What I Think Works…as of This Evening

I keep working on my photo skills as well as my gear. I am strongly aware that my baby son’s first year will never happen again, so I am doing what I can to produce quality photos and edit them well.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2023, when I finally bit the bullet and started buying new equipment and learning to use it.

When I found my wife in 2021, I had a 2006 Canon 350D, a Samsung Galaxy S8, a Yi action camera, and a Gopro Hero 8 Black. The 350D was a decent amateur DSLR for its day. It had an 8-megapixel APS-C sensor, meaning it was smaller than a full-frame sensor, which would be about the same size as a rectangle of 35 mm film. In 2006, putting 8 megapixels on an amateur-level camera was fairly impressive.

We started traveling in order to see each other in 2021. We made three overseas trips with phones and action cameras. The 350D stayed home, covered with the cockatoo dust it had accumulated after years of hanging near a bird cage. I don’t recall why I didn’t take it with me. Weight, maybe.

We got acceptable photos and a little video that year, although I screwed up more than once and ruined videos. I found the Yi to be difficult to work with. I have a video about 10 seconds long which I accidentally shot so it would be sped up upon viewing. I would guess it was supposed run more like 5 minutes. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill music.

In 2023, instead of taking the 350D on trips, I bought a used 200D. This is a more advanced camera from about 2017. I was under the delusion that my 2006 zoom lens needed to be saved, so I stuck with Canon. The lens fits the 200D. This was a bad idea, since I turned right around and bought a better zoom. I should have gone with Sony or maybe an Olympus.

I also bought a Sony A7IV and a Sony ZV1-M2. The A7IV was my no-holds-barred (few, anyway) quality-gear splurge. It’s a full-frame camera. I thought I should have the gear to do a truly top-notch job of capturing things. The ZV is a compact camera made to appeal to vloggers. It has a built-in zoom lens, and it’s very handy. Much better photos than a late model Samsung Galaxy, too.

I have never taken the A7IV anywhere. It’s heavy and expensive. I don’t want to carry it on trips, and I don’t want to have it stolen. It’s great when air travel is not in the plan, however.

When we went to the Far East for the second time, I took the ZV and the 200D. I was not ecstatic about the shots I got with the 200D. It was like I had forgotten everything I knew about composition, and I didn’t think they were sharp enough. The video was also extremely amateurish. I don’t know how I managed to perform so badly. The ZV gave me good video, but the stills were not always great. I relied mostly on my phone for stills.

I learned something interesting: the ZV1-M2 quits in hot weather. My wife and I were on a food tour in Singapore, and I noticed the camera’s monitor would go dark during video shooting. At first I thought it was saving energy, but in reality, it was turning itself off, without so much as a warning beep. It was overheating. Black camera that absorbed heat. Hot equatorial sun. I later learned that the ZV is just about useless for video in hot, sunny weather. Oddly, Sony does not trumpet this fact in ads. You find out after your videos of your priceless trip are ruined.

In retrospect, I find it amazing that anyone recommends this camera. It’s like buying a car you can only drive 10 miles at a time. Its primary purpose is video, and that is the only purpose at which it fails.

It is helpful if you remove the battery from your ZV and power it using a cable. The battery contributes a lot to the heat. But it’s still a very poor video camera for anyone who shoots videos in hot weather, unless they’re very short. If you have this camera, it’s fine for short indoor videos. Other than that, stay away. And it’s not cheap. I think they still cost about $900.

Since I began to buy better stuff, I have drawn a few conclusions, which may very well be wrong. And they overlap.

1. The most important thing is equipment that works, not equipment that works perfectly.
2. A handy camera you use is better than a heavy, complex camera you dread taking out of the bag.
3. Useful lenses are more important than buying the best camera.
4. Unless you want to spend a lot, don’t buy a few pricey lenses with top optical quality. Buy lenses that shoot well in low light.
5. For video, and maybe photos, you want some kind of stabilization.
6. A very good camera phone will do everything 95% of the population wants.
7. You absolutely must use wireless external mikes.
8. Good photography is almost completely about choices.

I guess I’ll start with 1.

Consider 2015. Ten years ago. They made pretty nice cameras. Twenty megapixels and more. Good connectivity. Good features. Excellent accessories. You can spend maybe $600 and get a very good, lightly-used camera from 2015, with a nice low-light prime lens that will be useful in lots of situations. On the other hand, if you buy a very, very good newer camera with a truly excellent low-light lens and a big sensor, think more like $4,000. Will the photos be 4,000/600 as good? No.

If you want to take photos that are optically very good, and you aren’t a perfectionist, buy a very good camera and lenses. If you want to take photos that are technically superior, spend 6 or 7 times as much for superior equipment. But consider the fact that many of the world’s great photographers used cameras and lenses that were, objectively, bad by today’s standards. Most of photography is about content and exposure, not corner-to-corner sharpness or minimal chromatic aberration.

2. I would guess my A7IV weighs over three pounds with the big zoom attached. There is no way to have a normal day with that hanging on you from breakfast to bedtime. You’re not going to drag it around with you unless you take pictures for a living. The a6400 weighs much less. It’s doable. The 200D also weighs less. All the other cameras weigh less. Then there is the phone, which is pretty good. Figure out what you are willing to lug around and use, and concentrate on whatever that is for day-to-day photography. If you insist on heavy cameras, you are going to end up using your phone nearly all the time.

3. Any 20-megapixel camera made can shoot excellent photos, but not without the right lenses. A $10,000 camera with one crummy zoom is less useful than a used $200 camera with several good lenses.

4. You can spend $15,000 on one amazing lens, but when people look at your photos, almost no one will be able to tell the difference between the photos it takes and the ones you can take with a $500 lens. You’re better off with several okay lenses than one lens that makes photo nerds cry when they see it on your camera. If you can afford it, get very good lenses, but if not, get lenses that will take okay photos with the exposures you want. It is EXTREMELY important to have lenses that shoot well in low light. You will find this out when you try to use your $1,500 f/3.5-5.6 lens to shoot a once-in-a-lifetime event in a dim restaurant. Go for 1.4 primes, at the highest.

5. Shaky video is annoying to watch. You can buy a thing called a gimbal, and it’s a big, cumbersome device that holds your camera and moves it up and down to cancel out your shaking, but it’s a royal pain to use. There are cameras that stabilize, and there are lenses that stabilize. Stabilized is better. My understanding is that a stabilized system will also let you shoot images in lower light (if it stabilizes images as well as video), because you will not move as much, and you can use a lower shutter speed without getting blurring.

6. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of getting camera gear, get a phone that does a very good job. Some phones are much better than others.

7. Buy external mikes, like Rode or DJI. My wife has the speech volume of a turbine-powered helicopter at home, but getting her to speak up on videos while traveling is nearly impossible. I have videos where you can see her lips move, but that’s about it. You, too, will find that ordinary situation noise kills speech, so buy external mikes. You can even use them with phones and selfie sticks. And use dead cats (wind noise suppressors) unless you like listening to wind instead of people.

8. Choice, not gear, is what makes photography an art.

I came up with my own system for categorizing photos. There are two kinds in the system: documentary, and artistic. A documentary photo’s main purpose it to show that something happened. “Wayne Newton kissed me at his show.” “This is really my driver’s license.” An artistic photo is, well, art. A documentary photo doesn’t have to have artistic merit, and it doesn’t have to be done well. An artistic photo has merit, and generally, although not always, it should be technically good.

A lot of people think photography is not an art, because you don’t have to draw or paint something in order to take a picture of it. They think it’s like having a sprained finger x-rayed or Xeroxing your behind at the office Christmas party. Of course, this is not true. An artistic photo evokes emotions. It usually seems to tell a story. It may tell a story that has nothing to do with what was actually happening in front of the camera. For example, a photo of two strangers at a bus stop, who don’t even know each other, may seem to be about dramatic events taking place between two people who have some kind of relationship. The mind and heart of the beholder fill out artistic photos with backstories that may be completely imaginary.

You choose your subject. You choose your camera. You choose a focal length, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. You choose the angle. You may be able to choose the lighting. You may shoot a number of shots and then choose the only one that says what want to say.

This is what makes photography a legitimate art.

If you want to take artistic photos, which is what I want to do (even when shooting my family), if you master the art of making choices, you will not be blocked by your equipment’s limits. You may not perform as well as you want to, but it’s better to have the right choices and the wrong equipment than the wrong choices and the right equipment. Bottom line: you should use whatever equipment you can get, today, instead of moaning about being unable to take pictures because you don’t have the gear you want.

I say all this stuff, but I keep buying gear. I got myself a couple of f/1.4 lenses for my a6400, and they have made a huge difference in my life. I can take shots now in light that used to produce noisy photos that looked awful. I also replaced the Sony ZV1M2 with a Canon Powershot V1. It’s bigger and heavier, but it will do everything the Sony will do and more, and it has a built-in fan.

I like the small size of the Sony, and it’s a little annoying to put the Canon in my pocket, AND I just wrote that handy is better than not-handy, but I’m willing to put up with a little more bulk in this case, given the enormous advantages the Canon offers. It shoots better in low light, it’s not going to overheat as fast, and it has image stabilization for still shots.

It’s too bad I don’t put photos of my son on the web, because he is extremely cute and possibly the most photogenic person in history. I’m not just saying that as his dad. He is really something. And I don’t consider “photogenic” to be a compliment anyway. Many ugly people are photogenic.

If I could post some of the shots I’ve taken lately, I think people would see how helpful the 1.4 lenses have been, not to mention how much better the ZV1M2 and the Powershot are than my phone.

I’m continuing to work on my editing. I just got a new PC. I bought a gaming computer because it happened to have a lot of parts that were excellent for editing photos and video. I am learning Affinity 2 and Topaz AI. I have Photoshop Elements, but I find it annoying and not noticeably better.

Editing photos is shockingly relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know why. I honestly think it’s one of those things that will improve your health if you do it regularly, like spending time outdoors.

I am going to put two very large hard drives in the new PC to store photos and video. One will back up the other, and my hope is that no catastrophe will wipe both out at once. I am hoping 10 TB will keep me going for a few years. It would be nice to have two huge, fast SDD’s, but that would run around $1600, and I don’t think I really need them.

I don’t like the idea of cloud storage. I don’t trust it, and I have an irrational (I hope) fear of having hostile people root through my files in order to harm me or my family. I also think it would take a decade to upload a single terabyte.

Now you know my current stance, valuable as it may or may not be, on the subject of photography.

One Less Thing to Worry About

I enjoy watching Mark Hemans on Youtube. He is a former missionary, and now he flies all over the world healing people. He learned from Bill Subritzky, a wealthy New Zealand developer who learned from T.B. Joshua.

He accepts donations, but he never asks for a dime. He never preaches the prosperity gospel. He hasn’t made any nutty prophesies about presidential election. The healings that take place at his meetings look legitimate to me. People bring doctors’ notes and so on.

Today I saw a video in which he prayed for healing for people with bone problems and so on. For a couple of weeks or so, I’ve had pain in my wrist on one side When I put my hand down to rest my weight on it, it hurt. I figured it would go away. I hoped I wouldn’t have to see a doctor.

I think of physicians as witch doctors. I don’t mean it in a hostile way. They are extremely weak and ignorant compared to God, the original healer. They fail all the time. They charge too much. Treatment often involves inconvenience, pain, and humiliation for patients. There are many, many things they can’t treat at all. There are many conditions they can’t explain. They actually have a word for “We don’t know what’s going on.” That word is “ideopathic.” It sounds a lot better than confessing complete ignorance.

Of course, I use doctors, because sometimes my own efforts at getting healed don’t work. I assume I’m doing things wrong. I have found doctors to be useful for simple things like vaccinations, warts, and setting broken bones. If I needed surgery urgently, and I couldn’t get healed, I would have the surgery.

I have had more than one miraculous healing, so I try to go to God first when I have a problem. Sometimes I forget.

