urbantrappistblogastery

I have this penchant for the high brow: modern paintings, strenuous books, Belgian beers.  I love these difficulties because I find treasure in the inaccessible.  Edmund Hillary, among many others of his sort, agreed. Anything with broad appeal tends to lack the potency and depth of the arduously crafted art which can only be [...]

Although I wash the dishes frequently, I tend to lead a dirty life. Running, yard work, and listening to non-Christian music leave me filthy. So do my assorted vices. Shame cometh, and right often.
In these guilty moments, I scrub a gamut of cleansing efforts, from justification to vows to rationalization to amnesia. [...]

This writing adventure brings a lot of frustrations. Through my first 24 years, I generally had the ease of an immediate transition from production to completion. I did my work (studying, essaying, youth planning) and saw it relatively quickly completed (tests, grades, events). I didn’t anticipate the gulf between writing and publishing.
Now, [...]

If you’ve been around me lately, you’ve probably heard my grumblings about doing assorted oddjobs for my parents. It’s really a baseless whine; I get paid for it, which is more than I can say for most of the rest of what I do (with an amazing exception being brewing).
But as I was laboring [...]

Show me your schedule and I’ll show you your values.
Let’s not go through my daily hours, lest we all be bored to tears and thoroughly amazed at how often I get sidetracked, but let’s rather look at one particular item that literally runs away with several of my hours every week: track. And I [...]

Christoffermas! Today is the solemn, solitary passion of this grand holiday. It is marked by a ritual reading of The Great Gatsby, a comfortably long run (though today may boldly shoot for a circumnavigation of Big Glen Lake, basically a half marathon and likely to resemble the mid-week trek of Hocking Hills (RIP)).

No [...]