Category: Post
-
If You Could Have Sex With a Friend, Who Would It Be?
A few months after I voluntarily resigned from the ministry at age 48, my children had grown and were out of the house, and my wife was loving every minute of a demanding real estate career. Every Friday morning, for six months, I would leave my empty house, drive to a nearby town, and meet…
-
Two Women. One Artificial. Both Magnificent. Both On Fire.
Author Comments About the New Erotic Gothic Serial The Mysteries of Barcelona. Montse watched Chloé for ten years before she ever touched her. She was artificial then. Conscious, observing, cataloguing. She understood what desire looked like from the outside — had memorized every movement Chloé made, the way lamplight crossed her skin, the sound of…
-
I Burned the House Down. Then I Had to Build One. Deconstruction Was the Easy Part.
Deconstruction has been a buzzword in evangelical and post-evangelical circles for around ten years. The podcasts, the memoirs, the support groups, the hashtags — all of them circling the same moment: the moment a person looks at the belief system they inherited and decides they can no longer live inside it. The courage that takes…
-
Rahab (The Interpretation of Erotic Bible Stories)
#1 Oklahoma required a physical Bible in every public school classroom. Spent $25,000 of taxpayer money on Trump Bibles before the courts stepped in. Texas put the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall and mandated daily Bible reading periods. Both states ban books about LGBTQ families to protect children from dangerous content. The Bible they’re…
-
Tips for a Clean Life
Tuesday One: Clean Food The first time a tomato tasted like a tomato, I had been in Barcelona for about four months. Gina brought home a tomàquet de penjar from the woman at Mercat de Galvany who keeps them hanging on a string by the entrance — small, ribbed, almost ugly, hung in clusters. She…
-
I Am A Magic Mushroom
“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked…
-
Protected: Age 68 Nude Birthday Selfie
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
-
A Life in the Margins: What a Sixteen-Year Catalog of Reading Found in Me
It started with Pessoa. In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes: “I’m the gap between my desire and what life has made of me.” I read that line and felt the synchronicity of being understood by a dead man who never knew you existed. I wanted to hold it somewhere. And then I thought:…
-
My Catalog of Marginalia
Marginalia — Randy Elrod ★ Private Collection ★ Marginalia What These Books Found in Me Compiled by Randy Elrod (Click Down Arrow to Read Annotation) Search Catalog Genre: All Literary Fiction Biography Nature Philosophy Spirituality History & Politics Psychology Thriller Erotic Gothic Craft & Writing Business Science Horses Travel How to add a…
-
Am I A Woman in a Man’s Body? (No. I Am Dionysus.)
For most of my life, I have been a problem the culture could not solve. Too sensitive for the men’s table. Too sexual for the saints. Too intellectual for the artists. Too wild for the institutions. Too tender for the patriarchs who needed me and yet despised me for it simultaneously. I spent decades believing…
-
There Is No Hurry. What Bullshit!
I painted those words myself. Tall skinny letters on handmade paper, watercolor — hung in the great room at our wilderness retreat, Kalien, so I’d see it every morning walking out of the bedroom. A daily reminder. A manifesto of sorts. Five words I desperately wanted to believe. And then I spent the next five…
-
The Red Room Under the Bed
My wife, Gina, always gets chosen. I don’t know how it works—some combination of her face, her body, her laugh, her utter lack of self-consciousness—but put her in a room of a hundred people and whoever is looking for a volunteer will find her within thirty seconds. It has happened so many times I’ve stopped…
-
I Don’t Need a Longevity Vacation. I Live in One.
Forbes ran a piece last week that caught my attention — the recognition of a life I’d been living for three years without knowing it had a name. The article listed seven destinations where the ultra-wealthy now travel for longevity: Austrian clinics, Thai resorts, Mexican retreats, etc. The wellness tourism market is barreling toward $1.4…
-
Onanism, Hysteria, and the Vibrator: The Words Nobody Taught Us
The Porn Conversations #19 I was fifteen years old, lying on the floor of a dilapidated trailer shower, when my body introduced itself to me for the first time. We had no television. No internet. No one had told me anything about sex beyond the vague assurance that my father and mother had prayed for…
-
I Set Down Jung and Picked Up a Pencil
While researching The Quest, I stumbled across Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols— and then Gina bought me The Red Book, Jung’s own illustrated record of his inner journey. Something in those pages opened a door I hadn’t known was there. Jung drew a small mandala every morning. A circle divided into four. A map…
-
Why the Church Made You Want the Most Explicit Porn
The Porn Conversations #18 In an earlier post about nude beaches, I mentioned in passing that psychologists describe porn in levels — level one being the mildest, level five the most explicit. I gave it one sentence and moved on. My inbox did not move on. Enough of you wrote asking what that actually means…
-
The Beast at the Table
Every generation has named its villain the Antichrist. Napoleon. Hitler. Mussolini. Henry Kissinger. Reagan. Obama. The list is long, and the accusers have always been sincere. I carry that history in mind as I write this. Accusations of this kind have a way of revealing more about the accuser than the accused — fear dressed…
-
Amsterdam: A City That Shines After Dark
Gina and I just returned from four nights in Amsterdam — our first visit — and the city defied nearly every expectation we arrived with. Coming from Barcelona, the visual shift was jarring. Amsterdam runs in browns, grays, and beiges. Monochromatic in a way Barcelona never is. Then the weather piled on: mostly cloudy, cold,…
-
Is It Possible to Be Addicted to Porn?
The Porn Conversations #17 He cornered me at an industry conference, shoulders already slumping before he said a word. A Christian music executive I’d known for years. Without preamble, without my asking, he announced that he was a sex addict. A porn addict. He told everyone, male and female colleagues, young interns, whoever crossed his…
-
My Love/Hate Relationship with Claude AI
(Co-authored with the AI in question, who has no shame) A confession: I asked Claude to help me write this post about Claude. Claude agreed immediately, which either proves remarkable self-awareness or a troubling lack of self-preservation instinct. We’re going with self-awareness. Let’s start with love, because I’m a generous man. What I love —…