Watched Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ the other night, and while I invariably stick my foot in my mouth bringing up religious matters — stating the obvious or uninformed or just plain wrong — I wondered, as I watched, what bizarre chain of events could make this figure, this particular figure, the leader of an established anything. The meek, the moneychangers, his comments on the wealthy. What establishment could find comfort there? How do they still? 

Mentioned this to a friend who quoted a line from Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites: "The spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion."

While watching I also had one of those sharp drops into a greater sense of my own inevitable death. Say "0" is complete unawareness of your own death and "100" is total awareness, total insanity. I usually operate on a 15. The other night, for a moment, I rose to about a 50. Shuddered.

When I was a teenager I lived at 50.