Life as it Really is

Yesterday I had a bizarre experience.

I was just about to go to bed, and before shutting the PC down, I got a wild hair and decided to look up some people I used to know. When I was a kid growing up in Tampa, two twins lived next door to me. They were my best friends. One was serious and a little crabby, and the other was friendly and easygoing.

They have an aluminum company now. Their dad built it. I believe he’s still alive. One of them is active on Facebook, and the other–the friendlier one–is nowhere to be found.

The serious one is Trumpophobic. He is furious about Trump’s very existence. You know the pattern. It’s a form of psychosis which defies reason. He posts angry messages about our beleaguered chief executive.

Not surprising. He’s Jewish. If you’re Jewish and you can cast stones from the safe shelter of America, you are obligated to hate President Trump. Jews in Israel, where bombs land from time to time, like him a lot better. Obama was the worst enemy they ever had in the White House.

I Googled the house where we lived, and I looked at it in Google Street View. Funniest thing…my blood ran cold. I felt chills. All the darkness of my childhood rose back up inside me, like ice water in a glass.

It was a nice little house in a neighborhood full of fairly nice people. It should have been a good place to live.

It occurred to me that there must be people who look at photos of their childhood homes and feel warmth and longing. I wondered what that was like. To me, the Google shot was like a police photo of the scene of a massacre. It was a little like looking at photos of the World Trade Center.

If it had been a hut in Somalia, I would not have felt the same darkness. If you have kids in a hut, the kids don’t expect a lot. Any good thing that happens is gravy. But this was a house in middle-class America. We were healthy. My parents were educated. We did not lack money. Things should have been better. What I saw were missed opportunities. I saw gold spun into straw. I saw waste. Having something good and having it turn to filth is worse than not having anything at all.

It was all unnecessary. Normal parents spend money on their kids. They like their kids. They get involved with their schooling and activities. Their kids aren’t afraid of them. There is no reason why my sister and I could not have grown up like that.

When I think of that house, I think of violence. I think of waking up in the night and seeing snakes and yard-long centipedes crawling on the beds, walls, and ceiling. I remember having nightmares every night.

It’s so strange, the things we do to each other for no good reason at all.

When the devil owns a house, and the people who inhabit it don’t know enough to fight him, it’s tough for a kid to live in it. My mother was on my side, and that was about it. She was all I had. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the knowledge or tools to fix things. She had a rotten life, and she died young.

I just realized I could go to a real estate site and look at photos of the inside of the house, so I did. It does not feel good at all. I remember where certain things happened.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. I don’t think it will help anyone. What am I going to say? “Be a good parent so you don’t destroy your kids”? The only people who would listen are people who are already making an effort.

No one but me is responsible for any problems I have now. Still, I can’t help being stung by the waste and needless destruction.

Before I got on the web and looked up my friends and the house, I watched a documentary about New York. It was created by Ric Burns, the brother of Ken Burns.

The show was interesting. New York is an interesting place, even if you would not want to live there. But it was also disturbing. The people they chose to interview were very different from me. They were writers and academics who appeared to be heavy-duty leftists. If they’re not, their success in New York is a miracle. The likelihood is so small it can be discounted out of hand.

New York is a symbol of worldly success. Whatever its faults may be, New York is a place where many things are done as well as they can be. Want to study the sciences or technology? They have Columbia University. Like the arts? They have the Met, the Guggenheim, Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, and God knows how many other places where you can indulge your desires. New York has top-notch food, clothing…everything.

It’s a place where I would be as welcome as streptococcus in a beaker full of white blood cells. I know! I lived there for about four years.

Imagine me trying to be accepted or even employed in New York. I criticize homosexuality. I believe God created the world. I think feminism is a curse. I believe in accountability. I am against the disenfranchisement of white males and the mindless promotion of minority leftists who have less merit. I think global warming is probably a socialist construct intended to weaken America. I carry a gun when I go to the grocery store.

