Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.

is the way Thomas Jefferson put it in a letter dated Sep. 23, 1800,

WHEN GOD TALKS BACK: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God by T. M. Luhrmann

If evangelicals are expert at conjuring God, they are just as good at dealing with disappointment when God fails to show up. When his presence fades or he fails to answer a prayer, it means God has decided that your faith is so strong, you don’t need constant proof. “The concept of spiritual maturity allows people to reinterpret a disappointment as, in effect, a promotion,” Luhrmann explains. This is not merely a grand exercise in self-­delusion. Luhrmann’s subjects are aware of their minds at work. They acknowledge the elements of “pretend” in imagining God as an invisible friend sitting at the kitchen table. Vineyard teaching is clear that the Christian life requires mastering a set of mental tools. Luhrmann’s account, she says, “is fully compatible with both secular and supernaturalist understandings of God. To a believer, this account of absorption speaks to the problem of why, if God is always speaking, not everyone can hear… . To a skeptic, it explains why the believer heard a thought in the mind as if it were external.”

Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious, and liberation, between chance, automatism, and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing.

Dear People Who Judge My Single, Post-College Lifestyle -

I am 27 years old, and on occasion I still drink until I throw up. In the case I do not throw up, I usually eat twice the calories I normally do the following day. Sometimes I even get drunk during the week. This past autumn I fell down the stairs at a college football game and kissed someone’s boss in front of clients while bleeding from the knees.

I WILL NEVER DIE

The murder of Biggie’s foe is a forgone conclusion. Let the hospital get a head-start on the paperwork!

Joe Brainard, ZZZZ … , 1977

When I hear men boast about how passionate
they are, I think of the two cleaning ladies
at a second-story window watching a man
coming back from a party where there was
lots of free beer. He runs in and out
of the building looking for a toilet. “My Lord,”
the tall woman says, “that fellow down there
surely does love architecture.”