My sense of humor tends toward both the dark and the absurd - two great tastes that, in my opinion, taste great together.

I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.

And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.

I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.

Jay Wexler is my kind of writer--a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures.

As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.

On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.