Hey Y’all-

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how mesmerized our culture is with Hollywood. We can’t get enough of celebs. All around us are images of who’s pregnant, who got arrested last night, who is or is not wearing under garments. We buy countless magazines from People to Us Weekly. I just saw a cover for Intouch that said, “Tom’s Secret Revealed”, and then in smaller font, “Tom’s plot to kill Katie”. It seems like even the once semi-legitimate magazines have become just like The Enquirer. If that’s not enough, we fill our minds with gossip TV shows like TMZ, The Daily Ten and Talk Soup. Well, maybe Talk Soup is alright because Joe McHale is hilarious, and the Daily Ten is cool cause Catt Sadler is an Indiana girl. Even the biggest “news” channels will run Anna Nicole as the top story and the war in Iraq or the aids epidemic in Africa as a smaller segment. In any event, the whole thing begs the question:

Are our lives so boring and insignificant that we have to live vicariously through the lives of what we consider, “the famous people”?

If you think about it, we created them. Hollywood can only exist because we buy what they are selling. We buy the clothes, we watch the movies, we create them. We find some young actor or rock-star that is new and elite, spend mega bucks putting them on a pedestal, and then laugh at them when their lives fall apart at the seems. What we do when we make someone famous is take away their “humanness”. No one can be famous. We weren’t created to be. The ancient Greeks fantasized about gods that had super human strength beauty and power. They even developed whole divine soap operas about which gods were sleeping with the other gods and who was angry with whom. They were totally captivated by this false system.

Believe it or not, we have fallen one step lower than the ancient Greeks. We have done this with real humans. They were wise enough to know that no human being could live up to this system. Not us. We have put humans in the place of Greek gods and have replaced Olympus with a town called Hollywood.

Because of this, I am no longer going to care about the gossip anymore. Last time I checked, gossip was a sin anyway. I had a teacher once who said that when he was in school he wouldn’t wear Dr. J Jerseys like all the other kids. He made his own with his name on the back. He claimed that it was foolishness to put someone else’s name on his back. He wanted everyone else to put his name on their backs. This stuck with me. I have an awesome family with one incredible kid. I have a great job and I live in a pretty nice area. No one knows who I am and that sounds good to me. There’s nothing boring about my life. I do wear under garments. There’s nothing boring about your life. Just live it. No more false gods.

And to answer your questions, Rick Stump jerseys will be out by the end of 07.

Love ya,

#13