Today I prayed along with Mark Hemans, for myself and other people. When I got done, the problem with my wrist was gone. I could feel a tiny remnant of the pain, but I was definitely healed.

When God does something for you, you should tell people, so here I am.

A few weeks back, I did my rear brakes, so I had to sit on a very low stool. While I was working, I stood up and did something to my left knee. I wondered if I had torn an important ligament. That’s a problem doctors can only fix with surgery. It’s a big deal.

My knee gave me sharp pains when I bent it too much. Putting on pants was very risky. When I lifted my left leg too high, pain shot through my knee and shin.

I was able to walk normally. I only felt pain when I bent the knee too much.

I had my wife pray for me, lay her hands on my leg, and apply oil.

My knee started getting better right away, and in a week or so, I couldn’t feel any pain at all. It was like I was never hurt.

By this time, I had developed a fear of putting my pants on, so I had to retrain myself to raise my leg without thinking about it.

During this time, I thought about a fact of which I have often lost sight: miracles don’t have to be instantaneous. In fact, the Bible doesn’t say Yeshua always healed people instantly. It just says he healed them. The Bible says that if we lay hands on the sick, they shall recover, but it doesn’t say it will happen in a second.

Yeshua tried to heal a blind man three times. The improvement got better every time. It didn’t happen all at once, the first time he tried.

There is nothing like divine healing. So much better than sitting in a doctor’s office, being billed huge amounts they don’t tell you about up front and getting bad results. It’s better than sucking down expensive prescription drugs with side effects and hoping they don’t ruin your health.

My little parrot Marvin died last month, and we prayed for her. We could not get a healing for her. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I should have fasted more.

It made me think about what I would like to do for God. For years, I’ve been praying for him to use me to heal people, but losing Marvin made me think more in terms of healing the small and helpless. Babies, children, and even pets. It is painful to lose anyone you care about, but it’s much worse when it’s someone small and helpless who depends on you for everything. When a child, baby, or pet dies on your watch, it’s your failure.

Our son has no real health problems. He had a crooked toe when he was born, but it’s nearly normal now. Taking him to doctors for little things makes me feel for the millions of people who have to watch their babies suffer and die every year. I don’t know how they keep on living.

In any case, I have testified. I hope I get to be involved in ending other people’s suffering eventually.

MORE

I don’t like giving negative testimony, but lying testimony is much worse, so here goes.

After my wrist was healed, it felt fine for a long time, but maybe eight or ten hours, the pain came back. It has gone away a few times since then, but it keeps returning.

I want to thank everyone who has expressed condolences in my comments, regarding my recent loss. It was very thoughtful.

I have been comforted by reminders that the living suffer more than the dead, except of course for the damned. For example, although I tend to remember my dad as a scary tyrant or the weak, prayer-loving old man he became, in reality, he is more like a god than a person now. He is younger than I am. That’s really something. He doesn’t wear glasses. His hair isn’t gray. He never gets sick. He never feels pain or sorrow. The greatest evil spirits there are can’t touch him or go anywhere near him.

Christian funerals used to be celebrations. Over time, pagan converts corrupted the church like Californians moving to Texas, and Christians started wearing black and focusing on the pain. I have to keep this in mind. I saw a recent video featuring Lester Sumrall, and he described moping over the deceased as feeling sorry for oneself. That sobered me up.

The condition of my heart will keep getting better, my blessed life will continue, and it won’t be long before I will be with God and all the dead people and creatures I have cared about, but for those who would not accept salvation. This life is but a vapor, as the word says. I am closer to heaven than high school, which seems very recent in my mind.

I will try not to be self-indulgent and make things worse than they are while my heart heals.

The Long View Must Prevail

A thoughtful reader asked whether it was possible I was depressed. The answer is yes, and I appreciate the question, which helped me consider the issue.

I was completely miserable during the last two days. My friend Marvin was dead, my faith was under attack, and a loving member of my household, with whom I had interacted nearly every day for 29 years, was gone, leaving a gaping hole, like a crater where the living room once was.

Something I had dreaded and dreamed about for years, which I had fought as hard as I could, had happened. My emotions were drowning me.

It made me think about Job. All the children he had hugged and loved as babies, and for whom he made daily sacrifices, had died in a moment, and his body had broken out in boils. He said, “the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” Although his misfortune was much greater than mine, I think I understand the nature of what he felt. I don’t think he was talking about the boils. He wanted to save his children.

I am not habitually depressed, though. That hasn’t happened to me since the ordeal I went through as a graduate student, when I was away from God and pumped full of ADD drugs, socially isolated and watching my dream slip away from me despite my best efforts. That was almost 30 years ago.

I have sometimes said I was depressed by proxy, however.

I have a great life. My relationship with God lifts me up above the turmoil, worry, and failure that are inundating most people. I know I’m saved. God answers my prayers over and over. I have a wonderful wife and son. My health is good. I don’t have to work. I live in an area full of warm, kind Christian people.

On the other hand, I see the world collapsing around me. Satan won the popularity contest, and even in formerly-Christian countries, people are turning to Satan in droves. Here in America, our culture is hateful and nauseating compared to the culture of 2000, and the farther back you go for comparison, the worse 2025 looks. In videos about the 1940’s, people who were considered normal then seem like those who are considered religious freaks today.

I can’t help people. Not many, anyway. No matter how good things get for me, I can’t get other people to listen to my testimony and give the Holy Spirit a try. I have to sit back and watch them destroy themselves needlessly. I know it won’t change to the point where the tide goes the other way.

I coined the term “depression by proxy” to describe this situation. Depressed people have no hope for themselves. I have no hope for the world.

God clearly agrees with me about the world. He told us the tribulation was coming. He didn’t say it might come. It will happen.

I would be much happier if I were not surrounded by people who are doomed, but I am not depressed. Not ordinarily. I was depressed this week, and I was depressed when my other bird died, but these were brief intervals. I haven’t gotten depressed when human beings died.

One mark of depression is predicting your own future irrationally. I have been doing this to some extent. I predicted that I would be stuck here for the rest of my life, watching other people crash and burn, and I thought it would be very hard to bear. Now I am leveling off. I realize my prediction about other people was correct, but I also know God will not allow me to be miserable on a chronic basis. Depression is the opposite of joy, and the Holy Spirit provides joy. It is named as one of the fruit of the Spirit. I feel it today. It displaces grief.

I don’t feel great, but today is much better than yesterday, and things will get better as God supplies me.

My Boys Went on Ahead

Today I took a box out of my spare refrigerator, took it to an animal hospital that does cremation, and said goodbye to my little friend Marvin. I did not open the box. I have also thrown out nearly everything that had anything to do with her or my other deceased bird, Maynard. I don’t want that stuff around me. I threw out food. I threw out vet bills. I deleted emails from vets. I didn’t keep their bells or toys. Just photos and videos, as well as a few old feathers.

The hospital says Marvin will be part of a communal cremation, and then the remains will be scattered on a horse farm. I hope that is true. I can’t say it actually matters, because Marvin is not in that body.

I have lost other pets, but losing a parrot is worse. A dog is likely to be with you a dozen years. You expect a dog to die after a short time. Marvin was nearly 29 when he died, and Maynard was 30, and they were fairly young. To say I was used to having them around is an understatement. I expected them to outlive me. I felt as though they would always be there, like the walls or the floor.

My habit is to greet Marvin by exclaiming “MARV!” as I come in the door. I used to greet both birds. Now I walk in the door, and I realize no one is there, and no one will ever be there again. The greeting sticks in my throat. I keep walking.

Last night I got up to use the bathroom. To avoid disturbing the baby, I like to leave the bedroom and walk past the kitchen. I always say something to Marv along the way. Not any more.

We went to a fried chicken joint today. Usually, we ask for containers for scraps for Marvin, which he loved. Not today.

For the first time since early 1991, parrots have absolutely nothing to do with my life. That is so strange. I have old books on parrots. I belong to parrot forums. I’m used to thinking a lot about parrot food, toys, and cage upgrades. Instantly and forever, that ended.

It’s like losing a hand. You feel you can look over and see it whenever you want, but it’s not there, and it will never be there again.

A life without parrots.

I was going to take Marvin’s cage to the dump. I gave away my other cage after Maynard died. I started feeling guilty about throwing out Marvin’s cage, so I put it on Craigslist in the Free Stuff area. I thought there might be some little bird out there whose owner could not afford a decent cage.

I got emails right away. When I asked the senders what kind of birds they had, they had nothing to say. I asked because I didn’t want scammers to take the cage and then try to sell it at thrift shops or on Facebook. Three senders didn’t answer, and one admitted he wanted to flip the cage.

Of course, none of the senders admitted they didn’t have birds up front. The whole business made me feel very bad. I didn’t need to have people try to take advantage of me on this particular day.

Now, for the next two days, I am stuck with a cage I will probably have to take to the dump. I can’t get rid of it until Wednesday. Maybe someone who actually has a bird will get in touch.

As for me, I do not feel good at all.

My faith has been attacked. I stood on the word of God, and then Marvin died. I felt faith when I prayed for her, and it didn’t work. I have been talking to God, asking him to help me know what’s real and what isn’t. My wife and baby son depend on my relationship with God. It has to be sound.

I am more tired of death than ever. I can get new pets and meet new people, but I will still see more deaths, so it’s an imperfect solution.

I would say I want death for myself, to get me out of this world, but that’s not true. I don’t want to die, and I would never, ever harm myself. I just want to leave. I wish Yeshua would come get us. I want to move to a place where things that go well. A place less like Omaha Beach.

Today in one short car trip, I saw sick people and crippled people. I saw poor people who clearly didn’t have it together. I kept thinking about how much suffering there was in the world, how little I could do about it, and how I was going to keep seeing it. I know what I’m in for. I could conceivably live another 30 years, and the world will be as it is now or worse. Will I ever be able to do anything real for people? I keep asking God to use me to heal people. I would love to heal people’s children and even their pets, so they would know this world doesn’t have to win. I sound like Holden Caulfield.

I am blessed, but those around me keep dropping. Being blessed is wonderful, but if you live among people who suffer horrible fates, it’s natural to want to be somewhere else where things are different.

God has said, “A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee; only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Sounds wonderful at first glance, but who wants to see other people destroyed over and over?

If it were not for my wife and son, I would be glad to leave this minute. My family is my only reason for choosing life.

When my dad was alive and I was single, I wanted to see him saved, and I wanted my pets to be taken care of. Other than that, I was happy to leave whenever God called me. Now my dad is dead and in heaven, and my pets are presumably with him. But I am still attached to this miserable planet by my family. I have to watch out for them. I have to prepare them. They are surrounded by enemies, natural and supernatural. They are swimming in a sea of lies. Abandoning them is not something that could ever be on the table.

I hope my friends and relatives do well on Earth, but I would not stay here just for them. Maybe that’s a flaw. I care more about my wife and baby.

I’ve also thought a great deal about what a bad person I’ve been and how I’ve let my loved ones and pets down. I don’t like thinking about it, but correction is like free money. I won’t turn it down. I wish I had done less evil.

I will surely feel better as time passes, but I don’t think the weariness will ever leave me. The future of this world is dim. I don’t expect the constant flow of bad news for humanity to stop or even stop accelerating.

I don’t think I’ll have much reason to mention my birds in the future.

“Marvelous” is Long for “Marv”

My sweet little buddy Marvin just left us. It was around 3:15. I had just put him in the car to take him back to the animal hospital. He was one day short of his 29th birthday.

This is something I have always dreaded. I have had many dreams about it. Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.

He was the funniest bird ever. He had incredible empathy. He read my moods. He adored me. He was far better to me than I could ever have been to him.

I didn’t deserve Marvin. This is for the best. Parrots were not created to be pets. They live too long. They’re too smart. They love too intensely. It’s better that my little friend is with Yeshua. I wish I could be there, too. I am so sick of death. I am sick of watching people destroy themselves and not being able to get them to listen to me when I try to help them. I wish Yeshua would come get us.

