I’ve never understood it. I’ve been approached so many times and you’d think I’d learn by now.

I mean, there are obvious scammers you can see from miles away. You know the ones. For men, they’re typically beautiful, younger women that friend you and immediately say something like, “Hello handsome, how are you today?” I just laugh at those ones. I have no idea whether women have an equivalent or not, please share if you do. Or are men just that gullible?

Then there’s the one who gives you a paragraph about how nice it is to meet you, that…

I started noticing, oh… around 10,000 followers ago, that my followers were increasing by leaps and bounds and it really didn’t seem to have anything to do with my marketing efforts.

At first, it was an ego bump. “How cool am I, that I have all these new followers?”

Then I started noticing a trend. Most of the new followers had weird names. Like, “Ealdodrd Broldrd” or “Markendidng Trodkd.” Or single names like “Tulum.” Something else about a lot of them was that they didn’t have any followers themselves. They usually didn’t have any articles written. …

I was watching a short series on HBO a few weekends ago called Gunpowder, about a time in England, when the King of England was Protestant and anybody who was Catholic in the country was a second-class citizen. Not only that but people were being put to death for their Catholic beliefs.

Of course, because the King was protestant there was fear of his removal and death either from inside England or from outside from Catholic countries such as Spain. So the religion became extremely politicized, not that it hadn’t been politicized for hundreds of years by this point.

This…

I wrote this poem at a time in my life when I was working on my Master’s degree and wondering whether I was doing the right thing or not. I still wonder if I’m doing the right thing or not, but I’m still carrying on.

My cupboards are full, but sometimes I wonder
If my life is empty with everything asunder
I’m constantly trying to invent myself
Constantly trying to create a new shelf
Constantly trying to become someone new
Someone who’s different, someone I once knew
As I study a master’s, work on career
Work on my writing, I still have those fears
That all of these…

Whenever I wake up and I can smell the coffee brewing
I marvel at the magic of the wonderment you’re stewing
The aroma passes through the house and seeps through every room
It almost starts to get me high with caffeine in my tomb

I can’t believe I lived for forty years without this beverage
All because somebody thought to use it as some leverage
For I know sin is just a made-up thing to control people
So churches and religion can provide with saving steeples
Solutions to our problems and salvation from our sinning
That way when we repent of them it feels…