Your Morning Denouncements

“Good morning. So glad to have you worshipping with us here at Tether’s End Methodist Church.

“If you’re vis—what’s that? You can’t hear me? Is the microphone not working? Let me… is that better?.. No?… Well, gosh, maybe I don’t need it… I’ll try to speak loud and clear. So, as I was saying, if you’re… I do need it? Well, hang on then… [tap tap tap] Testing… testing… ah, there we go! Y’know, I think this is the microphone that Virgil Munn’s boa constrictor swallowed last week at our Blessing of the Animals ceremony, and it may have gotten a bit mucked up. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer Reading and Some Are Not

Not everybody’s a reader. When my brother was 22 he was lounging on the sofa at the cottage one August day, engrossed in a comic book. “Is that the best you can do?” chided my mother as she passed by. “Little kids read comic books.”

“Good for them,” he mumbled. “I’m just looking at the pictures.”

My friend Troy isn’t much of a reader either. He thinks Barnes & Noble is a law firm. When asked the question, “Have you read anything good lately?” he’ll tell you about a funny billboard he drove past. Read the rest of this entry »

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John Grisham Ruined My Vacation

I remember when my mom used to sit on the edge of my bed and read me fairy tales. But then I turned thirty and she said, “Enough is enough”, so now I get celebrities to read to me. It’s the magic of audio books. Brought to life by famous and talented voices, I like detective stories, westerns, spy novels– these are perfect for the car, because they tend not to be intellectually demanding, and, as a driver, I can enjoyably listen to them with partial attentiveness while engaged by more important activities like steering with my knees while eating a burrito and texting. Read the rest of this entry »

God Bless Canmerica

Growing up in Canada, there was only one reason I wanted to become Prime Minister of the country: revenge. When I was 13, my family took a summer vacation to the southwestern U.S., and I remember a brief conversation I had with a local kid outside a Dallas diner. He’d never seen a Canadian before. “Y’all live in igloos up there?” he grinned, and his two buddies laughed at the image of us primitive Canucks huddled in little domed snow huts all year long, miserable in our itchy beaver pelt underwear. I vowed that I would rise to my nation’s highest office, knowing it was inevitable that our powerful southern neighbor would come begging to us someday for a share of our abundant fresh water supply. As the Canadian leader, my moment would have come. “Fresh water?” I’d say, addressing America in a press conference. “Sorry! It’s all being used as bricks in our housing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Water Pressure

My friend Moira, a talk show host on a Christian TV network, isn’t sure about buying green bananas anymore. She’d just finished an interview with me, and we were looking out a window at a suddenly dark and stormy sky. “Doesn’t it feel like the end times these days?” she said. “I think Jesus is coming soon.” This made me think of the shaggy homeless guy I once saw holding a sign that read:The end is near! Where will you spend eternity?, which seemed fitting at the time because I was on my way to the DMV. Read the rest of this entry »

Lessons from a Candy Bar Con Man

When the time came for “the birds and the bees” talk, my father’s message to me and my brother was very brief. It set aside birds and bees altogether and focused on flies instead. “Boys,” he said, clearing his throat, “keep it in your pants.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Late Show, Part 2

[When last we left our frantic late-for-the-wedding guests, they had burst through doors into the church basement, in desperate need to get one floor up, where the ceremony was already in progress.]

Rachel and I needed to find a way upstairs, but in our agitated state there didn’t appear to be an obvious means. There must have been six thousand doors spaced around the sprawling basement, all closed. We frantically began yanking them open to see where they led.

“Classroom!”

“Bathroom!”

“Boiler room!”

The organ music above our heads sounded now like it was taunting us: Having fun without you, having fun without you! Read the rest of this entry »