My True Nature...Revealed.

It's 1.30 in the afternoon on a Saturday. It is Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco and the city is alive with rainbow flags and nervous glances. A lot of people are excited and just as many are hoping for the weekend to be over with.

I'm sitting on the outside porch of a coffee shop right across the street from the Berkeley campus. But they don't serve coffee here - closest thing you can get is an americano (which is diluted espresso), which is almost the same taste. I came here so that I would not spend my money.

As I sat and read from "Blue Like Jazz", a girl stopped as she was walking by and asked if I liked the book. She thought Don Miller was a bit pretentious and she did not like his paternal allegory of God's character. She was a nice girl and a brave conversationalist.

Near the end of our conversation, she asked if I was from the Carolinas. I laughed and said that I, in fact, had lived there and wondered how she knew. She said that I had a bit of an accent. I never knew that I had been so changed by my time in SC and so unchanged since I've left. You've scarred me Carolina - in the best way possible.

I miss God. I've been having a lot of trouble breathing lately - kinda like mild asthma. Probably nothing real serious, but every time I struggle to inhale it brings to mind that my soul will suffocate without enough of the Spirit in me.

So I bought this bike last week. I'm really pumped about it. One of my co-workers is in to cycling and he and I are going to ride up Mount Diablo in a few weeks - 11.5 miles up, average 7% grade, last half mile is 16%. It's a doosie.