that pamphlet ultimately lured my parents to Southern California in the mid 1960s.
Restless
My Sabbath Day’s Journey isn’t 2,000 paces. It isn’t a regulation that guards me from violating the commandment. It is the long walk toward eternal, eschatological rest. It is the aim of my work. It is the desire of my heart. It is my longing for the day when the hard work is done, when sin doesn’t intrude, when there is finally peace in the garden.
Infinite Scroll
How many psychologists does Facebook employ, like the white coated scientists at the Doritos Factory, to study and exploit my potential for addiction? I am nothing to them but a frantic lab rat who will kill myself in search of just one more Mashable headline or Buzzfeed listicle.