I suspect a lot of humanity's frenetic activity, our epic booze and drug consumption, our obsessions with sex and things, our need to keep killing each other, stems from a lurking suspicion that god doesn't exist. And if you take away god, you take away purpose. You take away meaning. You take away hope. Without god [...]

God died the other day after a long battle with leukemia. With his death god took all the answers with him, the ones that might have helped me to understand why he bothered with the whole creation thing if he was just going to be endlessly disappointed in the results. Why? It's the one-word question so [...]

How often I feel like a fish trapped in a bowl, a prisoner to something called life. To an outsider this sounds depressing and at times I suppose it is. But it's all I've ever known. Like a 3-legged dog, I've only ever known hopping. Fifty-two years of hopping proves one thing: all that 'you' [...]

I used to think life was about finding one's purpose, bliss, cause, etc. That we were born with a life sentence and before its end date we had this very tangible goal to achieve. I also imagined there was this tiny population of people out there who had, in fact, found "it." It's pretty clear now [...]

At a recent holiday gathering I briefly found myself in the company of a precocious 9-year-old, a child I've known for quite some time now and who - along with her parents - I admire quite a lot.This little girl provided me with the best 15 minutes of conversation I've enjoyed in years - conversation almost [...]

Take a super-simple sentence - one of the earliest and simplest - and see if it doesn't blow apart the universe as we know it. See Jane run. Let's start with run. You and I and everyone we know take our bodies to be integral parts of ourselves. We walk, run, piss, screw, eat, digest, [...]

It is said the worst punishment that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement. Lock someone in 'the hole' long enough and he starts to go mad (note the metaphorical connection between 'hole' and burial/death). Seems rather clear to me now that this is pretty much the way each of us experiences life - [...]

An avid reader as a child, at some point I remember being intrigued by a rather simple discovery: that most of the really interesting people in life came from difficult circumstances. I don't remember any notable personalities, artists, writers, etc., emerging from the antiseptic world of suburban America (or any nicely developed stretch of society). [...]

In the sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," our heroes discover that most of the once-familiar faces around them are, in fact, hostile aliens in cloned human costume. The story resonates precisely because it taps into that most primal of human fears: that each of us is truly alone in a hostile universe. This is [...]

Sitting on the beach last week, watching the waves rise and fall, rise and fall. The tide rolling in, receding. Clouds building, abating. Birds (and humans) coming, going. Any or all of it a perfect metaphor for life, for existence itself. Little wonder that the mystics so often use the ocean and its waves to explain [...]