Todos pecados son iguales

Do you ever wonder if maybe the street preachers are right?

There was one on the train coming home tonight, bearded and straggly. He spoke in Spanish so I couldn;t understand all of it, but what I could make out went something like this:

"All sins are the same. It doesn't matter whether you rob or kill, or if you only feel anger or greed. To God it's all the same; he only cares what's in your heart. So forget whatever you are pursuing in life. Money, success, it doesn't matter. Just think about your heart, because that's all that God sees. Just seek that there be no sin in your heart."

And isn't that what Jesus would say -- and isn't that who Jesus would be -- if he came back today?

This Charming Man

It's that time of year again, when I contemplate the fact that I have not had sex for two and half years, or been in a relationship for nearly eight. Over the past two years I've been out on dates with 19 women and, except for two or three whom I didn't call back, been rejected by every one. The reasons are a bit mysterious.

In any case, the most likely reason you're reading this is you follwoed a link from one of my blog comments. So you can take satisfaction in seeing that posting lots of comments on poltiical blogs does, yes, have the implications for the poster's personal life that you had thought.

Never Predict Anything...

Subjects I might like to write about in this space:

- Article in the most NYRB about the treatment of Germans by American troops following WW II. (It was bad.)

- The book I'm currently reading, about the creation of the modern American state between Reconstruction and the 1920s. (It's good.)

- Eliot Spitzer, Law & Order's gift to American politics.

but as they say, "... especially the future."

Hello World, Take 2

It's right to write, right?

Just back from brunch. Apple pie and cheese, chicken and waffles, coffee and mimosas, doctors and crazy tatooed anarchist bikers, Americans and Canadians somehow living in harmony, writers and politicians and bureaucrats (hi!), a Brooklyn rooftop, the Willaimsburg Bank Building and the sunset over Manhattan. In short, life is good. Which, really, is why one ought to write.