A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Join us at the Indiana State Library
when Indiana’s best established and emerging writers will meet for a
full day of classes on the writing craft for the 2026 Gathering of
Writers Annual Writing Conference, presented by the Indiana Writers
Center and the Indiana Center for the Book.
Featuring a keynote address and a breakout session from playwright, Andrew Black. Other breakout sessions include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and more presented by
Andrew Black, Rachel Cochran, Kelcey Ervick, Chris Forhan, Shasta
Grant, Ashley Mack-Jackson, Karen Kovacik, Natalie Lima, Barbara Shoup,
Liz Whiteacre, and more. You’ll leave full of inspiration,
armed with writing drafts ripe for experimentation—along with a hundred
other writers who feel the same way.
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 8/14/2026]
Those looking for prurient information should skip this section. I dated only two women while in law school.
I started Valparaiso University School of Law in August of 1984.
My first semester was rocky. I had been out of school for two years. I was neither certain if I retained any academic abilities nor that I belonged there socially.
Second semester became a disaster. I came back knowing my mother's lung cancer had returned to kill her and that TJ no longer wanted me. I teetered on the brink of flunking out. That I might not survive scholastically was a first for me.
Dad offered to mortgage his house. I turned him down. I spent the summer working for him so I could be close to Mom. I got myself onto law review by way of the law review's case comment writing competition. (By the way, I consider my contest entry better written than my law review note which is stilted, pedantic, and boring.) I reverted to a pre-TJ mentality for survival: the professors, the school, became the enemy, my opponents.
I survived the summer of 1985 and watching the effects of chemo on Mom. With my attitude towards school, I survived. Even with Mom dying in March 1986 and learning in April that my Great-Aunt Elsie had liver cancer, I made it through.
I stayed with and worked for my father the summer of 1986 so I could spend time with Aunt Elsie. She died a month after I started my Fall semester class. I made it to graduation.
Survive may be a bit of an understatement, as I increased my grade point average and class ranking every semester. This occurred even though in my last year I was on law review, had a part-time job at the undergraduate library, delivered pizzas for about a month, and was a professor research assistant. I always knew how to work.
I thought law school was a serious place for serious people. They were not the educated morons I met at college. To the disappointment of at least one professor, we were not interested in the abstract, scholarly aspects of the law but in careers that could put food on the table. Thankfully, I was at Valparaiso instead of Indiana University-Indianapolis. Valparaiso offered none of the distractions of people and places in Indianapolis.
I think I would have done better for myself had offered the clinical class that it now offers. Anyone actually wanting to practice law needs to take clinicals. They will do themselves great harm by avoiding practical experience.
I will also say that a law school education is one of the best educations anyone can have and more should be exposed to its rigors. However, not everyone should practice law and no one should feel any shame about graduating law school and then foregoing the practice of law. I could not imagine not practicing law. I think now that I was utterly unprepared for the business side of law.
(How to know if you should go into private practice? If you cannot schmooze, if you cannot network with those your business depends upon, then a solo practice is not for you. Also read Jay Foonberg's How To Start and Build A Law Practice.)
Since becoming a felon, I seriously doubt ever being asked back to my law school (or to any other), but for the last twenty years I have wanted to tell law students two words they need for success. Those two words are: cash flow.
I admit creating a serious problem for myself by financing my law school career with student loans. I lost all control over my student loan payments in 1999. I took this path on the advice of my Aunt Mary Ellen's youngest son. Tax policy then allowed deducting student loans. Tax law changed, but being committed to finishing what I started, I took out more loans. Never base any long-term plans on the federal tax law. Doing so truly is building one's foundation on sand.
(Another interruption: with the Great Recession, the firms shed lawyers and student loan debt requires a steady income for younger lawyers. I predict we will be seeing younger lawyers leaving the profession and fewer wanting to go into the profession; law schools will soon find the environment as competitive as we did in private practice. I worry about the smaller cities in Indiana. I have already seen fewer younger lawyers coming into Anderson as solo practitioners. Operating costs have increased. I expect the Anderson paradigm of solo attorneys sharing office space as being extinct by the time I finish my sentence. Which then raises the question of how many people will go without what variety of legal services.)