I don’t think Marv suffered much. He never seemed to be in pain. Even today, when he was declining, he wasn’t sad.

I may have caused this. Bad diet, maybe. Not enough sun. It’s impossible to know.

I will never have another parrot again. I don’t want the guilt of buying a pet that needs more care than I can give and which will probably outlive me. The only exception I would make would be for a rescue bird that needs a lifeline.

I wish little Doug could have known Marvin. He should have inherited him.

I call Marvin “he,” but he laid an egg when he was 26. I could never get used to “she,” and Marvin didn’t care.

I must have kissed him ten thousand times. I blessed him every morning and every night. I rubbed him all the time and told him not to worry. I held him to my face and thanked him for being here.

Yesterday he was not so sick. I took him out to weigh him and hand-feed him, and although he was weak, he refused to get off my hand. I blessed him and kissed him and thanked him again and again for being here; being mine. I asked him to stay a little longer.

I talk to him all the time instead of talking to myself. Sometimes I find myself doing it out in the yard, where he can’t hear me. I’ll have to stop now.

Thank you God, for all my undeserved blessings. Thank you for rescuing my baby bird from this horrible world. I can’t wait to be with him again, along with Maynard and all the people I know who died in Christ.

His toys, possessions, food, and medicines are on the way to the dump. I don’t want to see them. I will get rid of his cage as soon as I can.

I have contacted someone about communal cremation. I can’t bury him here. It would kill me to walk past the grave over and over. I don’t want to see his ashes. They will be scattered on a horse farm.

It doesn’t matter. He won’t be there. He is already in heaven, where he belonged from the start.

If You Don’t Want Roaches, Take the Trash Out

Derek Prince was an extraordinary preacher. He died in 2003, and I still learn things from him.

Yesterday, I saw one of his videos, and I learned that Yeshua never called Satan “the god of this world.” I didn’t learn that directly from the video. In the video, Prince said Paul (not Yeshua) had called Satan the god of this age, not the god of this world.

People like me believe that God has broken history into distinct ages. I don’t claim to belong to any particular recognized brand of Christianity, but I would say I could be considered a dispensationalist. It appears that the history of humanity, prior to the return of Yeshua, is like a week of thousand-year “days.”

Abraham existed around 4,000 years ago, and it looks like that was the start of the age of the Jews. They were God’s main representatives on Earth. Then came Yeshua, and that began the age of the Gentiles. After this age ends, we get a thousand-year Messianic Age, during which Yeshua is present on the earth in the flesh and rules as king.

God likes the number 7, and it appears to be associated with completeness. Seven days per week. Seven millennia for humanity. Seven Spirits of God. The seventh millennium will be a long sabbath, like the seventh day of every week.

Eight seems to be associated with new beginnings. Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day. God saved 8 people during the flood to repopulate the world.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, the King James Version says:

But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

This is not correct. The Greek calls Satan “the god of this age.”

Yeshua himself called Satan “the prince of this world,” not the god.

There is some debate as to whether “god of this age” refers to Satan or Yeshua, but I think it’s safe to say it has to be Satan, because Yeshua is the God of all ages. It would be odd to call him the god of a particular age.

The Greek version of 2 Corinthians 4:4 makes more sense than the English translation. Satan won’t be in power forever. He’s an upstart, and he has to be slapped down eventually.

I believe the two millennia since the crucifixion have been the Age of the Gentiles. During this time, God revealed himself to billions of Gentiles through Christianity. Most Jews were expelled from Israel, the temple was destroyed, the Jews were dispersed, and mainstream Jews haven’t accomplished much of anything in the way of spreading the knowledge of God since before Yeshua. Meanwhile, the handful of Jews who accepted Yeshua and the baptism with the Holy Spirit evangelized millions, and Gentiles who believed them evangelized the world.

I complain to God a lot about this age. Humanity has become like a rotting trash heap. We give power and praise to astoundingly filthy people. This, in formerly Christian countries. We think abomination is good. All fornication is abomination, not just homosexual acts. Cross-dressing, idolatry and witchcraft are abomination. Pride and swindling are abomination. So is oppressing the poor. We are now solidly in favor of most of these things.

Increasingly, we are convinced we can solve all our own problems. We are like the college kids who keep telling us socialism will work if we just do it right. We never learn. We want all the blessings life has to offer, but we want them on our own terms, not God’s. We want sexual sin and pride. We want idolatry and drugs. We want to make up our own rules.

I believe the principle of rapturing doesn’t just apply to the rapture. It’s really just holiness. “But know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” as Psalm 4 says. When God lifts the people who love him off the earth and leaves the rest behind, he will be pulling that which is holy away from that which belongs to Satan.

When God tells you to give up secular entertainment, rapturing you away from it, he is making you holy. When he helps you to hate pride and love humility, he is making you holy. When he helps you spend hours praying in tongues, he is making you holy. He is preparing you for the big jump.

This process also brings you blessings and protection. It puts you inside God’s hedge with him. The word says, “Whosoever breaks a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.”

There is a wall or hedge around you right now. You’re inside with God and humility or Satan and pride. If you’re with Satan, through rebellion and pride, more bad things will happen to you, and you will miss out on blessings. Things that may seem harmless, like listening to secular music or watching movies, can put you inside the wrong hedge.

I think clinging to worldly culture causes things like cancer, dementia, poverty, miscarriage, birth defects, accidents, attacks from criminals, and just about every other type of misfortune. We tend to think bad things should only happen to those who do things like murder, rape, and theft, but there is no Biblical basis for that idea. I think showing your kids Disney videos or watching filthy Hollywood shows and movies will suffice to attract harm.

When Job wondered why his family had been killed and his body had been disabled by disease, he named all the harmful things he had not done. He included looking at young women. Sounds harmless to us, but Job apparently understood that it was dangerous. Try and sit through a week of TV without seeing a woman dressed like a whore.

Job wasn’t ignorant. He lived for hundreds of years. He knew things we don’t know. If staring at young women was dangerous, what about all the other things we consider normal?

At my last two churches, they played secular music to convince the kids Yeshua and church were cool. I wonder how much damage they did. I remember seeing the old fool Steve Munsey dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the stage at Trinity Church in Miami. That song is about a woman who had sex with a man in order to get him to marry her. It’s about abomination. Nobody in the Trinity hierarchy heard from the Holy Spirit, so they saw nothing wrong with Munsey’s antics.

This is normal in 2025.

I have found that the more God renews my heart and helps me feel love and empathy, the more I hate this age. I hate the suffering and failure. It makes me wonder how God, who is love itself, can stand it.

We harden ourselves and make ourselves get used to the suffering of those around us. I don’t think God wanted us to do that, but it’s a normal survival skill. We laugh at things that would have brought our grandparents to tears. I’m a huge offender. I made a deliberate effort to cultivate that type of sense of humor. I didn’t think it mattered to God.

I often pray for God to show my family evil. For example, I ask him to show us the worthless people around us, and I ask him to rid us of them permanently. It seems like he has come through. Lately, I have been asking him to show us the Spirit-led people around us, so all the exposure to the others won’t destroy our morale.

People in formerly-Christian nations are pursuing curses now, like never before. We get more and more loathsome. I find it oppressive now. I keep asking God to come now and rule.

John, who was closer to Yeshua than anyone, said this at the end of the Bible: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

He was talking about the end of this age, which the Revelation describes. It’s about the decline of man, the rapture, the tribulation, the millennium, the battle at the end, and the New Jerusalem. He was telling us Yeshua had said surely, he was coming quickly. Just like me, John said, “So be it. Even so [quickly], come Lord Jesus.” John was sick of this place, too.

I have about had it with this place. I want the rapture to happen now. Today. This minute. Barring that, I have to stay as close to God as possible, because that is the only way to have the blessings, protection, and strength to tolerate this place. It’s like living in a big building with adults who run around smearing poop on the walls and furniture. Enough.

Marvin has had some ups and downs with his medical situation. He got worse a day or two ago, so I had to drive him to a hospital in Orlando. His condition has been a very unpleasant ordeal for me. It has gone on for two weeks.

I prayed on the road in both directions. I was thinking about how miserable this world is and how I still had to stay here for a while. I was trying to have faith for Marvin’s recovery.

I got stuck in a traffic jam on I-75, and I found myself behind a semi. In the dirt on the back of the trailer, someone had written, “Bee [sic] the good. You are ENOUGH! Don’t quit. Pray for my Aunts Susan + Shelly. It’s gonna be okay Love God.”

Cars and trucks were shifting positions, but this truck kept ending up directly in front of me. I had to sit behind it.

It made me think of Belshazzar’s feast. Belshazzar and his pagan buddies were in Babylon, getting drunk using the sacred vessels of God’s temple, and a finger appeared and wrote, “You have been weighed and found lacking.” As my wife put it the other day, “not enough.”

The writing on the truck used the same word. “You are enough.” I took it to mean that though I was not very good, I was doing well enough to get God’s help and make it in the rapture.

I found that and the assurance that things were going to be okay very comforting. I prayed for Aunt Shelly and Aunt Susan, and my wife and I prayed for them again last night.

What Belshazzar went through was like the rapture and tribulation. God’s protection left him suddenly, and he was destroyed.

Today Marv is doing better. I got a call this morning. He’s on a better antibiotic, and he has capable people looking after him. I am planning to move him to UF as soon as he seems strong.

I don’t know when the rapture will come, but the way the walls are closing in, it can’t come fast enough to suit me.

Curb Your White Knight Privilege

It has been a trying month, but things have gotten a lot better.

It looks like I accidentally poisoned Marv, my African grey. He appeared to be at death’s door twice. He spent two nights in the hospital. Over the last week or so, he has consistently gotten stronger and feistier, however.

Yesterday, I heard him fall off the perch. This is not all that unusual for greys even when they are well. They get overly ambitious when they climb. Marv became very weak and wobbly after he was poisoned, however, and it is wearing off slowly. I think this made him fall.

It’s not a big deal when a parrot falls off a perch. Because volume and weight increase with the cube of linear measurements, and strength increases with the square, small animals weigh a lot less for their size than animals with greater linear dimensions. For example, a horse that is two times the size of a pony will weigh eight times as much. Weight is most of what determines how dangerous a fall is, so small animals can fall from great heights without harm. You can throw a mouse off a tall building without hurting it, and a man can survive a fall that would kill a horse. A short fall won’t usually mean much to a parrot.

Still, a parrot can get banged up in a fall if he does it just right. I have seen Marv with little bruises and even black eyes over the years.

During the afternoon, I saw a bulge on Marv’s neck, and I had no idea what it was. I Googled, and my best guess was that it was an air sac rupture. Air sacs are weird cavities in birds’ bodies that connect to their lungs. An air sac rupture is not always a serious injury, and they usually heal on their own, but web sources suggested it was worth a vet visit, so we left the house at about 7:30 p.m. and got back at about 2:30.

Bottom line: it’s probably no big deal. They gave us an anti-inflammatory which I don’t plan to give Marv because it’s dangerous, and they sent us home.

Of course, the vet who saw him didn’t know much about birds. This is the big problem with parrot medical issues. Generally, if you have an emergency, you will end up with someone who isn’t trained to fix the problem. She was able to call other vets, though, so I think we are okay.

Interesting thing: the standard remedy for a ruptured air sac has changed. A rupture causes air to be released under the skin, so your bird blows up in the area of the injury. A small hole in the skin will deflate the bubble. They used to tell bird owners to poke their birds carefully with needles, but now they say to leave the bubble alone, because if you pop it, air continues to come out through the rupture, interfering with healing.

Marv already looks better, but he is still wobbly. He will be seeing a real vet later this week. Best I could do.

I lay hands on him and declare his healing, and I praise God, who said that if we lay hands on the sick, the SHALL recover. Not “might.” God is true to his word, because he is his word, and he is the truth.