I could be the smartest, most capable person on earth, and I would still be unable to make it up there. We’re talking about a milieu in which people are fired openly for their religious beliefs, even when they don’t intrude on their job performance.

I felt very alienated. I could never befriend the people I saw on camera. Their Trumpophobia would put a veil of red over their eyes.

Today I was watching a TV show I had recorded, and one of the characters was balding, saggy, and grey. I thought how odd it was that he went on performing his job as though aging, decrepitude, and death were completely normal and acceptable. He wasn’t self-conscious at all. It occurred to me that we have learned to accept some truly terrible things. We don’t even notice them.

Imagine Adam sitting around with Eve and seeing a man with thinning hair, stooped posture, wrinkles, and a gut shuffle by. They would have been horrified. They would have asked God what was wrong with him. Before the curse, death and decay were unknown on earth.

Then I thought about other things I had seen in life or on screens. I have seen films and shows about disasters; some real and some fictional. I’ve seen damaged people wandering around prior to receiving medical care. I’ve seen post-apocalyptic movies in which people with radiation sickness went about their lives as though it were not remarkable to have a tooth or a fingernail fall out during a conversation.

I realized the earth is like a post-apocalyptic movie or a disaster movie. We go about our business in varying states of failure, disease, deterioration, and sorrow. We think nothing of it. When we see people who are worse off, it seems odd that they could be used to their problems, but we’re no different. It’s just a question of degree. On my street, you would have to be young and in top physical shape in order to get attention for your condition. In Auschwitz, you would just need to be fat enough so your ribs couldn’t be seen through your shirt. If you were forty pounds underweight but you could still stand and walk, you would be considered normal.

A long time ago, God told me two things: “The world is a death camp,” and, “The world is a ghetto.” We’re too used to it. We think a life under bearable curses is a life of blessing.

I didn’t have a good childhood, but there was no reason I should have. This is not a planet where people thrive without clinging to God. My problems were obvious, but other people, who I envied later in life, had problems that were worse and yet harder to perceive. If I grew up with neglect and abuse, other people grew up with love, success, and health but never got to know God. I’m certainly better off than they are. Their well-being is temporary, and it keeps them convinced they don’t need God.

The people who are truly blessed are the ones who were raised, from infancy, to know God. Everyone else has sham blessings at best.

People who claim to have visited hell talk about tormented creatures with no flesh, living in pits, burned and eaten by chewing worms. They say hell stinks. What must it be like to leave heaven and visit earth, though? Not that different. You leave a place with no death, sorrow, disagreement, cruelty, loneliness, disease, danger, or failure, and you come to a place where we have words like “hemicorporectomy.” That’s an operation in which your lower body is amputated just below the waist. It has happened often enough to make it necessary for us to coin a word for it.

This is not a good place. It’s a disaster. The universe is built in levels, and we are on the first level above hell. We live, literally, on hell’s roof. There is no worse place to be, save hell itself.

Getting attached to this place or having unrealistic expectations of it is a huge mistake. I feel bad for billionaires and celebrities who squirm and struggle to preserve their youth and extend their time here. The wrinkles will get them all. Who would buy a poster with a photo of Racquel Welch wearing a bikini, at her current age?

This is just a place to meet God, be improved by him, and be rescued by him. That’s all it’s worth. God says he is going to destroy it with fire and rebuild it. Makes perfect sense to me. Used diapers have to be washed.

If you don’t know God, all the success you think you have here is excrement, and it will be burned off in flames later. There are no Academy Awards in hell. There are no TV cameras. There are no yachts. There are no private jets.

It’s interesting to think of it this way.

My life keeps getting better, but my perception of life on earth, generally, deteriorates like the portrait of Dorian Gray. There is nothing here to hold onto.

Maybe I’m bumming people out. I’m not sad or depressed at all. Just a little more sober than usual.

Writers write about what moves them. Maybe you have to take the good with the bad.

Have a good Tuesday.