...and one of them is a 75-degree Ohio summer sunny day with the windows down on my 4-cylinder Asian car (made in the USA, of course) with the wind blowing through my hair, which has grown out two inches since summer started and can actually blow now.

It's me driving with my yellow driving shades on, cruising at 60 mph on a 45 zone country road, heading to the used bookstore to pick up literature on the Civil War. I've got my beautiful wife next to me. Tom Petty's on the CD player and my 2 year old son is screaming "I'M FEE-FAAHHLEEENG" like Jerry Maguire after he signed the Cush.

I wouldn't trade the experience and memory for Ron Jeremy's penis.

I wouldn't trade it for Wil Wheaton's crazy Star Trek poker skills.

I wouldn't trade it for Shane Nickerson's awesome but funked up trip to Florida during his college Spring Break.

I wouldn't even trade it for Tony Pierce's thousands of hits of daily website traffic.

I might consider it for a Vintage 1st edition set of signed Shelby Foote Civil War: A Narrative Books but it too would lose out in the end.

...and he lives not five miles from my house.

Rod Parsley, the sweating and screaming so-called Prophet and head of the Ohio Jim Jones cult World Harvest Church, is an outrageously pompous asshole who is beginning to wield a dangerous influence on the political affairs of our country.

See, I've earned the right to say that about his character because I had my five minutes face to face with the man. It came when I was a server in an upscale sports bar and grill here in Columbus, Ohio in the winter of 1995.

It was a weeknight. It was late. He and his entourage filed in and were seated in my section. Back in those days, when studying Joseph Campbell and Krishnamurti were relatively new things to me and before I would have called myself an expert in both like I would today, I wore an Egyptian Ankh ring on the middle finger of my right hand.

Well, Pastor Rod wasn't about to let a pagan symbol like this go unchallenged as it was waved before his eyes when I set down his food and drink. So, he called me out on it.

"Young man, you would be wise to abandon pagan god symbols such as that and declare Jesus Christ to be your lord and savior."

Well, that was it for me. Those of you that knew me back in those days, back in my One Man Crusade days, know that I would never let such a statement go unchallenged. I had no idea who this prick was or who he thought he was but we shared some heated words which started with me kneeling down listening to him and by the end I was standing and pointing my finger in his pudgy face saying the statement that still makes me cringe today.

"I AM GOD!"

I have no idea where it came from or why I said it but it worked. He and his holy entourage were up and out of the restaurant immediately. No tip.

It was a few weeks later when I saw this jack on the television, sweating and screaming, palm on foreheads, and throwing snakes, that I realized exactly where he was coming from and I was all the more happier I had called him out on his shit.

Well, Pastor Rod has since gone on to amass great wealth and political power throughout the country. He has a new book called Silent No More and he intends on taking over the country to install what he calls a "Christian Theocracy." He is still spewing hatred he doublespeaks to be love (this quote is taken from a Columbus Dispatch article from today but I couldn't find a link to it online):

Gays are God’s children, he says, but they have chosen a lifestyle that is harmful to themselves and society.

‘‘No one wants to talk about that because we hide behind this thin veil of political correctness," Parsley said during an interview. ‘‘I love homosexuals and lesbians, and I love them enough to tell them the truth."

In his book, he also condemns Islam as being responsible for ‘‘more pain, more bloodshed and more devastation than nearly any other force on Earth."

Yet Parsley said that he loves Muslims, too, and that it is his duty to try to convert them to Christianity.

He added that many Muslims want to destroy the United States, an objective he said is driven by some leaders within their faith.

‘‘There are clerics who will espouse love and teach their people that that’s what the Quran teaches," he said.

‘‘But unless Islam is confronted from without and reformed from within, we are going to continue to have the kinds of difficulties we’re seeing played out around the world today."

I have a very religious friend who has recently converted from Catholicism to a Non-Denominational faith similar to the World Harvest Kool-Aid drinkers, but different enough to still be respectable, and he asked me about the Left Behind series of books which is all about the End of the World and the coming of Christ to kill all non-believers in a river of blood and fire.

Well, I have read all those books and for the same reason that everyone should have read Mein Kampf in the 1920s when it was written--so that the lunatics who wrote it never come into enough power to make it actually happen.

