Ol' Bob came over to tell me that one of the young interns confused us. Thought I was Bob or vice-versa. All us middle-aged white guys look the same. He's a bit more portly than me, or so I imagine, but he's also taller so I 'spose it's a wash.
At work Philip told me he was on the phone and in meetings for four hours, and I felt like I should offer my condolences, as if he'd told me of an illness he'd contracted. "I'm sorry," I wanted to say, "for this sickness."
Steven Riddle saves all his old journals and doesn't care what his wife/kid might think in the event of his death and there's something admirable in that. Let the chips fall where they may.
My journals fall in that space between not being worth digitalizing (and password protecting them) and yet not so completely worthless, at least to me if only me, in discarding them. Steven's journals are reportedly more misanthropic than mine, so it says something given that he's willing to wing it. "What others think of you is none of your business," his mother used to say. Sounds like a wise woman.
Fr. B be back at St. Pat's and he's always inspiring, if only for his energy! He'd spent most of June at some Dominican conference. The soul of consistency, he is unfailingly optimistic and positive and makes me want to be better, such that I substituted cheese pizza for pepperoni Friday night as a small way of, as he puts it, "showing who's boss." I'm in charge of myself in other words, in charge of my appetites. (I hope myself was fooled. Ha ha.) He gave a "meta-homily" in the sense of saying that he doesn't know how the lectionary dude thinks the homilist was supposed to say about today's First Reading. It was like those "cursing Psalms," the one C.S. Lewis wrote about it. Fr. B. said that Lewis said that we should spiritualize the negative Psalms and see our enemies as our sins and vices. (To quote Mark Shea, "we are not our sins.")
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