Category: Post
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Apocalypse v Immortality
Reading the headlines about the end of the world by the end of the decade definitely gives me pause about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. Most of our politicians have no clue, with the rare exceptions of the venerable, ever-young Bernie Sanders and the well-read former President Obama. Trump and his sycophants are evidently choosing…
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Fifty Shades of Randy
The idea for this post with its double-entendre title came from a recent review of my erotic gothic novel, The Mysteries of Barcelona (TMB). Jing now lives in Barcelona and is originally from Sichuan province of China. She is in her mid-twenties and one of the smartest and wittiest people I have ever known. We met in…
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Protected: Why Does America Hate Public Nudity?
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Writing an Erotic Life Journal
Why your sexual history deserves the same attention you give your life story, dreams, grief, and spirituality I started my erotic journal for a simple reason: I had spent decades writing down everything else. Life Journals. Life reviews. Dreams. Grief reviews. But the part of my life that shaped me most had no record at…
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Things I Can Live Without (Thank You Barcelona)
As Gina and I enjoyed coffee on our terrace this morning, savoring the first coolish day after four or five summer heat domes, I asked her what she can live without, now that we have lived in Barcelona for almost three years. Here is the list we came up with: A Car—We do not miss…
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Questions for My 70-Year-Old Self (I Am 68)
Two years from now, I turn seventy. I have questions. Hell, I always have questions. I recently read that our current years move and change so fast that each year is equivalent to one hundred years of the past. Or maybe it just feels that way. So here they are. A list of questions I…
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A Letter to My 28-Year-Old Self (I Am 68 Now)
Forty years, kiddo. Forty years since you lay in bed with a book called Communication: The Key to Your Marriage open on your lap after eleven years together with your first wife (yes, there will be another-but that is another letter) and told each other the truth about your pasts. Forty years since you first realized you…
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Is Evangelical Worship Mutual Masturbation?
A megachurch pastor said it to me over lunch, as we talked openly, like a man finally handing off a weight he’d carried alone too long. Early thirties, built like a swimsuit model, the kind of face that makes a congregation’s collective pulse spike the second the lights come up. Charisma dripping off him the…
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The Five Meals I Will Never Forget
As I anticipate a meal at the three-Michelin-star and Italy’s #1 restaurant Ristorante Piazza Duomo in Alba in September for our fifteenth anniversary, it made me think back to the best meals of my life. I have been fortunate to travel the world and dine at some of the greatest restaurants. Here are the five best meals…
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I Am An Artist
There’s a line in the movie Midnight in Paris… Gil, standing in the rain with his notebook, gets called a child by his fiancée and by everyone who knows him well. I know those words. My lovers have ascribed them to me too… a little boy, Peter Pan, the man who never got out of the…
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The Spanish Invasion That Never Happened
I rarely write about political events now that I have established my home in Barcelona, but this past week needs to be addressed. Last week, almost sixty thousand people swam from Morocco toward a Spanish beach in Ceuta. According to Reuters, seventy-two of them died in the water. And within hours, the far right had…
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Five Gods Before Me And Now Only One
Yes, I have violated one (okay, almost all) of the ten commandments. As I’ve grown older, my relationship with gods has become more complex. Count them up, and it looks like promiscuity. Five gods in sixty-eight years, each one demanding worship, each one eventually abandoned. I used to be embarrassed by the list. Now I…
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68. Am I Middle-Aged?
I turned 68 this year, and as I read a fascinating article in The Atlantic this week, the question hit me: am I still middle-aged? The instinct is to laugh it off. Sixty-eight sounds like a number that should settle the matter. But I’ve spent twenty years building a framework I call The Quest, My Theory of Being, that…
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The Odyssey: Imagination as Survival
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened last week to $124.5 million domestically. It was the biggest live-action debut of the year, the best global launch of Nolan’s career, and a 95% on the Tomatometer. It is about a king who takes ten years to sail home from a war. The whole thing was shot entirely on IMAX cameras,…
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The Bully Who Wouldn’t Leave the Stage
Sunday night, MetLife Stadium, and Spain had just beaten Argentina to win the World Cup. Rodri stood at the edge of the trophy platform, seconds from the moment his whole career had been circling toward. The hoist, the roar, the flag, gold confetti raining down on a team that had earned every inch of it.…
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My Feminine Evolution in Nude Watercolors
Thirty-four watercolors spanning twenty-four years of integration They all are asking one question: Who is this woman within? Every painting below expresses it in different ways: rooms, marriages, and countries. Look at them in order. The pictures do the questioning here — my words simply hold the door open. These are thirty-four of over two…
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In Search of My Feminine Identity
She turns out to be legion. I asked Claude AI to read every dream I journaled over seven years and assess every nude I have painted over twenty, and to count the women inside them. The number that came back was not small. Hundreds of them, named and unnamed, real and invented, across over one…
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The Man in the Mirror (I’m asking him to change his ways)
After I published my essay wrestling with femininity, a gay man named Chris (who is a kindred spirit) left a powerful comment that I have not been able to shake. He wrote about the revulsion so many conservative men and self-styled alpha males feel toward gay men, and he named it with a clarity I…
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The Boy on the 920’s Shelf
The Historical Novel Society has selected The Mysteries of Barcelona for a review that is forthcoming this fall in the Historical Novels Review Magazine and Website. The news transported me straight back to an elementary school library, decades gone. In sixth grade I found the biography section of my school library, Dewey 920, the numbers stamped in black…