I got to spend last week in California seeing people doing things from Irvine up to Sacramento,

and people kept trying to get me to go with them to vineyards, though I no longer

drink. I used to, and then I had a two-year-old daughter, and I decided I didn't want her to see me

drunk. She and I love silliness, but that's a whole other matter. I'm capable of foolishness

without adding intoxication to it. I went to Modesto, the home of Ernest and Giulio Gallo wine,

the wine that I drank in my college days, the cheap wine and the

gallon glass jug. You poured it into an ordinary drinking glass and you drank it with dinner

and either you liked it or you didn't drink it, but you didn't sit and discuss it. And now I have friends, bless their hearts, who are connoisseurs

of wine, and who employ terms like well-structured, buttery, complex, nicely restrained, autumnal, jam-flavored, rangy, which strikes me is complex, well-structured,

hogwash. I am an alien in the midst of these people. The only wine I taste now is from the

Sunday morning communion cup, and maybe it's complex, but I just think of it as the blood of salvation.

Well, we live in a big democratic country where people speak freely, so you don't have to go far

to be an alien, and I am an alien among Generation Z people when they talk digitalese.

I tune in sports talk shows on TV to enjoy watching grown men

shouting at each other about a game. Meanwhile, the planet is heating up and Los Angeles is burning

and a party has taken power whose members are forbidden to speak the words

climate change. From Modesto, I went to Lubbock, Texas, by way of Southwest Airlines, which encourages

its flight attendants to do stand-up comedy. Landed in Lubbock,

one of them said, be careful opening the overheads, luggage can shift, shift happens.

I went to Lubbock to do a stand-up show myself at the Cactus Theater.

And standing in the lobby, it seemed to me that I was drawing a Baptist crowd.

I asked an usher and she agreed with me, so I worked some hymns into the show, not hard for an old evangelical like me.

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