Archive

February 2025

Re: The Super Bowl and Whiteness: When examining art that confuses you, things to consider might include asking if you are the intended audience, or if this is a medium you understand. If it isn’t, perhaps ask people who do understand it to explain it to you. Or, you can accept that not everything is for everyone, and that …

January 2025

The reference shelf: On a shelf over my desk, at eye level when I stand, are 8 reference books. They are mostly “How to write English good” books - a dictionary, a thesaurus, Strunk and White, Garner’s English Usage, etc. Because I preach and write occasionally about theological matters, I have an …

Mourning the days of blogging past: Trying to figure out blogging outside of the WordPress ecosystem (where I’ve been for ~17 years) is so frustrating. (WordPress as a CMS is so bulky and unwieldy, and their “website builder” direction the last 5 years or so is extremely un-user friendly.) I know I’m entering …

Two kinds of people: “Would you hide an immigrant from ICE?” A friend asked me this the other day. My first thought was, “This is where we are, I guess.” When we read the Diary of Ann Frank in school, something pretty quickly jumped out at me. Their world was populated by two kinds of people: …

My news stack: Tuesday night it hit 14 degrees, which is not unheard of here, but is also not what most days are like, thank God. I didn’t have any meetings planned until lunchtime, so I decided this would be an excellent day in which to sleep in. When I rolled out of bed at 10 minutes to 7 (I am, my wife tells …

Not nothing: It’s getting cold as hell tonight, and so for supper I made my platonic ideal of chili, which means it tasted like the chili my mom made when I was young. We served it with Fritos, as God intended, and with good sharp cheddar and sour cream. There is a lot I do not like about the world right …

A pastoral prayer, on the eve of the inauguration: I’m preaching tonight at Safe Harbor Church in Clinton, MS - a church with a large LGBT contingent in their congregation. Tomorrow is the inauguration, and many of us, not just those in that community, are nervous. God of love, God of hope God of our understanding and longing On the eve of the …

The other days: Some days the words just show up. You are practically vibrating as you sit down at the keyboard, coffee cup in hand. As your hands fly across the keyboard, your coffee grows cold, forgotten, as the words crawl across the page. Often when this happens, you have been carrying these words around with …

Weeknotes: It is a truism that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, and underestimate what we can account in a year. I think we also discount what we have already done. I can, at any given time, feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing over the last year, despite that obviously not …

Not for me. : My wife loves the videos on YouTube by Emmymade. They are a bit hard to describe, but a recurring routine is that Emmy will do taste-reacts, where she eats a food - usually something out of the ordinary, like Hard Boiled Egg Chocolate Pudding. She likes lots of these things, and says so. But she …

Legacy: In a first meeting with someone yesterday, I mentioned that I was a sixth-generation Mississippian. That lead to questions. I briefly told how Jonathan Hollowell and his family had moved from Wayne County, NC to Marshall County, MS in the 1820’s, to take up land left when the Chickasaw were …

Saving your Facebook content before you leave.: In light of waves hands everything going on, some folks are considering deleting their Meta accounts. I’m not ther eyet, but that is largely becaise of the 19 years and 11 months of work I have put into that site. There is writing of mine on there that exists nowhere else int he world, there …

The little things.: My dad died when I was 48. For my entire adult life, every time I would call his phone, it would go the same way: Him: Hello? Me: Hey Daddy. Him: Hello, son. Every. Single. Time. It’s the little things you miss.

Woods that no one owned.: “At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned.” ― Cormac McCarthy

Got all the crown molding up and caulked today (so much caulk!) in the kitchen. I’m like 95% done with this never-ending kitchen renovation.

Turns out I told my patrons I would resume the weekly essays on the 4th of January. Whoever let me do that should be sacked. (It was me. I’m whoever.)

Seasonal living.: It’s wintertime. Granted, it’s wintertime in Mississippi, which means it might be 75 degrees and 90% humidity, or it might be 17 degrees. Every day is an adventure! But it’s winter, and the days are short, and the nights are long. For my European ancestors, it would have been a …

In the beginning...: I found the first blog post I ever wrote, back in December of 2003. Bless my heart.

The tree burning.: Last night, our neighborhood did one of its annual traditions - the burning of Christmas trees on New Year’s day. It was a magnificent affair, as it always is. Flames that leapt 20 feet in the air. The passing of the trophy for the Fantasy Football league winner. The naming of those who died …

2025 Phrase: Less but better: I knew a guy once who seldom drank, but when he did, it was single malt scotch. His motto was, “Drink less, drink better.” Going into the new year, that is my guiding phrase: Less, but better. Fewer, better projects. Fewer, but better, articles published. Fewer, but better, income …

December 2024

Stripped down blogging. : I spent the morning redirecting my domains and so on with micro.blog. I guess I am doing this thing. I’ve spent some time working on my site notes page, in an effort to describe what I’m trying to do here. The TLDR of it all is I want to like blogging as much as I did back in 2004. …

From scratch: I have been complaining about social media for at least 7 years, maybe more. I don’t like the way it captures my attention, the way it sucks me in, the way it kills my mood and makes me distrustful of people. Yesterday I saw a positive post about a thing currently in the zeitgeist, and whose …

The End: I’m not really into technology, but I follow and read a lot of technology folks. H’mmm, that’s not quite right. I obviously use tech - like I am right now! - but I don’t really care how it works. I’m sort of like the guy who drives a hi-performance car, but has no …

Learning: I like learning new things. It’s sort of my toxic trait - I would rather learn something new than master the existing thing I know. It’s probably ADHD-related - God knows everything else in my chaos-Muppet existence is. Like, last night I came across a video of someone silver-soldering a …

A new thing.: I have been on social media since the early days. I have been blogging since 2003. I have friends from all around the world because of social media. I have raised several million dollars for good causes because of social media. My livelihood, my relationships, and so much enjoyment I get from my …