Peace. I pray for peace.

Not national peace. Not global peace. Those concepts would be nice, but they are too big for my head to comprehend. No human has ever seen world peace. I don’t even know what it would look like.

So what I pray for is small peace. Tiny, microscopic, unnoticeable-to-the-naked-eye peace.

I’m familiar with this kind. Because I’ve felt it before. So have you. It’s not a completely rare sensation. It’s an inner stillness, beginning in your chest, working its way into your whole body.

Sometimes you feel this peace in the early mornings, before everyone is awake. For a brief moment, without reason, you’re simply not worried about normal crap. You’re not stressed or frightened. In fact, you’re not even wearing pants.

You’re just cool. Everything is cool. Life is cool. God is cool. It’s all cool.

That.

That’s what I’m praying for. Because a guy at peace doesn’t think the same as regular people. Regular people are not at peace. Regular people are terrified. And do you know WHY we’re all

afraid?

Me neither.

What the hell are we so scared of?

But we are most DEFINITELY afraid of something. You can see it all over our faces. Hear it in our voices. Fear. It’s in our TV shows, social media posts, and even in the faces of our kids, who try so hard to fit in, tirelessly trying to keep up with the rest of the mainstream crowd, even though that crowd has the collective IQ of mayonnaise.

I ask myself, what are they afraid of? Moreover, why do we always need to be right? Why are we constantly playing games of one-upmanship? Why are we always looking out for Number One instead of looking out for Number Two, Number Three,…

“I am 10 years old. My name is Peyton. I am a girl. People think Peyton is a boy name. But it can be both. What is your favorite animal? Mine is a dolphin.

“…Dolphins are nicer than people sometimes. People are mean to me at school because I have a speech impediment and I wish I was a dolphin so they weren’t mean. Thank you. Have a nice day.”

Dear Peyton. I agree. Dolphins are at the top of my list. Namely, because they are so smart. And they ought to be, they’re older than Methusala. Literally.

Dolphins first appear in the fossil record about 50 million years ago, only slightly before the birth of your mom and dad. By contrast, humans are in our 300,000th year of existence.

Think about that.

This means the dolphin brain has had MILLIONS of years to improve itself, perfecting its hyper-intelligent design. As a result, dolphin brains are advanced in areas where human brains are not.

Areas like sleep. When a

dolphin sleeps, half the brain sleeps, allowing the other half to remain alert, monitor its breathing, regulate heart rate, etc. This is called unihemispheric sleep, a state of consciousness humans can only achieve during long sermons.

Also, dolphins are more advanced in communication than us. Dolphin language is a significantly complex language, built on a system of squeaks, whistles, clicks, and body language.

We humans cannot begin to understand their language because (a) many dolphin communication signals occur at frequencies 10 times higher than equipment can detect and (b) our species is still busy trying to remember each of our individualized internet passwords.

FACT: The average person has 168 individual usernames and passwords.

Some researchers believe that dolphin communication is so advanced that it borders on telepathy. Seriously.

They were good kids. Mostly. Two boys. Brothers. Lots of energy.

Friends of the family say the boys couldn’t sit still without vibrating. They were always getting into something. To call them “bad” kids would be unfair. They weren’t bad. Not at all. They were simply professional hellraisers.

To be fair, their daddy was a preacher, and you KNOW what they say about preachers’ kids.

Willie, the older of the two, was a senior at Steele High School. He was a good student and an even better athlete. He had plans. Big plans. He was going to graduate, then attend Yale Divinity School and become a minister, like his father.

His kid brother, “Bubs,” was his best friend. They rode bicycles together. They were inseparable. They were smart. They were funny. They were energetic. They brought the party. They had such bright futures.

Until everything changed.

One March afternoon, Willie was playing hockey with the high-school varsity team, when life took a sharp deviation. It was a heated tournament

between friends. All the guys were out on the ice, yelling and laughing. Willie took a stick to the face.

The boy went down. He lay on the ground, covered in blood, crying in agony. His teeth were gone, his mouth and jaw a mangled mess. The bones of his face were shattered. The surgeon had his work cut out.

After the operation, Willie was put on strict bed rest. No more sports. He fell behind on his studies. He stayed home and fell into a deep funk. There were complications after surgery. Willie developed stomach trouble, heart trouble.

Soon, Willie was no longer the picture of adolescent health. He was a shut-in. He dropped out of high school. His future in academia went “poof!”

The boy sat around the…

My dogs sleep all day. It’s just what they do. Except when they’re busy chewing up my 48th pair of reading glasses.

They sleep, sleep, sleep. And amazingly, after a full day of sleeping, they don’t feel guilty about it. Not even a little.

They don’t appear to undergo any self-loathing for laziness. They don’t hate themselves for exhibiting careless unproductivity. They don’t worry about their inability to “carpe” the current “diem.” They just crawl off the sofa, wag their butts, stretch, and go outside to pee on something.

