my careless contagion

The Smiths' How Soon Is Now? is iconic. Check out the lyrics . Certainly not a run-of-the-mill 80s song. It came out in '84 but didn't pick up steam until later. Do the lyrics make more sense when you know Morrissey (the singer/coauthor of this song) is vegetarian (since age 11) turned vegan? No wonder so much of his music is sad and "beta," as the kids would say. (Eating meat helps men produce testosterone.) Maybe that's why I want to talk about this song. It's about longing. It's about love. It's about longing for love. Saw a license plate recently that simply said, "SIMP," which I understand.  I realized perhaps too late in life the driving force of my being was the search for love. Just wanted to be loved. Looked everywhere for it. That search was behind all major failures and was the wound that drove the most virulent sins. Little did I know there is no human love that can satisfy, and only God can love me fully and in a way that hea...

It's hard to explain what goes on inside our heads. We can talk all day long, but if those we talk to have no experience with the weirdness that's so familiar to us, then it's no use. I have struggled most of my life with what I perceive as normal and my inability to be normal (but I insist normal does not exist). Around the age of 30, I decided it was a fruitless endeavor and nearly impossible to change my core personality or ensconced behaviors.  Years ago, I read a book about the power of being an introvert. It made sense, and it even stated that most people in this world are introverts (about 60 percent), but most will not self-identify as introverts. The trouble with being an introvert is we are often undervalued, especially in American culture, where the extrovert rules. And an introvert in America looks very different from an introvert in, say, the United Kingdom. That's the influence of culture.  Every personality type has things that exhaust and ...