I have also been slaving away, fixing the used mower I bought. As noted earlier, the deck has 4 one-inch pipes that hold anti-scalp wheels, and all of these pipes galled to the parts inside them. The seller or the old guy who originally owned the mower used heat to get the stuck parts out of the forward pipes, but it came to me with the rear wheel shafts lodged firmly. I found out when I tried to adjust them.

I tried everything anyone could possibly suggest, other than cutting the pipes off the mower and mounting them in my hydraulic press. That is coming.

Kubota’s design is really, really stupid. There is no room between the shafts and the bores, and everything is made from carbon steel. In a humid climate with temperature swings, water condenses on metal over and over during the year, and on a vertical shaft, it’s going to run downward. That puts it inside the pipe holding the shaft, where even a thin film of rust will unite the parts as though they were welded.

At first, I thought an air hammer would be overkill. I used a sledge, heat, and cold, and then I tried the air hammer, which did nothing. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench. Of course, this was after letting penetrating oil soak in for days.

I ended up drilling the left shaft out, killing my cordless drill in the process. I was using about a 1″ bit.

The drill left me with a pipe inside a pipe. I used a carbide burr, hacksaw, and sawzall to cut the pipe from inside. I ended up putting a punch between the inner and outer pipes, and I hammered to peel the inner one off. Eventually, I heard a clanging noise and saw something brown on the ground. It took me a second to realize it was the shaft. I was so used to feeling like it would never come out, it was hard for me to accept what had happened.

The miserable thing was barely rusted. Just enough to turn the shaft brown. It felt smooth. That was enough to lock it into the mower. It was covered with oil, showing that penetrating oil doesn’t do any good in some circumstances. Most, I would say.

This process involved work done over several days in the blazing sun. I strained my back in the process.

I was hoping to avoid cutting the other pipe support off the mower, but now I am committed to it. I can slice it off, put the whole business on the press, mash the shaft out, and weld the support back on in a day. That looked like a lot of work before I tackled the first one. Not any more.

I have lots of tools, and I can do lots of things, but sometimes it’s hard to take the leap and do what I can do. I know I can cut this part off my mower and put it back, better than before. It still feels wrong, somehow, but I have to do it. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you’re not willing to use your tools, sell them.”

The seller seemed like a very earnest guy, but it looks like he committed fraud. People are disappointing.

The final (!) parts for the mower arrive tomorrow, so there is hope I’ll have it together for the weekend. I hope so. I really do not want to revive the old John Deere.

People on forums are angry with me for saying Kubota’s anti-scalp-wheel engineering is stupid. It’s amazing how people white knight for big companies that don’t care about them, while persecuting fellow consumers they abuse or let down.

Brand loyalty is like a mental illness. If I say Kubota’s engineering is stupid, and you have a good counterargument, it’s fine to present it. Getting angry with me because you love Kubota makes no sense. Kubota isn’t your mother. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a faceless company that has no feelings. It doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I tend to think inappropriate emotional investment in businesses is a sign of both immaturity and low intelligence. You won’t see many septuagenarian mathematicians getting in fistfights in bars because one roots for the Gators (a business) and the other roots for the ‘Noles. It’s the kind of guys who drive lowered pickups with tinted windows, loud pipes, and everything blacked out. The kind of guys who let their rottweilers run loose and get tattoos advertising Harley-Davidson.

That last thing has to be difficult to bear now that Harley-Davidson has become a major promoter of sodomy and cross-dressing.

Here’s something I find weird: people get in fights over the college teams they root for, even though no one in their families has gone to college. I have two University of Miami degrees, and I see a lot of people who clearly didn’t go to college, displaying UM paraphernalia. I have no interest in that stuff, so why should they? I have never been to a UM game, except once when I was in high school. My ultimate Frisbee team played theirs, and they killed us, although they were smoking weed on the field.

UM is a private school, which makes it even weirder. You can say you root for UF because it’s your state’s school and your tax dollars support it, and this would almost make sense to some people, but why root for a private university that doesn’t represent a city, county, state, or nation?

If you bleed green and orange, drive down to UM and ask for free season’s tickets. See how UM feels about you.

If you refuse to talk to your brother-in-law because he drives an F250, there is something wrong with you. You failed to develop to full adulthood. If it makes you mad when someone says Dodge diesel pickups have weak transmissions, you have a lot of growing up to do, but it probably won’t happen.

Getting angry at companies is perfectly reasonable. It’s normal to get angry at anyone who mistreats you. It makes me angry when companies let bad engineering a child can correct slide, causing it to fall on my head. There is no excuse. It also bothers me when a product flaw causes many people suffering and expense, and the company lies and says it’s not a known issue.

Praising companies doesn’t do much good at all, but criticizing them makes them better. They’re not like people, who draw strength from encouragement. Praising companies breeds an entitlement mindset and causes them to take consumers for granted.

People have tried to tell me a consumer should follow the manual and grease the rear shafts on my mower’s deck. Wrong. It’s not in the manual or the shop manual.

They’ve tried to tell me it’s just common sense to grease the shafts, so a person who doesn’t figure it out on his own is to blame when his mower locks up. That is SEVERELY wrong. The engineer is to blame.

1. Good engineers foresee obvious problems and take reasonable steps to prevent them from arising. Kubota didn’t do this. They made their shafts too tight. Other mower companies don’t do this, and their decks last for decades. A tight fit isn’t necessary or helpful.

2. Grease isn’t intended to prevent corrosion. It’s for lubricating moving parts. Anti-seize is the correct thing for galling prevention.

The rear shafts on my deck aren’t moving parts. For lubrication purposes, a part that moves rarely is not a moving part. The shafts have no zerks or journals. If you put grease on one, it would have to be coated by hand, end to end. Grease doesn’t distribute itself on stationary parts.

The shafts only move when you need to change the height of your deck, which could be once a year or never. The shafts lock in place after an amount of corrosion that could easily take place in one off-season.

Some guy claimed a mower would cost $40,000 if Kubota did the things I suggested. I asked him how much it would cost to change a few lines of code on a CNC machine to make the shafts slightly thinner.

He came back with an appeal to authority; his own. I didn’t understand how industry worked, but he did because he had seen it, so I had no right to speak. Removing 0.050″ from the diameter of one part would call for meetings and all sorts of other corporate turmoil. It would cost Kubota hundreds of thousands.

I told him Kubota had designed and built an entire new model after mine, full of changes much bigger than making a shaft thinner, and I asked him why it didn’t cost $40,000.

He got mad and insulted me. I’m not the one who made him walk into a door.

Imagine if the world of industry worked the way he claimed it did. “We’re thinking of replacing the 2026 Dodge Ram with a 2027 model.” “NOOOO! We’ll have to charge $200,000!” Somehow car companies manage to make changes every year. Bigger changes than thinning down one shaft.

My mower’s model comes in two versions. One before a certain serial number, and one after. The price of the mower didn’t change.

People argue with me, not because I’m wrong or rude, but because I gored their sacred ox. Kubota good, therefore anyone who criticize it very bad enemy. Must take down. Sing Kubota company song over dead body.

Another guy got mad at me, saying I was bashing all engineers. I got him to admit he was an engineer.

Engineers are wonderful. Bad engineers and bad engineering are not. I wish I had gotten an ME and an EE instead of a physics degree. I love what engineers do. I admire their accomplishments, but because I said they often did stupid things, which is so obviously true it’s almost a tautology, he felt threatened.

I took my mower’s starting system, which causes many people horrible problems, and I did and published what is probably the only thorough analysis on the web. Thanks to me, people with bad control modules can Google and make their motors run in 10 minutes. I revealed the simple answer to the deck’s galling problem, which other people have dealt with. I found a cheap source for the nylon push rivets Kubota dealers charge $2.60 for, and I revealed it on a forum. Cost: $.03 each. But I’m the bad guy because I won’t run into battle behind the Kubota flag with my chest painted orange.

I don’t care if Kubota goes bankrupt. I just want good machinery for everyone. Kubota can make it, or a company that destroys Kubota with better products can make it. I am not Kubota’s keeper.

I love Kubota products. I should stress that. My tractor is great. My zero-turn is utterly superior to my John Deere garden tractor. But nearly every complex product has flaws, and in many cases, they are stupid flaws, even when the companies that make the products are generally exemplary.

The flail mower I ordered has arrived, and it’s sitting in the driveway. Tomorrow I have to put it together and try it out. I look forward to seeing it run, because the bush hog is crude and difficult to work with.

Meanwhile, the house is a mess. I took the kitchen apart in order to paint, and then Marv got worse, so I stopped. I was in the process of fixing the pool, but I found myself driving back and forth to the animal hospital. The mower problem took up my time. The weather was unbearable for a couple of weeks. I am really hoping I can come back to life now.

If You Care, be the Bad Guy

My friend Marvin the parrot got sick because I made the mistake of using bifenthrin spray on a loveseat that had carpet beetles in it. We bought the loveseat from a place called Koontz Furniture and Design. My wife liked a bigger couch that matched it, and they showed us the loveseat, which was a like-new return.

They said they had taken it back after 6 months. I asked why. They said the customer didn’t like it. I thought that was odd, but their explanation was that the boss was a really nice guy who wanted people to be happy. I was suspicious, but then people here are very nice.

The loveseat was discounted heavily, and it looked unused, so we bought it. Weeks or months later, we started seeing little black balls on the floor around it. I thought maybe a roach was wandering around in the living room, and the balls were roach poops.

I knew nothing about carpet beetles. Eventually, I dug up the truth on the Internet. Carpet beetles are tiny, round, black bugs about the size of roach poops.

I tried imidacloprid on the loveseat and couch, and things got a lot better, but the loveseat appeared to continue to produce some bugs. This is why I tried bifenthrin, a “safe” chemical that leaves a dry residue that kills for months. I have used it in the house for years with no apparent problems.

A lot of spray got into the air, and Marv got sick the same day. Seizures and weakness. Short of watching your baby son die in your arms, nothing could be worse. But God was gracious, as always, and Marv did not die.

He spent two nights at the small animal hospital at the university, and he improved a great deal, so we brought him home.

Then I very stupidly let my wife push me into painting the kitchen. Most of the interior of the house looks fantastic, but the kitchen and two stairwells need paint.

I have told my wife not to nag me. Nagging is evil, and doctors believe it actually shortens husbands’ lives by ruining their cardiovascular health. My wife’s response was to cite the story Yeshua told about the widow who kept bothering the wicked judge until he granted her wish.

That’s not a good analogy. The judge was not her husband, so he was not the king and priest of her house, to whom God expected her to submit. Also, the judge was not subject to nagging all day, like a husband. Finally, she had been wronged, and she was asking for justice. My wife was not wronged.

I told her to knock it off, but I decided to start on the kitchen all the same. The pressure had an effect.

The day after I started painting the kitchen, Marv took sick again. The obvious reason: paint fumes. Birds have very sensitive lungs, which is why canaries used to be used to let miners know about gas accumulations. Marvin was getting better, but his lungs were still unusually sensitive, and he is a bird.

I felt like an idiot, because that’s what I was. I should never have let my wife goad me into doing something dumb. If I had not let her rush me, I would have thought more carefully, and common sense would have told me not to paint the kitchen until Marv was fully well.

Here’s something you really need to know about God: he can’t be rushed, and he does not want his children to be rushed. When someone rushes you, it’s nearly always for an evil reason. If you’re in a burning building and someone tells you to get out fast, that’s fine, but what if you’re at a car dealership and the salesman tells you a deal is only good for 24 hours? Walk. He’s not looking after you. He’s trying to get you to make a decision that will harm you.

A long time ago, I heard God say this while I was with him: “I will not be rushed.” I said it in the first person, but it referred to both of us. He will not be rushed, and he wants me to refuse to be rushed, too. I should have thought about this when my wife was in error, pushing me to do something dumb.

I sprayed the couch because of her impatience. She was pressing me to call Koontz and demand they take the loveseat back. When I finally called them, they said the sale was as-is, but they offered to send a bug guy.

