In today’s society, we often take great pleasure in putting down our enemies. One especially fun way to do that is to compare them to despised or disgusting things. If a teacher is too strict, the he or she is like a boring BDSM master or mistress. If a roommate is lazy, then he or she is a useless pile of crap. Because both of my parents worked in education, my natural enemy is the Republican Party. And so, to get in on the fun, I will say that the current Republican Party is like Keyser Soze from the film The Usual Suspects.

Hi, other white guys. I know that we see each other all the time, but we don’t really talk about stuff, you know? Rock music, maybe, football, sure, but not serious stuff. I know that that sounds weird or like I’m going to hassle you, but it looks like a lot of us have made a mistake. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a hard time about slavery. That was bad, for sure, but it’s not really my place to talk to you about that.

I grew up in a house full of guys. Throughout most of my adolescence there were not a lot of moments where the finer points of being a female were taught. Instead I learned the not-so-subtle art of being a boy, like jumping fences, hopping apartment building rooftops, and learning how to take the pain of rough housing.

Waiting for Godot, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s two act play from the Theatre of the Absurd, is a quintessential primer to understanding politics under the Trump Administration.

Look, I’ve been in and out of the newspaper business for going on a quarter of a century. I’m cool with that, I know I’m in a business going the way of coal-powered dodo birds, the telegraph, and professional jitterbuggers. If I’m the last one standing the day they stop rolling the presses, feel free to chisel it on my tombstone.

We wade in the middle of the still blue waters of Capo Caccia. Vivienne, who has taken a break from preparing lunch, tells me the story of the island’s most notorious brothers. She and her husband George have lived on their yacht in Bosa for the past fifteen years, and they have taken us out, Nick and me and three other couples, to spend the day exploring the island’s surrounding caves and capes. We are in unchartered territory.

The call was certain and unwavering.

I felt pulled to volunteer at a local homeless shelter. My friends and family started to wonder what I was doing because it started so randomly. I was always honest as to my intentions - to various degrees.

At the end of winter, I was looking to blow some money on something fragile and undemanding. I bought the Instant Back with my Diana camera because I knew no one had patience on St Denis street after 6pm. I wanted to be as happy as the faces on the instax mini fujifilm, rainbows and bears screwing without prejudice inside my hair. I wanted that. You said, Lomography is a scam run by straight, white, billionaire men and I said, how me something that isn’t.

Because the joys of intimacy with other men still enthrall me, I agreed to pick him up. Never mind that the thought of consorting with a man who’s engaged, however far away his fiancé resided, at first stood in stark contrast to the aphrodisiac of his body, hewn and handsome following years of playing varsity volleyball. This friend of mine was biracial, his face stubbled, chest shaved, curly hair cropped close to his ears with a legitimate six-pack to boot.

I was lucky because my husband, Jason, was alive. He was just constantly gone.

For Frederick, there was not a transition. He merely wanted to be who he was.

I’m at my counselor’s office. He’s in the same practice as my wife’s counselor, so she’s in there with her counselor as well. This is our first joint counseling session. It’s about three weeks since I was found out, what those in recovery call “discovery.” My counselor wants to share with my wife’s counselor where we are in the counseling process. He told me that they want to talk about our “situation” together in front of us,  to make sure we are all “on the same page.” I. Am. Petrified. This is a potentially dangerous situation for my own well-being.

In the fall of 1976, we sixth graders were thrilled our Georgia Governor Carter had been elected President of the United States and that we’d celebrated the bicentennial of our country. Our community had come together for a parade with the high school marching band, the mayor in a convertible waiving, and our church youth singing the good news on a float pulled by our song director’s Ford F-150.  The next day, Sunday morning, our twelve-year-old group of boys marched into the sanctuary of the Baptist church, sitting near the back, so we could pass notes, send spitball through straws to girls a few rows down, fart and laugh at ourselves. 

In nature, good and evil do not exist. All actions and events in the organic world follow elemental law, which is to survive despite chaos. Good and evil are constructs of the human experience and relative to situations within that experience. They are value judgments regarding how we perceive situations to be; we make them either of benefit or detriment to our individual interests, ethical and moral frames. The natural universe is morally neutral.

In 1955, Emmett Till was murdered.  He looked wrong.  He’d looked at someone who looked wrong.  However you’d like to put it.  He did nothing.

Then we caught the killers.  Wasn’t hard, because there was nothing surreptitious about their murdering.  Their motives were loudly proclaimed.  We didn’t have a cellphone recording of Till’s final moments, but we had most everything but.

The killers were found not guilty.  Free to walk.

“…..I’m a believer in Christ, and I am a recovering sex addict.”

Those were the jarring initial words I heard after I walked into my first Christ-centered twelve-step meeting several months ago, before I had admitted to myself that I couldn’t control whatever had gotten me to this point. Ok, I just have to dwell on those initial words for a moment. A “believer in Christ AND a recovering sex addict?” How is that even possible? What does that mean and how does that apply to me?

The old dance hall above Radio Shack is crowded, and it sounds like the ocean when I close my eyes. In yoga class, we breathe only through our noses, and I pray the person next to me isn’t smelly as the teacher shuts all the windows and we stretch our arms above our heads.