We aren’t like them. And by “we” I mean Homo sapiens, as well as many forms of Congresspersons. “We” aren’t carefree enough to sleep all day.

In fact, we don’t sleep at all. Over one half of Americans are sleep deprived. This statistic continues to rise. Americans already lead the world in consumption of sleep aids and tranquilizers.

Even our children aren’t sleeping. Approximately one third of American children do not get adequate sleep. Some researchers believe this is due to brain patterns affected by electronic devices.

Which

isn’t surprising. The average American child spends five hours on electronic devices per day.

The average adult spends eight.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what life would be like if we took a cue from dogs?

My dogs certainly don’t spend any time on devices. They will, however, occasionally eat one.

Not long ago, my dog, Thelma Lou, ate one of our houseguests' smartwatches. When the deed was done, we were worried about our dog. Our vet said it was no big deal. Then he said immortal words which I shall never forget: “This is just another way for your dog to ‘pass the time.’”

You know what else my dogs do? They sit by the door and wait…

I was in the airport when an AI robot custodian was roving around, sweeping the floor and accepting various bits of trash from nearby passengers.

The robot came close to me. We just locked eyes.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, do you have any garbage for me?”

I smiled. “No.”

The robot buzzed away.

When I was a kid, artificial intelligence did not scare me. In kid-world, the concept of AI always carried a fun-loving tone. Robots were your friend.

There was Rosie from “The Jetsons.” She was a big, maternal robot. A lovable mechanical member of the Jetson family cooked, cleaned, and spoke with a Brooklyn accent. All her antennas (antennae?) flashed and beeped whenever she spoke.

There was the Environmental Control Robot on “Lost in Space,” an advanced computerized intelligence module that looked exactly like a guy wearing a trashcan. The robot’s role was unclear. But he was a valued member of the Robinson crew, exhibiting a wide range of human characteristics such as laughter, sadness, as well as

singing and playing the guitar, and answering each question helpfully with, “That does not compute.”

So I didn’t know I was supposed to be afraid of AI until this year when someone asked a chatbot to write something in the style of Sean Dietrich.

Now, my first thought was: The chatbot is going to reply, “In the style of WHO?”

Namely, because in the literary world, nobody knows who I am. If the publishing world were like high school, I would not be one of the “cool kid” authors. I’d be the author who is in detention every weekend dutifully trying to break his record for most spit balls stuck to the chalkboard.

Even so, the chatbot actually imitated one of my essays. Although, you…

I receive a lot of questions every day. I wish I could answer them all. But if I actually tried to answer every message, email, letter, smoke signal, etc., I’d need a permanent ureteral catheter installed.

Many of these questions are of a spiritual/religious nature. I have found that the most vocal readers are often the most religious. So, I have never done this before, but I have compiled these commonly asked questions here:

Q: What happened to the old Sean? I used to like reading his work because he was funny. I’m not a fan now. Ever since he walked the Camino de Santiago, Sean’s writings have taken on more of a spiritual nature. Will the old Sean ever come back?

A: You must be new here.

Q: Why do you say that?

A: Because I’ve been writing a column every day for 12 years. In that time, I have written about almost everything from nostril hair to (really) slug excrement.

I have been writing spiritual stuff from the beginning, too. This is evidenced by a Google search

I did on myself. I typed in: “Sean Dietrich quotes spiritual.” Here are a few snippets from columns I wrote in 2013:

“God invented beer. Deal with it.”

“I don’t mean to suggest God is a woman. But if God is indeed male, then who stands around telling Him what to do all day?”

So we can see that there is a much deeper side to me.

Q: What exactly happened out there on the Camino anyway?

A: What happens on the Camino stays on the Camino.

Q: Will you be writing a book about the Camino?

A: It’s almost finished. I think I will entitle it “Chevrolet’s worst idea.”

Q: Hi…

This is weird. I realize this. But I wanted to write to you, dear loved one. Namely, because I’ve been dead for some time now. And the way I left this world happened so fast. So unexpected.

I wasn’t expecting it to end like this. None of us got any closure. Especially not you.

The pain you went through after my death was much worse than the pain I went through by actually dying.

Dying, it turns out, wasn’t all that bad. In fact, I wish someone would have told me how beautiful the transition is. I would’ve never been so afraid of death if I’d known.

When I was alive, I was horrified of death. This unspoken fear hovers beneath human consciousness, motivating all decisions. Fueling everything from obsessively healthy eating, to elderly men buying Corvettes.

But it’s death they’re really afraid of. The fear permeates a human’s psyche, and makes us small. Paralyzes us. Other creatures do not fear death this way. Dogs do not wake up and say to themselves,

“Gee, I wish I had adequate life insurance.”

