I wrote "How to Stop Selling Jesus" in the summer of 1999, mostly by hand, always while sitting in "Coffee Time," a cafe about a block away from my apartment. Coffee Time is a narrow space that runs deep and to get out of the heat I'd sit in the back in a room that was lit by 40 watt bulbs and that was full of cigarette smoke.

I'd sit in near darkness and type on my laptop, write by hand, or cheat and read the autobiography of Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin had died a few years earlier, but I'd found out about his passing that summer, and it left me feeling melancholy.

That's what "Selling Jeus" is most closely associated with in my own mind: Reading the complaints and reflections of a boy who lived in the shadow of his bear.

It was a hot summer and I remember drinking iced coffees and watching the homeless kids who drank iced water and asked me if they could check their email on my laptop. I remember switching over to the use of a pen, the lamp without a shade, reading and writing to light from a bare bulb, and mixing AA Milne with God in my mind.

AA Milne as God? A strange idea, especially when you consider what his only begotten son had to say about the old man:

"It seemed to me almost that my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me nothing but empty fame."

I spent the summer of 1999 reading the New Testament, Christopher Robin's biography, and writing this 2nd person short story. Somehow all of it combined in my mind, but I can find only the slightest trace of Pooh bear in the final product.