On her 15th birthday, my daughter received a beta fish from a kid who lived in the neighborhood. A kid who had been in our house many times. A kid who would know we weren’t “fish people.” I thought it an odd gift. And then thought, what an odd fish. Beta are strikingly beautiful to be sure, and this one was no exception. He was blue with feathery red fins. We named him Beta. And Beta looked lonely in that…
Matthew 6:24 is a prominent driver in my novel. It basically says you can’t serve both money and God. It doesn’t matter whether you’re agnostic or atheist. That’s not the point. To prove it, replace God with Mankind–or anything “good” in the same context that the idea of God is “good.” The rule from this verse in the bible still applies. What happens when we make money more important than God or people or anything “good” is that we literally…
The most gratuitous use of power I’ve ever witnessed occurred about four years ago when my then 12-year-old daughter was “dating” this Korean kid in middle school. This boy was gaga over her, and he was nice, and so she liked hanging out with him. It was a beautiful Saturday and we invited him to join us on a bike ride along the greenway. About an hour into it we were taking a break when my daughter said, “Hey Dad, John (not real name)…
I’m a writer who makes his living in marketing. I’d rather save whales and write adventures about it, but I get paid to position brands so that they grow. Marketing pays the bills, even though it means competing in an oversaturated field chock full of conmen with blue checkmarks on Twitter. And I’m pretty good at what I do. There’s a big difference between knowing how to run a Twitter campaign and understanding the idiosyncrasies of a brand to make…
A human being thought the bombing through. If we’re all born innocent and pure, and we all agree that murder is bad, at what point do we give in to evil? I’ll tell you, when we forget to move toward the light. Because the dark side is an easy sell. Lust. Money. Power. These are easy concepts to sell people (trust me, I’m in advertising.) Love, however, takes patience and tolerance. In other words, work. I once attended a Zig Ziglar…
It was a simple affair. A white trellis adorned with fresh gardenia. Two rows of white chairs. We held the ceremony at the home of a friend who lived on a tributary of the St. John’s River. There were maybe a dozen people present. My parents came in from Texas. Her mom and a friend drove down from New Jersey. Because it was such a simple wedding, we felt guilty about them coming at all—but they insisted. And so here…