But we do. I think this fear has something to do with our logical brains. That human logic we use to problem solve; that same logic can also be our enemy.

Because this very intelligence makes us doubt what our heart is always saying. And what our heart is saying is: “This is not all there is.”

I know that now, dear loved one. When you pass, it’s like not like dying at all. It’s like waking up from a dream. There will be relatives you have never met, waiting for you. A massive cloud of witnesses, a stadium of souls who are all waiting to embrace you.

I will be at the front of this crowd. And when we…

The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

The 18-year-old girl was in the hospital room. Her bed sat amidst a forest of hissing machines and blinking lights.

The young preacher knew he’d found the right room. He straightened his tie. This was the hardest part of his job. He’d been sent here by people in his church to offer this girl salvation.

“Come in,” said the bubbly voice.

The young woman was covered in tattoos. The preacher could see punctures in her skin from where all her earrings, nose rings, and whatever-else rings used to be. She came from a broken home.

There were tubes entering and exiting her body from all locations. The bone cancer was claiming her life.

“I’m here to talk to you,” said the young minister. Bible beneath his arm.

“Really?” she said happily. “Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

The minister pulled a chair to the bedside. He sighed.

“I want to talk about your soul,” he said. “A lot of people in my church are worried about where you’re going to spend eternity, sweetheart.”

He paused. “I’m here to ask whether you are saved?”

She looked confused. “Saved? What’s that? I don’t go to church.”

“Yes,” he said, sadly. “I know that.”

The minister squirmed, but started going through the patterned speech about Hell, the Devil, eternal separation, sinful nature, repentance, eschatology, hamartiology, etc.

The girl interrupted him. “Oh, you’re talking about GOD!” She was smiling.

“Well, yes. God loves you and has a plan for—”

She laughed a beautiful laugh. “God and me are already friends.”

He covered his face and sighed. The kid still didn’t understand.

“God WANTS to be your friend,” he…

Young Jimmy prayed, but nothing worked.

The 14-year-old boy cried as he knelt beside his bedside, clasping his hands together. He sobbed, imploring the heavens for a miracle.

“I’ll be good, God, for always,” Jimmy said, crying into his pillow. “If only You bring my mother back.”

But Jimmy’s mother was not coming back.

The year was 1956. Jimmy’s family was poor. His mother was dead after an operation in the hospital. His mother’s funeral had been the hardest thing Jimmy had ever endured.

It all started when Mary developed a pain in her breast that wouldn’t go away. The pain got worse. His mother disregarded the discomfort. She didn’t have time to deal with sickness. She was a poor mother, trying to raise her kids. There was no space for illness.

But her breast cancer wasn’t going away. And now Mary was gone.

Even so, God was God, wasn’t he? He could still bring Mary back if he wanted to, even though the funeral was over. Right? That’s what Jimmy thought. So Jimmy kept

praying. He asked God to change His mind.

“Bring back my mother, please.”

But nobody heard him up there, it seemed. It was as though God were sitting behind a steel ceiling. Impassive, indifferent, and totally fake.

As the boy prayed, he felt his fettered beliefs slipping away like bits of paper in the wind. He was a smart kid. He knew it was impossible to bring someone back from the dead.

So Jimmy stopped praying. The prayers don’t work, he told his brother Mike. “They never work when you need them to.”

Then came a knock on his bedroom door. It was his dad. His father, the grieving widower. Back during the war, his father played trumpet and led…

Hey, Daddy. Just checking in. How’s the customer service up in Heaven? I heard they have a great buffet. The cruise director happens to be an old friend.

So anyway, I don’t know if you remember, but I’m currently the same age you were when you took your own life.

I was a kid when it happened. I was 11 years old, standing before your casket, crying my eyes out. Snot coming out of my nostrils. And I had no idea what to feel.

A huge part of me missed you. But there was another part of me that was relieved you were gone. And another-NOTHER part of me felt extremely guilty for thinking that way.

What kind of sick, twisted kid is glad his father is dead? Let me explain.

You and I were different. Night and day. Black and white. Oil and Water. Mork and Mindy. And we still are different.

For starters, I love my life. I’m not miserable the way you were. I know your

misery wasn’t your fault, exactly. So I don’t blame you. You had a chemical imbalance. You hated your job. Hated your marriage. Hated your own life. Probably even hated me sometimes. Which is why you were abusive.

Speaking of abuse. Do you know that it took me 42 years to realize I was an abused child? I don’t know how I was the last to know this. How could I miss all the telltale signs? I’m a slow learner, I guess.

We made excuses for you. We invented all sorts of fantastical stories about our bruises. “I fell out of a tree.” “I fell out of a tire swing.” “I fell in the shower.”

Mom and I did a lot of “falling.” But I never really identified as a child of domestic…