What happened to the nice guy who took furniture back just because customers didn’t like it? He must have retired. Or maybe they took the couch back because the customer found bugs in it, they sprayed it until they didn’t see any bugs, and then they dumped it on me.

Oh, well. A $9,000 mistake and a lesson learned.

I sprayed the couch myself because I was concerned the bug guy might use something that would harm Marvin or my son, and I picked the wrong spray.

If you’re a husband, and you don’t want curses to fall on your house, you have to learn two things. You have to learn that you’re the leader, not a partner. You also have to learn to be willing to be unpopular in your own house. When your wife or child goes against God, you have to stick with God. This is one of your main purposes. It sounds odd, but battling your own wife and children for their own good is one of your primary functions. You should expect it and try to be grateful for it.

I put Marv in our son’s nursery, closed off the air conditioning vent, opened the windows, put towels under the doors, and gave him food and water by hand. My son rarely sees the nursery, so it didn’t matter to him. Of course, I humbled myself before God and used all my supernatural tools and weapons. After two nights of misery (for me), Marvin has perked up and started eating and playing in his water. It looks like he’s okay. I will be babying him for at least a month.

I told my wife to go ahead and put the kitchen back in order, because there was no way I was going to resume painting it until it was safe. I didn’t ask her if this was okay with her. I said this was how it was going to be, end of story, and she was fine with it. She feels very guilty.

Women resist leadership, but they like decisiveness. A woman who will fight a polite suggestion will be completely content to comply with a stern command. The same thing goes for men when they deal with their superiors. No one trusts a leader who cajoles and waffles. It encourages argument and plants doubt.

The truth is that I let my wife down by trying to please her, just as Adam, Abraham, and Moses let their wives down. I let her down, and I definitely let Marvin down. I know God forgives me, but I will never forget what I put Marvin through with my 20th-century feminist brainwashing. The things I saw and heard will live with me for the rest of my life, as they should. I deserve that.

It is inevitable that wives will rebel, but it wasn’t necessary for me to fail to lead properly, so who is more to blame?

I intend to be more forceful from now on. My family is depending on me, and so is Marvin.

Weeds and Woes

Times have been challenging of late here at the Armed Northern Florida Compound.

I accidentally poisoned Marvin and had to drive back and forth to a veterinary hospital in Gainesville several times. The zero-turn mower I thought was a bargain turned out to have a couple of problems that will require a lot of work. The temperature has approached or hit the hundred-degree mark nearly every day. And my wife is pushing to get the kitchen painted.

Marvin is fine. He gets stronger every day. What a relief. But the stress took its toll on yours truly. I went out to do outdoor work a couple of times during the last week, and I had to come back in. I felt weak. I was drained.

It made me think of my grandfather. My aunt died in May of 1994; the first of his children to go. My grandfather died in June, after losing his temper at a trashy tenant farmer and running after some cattle that got out. The night after the incident with the cattle, he had a heart attack, and he was gone after a few days. The cardiologist told me her belief was that the stress of losing my aunt caused a lesion of some sort to develop in a coronary artery, and the fracas with the tenant farmer caused it to come loose from the wall and block circulation.

Marvin is just a bird, but I really love him, and he has been with me since 1996. Over the years, I have had nightmares about bad things happening to my birds, and when Maynard died in 2021, one of the things that made it hard to bear was the fact that it was something I had dreaded–irrationally, I had thought–for a long time.

It was like having intrusive thoughts about a big shark behind you while swimming in your backyard pool, and then being bitten.

It’s possible to be hurt more by the death of a pet than the death of a person. It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Different factors determine how any death affects you. I felt very bad when my mother died, but I knew it was coming, my mother was at peace with her fate, there was nothing I could do about it, she had accepted responsibility for all the cigarettes, I had a long time to get ready, and it was not my fault. It wasn’t as painful as Maynard’s death, which was sudden and preventable.

When Marvin started having seizures the other night, it was Maynard all over again, only worse, because I thought he might die in my hands, without even making it to the vet.

I have told my wife about my grandfather, and I told her to go easy on me for a while. I don’t want to push myself too hard too early.

Her prayer life is subpar these days, and it affects my welfare. The baby is an extremely powerful distraction. I am working with her to get her back up to speed. I know I am getting the short end of the stick at the moment, but this is actually normal for husbands. In a healthy, godly family, the husband and father is the one who makes the most sacrifices. Women love denying this and claiming the title of martyr, but men give more than women, unless they are substandard men.

It’s not something to resent. With authority comes added obligation. A marriage in which the woman has to do everything for the man, as though he were another child, is a sick marriage.

The mower has two anti-scalp wheels on the rear corners of the deck. They looked fine when I bought the mower, but I have learned they are stuck in place, and it is obvious the seller knew about it. They are held on two shafts that go down through little pieces of heavy pipe welded vertically to the deck. The ID of the pipe is about 1″. For some reason, Kubota practically made the clearance between the shafts and the pipes an interference fit. Then it made the shafts and pipes from steel, guaranteeing galling in wet or even humid weather. This was very bad engineering. In order to prevent galling with a fit like this, you really have to take the shafts out occasionally and put anti-seize or something on them.

An interference fit is what you have when you have to shove something in order to get it to go into something else. It means the OD of the inner thing is actually bigger than the ID of the outer thing.

Kubota didn’t even put grease fittings on these pipes. The wheels aren’t supposed to turn right or left, so I guess Kubota saw no need to call for grease. It might have prevented the galling.

The shafts have to move up and down in the pipes for adjustment purposes, but they are essentially welded in place. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench, penetrating oil, an air hammer, and a plain old big hammer, and nothing has moved the shafts at all.

I started drilling one of the shafts out. I ended up frying a nice Makita cordless drill after I got to what I believe is a 7/8″ bit. I now have a crude pipe I made myself, inside the deck pipe. I would guess I put 6 hours of work in, in the ruthless sun, bent over most of the time. Not smart.

I can now get a die grinder burr and a sawzall blade in there, so when I feel better, I plan to use both to weaken the remaining shell of the shaft until I can grab it with pliers, bend it, and pull it out.

Then I have to work on the other side.

I also broke one of the mower’s plastic fenders.

The mower came with a fuel problem. When I ran it on the left tank, it choked periodically. To fix this, I had to take the tank off and clean it out. The tank sits under a fender, and the fender is a bear to take off. I found I could loosen the fender and wiggle the tank out, but as I was doing this, the fender split.

I was wiggling it gently, but it looks like the sun had made the fender extremely brittle. The $200 fender, that is.

Now I have two new fenders coming. I could have glued the old fender together, but it would have looked awful, and the plastic would still be brittle. I should have everything put in order in about 10 days. Until then, I have to decide whether to run the mower with one fender and a bunch of stuff missing or fall back on the John Deere.

I have a flail mower on the way. I bit the bullet and bought one. I was concerned about the China tariff deal, not to mention inflation. Every time I have put off a big buy like this, the price has gone up before I gave in.

I need to be able to deal with my weeds, and the bush hog is not the right tool. It’s huge, it’s extremely dangerous, it cuts very crudely, and I just plain don’t like it. A flail mower should cut anything up to 1.5″ woody stems, and it should do it safely, leaving pretty fine clippings, closer to the ground than a bush hog.

The mower I got is a ditch mower. That means I can use hydraulics to extend it to the right of my tractor, and I can also tilt it up 90° for hedges or down quite a bit for ditches. The main thing I like about tilting it up is that it will give me access to the underside so I can work on it without lying on my back or something.

I keep thinking about buying a John Deere 4520 or 4720 tractor from the pre-emissions days. These are supposed to be very good machines, and they have considerably more grunt than my Kubota without being much larger. Maybe next year. Or maybe this year if inflation keeps hammering us.

Used tractor prices have plummeted because no one cares about the pandemic any more. People are going to work and making things and selling them, so getting a new tractor is easy, and that makes used ones less desirable.

I detest John Deere because of the way it treats customers, but I don’t have a lot of options unless I want a Buck Rogers post-emissions tractor. Which I don’t. JD should keep making parts for the 4520 and 4720 for at least another 15 years.

In around a week, I should have my flail mower, and by the end of the ensuing week, my zero-turn should be back together. Then I’ll have a couple of months of mowing before the grass and weeds go dormant, and then I can rest, during the months when the weather is cool and working on a lawnmower would actually be bearable.

Recovery Underway

God has been gracious to me, as always, and my little friend Marvin has come home from the hospital. He is in the piano room eating peanuts and french fries.

I did a lot of research while he was away. The vets could not figure out what the problem was. Offgassing from Teflon pans? Atherosclerosis? Nothing really fit.

He had a huge battery of tests. Everything but a CAT scan, and they still want to give him one in a couple of weeks. They didn’t find out what was making him ill, but we got a ton of good news, because all the tests looked great.

At some point in the process, I decided to look at bifenthrin, a “safe” pesticide I use in the house. It’s a synthetic pyrethroid. I believe the first pyrethroid was pyrethrum, a natural pesticide found in chrystanthemum blossoms. Google and correct me.

Bifenthrin is supposedly safe for pets and people, it kills a wide variety of tough bugs, and it has a residual effect that lasts for weeks or months. Sounds great. But some sources say it’s not all that safe. For example, if you spill it on your skin, it can cause numbness, which is a clear sign that it’s doing something significant. If you inhale sprayed bifenthrin, it acts as a respiratory irritant. It can cause tremors. It is a suspected human carcinogen. It kills mice and fish.

In birds, it can cause anorexia, lethargy, vomiting, and seizures. Exactly what Marvin had.

On the day Marv took sick, I sprayed a couch with bifenthrin to kill carpet beetles. I have sprayed bifenthrin in the house many times, but ordinarily, I just squirt around the baseboards. When I sprayed the couch, I had to shoot a good deal under each cushion and on the underside of the couch, so a lot evaporated into the air.

Bifenthrin is supposedly completely safe to birds when dry, although that isn’t true if they manage to lick something you’ve sprayed.

I also sprayed an insect growth inhibitor called hydroprene, but I couldn’t find any online source saying it was harmful to birds. The SDS says the inactive ingredient in the can is petroleum distillate, so, more or less, WD-40 or mineral spirits. The SDS says not to inhale it, but I think it means not to huff it. I’ve never heard anyone say it was necessary to be careful around petroleum distillates. Just the usual “well-ventilated area” language.

The remedy for inhalation is to give the victim fresh air and put him in a position that makes for comfortable breathing. It says to get medical help if he has difficulty breathing. If. Nothing about medical help otherwise. The manufacturer clearly is not very worried about the effects of incidental inhalation.

During these past few days, I have dreaded hearing from the animal hospital. I got mad at my wife because she used her phone to call me from across the house at a time when I was afraid the vet would call with bad news. I was very disturbed when I heard it ring. By God’s grace, today’s call from the vet was very encouraging. Marv looked as well as he had the day before when we left the hospital, and that meant he looked miles better than he did when we first took him to the ER. On the first day, I don’t think anyone there was optimistic about his survival. I think they expected the worst.

She was very concerned about Marv, as though he belonged to her. She said it would be great if we could drive up to see him, because he did better when we were around. To me, that showed she had a good attitude. She seemed to feel we were doing her a personal favor when we tried to help Marv. Of course, I was extremely concerned about him and eager to do whatever I could.

We made the trip to Gainesville, and before I saw Marv, I picked up an order of beef tallow fries at Steak ‘n’ Shake. I stole a couple, and they were delicious. Canola should be illegal. Anyway, the plan was to get Marv to eat and drink, and I knew fries were very close to a sure thing.

They brought him out, and he looked much better than he had the day before. There was a big difference. He was alert. The previous day, he started to fall asleep several times during our visit.

He was standing. He reacted to us. He groomed himself and performed parrot behaviors consistent with pleasant excitement.

