Warning: personal post–more so than usual, I think….

Following on the ragged, bourbon-stained, piss-soaked J. C. Penney’s coattails of my last post:

I think one of the most difficult acts to do for those who were raised to believe that every thought that issues forth from the human heart is nothing but evil continually (cf. Gen. 6:5) is learning to accept certain intuitions, especially if these intuitions find no easy accommodations in a penny catechism or the Summa Theologiae. 

Granted, I am a minor master in post hoc justifications, but maybe, just maybe, one does not have to choose either God or the girl. (Okay, okay, okay, so cheesy and easy.) Or, God or a vocation as a writer of decidedly non-edifying fiction without any clear-cut Catholic prescriptions and proscriptions. Thank God and all His Saints for Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh, and Shusaku Endo. I could be grabbing the wrong bull by the horns, but most people lack the imaginative process to allow anyone to wear anything but a red cape.

I have always felt like an outsider and slightly adrift. Attribute that, if you will, to any of the following: mixed-racial descent; homeschooled (one word, bitches) antagonism; an agonizing stuttering problem as a teen (that I corrected without any help from speech therapy); having been raised by transplants in Southern California, the land of the unmoored and deracinated; a lack of interest in what most people find worthwhile; having converted to a faith foreign to your family and friends; my aristocrat of soul persona; etc. Thus, forging an individual path is no problem with me. I actually find a perverse energy in the derisive laughter of others, especially if it comes from students.

Disappointing those who want me to swipe right and find a ready and fertile womb and those who want me to acknowledge my romantic failures and devote myself to God, I plan to continue my work. Soon (enough) everyone will have a chance to judge whether I trod the right path.