Health Update: I said I would not post about my health unless there was something new. There is really not, except for one minor point. Last month my news was that even the most sensitive test for Multiple Myeloma, the M-Spike, was no longer positive. Well, then it was listed as “present but too low…

I have a new podcast (here) that is on my common theme of finding absolute truth and rationality in a postmodern world. It is looking at the history and consequences of postmodernism through a simplistic philosophical window. While this has been a recurring theme of my writing and speaking for decades, this time it came…

Things are well with the Jones family. We had a holiday get-together with 4 of our 5 kids and their significant others up in the Cascades. The snow was 50 inches by the time we left and the driving was precarious at best (the pass was closed the day before and after each journey over).…

Novels are birthed from a wide variety of inspirations. I wrote Christiana Athena: The Girl with the Headaches in four weeks from a hospital bed at the University of Washington while undergoing a bone marrow transplant. It was either writing a book or laying there thinking about my suffering and watching soap operas. But I’ve…

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…