He started peeling and eating fries. He drank a lot of water. He had to receive fluids intravenously during his stay, so drinking water was a sign of great improvement. To me, he seemed to be at about 75%. The day before, I would have said 40%.

His right leg has been weak since he got sick, but today he balanced on it and ate fries he held with his left foot.

Without prompting, he climbed out of his little travel cage and stood on top. That could never have happened two days ago.

The hospital people did something extremely considerate. They gave him a beautiful platter of goodies. Cheese, mashed potatoes, bird pellets, bird seed, zucchini, blueberries, broken cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, apples, and oranges. Everything cut in little pieces. I was very touched. Marv, however, only ate fries. Takes after me, I guess.

He talked a lot. He received a lot of petting and poking.

They decided to send him home with us, so now he’s here recovering. We put his cage in the nursery because it’s the only convenient room that can be shut off from the area where the bug-spray couch sits.

He has been shelling and eating his own peanuts. He wouldn’t do that at the hospital. I couldn’t even get him to finish a shelled peanut.

There is no reason to think the bug spray will harm him now, since it has been dry for several days, but the vets recommended keeping him away from the couch, and if I do what they say, I will sleep better. I am considering buying camicide, a pesticide people who raise birds use. Upstairs, bifenthrin should still be fine.

To be honest, I don’t think the vets helped him a lot with their knowledge and skill. I believe the main benefit was getting him hydration and an incubator. It may have helped to get him away from the house and the pesticide fumes, but I think they were long gone by the time he got sick. It looks like God provided the answer through me, not the vets.

I prayed and blessed a lot while Marv was away. I relied on a Bible verse that says those who believe will lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. For some reason, I thought Peter said this, but it was Yeshua himself, and he said “shall,” not “may.” And he didn’t say anything about limiting the sick to people.

I thought about the parable of the man who killed another man’s pet lamb. When David heard about it, he said the man deserved to be put to death, and if there had actually been such a man, David, who was a man after God’s own heart, would have had him killed. Clearly, God loves our pets, so there is no reason why he wouldn’t heal them.

From now on, Marv will be getting sun a few times a week. I will try to improve his diet. I’ll hang out with him more.

I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog prayed, but if you did, I truly appreciate it. God alone healed Marvin and brought him home to me.

VIP Service. Make that “VVIP”

Today my wife and I drove to Gainesville to take food to Marvin, my parrot friend who has been ill since night before last.

This morning, I got a bad report. The vet said Marv seemed somewhat worse off than the day before. I discussed the situation with her. We talked about ways to stimulate Marv’s appetite.

I asked what they had been feeding Marv, and she mentioned seeds, carrots, tomatoes, and greens.

Very discouraging. I had to tell her Marv would turn down those vegetables regardless of his condition. I expected this, however, because the vet is a lady, she works at a university, and women and university employees lean left. Leftists are very self-righteous about food, and they project their own beliefs onto others, sometimes including animals.

I mentioned the possibility of trying meat, which Marv loves. Unsurprisingly, the vet made a wild claim, saying African greys were essentially “vegan.”

This is an old wives’ tale. Parrots are omnivores. African greys mainly eat seeds in the wild, along with other plant parts, but they also eat bugs and carcasses. They have been seen swarming on dead animals.

I said Marv liked yogurt, but she said parrots were not set up to eat dairy foods. Other vets have specifically recommended yogurt for birds, but okay.

I made rice with butter and salt, and I stirred a couple of eggs into it. I shelled some roasted peanuts and put them in a bowl. Off we went to visit Marv.

I was praying and commanding healing and so on most of the way up.

I appreciate everything they’re trying to do for Marv, but I am concerned that their prejudices may harm him.

They put us in an exam room. While we waited for them to bring Marv out to us, I was tense. Yesterday morning, he was in a bad way, and they had said he was worse today. When he came out, he looked a lot better than he had the previous morning. He was standing. He was alert. He talked. He wasn’t throwing up or seizing. He didn’t have poop stuck to his feathers.

They left us with him, and I took a spoon and fed him a tablespoon or so of the rice mixture. He wasn’t voracious, but he ate willingly. I got him to eat a tiny bit of a peanut. They brought some peanut butter on a spoon, and he ate a small amount.

I got to rub him and pet him and tell him what a great bird he was and how he had been a blessing to me all of his life.

When they came in to check on us, they were surprised to hear him talking. I guess he had been quiet since we left yesterday. He asked for food, saying, “Here you go, Marv.” He thanked me with his thank you noise. He said “bird toy” a few times. I think this is his new name for me.

I had to pick him up because I needed to smell him. When birds get fungus in their crops, they smell sour. He smelled like a hamburger. When I put him back in the cage, he surprised me by climbing on top of it. He could not have done that yesterday morning.

I didn’t want to pick him up, because he was somewhat weak and wanted rest, but I thought it was important.

I anointed Marv’s beak with oil and laid hands on him. We prayed for his healing, and I told God I believed his promise. He has said that if we lay hands on the sick, they will recover.

We got a call maybe 90 minutes after we left, and the vet said he was still relatively energetic. He didn’t crash from exhaustion when we left.

I keep saying “he.” Marvin laid a surprise egg two years ago.

That’s the situation. We had lunch at PF Chang’s. The Gainesville location is excellent. Now we’re at home, and Marv is still receiving care.

They didn’t look at Marv’s poop until today. I persuaded them to do it. Ordinarily, it’s the first thing a vet does. We are waiting for results.

They shot an antibiotic into him yesterday or today. I can’t recall. I think they should have done that at the start, because it was unlikely to do harm and could have turned out to be a quick cure. But I’m not a vet, so I am guessing.

From the natural standpoint, things are bad, but not clearly dire. I am approaching the situation from the supernatural direction as much as possible.

They now think he could have been poisoned by fumes from nonstick cookware. The old wisdom was that it was safe around birds unless it burned, but now there is suspicion that it can do cumulative harm even if you use it correctly. I find it hard to believe it’s the problem. I wouldn’t expect this issue to come on suddenly, over a few short hours.

When you smoke every day for 60 years, you don’t wake up one day with COPD or a huge tumor. When you drink too much, you don’t develop cirrhosis in a day. The vet says Teflon causes lung burns. Well, surely if Marvin had large lung burns, we would have seen some kind of evidence earlier. Generally, when you hear about birds being killed by Teflon, it happens over a few minutes because someone left a pan on the stove.

We didn’t do anything extraordinary with Teflon the day Marv got sick.

As far as I know, a burn is an acute injury, so it doesn’t sound like it fits Marv.

They’re shooting in the dark, to be honest. They are checking every angle, hoping something pays off. I think Marv has some kind of infection or ate a ball of rat poison or something. We recently had a mouse intrusion, and the mice stole rat poison and moved it around the house. I believe we kept Marv away from it, but I could be wrong.

I sprayed a piece of furniture with a bug product, and although Marv was never close to it, I suppose it could have affected him. The active ingredient is harmless to birds, but the carrier may not be.

I hope my little pal comes home tomorrow, and that we are able to give him at least 20 more years of improved care. God is kind and forbearing, and if he loves me, surely he loves Marvin. I remember how angry he got at the man in the parable who killed a pet sheep.

If you prayed for Marv, thank you and may God bless you.

One More Chance, Please God

This is a tough day.

Marvin, my sweet little feathered buddy of 28 years, had some seizures last night. I had to hold him and consider the possibility that he was dying in my hands. Seizures can be caused by things that are reversible, like low calcium levels, but they can also be caused by worse things.

I did what I could for him last night, and he pepped up and started playing with his toys, but in the morning, he was weak, so I took him to the animal hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That is where he is now, having tests and receiving care. I have been praying and commanding the illness to go. I have been speaking blessings over Marvin.

My county is extremely conservative and full of Christians. Gainesville is different. A typical university town, it is a hotbed of white-hot socialism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, DeSantis Derangment Syndrom, imperialist feminism, perversion, wicca, and, presumably, antisemitism.

My wife and I got into the car with Marv, and of course, our son had to go, too. The people at the hospital took a long history and started work quickly. They were very nice to us.

I was highly distraught last night, and I was only a little less upset this morning. Having harm come to one of my pets has always been one of my worst fears. I lost my cockatoo, Maynard, 4 years ago, and it was very, very painful. Now Marv is having problems.

It’s terrible when something you have feared and fought to prevent for decades comes to pass.

I speak blessing over Marvin twice a day, and we include him in our daily prayers. I try not to do anything to open myself or my family to dangerous spirits. I think this is the best a human being can do.

When we left the hospital, my wife asked me if I had noticed something. She saw several women who helped us, including a veterinarian, and every single one had a huge septum ring hanging out of her nose.

She didn’t see the receptionist, who was an older woman. I believe she didn’t have a ring.

Anyway, it was very disturbing to be told that 80% of the women who helped us had these off-putting ornaments. They looked like they belonged to a cult. It really bothered me. I felt like I had just discovered that I was living in a horror movie.

A septum ring is supposed to be a way of expressing your individuality and your contempt for conformity, but in reality, nothing says you’re a conformist like a septum ring.

My son, true to form, blew out in his car seat, so my wife had to use the “family” restroom to clean him up. There was a women’s room and an everything room, but there was no men’s room. I suppose that was a deliberate insult.

My wife was hungry when we left, so we went to a nearby pizza place. It was a dirty little place with good reviews.

We had to stand to order, and then we filled our own drinks and waited for the food. When I got our drinks, I couldn’t find the straws. The lids had weird openings in them, much larger than would be needed for a straw. I realized the obvious, but hoping against hope, I asked where the straws were, and a young black man behind the counter told me they weren’t allowed to put them out where people could see them. He said, “It’s kind of weird.” I nodded and told him I understood.

While we were waiting for our food, a couple of big young ladies in long dresses came in and sat near us. The dresses were very similar. The kind of thing you would imagine Auntie Em and her friends to wear back in Kansas. I think they may be called prairie dresses.

The women were not good-looking, and they had big feet. They didn’t appear to be wearing brassieres. They had fairly large breasts that needed, but lacked, support. One of them was wearing what I would call gladiator sandals. They had no makeup on. One of them had sideburns, which I failed to notice at first. I thought she had just combed her hair down in front of her ears.

They looked bizarre, dressed so oddly and so similarly. Like they had just escaped from a Mormon commune.

Soon after they came in, my wife let me know they were both men.

This shocked me. Ordinarily, trans-whatevers are obvious. I wasn’t in the mood to be observant, and I guess the sagging breasts fooled me.

The smaller guy had a great big septum ring. I believe the other guy had one, too, but I’m not sure.

A feeling came over me. It said, “This world is lost.” I realized my family lived in a precious bubble. There are children of darkness where we live, but the Christian population is very large, and the wicked haven’t been able to take over. It’s an unusual place. Gainesville is more typical of America. Although it’s small, the university’s presence gives it a culture like a big city. Most Americans live in and around cities, and almost all cities are lost.

No men’s room. No straws unless you ask for them. A hog ring in almost every nose. Men proudly wafting around in frumpy cotton dresses with little or nothing underneath. This is my country now.

Importantly, such people control the university; a type of portal just about every American is required to pass through if he ever expects to be successful and accepted. Going to college has become like joining the Freemasons. It’s like becoming a Mormon in Utah. You don’t have to do it, but expect to be blackballed if you don’t.

American kids think they have to go to college, even if they’re going to become cops or Burger King managers, and nearly every college is controlled by perverts, socialists, witches, minority members who hate whites, antisemites, militant atheists, man-haters, America-slanderers, backers of Islamist terror, and every conceivable type of pagan. “You want your child to be a success? You have to give him to US first.”

It’s like putting your baby through the fire to Moloch, except the baby comes out alive with a diploma that entitles him to a fair shot at employment as a fungible cubicle occupant.

America is done. It is absolutely finished. It’s nice that Trump won, but it doesn’t mean the climate or the trend has changed. If the Democrats hadn’t put two vegetables in a row up against him, we would be looking at a fourth Obama term. America will probably elect a Democrat in 2028.

