Let's talk about the idea of a document that a group of people agrees to accept as true and uses to establish the veracity of all emergent claims as well as the morality of all proposed courses of action. You've got two Jews and three opinions but you've only got one Torah so the correct opinion is the one that can be shown to be most supported by ( Read more... )

This is everything that happened as I remember it:

January, 2001

I am in grade eight at Harold T. Barrett Jr. high school and there’s an election on in the United States. I am interested in politics but I don’t really understand it. I draw political cartoons the humour of which is entirely derived from the candidates’ names. I depict “Bush” as a ( Read more... )

It is not that time travel is impossible, it is just that whenever a time machine is invented, it inevitably gets in the hands of some woman. The first thing she does with it is the first thing any woman would do: she goes back and seduces a young Isaac Newton. It is just too irresistable to land the ultimate stolid asexual man of science with the ( Read more... )

Raze your glass, let’s burn a toast,
To a guy, my faberite one,
Fair in height, poor, 51.
You wonder why I liked him most?
He was a book.

The phrase “you only want what you can’t have” is true by definition. To be “in want” means to be without. You can love something that you have. You can want to continue having it. But you can’t want it. I propose that there are three concepts that the human mind wants, that it yearns for and burns for, precisely because it cannot quite possess ( Read more... )

Choden, when you bent over the butter lamps,

I could see the hint of henna in your hair,

And the glint of that tough trouble you found down in Phuntsholing,

And I burned up and melted in your prayer.

And I remembered Sara back in Canada,

Beside a granite grave in faded jeans,

She placed me. I was plastic flowers.

Ever in bright bloom for troubled teens.

( Read more... )

Blah. I'm a black sheep,
Gnawing off my wool,
Four tags on four bags,
Three-quarters full,
One for Zoraster,
One for Aquinas,
One for a bonny boy,
One for His Highness.

Zoraster, my master,
I used to be his lamb,
He showed me what growed free,
And called me "madame".
He tooketh me then left me
Beside still water,
He couldn't keep a sheep,
That he couldn't bear to ( Read more... )

I wake and grab my cellphone from atop the jumbo pack of toilet paper. The time is 6:20.
We are on a rock ledge in the deep of winter in the blue of daybreak. From nowhere we are enveloped in the sound of wings. Birds, numerous like starlings, rush by in a fast flock, but they're not starlings; they're bald eagles. Solitary hunters forgoing solitude ( Read more... )

Swastiskas outnumber swirls,
In Himalayan art,
And I wonder 
If in a month or year,
I'll finally have the heart
And the stomach
To see that four fanned figure,
And see only the art,
And not think of the Nazis
And not turn still and sad,
To know symbols are innocent
And only men are bad.

You are quiet by the river hearing truth in gentle rest,

I am running to the sunset to find the wonders of the West.

All alone you’re learning much and on my own I’m going far,

But let us come together, love, and be more than what we are.

Let us bend and flex to fit our habits to a single life,

Let us come to be companions, true united man and ( Read more... )