Last evening as I was minding my own business, my dear wife suddenly started yelling at me from her seat in front of the computer.

“What on EARTH are you doing?” she exclaimed.

“Are you completely insane?” she asked in quick follow-up. “What do you mean that you’re a mere ‘hanger-on’? Are you kidding?”

“Wait…is this all about that religion stuff again?” she accused.

“Um, I thought you never read the blog,” I replied weakly.

“I don’t,” she answered with perfect feminine logic, “but I’m reading this. Why are you leaving the Llamas?”

“This” of course being my post over at the Llamas about why I felt compelled to set up TPSAYE. I explained that I’m not leaving the Llamas…that I shall continue to jolly it up and snark away over there but that I wanted a platform for somewhat more serious thinking – yes, much of it about religion – away from the where my fellow camelids would have to put up with it.

(BTW, this morning, I found an email in my in-box from fellow-Llama Steve-O reading, simply, “dude??? dude!!! dude…. ” I won’t go into the e-conversation that ensued. Suffice to say that everything is fine. After all, Steve-O and I have been friends for better than 20 years now. My constructing a separate sandbox basically for the entertainment of my mackerel-smacker friends is not going to interfere with that.)

As I was thinking about all this, I had a funny sense that I had been through it before. Then it suddenly hit me: I am, in effect, duplicating in the blogsphere my real-life churchgoing habits. You see, when I swam the Tiber, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to disrupt my family by suddenly vanishing from my old Episcopal church, but would keep on attending services there with them as well (sans taking Communion, of course). This policy has worked out so well that I do believe that most of my old Palie circle don’t even realize that I’ve converted. (Indeed, I’m not even sure my old Rector is aware of it. Not that it would matter to him – a warm body in the pew is a warm body, period.) And in the meantime, I have been quietly deepening my Catholic faith off on my own.

So I hope to do the same sort of thing here. As I say, I shall continue to whoop it up with the boys over at Llama Central. In addition, I’ll probably wind up cross-posting a good many of my cultural entries both here and there. But in the meantime, I am attempting to carve out this little niche as a place where I can come and be more serious when I feel the urge.

Let us just hope that in doing this, I do not go the way of Leonard Nimoy!