“Did someone forget their apple?” Faith asked, emerging from the bathroom, holding a half-eaten, half-rotted apple by the stem she’d discovered on the tiled floor next to the toilet.

The house is three stories; tight staircases and half-a-dozen rooms on every level, and I’m sitting on rug in the second floor den playing cards–feeling tired and longing for home. Wherever that is.

Nothing like leaving a rotting apple on the bathroom floor of the complete stranger’s home that’s provided a roof over your head to say, “thanks for the hospitality.”

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It’s a rainy morning in Pittsburgh, and I’m coming to you a bit later than usual because I’m crashing with a rather swell blogger here in PA, Secret Agent L, who lives a rather simple “sans internet” lifestyle at home when she’s not surreptitiously leaving behind random acts of anonymous kindness for strangers to find.

Every city and town I am in, I never know who or what I am going to find. And trudging through the rainy streets this morning I realized something…

I didn’t start this blog to be your teacher. I started Make It MAD to create.  To be me. To share truth.

So if you’ve come here for a lesson each Wednesday, you’ve come to the wrong place.

I don’t know the first thing about tomorrow.

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The following is a work of fiction I penned from the desk of a run-down motel room yesterday, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold coffee well into the night. Which, as you may know, is just the business of fiction.

| | the soundtrack to our suicide by Max Andrew Dubinsky 

Stale coffee and sulfur, I’m sitting in the bathtub smoking cigarettes with the door closed because nonsmoking rooms are all they had left, and it’s too cold to stand outside. I’m striking matches with no real intent to burn anything other than time.

Kissing the inside of your thigh, I noticed the bump on your leg, red and swelling fast. When I asked you about it, you said, “Spider bite.”

I got up and used the mouthwash even though we’d just had sex without protection.

Funny, the things we truly fear.

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I will cross the country in a search of your faith even though I may have lost mine.

I claim to believe in a God who is fair, but there is nothing fair about this.

I will give you the last dollar in my wallet when I see you on the street

just to forget you.

Never to feed you.
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Think of a memory.

Now tell me that memory.

In the comment section below.

Go ahead. Right now. Before you even finish reading this post.

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I am sitting in what is quite possibly the coldest coffee shop on planet Starbucks this evening, my stomach still in ropes from the debilitating illness that left me spilling my guts all over a bathroom floor in Seattle last weekend, and I’m rapidly losing weight having had to knife a new hole in my belt Monday morning.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I just had a kidney stolen.  All the elements are there, but as far as I can remember, I didn’t wake up in a bathtub full of ice this morning. I still haven’t counted it out, though.

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Eight days on the road, and you want to know what I’ve learned?

I have no idea what I am doing.

There are no miraculous encounters to retell here.

No life-threatening misadventures.

I haven’t seen a single burning bush, and not even one snake slithering around in any trees containing knowledge of good and evil has offered me a delicious apple.

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I arrived here with the intent to camp, set up a tent, crash in a sleeping bag on the cold, hard dirt, rub two stick together to make fire, and perhaps even roast a hot dog while listening to nearby campers tell scary ghost stories.  Oh, I also came here first to clear my head, pray, connect with God in nature, and marvel at something not man-made.  And if I had to kill a coyote by hand, I would do that too.

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Dear America,

It’s been a hard day, and all I want is a cigarette, but all I’ve got is this stale cup of coffee and a Bible in front of me so you might not like what I have to say.

Where has your faith gone?

Where has my faith gone?

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By Max Andrew Dubinsky and Lauren Nicole Lankford

I have spent a lifetime getting to know women on an intimate level.  Growing up, I was the only man in a household full of this mysterious and fascinating gender, under the care of my mother, two older sisters, aunts, and grandmothers.  Women with an overwhelming desire to share with me everything that happens to the female anatomy and mind.   Things most adult men twice my age still know nothing about. (Whether or not this has done more damage than good is still up for debate.)  My first childhood friend was the girl on my block who lived two doors down, and I consider my oldest sister, Julie, one of my best friends today.

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