I told my wife we have no place in this world.

I had this feeling that our situation was like living in America while we were at war with Japan, supposedly in the Pacific, and suddenly noticing that people around us here were Japanese and looking forward to taking over.

I told her about the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

People have decided they don’t need God in order to have pleasant lives. Worse, they have decided God is an obstacle. They have decided he is evil and that the world will progress and suddenly make a great leap forward (to borrow a phrase) when the world is rid of Christians as well as Jews.

Somehow Muslims aren’t considered problematic, in spite of mutilating girls’ genitals with kitchen knives, beating women for going outside with their faces uncovered, and murdering and hypocritically raping homosexual men.

I don’t know why the people we saw bought septum rings, apart from conformism. Maybe one or two of them think they’re close to God, and adopting a signature adornment of the children of darkness was just error. But seeing so many of them made me feel as though I were in a horror movie, waiting for someone to send an attack signal through the rings and yank the wearers into battle by their noses. A huge swarm of nose-ringed Agent Smiths.

To say I felt left out was an understatement.

It’s normal for younger people to make the mistake of altering their dress and appearance to upset older people, but it is very strange to see so many of them choose exactly the same ornament, as though they were threatened with prison time if they didn’t comply. Back in the Sixties, young people made all kinds of ill-conceived fashion and grooming choices, but there was way more variety. There was no single accessory nearly everyone felt compelled to wear.

While I thought about these things, I thought about the way my prayers have changed. These days I keep saying, “Yeshua, please come back and rule the world.” I want to cavalry to come save us. The waters are rising around us, and I don’t know how we are supposed to carve out futures for ourselves here. I don’t want us to become like Christians in Rome under Nero and Domitian.

As I was thinking about these things, I started to feel great peace about Marvin. I want Marvin to come back home and spend more years with us, but on the other hand, this world is a very bad place, and if God has decided Marvin should not have to be here when things get worse, then that’s how it is. Even a bird should not have to suffer here more than is necessary.

In somewhat-related news, I heard from my aunt the other day. The one who has been so abusive, and whom I believe uses the stubborn unsold remains of my grandparent’s estates to enrich herself and her family. She called about selling an inconsequential piece of land.

She couldn’t have been nicer. She behaved as though she had never attacked and insulted me, and she clearly expected me to act as though it had never happened.

I was polite.

She wanted to know if I still had my wife, which was a jarring question.

Now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense. I think her has been married three times. I have met three wives. There may have been others for all I know. Adultery and divorce are like musical chairs in her area. In most places, you ask a man how his wife is doing. In Eastern Kentucky, you ask if he’s still married to her.

My wife will have to sign things in order for the lot to be sold. Ostensibly, this is how she came into the conversation. My aunt asked if she were here with me. In America, I think she meant.

She asked about children, and I told her we had a son. She asked for photos, so I sent a couple, and she said he was “the cutest baby,” which is actually true. She asked if she could forward the pictures to her daughter, which was fine by me.

Before she hung up, she said it was good talking to me.

That could be the Parkinson’s talking for all I know. She has admitted she has some dementia because of it, and maybe she doesn’t remember insulting me and telling me she was going to do whatever she wanted with my inheritance regardless of my wishes. Strange thing for a fiduciary to say.

She likes bragging about her family; people whose relationships with me she helped end permanently. She told me she had an enormous grandson who was being recruited by Harvard for football as a high school sophomore. Harvard actually does that, although Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships.

My aunt’s family has had the misfortune to fall under the spell of Catholicism, the quasi-pagan and dominant branch of nominal Christianity. Her daughter married a Catholic, and my aunt converted. The city where my cousin lives has several prominent Catholic high schools dedicated to producing pro athletes, which is an extremely perverse goal for a Christian organization.

I don’t believe or disbelieve her. I don’t know what the truth is. This is the same aunt who said her daughter was likely to become Miss Kentucky, which wasn’t anywhere near true. She also said her son had been accepted by the University of Michigan’s prestigious law school when it was actually the University of WEST Michigan, which is the single worst law school in America. He ended up going to the second-worst.

Maybe the boy really is being courted by Harvard. This is not a school known for good football teams, so it wouldn’t be that remarkable if a big, smart kid who was playing pretty well in the 10th grade seemed like a fine prospect. They can’t get really good athletes because they all go elsewhere.

My understanding is that his dad is an accomplished individual and a good family man.

It amazes me that any Christian allows his son to play high school or college football, and no Christian should be in the NFL. Football takes a toll on the body, it causes brain damage, most players don’t get rich, most who get rich lose their money, it develops negative character traits like aggression, competitiveness, materialism, and pride, and it subjects players to armies of aggressive sluts. Combine all this with the fact that college and NFL football only exist because of gambling, and it’s a very unwholesome picture.

I thought about the horrible atmosphere at Harvard. I would not be happy if Harvard wanted my son. I want him to have a business and investments, and I want him to have a wonderful Christian wife and Spirit-led friends. I don’t want him to be tormented and assimilated by sick, vicious freaks for three years and eight months at my great expense.

She said another grandson was getting degrees in anthrolopogy and archaeology. I said, “I guess he’ll be a professor.” I thought that sounded positive.

Try and imagine a field more worthless and anti-Christian than anthropology. And archaeology sounds like employer repellent to me.

I had to take anthropology as an elective while I was getting a physics major and a math minor, and I found the whole business contemptible. The professor taught us made-up, implausible, unclever theories from a thin paperback text, and my studies for the entire semester took up less than one day. The final was a multiple-choice test. I got an A for breathing. Physics took about that much work every week. Physics was so hard, math seemed like a gut major in comparison. I spent about 4 hours a week doing homework for multiple advanced math courses, and I put in several times that much work for physics.

These things I say are literally true. Even good physics students are often unable to finish their homework, and my math courses, while hard by college standards, at least generated homework people could reasonably be expected to complete in a few hours a week.

With math homework, you quit when you know the problems are solved. With physics, you quit so you can get three hours of sleep before showering and going to class. You hope everyone else did as badly as you did, and usually, they did.

At the University of Texas, as a grad student, I asked my quantum professor about a particularly hard problem he had given us. I found it so hard to finish the math, which, I believe, was a long string of vector operations that would be easy to fumble, I bought a program called Mathematica and made my computer do it. I didn’t know if the result was right. I felt panicked.

He told me he hadn’t been able to do the problem. He asked me what I had come up with. True story.

His CV says he got his master’s at Cambridge with first class honors. Cambridge is where Newton and Hawking worked. Couldn’t do the homework he assigned.

His name is Fitzgerald. He’s still there. I should fly out there and egg his house.

Anthropology is just gossip, like the Talmud or the theories aborigines made up around campfires to explain their universe to their children. Giving your life to it is an appalling waste. It’s an insult to God, like playing golf. It says you have no idea how valuable your time here is.

It’s like going to college to become a phrenologist.

It also challenges the creation story, which is factual.

I’ll give you an example of anthropological science. You can Google to find out the actual details so you can repeat them in a comment as though you’re smarter than I am, although I’m actually just too lazy to check. A theory named after someone who may be named Hanson or Hansen says that people close to the equator have dark skin and long limbs, while the opposite is true in colder regions. Well…Eskimos. Mongolians. Thais. Indonesians. Slavs. Scandinavians. Amazon Basin Indians. See if you can see how they violate the theory. That’s some great science, that is.

Archaeology is a legitimate field of study. My main problem with it is that every time shaky research tends to discredit the Bible, it is lauded as proof, and then years later, the research is always discredited, after the damage is done. And academics who have been shown up don’t make any effort to inform the public. People keep quoting their nonsense decades later as though it were fact.

By its very nature, archaeology is incomplete. We have only dug up a tiny fraction of what’s out there. But archaeologists love to draw firm conclusions based on fragmented evidence.

These fields are bad choices. You shouldn’t pay for your kids to throw away years of their lives so they can become Uber drivers or do data entry, which is where liberal arts people often end up unless they become academics and try to join the opposite sex. Or they go to law school.

My mother got a degree in social work, so she had to become a realtor. You know those people you end up talking to when you call Mastercard about a charge you don’t recognize? Liberal arts majors.

If you want to have a revealing conversation, get together with a bunch of college graduates at least 35 years old and ask them what their majors were and what they do for a living. See how many of those history majors became historians. See how many of those philosophy majors became professional philosophers.

I don’t know this grandson. His name was not familiar to me because my family’s interest in including me in anything dried up and fell off years ago.

The family I loved and treasured lives only in my memories. He must be my aunt’s son’s son. I don’t know his siblings’ names or how many of them there are. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. I hope he finds a career that pays well. We prayed for my aunt’s whole family last night.

College should serve some purpose, but I would estimate that for most kids, it does not. I think most college kids major in fecklessly-chosen dead-end fields. The lofty notion that learning for its own sake justifies college rings a little hollow when the learning can cost half a million dollars and leave you years older, penniless and in uncancellable debt, filling out applications at Marshall’s and Walmart.

Liberal arts degrees made little sense even before the Internet, but now you can stuff your head with all sorts of knowledge all day for nearly nothing, so why would you pay someone thousands to tell you what Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice were about? And then end up not reading them and cramming from Cliff’s Notes.

Before I gave up secular entertainment, I saw some clips from a movie called The Company Men. It’s about a company that built ships. The white collar employees weren’t brilliant naval architects and engineers. They were unremarkable people who did work anyone could do. Negotiation. Sales. Submitting TPS reports.

Future AI targets.

America’s manufacturing base collapsed. Nobody wanted to build ships in America. The company cut lots and lots and lots of jobs.

Ben Affleck played a young executive who made 6 figures, had a nice house the bank owned, drove a Boxster the bank owned, and belonged to a country club. He was cocky. He thought he was important and too valuable and just plain wonderful to fire. Then they canned him without warning, and after being rejected by a long list of potential employers, he ended up getting a pity job from his brother-in-law, a carpenter.

I watched this movie and thought, “What do you expect to happen when you get paid a ton of money to do a job anyone else can do? What do you expect to happen when you’re not remarkable, you got a liberal arts degree, and you never developed any actual skills or learned anything useful?”

If this were a real company, the people who had important skills and knowledge that couldn’t be picked up in a month by a random Circle K clerk would have kept their jobs to the bitter end. If the company had gone under, other companies would have gone after them. They wouldn’t have chased the sociology or art history majors.

A doctor can always find work. An accountant can always find work. A guy who writes conjecture-filled papers about Sumerian poetry is not so blessed.

To circle back around to the point, I don’t see how anthropology and mainstream archaeology could have any importance to a Christian. They promote all sorts of faulty anti-Christian notions, and to make it in these fields, you pretty much have to buddy up to people who hate your religion. I don’t think an informed Spirit-led Christian could want anything to do with these fields.

My cousin the lawyer is not Spirit-led. That is obvious. The most reasonable guess is that his son is far from God and never had a chance to get to know him. I have a feeling law school is in his future.

I feel extremely distant from my family. They live in a different universe. Nearly all of them are in real trouble, but they don’t know it. I wish I could help them.

When my dad died, I took his ashes to Kentucky to be buried. He had an astonishing testimony of conversion and reconciliation with God. At the sparsely-attended viewing, I told the whole story to my cousin the lawyer as well as his wife and another male cousin. Didn’t make a dent. My aunt wasn’t there, but I’m sure I told her the story by phone, and she only got worse after that. One cousin visited me for Christmas the following year, and I baptized her in my pool, so I have hope for her.

I have heard from the animal hospital, and at the time of the call, Marv was perking up. They had run a number of tests. Marv had eaten a little. They seem to expect him to make it through the night.

What a privilege it has been, owning that sweet little bird. I have been a miserable excuse for a caretaker. I hope God sends Marv home to me so I can do better and better every day.

