Luke Warm, Thought Drunk (Paperback)

"I make rich men richer by strangling all life out of the words before sending them off on a barely seaworthy boat bound for the seven seas of commerce." With one exhaustingly awkward day of the conference finally at an end, he's looking for something-anything, really-to read. Ink's a freelance-turned-career journalist from Punch-Line, Idaho, with a rapidly shrinking vocabulary, which he fears is another unlabeled side effect of his banking beat. And as if disappearing words weren't enough, he's also been diagnosed with high cholesterol, which apparently is the culprit behind his slothfulness, diminished fielding skills on the softball diamond, and overall hyperactive lack of creativity. But. He doesn't want to make it sound all bad. He has a beautiful wife, three kids, health insurance. 401K. Ink just wants something to read and a room without mirrors. Above his ransacked drawer of XL undershirts, he finds a Gideon's Bible, not surprisingly, but quickly realizes it's all become desperate-a titanic surprise. Vocabulary words are vocabulary words, he tells himself. The Bible opens to the book of Luke, and he reads himself into enough words to tell his own story in a new way. In what becomes a journal or a daily devotional of sorts ("to be sipped like port wine"), Ink interacts with each verse-about Angels; Jesus's birth, death, resurrection; God's hand; suffering; politics; heartache; laugher; blah, blah, blah; life-like he would digest and rework a balance sheet and quarterly conference call for the busy banking exec., all that dance. It all boils down to math or verbiage or cause-and-effect, and really what to tell the kids about why dad is acting so strange and whether life imitates these scriptures or whether these scriptures are just imitating this puzzling, lackluster, whiny-he forgets the perfect word-existence.