I always watch Edward Burns movies because there’s just something about him I love. And the way he pokes fun at Catholic-flavored wrong-headedness is plain adorable to me. One of my favorite exchanges in She’s The One was near the end of the movie where Ed’s character says something like, “But you don’t even believe […]

Have you heard of this thing called “cringe therapy” wherein people dig up embarrassing things they wrote during adolescence and publish them in a book or read them in front of a crowd of drunks? Well, I’m not sure what’s therapeutic about it, but the idea is most intriguing.
So, I went looking through my old […]

San Francisco was named after the most beloved of all Catholic saints - St. Francis of Assissi. Now, whenever I think of St. Francis, I think of Bambi and Thumper and all the cartoon birds and butterflies of the forest, because he’s known for his love of nature and all the living creatures of the […]

In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House, mushrooms are the drug of choice. In her poisoned haze, the high priestess can see the past, the future and the present. Like the Druids, San Francisco’s youth are also famed for their appreciation of hallucinogens, even if they do lack the sensibility and spirituality of Avalon’s priestesses.
In […]

San Francisco started out as one of many Catholic missions established in California by Spanish priests. The priests and the natives of the land flourished together with the father, the son and the holy ghost for many generations. Then in 1834, the Mexican government smashed the mission system in an attempt to secularize the country. […]

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon books brought me to world of pagan appreciation for the beauty and power of nature. Churches with walls and roofs are an aberration, for the beauty of god is not inside a man-made structure, but outside with the earth and the sky.
In Lady of Avalon, priestess initiation happens on an ocean […]