Here is what I wrote my friend:

Yes, I have read all the books in the Left Behind series. I know all about Rayford Steele and Nicholae Carpathia, Chloe, Buck and the legion of other secondary characters. I was there from the beginning when everyone disappeared on the plane to the end when Jesus returns and damns the non-believers and, well...you'll have to wait to find out. I really enjoyed these stories but I want you to keep in mind that they are all based from a center of fear and an inherent separation between God and man--that God is something to be feared. I was very entertained by the stories but they are not about the Jesus I know. The Jesus I know is no one to fear--his heart is full of boundless love even if you get his name wrong and call him Mohammed or Buddha or Confucious or Yahweh or "I don't believe in you at all."

The heart of the Lord is mercy, not suffering, and I have to believe that these "End-Times" prophecies of destruction and blood and fire and plagues are the result of misdirected faith. See, people that have been touched by the merciful heart of God sometimes go absolutely crazy from it and fall in love with their image of what God is and they get stuck there with that image. They begin to worship that image and the words that describe it, forgetting that "God" is an absolute mystery to the finite mind of man--only the heart without the brain can truly "know" God and the heart can't pull its knowledge of God from this moment to the next--it can only be experienced in the here and now.

The moment true bliss is attempted to be dragged to the next moment, it becomes dead, a thing of the past--something to be placed on an alter and have candles and incense lit all around it. That image, that memory of bliss, then becomes something to kill over, something to say, "Your God is not my God and therefore I am going to fly airplanes into large buildings and murder you for." And this is exactly what our species has been doing for ten thousand years, killing one another over silly words that are supposed to point past themselves to a glorious mystery that absolutely transcends all waking knowledge. We can only come to the true alter of God naked as individuals, stripped away from our egos and insecurities, pure hearts beating in time with the mercy of the Lord.

The universe is a great beating heart and compassion and joy is the blood that flows through the vestibules of time to unite us all in the mystery of being born from nothing, accumulating experience as our minds move through time and relationship with others while our physical bodies grow bigger, stronger, peak, plateau, and then begin a great descent into the inevitable death that unites us all with a common universal suffering and beyond which we dissolve back into the great and glorious void of pure, compassionate, and creative energy that is the ultimate ground of being.

There is nothing to fear from what lies beyond the word God but there is everything to fear from what lies beneath it. For true eternal life exists once one has gone beyond all words but there is only death and finality waiting for those trapped beneath the blooded weight of words. The word God can be the greatest liberator or the greatest slave ship humanity has ever known and the choice is ours as individuals to make.

Now, tell me, whose religious outlook on life is the more mature, more respectful towards others, and more likely to represent a true communion with the divine?

It has been one month and one day since the infamous post that began the blogging war between myself, Tony Pierce, and Shane Nickerson and it has been a relatively quiet month in the blogosphere.

Since then, this blog has been completely converted from a free hosting platform to this awesome new home on Powerblogs, which was an excellent referral by Antimedia. I spent sixteen hours going blind fixing CSS code and categorizing each blog post I had made since April as I converted my entire catalog of Blogger posts over here.

But even the snazziest sites are nothing without content, as Tony has said time and again, a statement I agree with whole-heartedly.

That little war started all because I had grown fed up with what I perceived to be "fluff pieces" by the popular bloggers (not just Tony, Shane, and Wil but many others as well) and I'm sure my critical comments kind of took them by surprise. But it wasn't their writing ability I was taking issue with but rather the content of their posts.

Now I apologized for the way I came across and Shane and Tony accepted and all that is under the bridge now but it seems to me that I was frustrated because I was caught in a nexus of the blogosphere, unsure of where I was positioning my online identity and the niche of my blog.

I have been doing a lot of thinking (as well as a lot of writing, a lot of coding, and a lot of bugging Chris here at Powerblogs for help) about the whole incident which went from me making what I thought were insightful comments to me apologizing to the entire internet for my behavior.

And it seems that my main problem was that my blogging inspirations were far too spread out and I was being pulled in too many directions at once. See, I dig the political blogs like Michelle Malkin and Antimedia. But I also dig the Mommy Blogs of Supafine and Sweetney. And I dig the hipster cool entertainment blogs like Shane's, Tony's, Wil's, and Alex's. And I dig the crazy news sites like Mensix.