I left law school for private practice. I had had no plans for myself past graduation. All the reasons I had for law school and going into the legal profession had departed from my life by May of 1987. I was never good at doing things for myself, such selfishness never felt right to me. I had no idea what to do now that I was on my own. No real goals other than to make money. Inertia saved me a lot of thinking, and I was heading back to Anderson.
[It looks like I was not far off the mark in 2010 about new law school students: Law School Enrollment Trends, 1963-2025 (LawHub ). And I was not wrong about law schools, but did not expect it to get worse:
Part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of
America’s “AI Red Lines in Orthodox Theology” project, supported by a
grant from the Future of Life Institute, the panel identified five
Orthodox “red lines” for AI: that it must never replace human
responsibility, never replace human presence, never be confused with the
nous, never reduce the human person to data, and never allow capability
to outpace wisdom.
Fr. John opened his remarks by tracing the
anxieties surrounding AI to older stories about the limits of human
freedom, pointing to the myth of Prometheus and the Book of Genesis.
“The principal lesson gleaned from such texts is that we are not God,” Fr. John said. “Yet, most of us live as if we are God.”
He described a spiritual dimension to
modern technology, calling algorithmic innovation a form of idolatry and
cautioning that the companies developing AI are driven by profit rather
than the wellbeing of those who use their products.
Fr. John connected this reality to a broader anthropocentrism.
“In contrast to the divine mandate in
Genesis for us “to serve and preserve” creation,” he said, “we are
developing AI with the assumption that its sole objective is to serve
and preserve us.” “We need to re-learn what it means to be a
part—unique and indispensable, but one part—of creation. Otherwise, we
will treat the world—both other human beings and the rest of
creation—purely as raw material for consumption and exploitation,” Fr.
John continued.
Fr. John also warned that AI may usher in newer, faster methods of injustice and discrimination.
“Algorithms—especially those that
determine employment, housing, and healthcare—tend to replicate or
reinforce already existing and deeply embedded societal biases,” he
said. “AI is unlike previous technological revolutions—like the printing
press or the television—because it can actually decide whom to help or
heal, whom to overlook or hurt.”
Turning to the distinction between intelligence and nous, Fr. John invoked the patristic separation of “intelligence” (dianoia or mathematical thinking) from “intuition” (noesis
or spiritual understanding). Artificial intelligence, he said, does not
have a complex inner worlds, inner motivations, or an emotional
landscape, and thus questions about meaning or hope will never be
resolved through it.
Fr. John also offered a measured critique of the recent papal encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas.
He observed that its title refers to human greatness rather than the
glory of God, and noted that the piece opens with the story of the Tower
of Babel rather than with the story of God’s covenant with Noah to
preserve creation.
On approaching our creation “in the image
of God,” Fr. John argued for balance. Genesis states that humanity is
formed in God’s image, he said, but the same text also describes
humanity as fashioned “from the dust of the earth,” sharing its day of
creation with every other living creature.
Forgetting we are “inseparably
interconnected with nature,” Fr. John said, leads to a distorted sense
of human exceptionalism that is, at best, a “half-truth.”
The recognition of those churches and communities’ ecclesial nature
outside of the Orthodox Church’s canonical boundaries compels the Church
to be in an unceasing dialogue and collaboration with them, allowing
the Holy Spirit to move all into complete unity with Christ. However,
recognizing the ecclesial nature of other nonorthodox Christian churches
and communions does not sanction, at least for the Orthodox Church, the
practice of intercommunion. The Church’s reluctance to be in
sacramental communion with other Christian churches—despite the
affirmation that they are imperfectly and incompletely members of the
One Church of God—should not be perceived as a sign of arrogance, and
neither should it be a source of Orthodox triumphalism or
self-sufficiency. It does not allow the churches to become complacent
with present relative unity and collaboration. It is a painful reminder
to all that the unity of God’s Church requires the fullness of the
Apostolic faith, life, and witness. Toward this realization, the
churches are called to intensify their prayers so “that all Christians
may work together so that the day may soon come when the Lord will
fulfill the hope of the Orthodox churches, and there will be ‘one flock
and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16).
