I am going to end this series of articles here, as not to “beat a dead horse.” But I do what to look at a couple of dimensions of pretentiousness and avatars, that I have not covered. In the area of pretentiousness, I wish we all could be more authentic. I wish that society was…

As stated before, I have always been interested in how we form a gap between who we really are in our secret, personal spaces, and how we present ourselves to the public. I am thinking about this concept now, and writing about it, because my next novel–if I choose to write another one–is centered on…

In a perfect world, there would be no secrets. There would be no shameful events. The reason that anything becomes a secret is that there is shame associated with it. There would also be no shaming by a greater society for those personal experiences. I suspect that the most common arena of secrets is in…

I have been intrigued about personal and family secrets since I was a young boy. Even as a preschooler, I had observed a dissociation between how most people behaved in their private lives and the way they presented themselves to the public, at least in the Bible-belt. Shakespeare expressed it this way, “All the world’s…

When I was in college, the leader of Campus Crusade for Christ, Mack, was a witty, talented man. One of those talents was his quiver of cliches for every occasion. I remember how he would respond to students around him who would say things like, “damn,” “shit,” “fuck,” or “hell,” “Do you eat out of…

The very first time I tried to publish a book was in the early 1990s. This doesn’t count my feeble attempts to write a book on philosophy when I was sixteen, “self-publishing” it, literally by typing up each page and binding it with cardboard and duct tape. That book had one reader, our high school…

Today was a landmark day. After two and a half years of patience, my permit was issued today. Hallelujah! Now, the hard work begins. I am the general contractor for this project and will end up doing most of the work myself. I need to learn to do good plumbing, framing, electrical work, roofing, and…

I don’t expect strangers or friend to be that interested in my mudante health updates and thank God, this one is mundane. I was planning on suspending such postings, unless there was some important information. However, I thought about the fact that my children and extended family get their news about my health here, I…

I am on the home stretch of the grueling process of working with a professional editor for my manuscript. She completed her work yesterday, and now I must do one more rewrite (this will be rewrite number 24) to incorporate her corrections and suggestions. After that, then one more pass through the proof-reader, then cover…

 I don’t know when I fell in love with old things, but it must have been a long time ago. My dad had his tenure as the president of the Tennessee Archeology Society during my formative years. So, it was typical during my early teens, I would spend my Saturdays with my dad, “in the…