still no entries in the open contest from week 25, but i'll keep it open for one last week, for the benefit of certain doorhinge-type college students who practically begged me to bring back the contests, but haven't bothered to enter now that i have. i will not condone such tardiness by repeating the rules of the contest, however. you must reread y3#25 for that. it's late january, college boy! you're back from school & have no excuses!

speaking of january, these sermons are a great scrapbook of the past few years of my life, but they're skimpy on traditional dates. i'll have perfectly preserved permanent memories of the events in these sermons, but no accurate date information. occasionally i'll make brief reference to the time of year, or have a holiday sermon, but otherwise sermonworld is in a chronological vacuum. the only substantial measurement of time is the sermon week number. there's good reason for that.

i noticed something peculiar during my ritualistic rereading of past sermon #27s. the shift in chronology is quite apparent. the first sermon #27 was about halloween. year 2 #27 made ambiguous reference to being "the holiday season". now y3#27 takes place in late january. nowhere else is the contrast this noticeable.

this raises an interesting question which i'm sure you'd ask if you were as observant as i (but it does not beg the question! look up "beg the question" in the dictionary if you don't understand). you're probably asking it already: how long is a sermon year?

in fact, you might be thinking about it even more thoroughly. yeah, what kind of calendar has the same "date" fall at a different time each year? you might be thinking to yourself. or has only 2-1/2 years go by when more than 3 pass in the real world? so who do you think you are, mr stAl!io, making fun of our precious gregorian calendar & that poor old monk guy who didn't know what zero was, when the years on your sermon calendar aren't even the same length? i demand answers! i demand retribution!

i will admit now that sermon years can be notably longer than earth years. i estimate the first year was at least 14 or 15 earth months, & the second was no less than 13. but there is a perfectly good reason for this. the sermon year is not based on the movements of the sun or any other astronomical body. i hate the sun; it hurts me. & though i enjoy the moon & stars, i rarely pay much attention to them. the sermon year is based on the ebbs & flows of my life. each sermon represents one week. but sometimes events happen which are just too big for one earth week. you know what i mean: big, huge, possibly-life-altering events which spread out over the course of many days (or which leave you exhausted for days). the sermons have already seen 2 major tragedies, the carjacking & the skip-out, & in both instances i took a few weeks off before writing the next sermon. i condensed the coping period after the trauma from 3 or 4 earth weeks into one sermon week (it's better storytelling that way). there will also be the occasional vacation when i won't have computer access at all.

with all these gaps, there are only 2 options. leave gaps in the sequence for time missed, or have years last longer than earth years. i don't like leaving gaps in the sequence; then people start looking for things that aren't there, & you have to keep explaining "abandon your search! there never was a year 2 #45!" etc. so sermon years are necessarily different lengths than earth years, & different lengths than each other. if i were motivated enough, i could even put out more than one sermon in one earth week (but that will never happen; even if i wrote 2 in a week, i'd only save the 2nd until the following week before sending it out).

you may also wonder why i just spent another entire sermon writing about other sermons. well, i've always like having the wAy be a metatext to some degree, self-referential & self-analytical. analysis & literary commentary are inherent to the intellectual mind, & the sermons are as worthy of analysis as any great work. but who else is going to write literary analysis of the sermons? you guys? maybe 20 years from now, but i want the commentary now! & the only way to get it now is to write it myself. so there.