My family and I have lived here in North Carolina for seven years now. We didn't celebrate the anniversary of moving in, though, since it happened on that day that will live in infamy, September 11. Charon's airliners crashed into the towers while we were moving in. But otherwise I certainly would celebrate it, since I love living here. I loved New Jersey, too, and have nothing bad to say about it. But I love the people and the pace here. And our house. And the food.

I left New Jersey, practically feeling the hand of fate directing us to move back here (where Carol and I had lived 1985-1989). I had come to feel that everything I was doing in NJ had come to its natural end. Everything that once seemed pregnant with possibilities: our house "church," the Grail, plus Heretics Anonymous, the work with the Humanists, teaching at Drew and Bergen Community College--all had finally come to nothing. It was time for a change.

I find that life seems to unfold in more or less five year periods for me, and it is time for yet another new one to begin. Seven years later I seem to have come to another period of transition, and on a more serious level than I have considered before. I have no real career options. It is clear to me that my published opinions have ruled out any career in teaching religious studies. I am radioactive. I can and do write books and papers to express my views, but I seem to see an end up ahead to that, too. I feel I may soon have shot my wad, said all I have to say about biblical criticism and Christian origins. I know I hate debating fundamentalists. Pure vexation. I still do it when a sponsor is willing to pay, because I cannot be choosy when income opportunities present themselves. Having arrived at theoretical conclusions on the historical Jesus and Paul which satisfy me, I wonder if I can maintain interest in these questions?

I have no future in organized Humanism/Atheism, either. I love all the wonderful people involved in it, but I imagine I am too friendly to religion for any of these groups to want to make me their representative. I am politically at odds with most of them anyway. So I am thinking more and more that I ought to just "say goodbye to all that" and return to my first love: fantasy and horror literature. I have edited numerous anthologies and written plenty of fiction as well as criticism. I am home in those shadows, and I think that maybe, like Richard Upton Pickman, I should return there. Yeah, there's no real paying career there, either, I know, but Carol and I manage to make ends meet. I guess I'll still do some adjunct teaching as it is available, and I'll do the Bible Geek. I love the stuff, but maybe I am falling out of loive with it. I have been selling lots of books lately, some of them that I could recently not have imagined myself selling. It seems easier now.  I can't stand going to the Society of Biblical Literature meetings. Can't breathe there.

So I am finishing up a paper I am to deliver in Germany. I have a few Jesus books to review for Religious Studies Review. And I want to look into one more scholarly book I have long thought about writing, one involving the Nag Hammadi writings. But if I feel I haven't enough to say on the subject, I won't pretend I do.

After that, I guess my job is to wait for the new future, the next stage, to arrive. I'm sure it will. I must leave the way clear for it to emerge, like Santa down the chimney, like the birth canal for the baby. Some new meaning or new self may emerge. I will be eager to see what it turns out to be. And I'll let you know.

Bob Price