It is in this spirit that we call the faithful of the Orthodox Church
in America—and, through their witness, this nation—to repentance:
repentance for injustices past and present; for the idols of wealth,
comfort, and power that seduce every generation; for the divisions and
enmities that tear at the fabric of common life; and for the ways in
which we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. A true
commemoration of a nation’s founding is not mere self-congratulation; it
is a moment of sober examination, of honest confession, and of renewed
dependence upon God.
The Church does not speak this word from a posture of superiority. We
acknowledge our own failures—in charity, in unity, and in the fullness
of our witness to the Gospel. We, too, stand in need of God’s mercy. But
it is precisely because the Church has known the healing power of
repentance that she cannot withhold this word from the world she is
called to serve.
I think therein is an answer to those who can see only America's wrongs and those who pride themselves on being anti-woke. Acknowledging failures must be followed by the repair of damage done. Ignoring our failures is hubris.
There is a Byzantine word that guards this mystery from being turned into propaganda: charmolýpē
“joyful sorrow.” The word sounds paradoxical because it is a paradox,
not of logic but of spiritual truth. It does not describe alternating
moods, as if joy and sorrow take turns. Rather, it names a single,
integrated experience: joy that has not forgotten the Cross, and sorrow
that has not lost the rose scent of the Kingdom. Charmolýpē is
not a decorative nuance of Orthodox piety; it is a discipline of the
heart. It teaches us how to celebrate without arrogance, how to hope
without cruelty, how to speak of victory without becoming triumphalist.
Triumphalism
is a subtle temptation precisely because it borrows the vocabulary of
faith. It speaks easily of “victory,” “chosen people,” “truth,”
“enemies,” “purity,” “greatness.” It appears in religion, ethnicity,
politics, even in the Church’s own self-understanding. Its danger lies
in replacing the Gospel’s disarming power with a familiar one: the power
to dominate, to humiliate, to rank human beings. It imagines that God’s
truth must appear as our superiority, that blessing must look like
strength. In such a climate, the Cross becomes embarrassing—a means to
something more “successful.” Resurrection is reduced to a trophy, and
Christ becomes to a tool.
Our time
offers many examples of this drift, especially in heated political
cultures where leaders are clothed in messianic language: savior,
healer, anointed, the one who alone can fix what is broken. In the
United States, this temptation has become particularly visible in the
way the President has been portrayed by some supporters in
quasi-messianic terms, and at times has spoken in ways that reinforce
such a narrative. The point is not to score partisan arguments, but to
name a theological distortion: the substitution of Christ with a
political image of redemption, where salvation is reduced to the triumph
of power and healing to the defeat of enemies. When Christian language
is recruited to sanctify domination, the Church is no longer teaching
the nations; she is being taught by them.
***
Charmolýpē lives precisely here. Even in resurrection, Christ
is humble. Even in glory, He remains the One who poured Himself out. The
wounds do not disappear as if they were mistakes. They remain, not as
raw pain, but as radiant memory, a witness that love has a cost, and
that the cost was freely embraced. This is why Christian joy cannot
become arrogant. If the Risen Christ carries wounds into eternity, then
the Church has no permission to preach victory as the humiliation of
others, or to present God’s Kingdom as a celebration of our strength. To
proclaim Pascha truthfully is to proclaim a victory that looks, at
first glance, like weakness: a candle flame flickering in the dark.
I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP?
Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?
Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.
When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.
Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a
surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective
emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a
bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with
confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to
capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is
at times quite astonishing.
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.
***
Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out
home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself
“experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of
things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of
having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing
that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity?
That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies
(1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist
comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to
Fielding.
From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.
Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:
No church. My ride is sick, my stomach is uncomfortable in a way that I want to stay close to home, and it started raining again. Just what Indiana needs.
It is a consolidation of some of my Indiana factory town stories into one. The ones inspired by Anderson and Muncie; the smokestack is the old Andaconda smokestack repurposed (btw, Anderson knocked that down). KH dislikes the format. He calls it the Our Town version. I would like to hear your opinion, if you feel like reading it.