I wanted my blog to be a little of all these sites. I want it to be funny yet sobering, entertaining yet somber, enlightening yet mundane, controversial yet safe, and I want it to be a site that at the same time it encourages my readers to feel as though they are part of a community for each of them to feel that there was some piece of me that they couldn't have and that the more posts I made the less they actually saw of me. I want this to be a portal of mystery as well as a blatant and outright source of truth. Like Tom Petty said, I want it all or nothing.

I feel like I've got a pretty good start on filling what I perceive to be a void in the blogosphere, which combines all my influences into a new jamming wavelength in the dissonance we call the blogosphere. I want to be the first blogger who writes about global economic war diplomacy and then posts about Internet porn and 2Pac with full cursing followed by a great old stoner story from back in the days when all there was to do was get high and try to get laid. I want trackbacks from the left, the right, legit press, and the underground.

But in the same vein, it's just blogging and it's not life--like the John Lennon quote that's become cliche and I never want to turn into the Blogebrity parody that Alex so brilliantly describes.

So where does that leave me? Right here in front of you. In the end, everyone was right in the Blog War and everyone won (although I had to sacrifice the most). Shane was right in that blogging is best done when its entertainment for oneself and, if others enjoy it also--even better. In fact, Shane has taken his blojo to new heights in the past week with his multi-part serial story about a crazy Florida trip gone wrong. Excellent stuff, Shane. I still feel horrible about the "it's just an actor's blog" comment, just so you know.

And Tony was right to claim dominance over his portion of the blogosphere--he does his thing and has been a major trendsetter in the way that thousands of people both read and write blogs. I was lucky enough to develop my own style before I had ever even heard of Busblog but I still started off imitating the people I thought were doing it right--Seth Godin, Shane, and Wil (I was introduced to Tony from Shane's blog). But Tony's got mad skills and you've got to give him his props and that's really all he was asking for--here they are Tony--you're the man. Well you're one of the men.

Wil stayed out of the whole affair--a bloGod such as he spends no time swatting at the ankle biters like me--good for him--his success has served as inspiration for me.

And me, after apologizing to the entire blogosphere and undergoing a complete online crucifixion, I was reborn with a clarity and purpose I had never known before in my online writing. I came out with a couple writing gigs, some more loyal readers who I hope to have made into fans, and I've completed the third revision to my book which is coming out for sale on JoshuaMinton.com in a few weeks.

I came out with a new blog and a new position, a new direction and a new base of operations. I came out with more respect for others and, above all, I finally realized that you don't need to piss people off anymore to get through to them and make them think. I was hung up on what I call the Nine Inch Nails method of writing and that was so 1994 of me.

But the most important lesson I learned is that it is possible for thousands, if not millions, of individuals to speak at the same time as well as listen to each other and those who get good at doing both are going to enjoy enormous success online.

I plan on being at the front of that line one day but I also realize that there are dues to pay and props to be given.

Let's call it egotistical humility and leave it at that. I consider this book finally closed.

Why is your site title Boys Wear Pants, Men Wear Trousers?

My brother-in-law is a dude who would wear suits into the office every day if he could. He's so conservative that he would have voted for Alan Keyes for President. Anyway, when I first started dating my wife and would make periodic references to my pants (e.g. "I spilled something on my pants" or "I got a great deal on these pants"), he would cut me off, saying, "Boys wear pants. Men wear trousers." Eventually, this became like some kind of zen saying that came to hold a lot of meaning to me and became a catchphrase of distinction about how conservative white dudes in the Midwest think. So, when I was soul-searching for website names, this one popped out and took on another life.

Where are you in the background picture of this site?

I am sitting on Thomas Jefferson's back porch at Monticello in Virginia. I have been there twice and consider it one of the holiest sites in America (at least that I have visited). My father-in-law snapped this photo of me and I remember sitting there, imagining I was TJ pondering the nature of how much the Louisiana Purchase would change things in my country forever. Going to Monticello that second time was such a religious experience that I shaved my head upon returning.

My regular readers know that I was honored to be asked to participate in The Columbus Dispatch's Create a Classic Novel event but this has almost come to a screeching halt after what happened today.

The whole idea is that a story starts with 1,500 words from a writer at the Dispatch and is then handed off to another author who takes the story in a new direction (while keeping it rooted to what came before from other authors) in another 1,500 words which then get handed off and so on.

