Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, How hard it is for a person to change! (I feel stupid already for what I said just now because it is too obvious, too trite for the words to be even uttered.) And "born again"?  How elusive an idea, how utopian a dream, how unfeasible a proposition! I hate this rain and wind.  I absolutely detest driving in the dark in this rain and wind.  It could have been a much more reasonable affair if people are to be reasonable about their own life and others', to not dress in deep dark colors wearing headphone and sometimes thumbing their phone while on the road. But I can't change even my own kids.  It is not fashionable to dress bright.  It is pathetic to wear a flashing light.  I hope they don't look at their phone but I doubt my hope.  There's always something coming through the phone that they have to answer to.  How does one jump out of what is expected of him and look at life anew? The world is killing them softly if not fin...

Dear Eugene, Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt like you've lost something near and dear to you, that you didn't know where it is...and worst of all, you didn't even know what it is? A sense of inexplicable loss that demands an explanation, in words but more than words. It's like after making love being sent away with a gesture to clarify you weren't really loved after all, desperate texts firing back and forth to salvage a teenage love that is growing older by the second, shriveling into a grotesque finality shivering on the roadside that a passerby can't help but look away. What have I lost?  Why is this loss so profound yet I don't even know what it is? In the movie "Leaving Las Vegas," the Nicolas Cage character sold everything, checked into a motel to drink himself to death.  He read the name of the motel on a sign, " The hole you're in... " I am missing Jesus, I know. When we don't care about wha...

Dear Eugene, This morning: " The bodies of 26 teenage women and girls have been found in the Mediterranean, Italian police said. " Were they tortured, sexually abused?   Does it still matter, now that they are no more?   Who is going to make such non-matter matter again?   Who is going to speak a word for them now that they are silenced? When did it happen?   When I was holding up my pious hands singing songs in church?   When I was articulating my sound theology out of my pizza breath on Saturday night?   When I was watching some Chinese Rocky movie for the umpteenth time with my family on Sunday night, followed right after by some ultra-HD nature "documentary" that tells of the same story of survival-of-the-fittest, over-eaten, over-talked, over a hill that I knew not the purpose to climb but did it anyway? The 26 teenage girls did not survive; I did.   I guess that's the story.   I guess I should be happy I came out on the winni...