Welcome to Our World!
"From the ashes, a fire shall be woken..."
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Welcome, dear friend, whoever and wherever you may be in this strange world of sin and shadow, of joy and beauty, in which we are all allotted to live out our days. We are made for joy and happiness, and yet we are so often subjected to hate and terror—when we are not hating or terrorizing, consciously or otherwise. We each have an infinite desire for love, yet a limited ability to return it. Our lives pass quickly, and the shadow of death looms over us all; yet there are also moments of ecstasy sharper than any pain.
It is a decidedly mixed bag, to be sure, and we are all well-advised to keep our wits about us—while remembering that everyone else is in the same position as we are. This is true whether we live in a box in a homeless community under a freeway overpass or while away our summers at the Bohemian Grove. I have known extremes of wealth and poverty in my life, and I know this to be true.
Who am I? By what right do I pontificate in these pages? Fair questions.
To answer the first, I was recently described as “a French-Canadian Knickerbocker from Hollywood, living in Austria.” This sounds odd, but it is not untrue. My parents were radio actors—my father, a French-Canadian from New England, and my mother, a native of the city. My brother André arrived seven years before I did. I was born the day John F. Kennedy was elected, and in the mid-60s, we moved to Hollywood. There, we settled in the house of the then-famous television psychic, Criswell.
This was the immediate post-Vatican II era, the height of the Hippie Counterculture, and various other movements that left their mark on all of us Boomers—a generation of which I am a junior member. My brother married, and he and his wife have ten children, all of whom are the apples of their doting uncle’s eye—the more so as I never married and have none of my own.
I attended a number of schools; the ones that marked me the most were Blessed Sacrament School in Hollywood, where the IHM nuns exploded in Sapphic rage in 1968; gang-ridden and occasionally lethal Virgil Junior High; Bishop Alemany High; and New Mexico Military Institute. Having pursued several strange occupations—most happily as a stand-up comic—I had a book published in 1987 and settled down to a life of literary and journalistic adventure.
Eventually, I began a still-running podcast, Off the Menu, with the redoubtable Vincent Frankini. A few years later, I was convinced to pursue a Master’s in Sacred Theology in Austria and fell in love with the institution, the country, and the Mother Continent. Here I am at the moment; what the future holds, I cannot say.
What gives me the right to pontificate? Well, the same thing that allows any other member of the chattering classes to chatter, I suppose: I’ve been paid to do so for a long time. But I have studied history more thoroughly than most and traveled a great deal. I have known monarchs and dropouts, rich and poor—and enjoyed and disliked some of each. I have done my best to stay true to my ideals, such as they are, while maintaining a great many interests, which I suppose could well be called eclectic. I have always been guided by my father’s dictum that if something was not worth studying, it was not worth having an opinion on. This is an extremely liberating rule, to be sure. So I try not to express an opinion without having reasons for it that will withstand examination. That is the basis upon which I presume.
Now, at this point, you may well have had enough of me. If so, I thank you for your attention and wish you well on your journey, as we have come to the end of the free reading. But if you wish to venture beyond the dreaded paywall, more shall be revealed regarding my beliefs, upon which this Substack is based, and some of the areas we can explore together! Whether you stay or go, God bless you, now and always!