So, I was asked to write Chapter 6 and did so. The editor was on vacation the day of my deadline and it didn't get posted until two days late. Well, the next writer must have assumed that he had to work off the previous chapter and didn't bother to check and see if a new chapter was posted (although how he missed the fact that he was supposed to have written Chapter 7, which picks up when Chapter 6 ends, I'm not quite sure).

At any length, the new chapter they posted picks up where the one before mine ended. So the guy completely wrote over my stuff as if it had never been posted.

Now, don't get me wrong, Holbrook did a fine job of writing a good scene and even brought up an interesting twist to the concept of the Naiades project (turning humans into oil and water for use by other humans--a nice holocaust with a purpose theme) but I would have liked to have seen him tie that in with the direction I took before him.

See, most science fiction novels and stories are written by flaming liberals. I am not a flaming liberal and at first I found the whole "global warming and overpopulation wasting the planet's resources" to be completely cliche. That's why the twist I took (an alien organism mutating humanity from an energy process breaking down oxygen into energy with carbon dioxide waste into a type of photosynthesis) to be pretty novel and a kind of "alright you tree-hugging plant worshippers--have your way--you are plants now so shut the fug up about it."

But I can't blame the next writer. There was a time gap where he legitimately could have thought that chapter 5 was his starting point.

But that doesn't mean I'm not pissed off about watching a decent story go bad. I have found it so hard to collaborate often with other writers in the past because the egos rarely mesh and I usually just end up pissed off.

And as a further aside, let me just say that my problem with literary fiction (the kind taught in universities and writing programs) is that there are rarely great stories involved. There may be good characters and good scenes (sometimes both in the same piece) but rarely are there great stories (the kind you remember regardless of the language.

The best is when you get great characters, great scenes and truly great stories. I haven't come across too many of those but those I have, I keep very close to my heart and on the top of my bookshelf.

Here is the full text of my letter...

Hello Mr. Tiberi,

I would like to thank you for your prompt response to my previous inquiry regarding security on the internet (specifically blogs).

The purpose of my communication today is in regards to the #1 New York Times Best Seller "The FairTax Book" written by Neil Boortz and your peer Congressman John Linder.

I want to express my full-spirited support for this book and the plan laid out to completely replace the IRS. I believe that the present tax system in America is amongst the most oppressive organization ever impressed upon the American public and has put this government, which derives its power from the consent of the governed, on a course of pure tyranny.

I was completely dismayed to discover that there were 6,000 "pork projects" in the Highway Bill recently passed and that this bill was signed off on my Republicans who claim to be conservative.

I have felt for a long time, and am now further justified by this book, that the income tax was conceived as a weapon of class warfare and became a brilliant light that turned public servants into moths crashing themselves and the country against the glass that will ultimately bash us all into the lowest standard of living if we continue on any further.

I am willing to overlook your support of these bills that continue to waste scarce resources and punish those who achieve and reward sloth. But in return I want to see you throw your full support behind H.R. 25 both publicly and amongst your peers. I will be watching for your public response to this and plan to continue to push the issue in our local media and on my blog which is gaining in online popularity each day (http://boyswearpants.com).

I feel you are an honorable man and I am proud to have voted for you and will continue to vote for you provided that you do your part to ensure that the Republican Party does not become the Democratic Party in practice if not in name.

Sincerely and With the Utmost Respect,

Your Fellow Citizen, Joshua Minton

Blog Link

That's how this one from Sunshine Coyote felt like to me.

I couldn't imagine being the father of a baby carried to full-term that died from something so incomprehensible and arbitrary as calcium deposits in the amniotic fluid...

My prayers for the healthy delivery of her baby and every baby!

Hey gang, I want to apologize for not posting too much these past few days. I have been diligently rescripting and categorizing every single blog post I've ever written.

I've got a great post I've been working on about the latest Harry Potter book that should sew up the series nice and tight (at least what we know and can make a conjecture about where its going).

But, for being so patient, I'll give you my Aunt Shirley's recipe for "Evil Ice Cream Dessert."

1. Line a cake pan with ice cream sandwiches
   
2. Drizzle the ice cream sandwiches with caramel
   
3. Layer cool whip on top of the ice cream sandwiches
   
4. Drizzle the cool whip with chocolate sauce
   
5. Top off with crumbled heath bars
   
6. Freeze the pan for about 5 hours
   
7. Eat and prepare to drift off into a sugar coma...
   

Enjoy, I'll be back soon.