Side Effects Looking a Lot Like Main Effects

I am not an anti-vaxxer. When Trump rushed vaccines to market in a demonstration of his extraordinary competence, I took one as soon as I could, not knowing it would later be banned because it caused fatal blood clots. I took 5 vaccines last year, for things like tetanus and the flu. I think vaccines are generally good. I only have concerns about vaccines reputable experts are concerned about. Like every single covid vaccine, for example.

My son has had something like 8 vaccines. I forget. I’m doing what is recommended, and I only apply three rules of my own: no covid shots, no mRNA, and no pincushion days in which he gets an extreme number of shots. I spread the shots out somewhat. The establishment claims there is no benefit to spreading vaccinations out, but it also says you should wear a mask on an airplane, where your chance of catching something is one in half a million. There is definitely no down side, and this is my son, not Anthony Fauci’s.

My covid rule is sound. I’m not sure any healthy person should ever have had a covid shot, but these days, I know that no one outside of high-risk groups should be injected. That excludes the young.

The vaccines unquestionably kill a certain number of people, young people are dying suddenly and inexplicably in unprecedented numbers, people who have decent credentials are concerned that the shots may cause cancer in some individuals, and we have learned that the mRNA shots were tainted from the start. On the other hand, low-risk people are extremely unlikely to have serious problems with covid. There is no good reason for them not to wait till the vaccine problems are eliminated beyond any dispute.

It appears the disease has become very mild. No one talks about it any more; we’re no longer scared, leftists nuts excluded. It also appears to be much less common than it once was, even though people have quit taking shots. I got it several times back when it was the hot new plague, but it has probably been two years since I’ve had any type of illness at all. Maybe longer. No covid. No colds. No flu. No nothing. I can’t remember the last time I was sick.

I just recalled something. About 16 months ago, beer started tasting off to me, and I thought I might have covid. But I didn’t get sick.

Covid is so unsensational these days, you can get covid and die from a gunshot wound, and they won’t even lie and call you a covid fatality. Like they would have a couple of years ago.

It seems pretty clear to me that many millions of people who contracted the flu and colds and so on were deliberately misdiagnosed as covid cases. I consider it a fact, because to believe otherwise would be to make unreasonable leaps of unsupported faith.

The flu ordinarily hits hundreds of millions of people per year, but the medical establishment would have us believe it nearly vanished during the covid years. The last sentence is not a conspiracy canard. Medical institutions that are hostile to conservatism publicly discuss the “mysterious” disappearance of influenza. You can see it on charts compiled by the government.

When covid was hot, the government made the mistake of publishing a PDF listing its diagnostic criteria. I downloaded it. Early on, there were no tests, and later, tests were very hard to come by, so guess what? Doctors were told that if patients had certain symptoms, they could be filed under covid. No tests required. The symptoms were consistent with the flu and other common respiratory disease.

For a long time, the vast majority of people were diagnosed without tests.

After tests became available, they were very unreliable. My wife and I traveled all over the world, and both of us caught covid on trips. We had to be tested before boarding planes. We always passed our tests and flew home sick. There was virtually no possibility anyone would be infected by us, staying abroad would have been extremely expensive, and I had an expensive, unoccupied home and two pets to look after.

When hundreds of millions of people were being tested over and over, and the tests were highly likely to result in false positives, of course there had to be many millions of false positives. Meanwhile, who was being tested for the flu? RSV? Pneumonia? Nobody. They almost never test for those things. Who gets a flu test? They just guess based on symptoms. So there was no real counterweight to offset false covid positives The false negatives could be offset to some degree by doctors who trusted symptoms enough to overrule test results.

If we gave two billion people tests for syphilis right now, and the tests gave false positives 20% of the time, we would have 400 million false positives. Coronavirus tests in the US alone have run into the billions.

Hospitals were paid a king’s ransom for every covid diagnosis. The payoffs could exceed a hundred grand for one patient. Covid diagnoses also bolstered the left’s hysterical covid propaganda, and the medical establishment unquestionably leans far to the left. They bolstered the power of leftist politicians who went so far as to put millions under house arrest. Politicians will support anything that gives them power. Finally, medical people were terrified of covid, just as people were terrified of AIDS before we found out it was just about impossible to get without sodomy or shooting up. There were powerful incentives to lie and boost the figures, and there were no negative consequences. In fact, society leaped on dissidents and whistleblowers and tore them apart.

The cowardly, intolerant, dishonest, greedy, selfish, cruel behavior of the human race during the pandemic stands out as one of the most disgraceful global phenomena ever to be recorded. We learned that ours is not a species with which you want to share a lifeboat.

Doctors admit there is no way, within the bounds of science, to explain the sudden disappearance of the flu. But there is a very plausible political explanation, and then there is Occam’s razor.

People who died from non-covid problems while suffering mild covid were called covid deaths. A local guy here was killed in a motorcycle crash, and his family got mad because he was labeled a covid death. Another man died from a heart attack and got listed. I’m sure many people who died from the flu, RSV, severe colds, pneumonia, bronchitis, strokes, all sorts of cardiac events, old age, and even car wrecks and muggings ended up on the covid list.

Yes, you can die from a cold, if you’re frail enough. It happens.

Having mild covid and dying from an unrelated cause used to be like dying in Chicago and then voting for Democrats. You were gone, you couldn’t fight back, but your name was still useful to the leftist machine. I’m surprised they didn’t claim Kobe Bryant for the covid list.

Maybe they did. How would we know? Maybe they sat down and entered numbers without bothering to provide identities and data.

To sum up, no coronavirus shots for my boy.

He had several shots last week, and yesterday, we made the mistake of having him vaccinated for rotavirus. This is a bug that causes something like norovirus, and it has killed babies through fever and dehydration.

I shouldn’t say we made a mistake, but we are experiencing consequences we did not expect, and we were not informed well in advance. The nice lady who dribbled the vaccine into our baby’s mouth said he might have diarrhea for a day or two. Given the usual state of his bowels, I’m not sure how we would tell the difference.

He was up most of last night. He had abdominal cramping. Got him up this morning, and he had a huge diaper blowout. Then more cramping. He spat up more than usual, so getting liquid into him was a chore.

“No big deal,” I thought, “How long can it last?” I checked. The answer: 7 days. Unless it lasts longer. In other words, no idea, except that it usually subsides in under a week.

Now my wife’s eyes are red. She hasn’t slept much at all. We are wondering how long this will last.

The rotavirus vaccines are interesting because they are not vaccines in the sense of the word the general public understands. When I think of vaccines, I think of shots that provide dead viruses or bits of virus DNA to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. Rotavirus vaccines are full of live viruses, so when you take the vaccine, you’re actually getting the disease. It’s milder than the form you would get if you sucked on a dirty ball at daycare, and it builds immunity, so it’s supposed to be worth it.

The viruses in the vaccine are weakened. I have no idea how you weaken a virus without killing it.

There is even better news: after your kid takes the vaccine, you can get rotavirus from him. It comes out in poop and spit. The vaccine lady told us not to kiss him on the mouth or we might get diarrhea. Neither of us comes from the kind of family where people kiss each other on the mouth or play spin the bottle with each other, so we figured we were safe. Not so. We have to be careful and wash our hands a lot.

Our son isn’t doing too bad. He seems a little tired from increased pooping. He is generally in good spirits.

It’s nice to see how he improves with age. As late as a week ago, he thought every inconvenience had to be met with top-volume screaming. I started to wonder if he was going to be that kid. The one no one but his parents can stand. Now things are getting better. I can tell he is trying not to cry.

He was having an unpleasant bowel movement this morning, and he restrained his cries. He even smiled at us while this was going on. I thought this was fantastic.

We live in a world where many adults live in a constant state of tantrum or tantrum readiness. It’s disgusting. They go off over nothing, and they can’t be placated because they don’t want to. They prefer the tantrum experience to normal life. They relish the screaming, vandalism, and violence. They look for reasons to start, and they reject efforts to calm them down. Calming down spoils their fun.

This is what happens when you enjoy tantrums more than getting along with people; when you look forward to having tantrums and you want them to last.

Emotional cultures produce this type of person. American blacks and Hispanics are notable for short tempers and tantrums in adults. It’s also a problem with many Southerners, although not as commonly. It’s worse among white trash; the type of people who steal each other’s yard tools. Italians also like screaming and yelling. They think being emotional is something to be proud of, when it’s really a major disgrace.

Containing your emotions is like using a toilet instead of filling your pants. If you can’t do it as an adult, you should be deeply ashamed. It doesn’t mean you have a big heart. It doesn’t mean you’re a free spirit. It means you’re a little closer to a monkey than everyone else.

Ding my door in a parking lot, and I will politely ask you to take responsibility. Ding the door of a person who thinks his emotions are always right, and he may have to be pulled off of you.

My son is developing a preference for self-restraint. What a relief. He won’t grow up like a family member of mine who thinks every slight is justification for taking cowardly revenge later. He won’t go through life like an ex-girlfriend who thinks she has to ruin your existence instead of moving on with life because you got smart and dumped her instead of fulfilling her shallow marital fantasies. He won’t want to join Antifa.

He won’t have to be handcuffed at an airport or Walmart because he has to hit everyone who won’t give him his way.

My sister the felon ran from a traffic stop and hit the cop who was talking to her because she has to have her way every second of her life. She can’t self-monitor or exercise any kind of restraint. My son is not headed that way.

I was concerned for him because he cried a lot, and it was partly because of my family history. My dad was somewhat sociopathic, and my sister is the full package. Both very abusive. Extremely selfish. Destructive to the people around them, not to mention themselves. My dad’s grandmother was a grudge-holding hellcat who ruled her husband’s house. My dad’s sister was a sociopath who beat her stepdaughter all the time for no reason. I thought there was some risk my son would inherit their problems.

Some people think nurture is everything and nature is nothing. They don’t think personality traits, talents, or intelligence run in families. Yeah, okay. Niels Bohr and his son both won Nobel Prizes, but okay. The Bernoulli family just happened to produce multiple great physicists and mathematicians. It was something in the water. Tall people have tall kids, but we’re not allowed to say low intelligence, anger problems, or poor impulse control run in families.

We are surrounded by demons we can’t see, and based on experience, many Christians believe some demons stick with families and spread and continue characteristic family curses like abnormal sexual desires, addictions, and even poverty. We know this is possible, because there were cursed families in the Bible.

I believe it’s true. I have often wondered if evil spirits are able to change the DNA of cursed families. They probably can. They are definitely able to affect the natural world. They cause diseases, so why shouldn’t they be able to code DNA for narcissism and malice? Why not perversion? Odd as it sounds, doctors say homosexuality, a curse that works against reproduction, runs in families.

We bless our son, out loud. I curse the spirits that want him. I tell him God will fill him with supernatural love, faith, peace, joy, revelation, and humility. I tell him he will be full of the Holy Spirit. I don’t want him to be like relatives who led destructive lives and harmed themselves and the people they should have loved and built up. I don’t want him to go to hell like my aunt.

As he changes and improves, our bond grows. As he screams less and gives us more positive feedback, we find we can spend more time interacting with him and less time trying to clean him and calm him down.

I started teaching him out of his crinkle books. These are washable fabric books full of pictures, and they make crinkly noises when babies play with them. We have one about farm animals. I told him we don’t like squirrels and we must shoot them on sight. I informed him that the pig was the king of animals, and I listed some of its many blessings. Ribs. Bacon. Pork rinds. Country ham. I told him horses make great jackets.

I don’t know how much of it he absorbed, but he followed right along as though he understood.

I hope the vaccine’s side effects vanish quickly. We were getting enough diaper blowouts before the vaccine. We don’t need any more. I want my son to be able to sleep. I don’t want him to be tormented by stomach cramps.

In two months, we get more vaccines. Before we do, I am going to do my own research. This time, we relied on the professionals, and we were caught flat-footed.

MORE

This is glorious. Can it be real? Donald Trump has torn down Joe Biden’s covid page, which falsely claimed coronavirus came from a natural source. It has been replaced with a page containing the most up-to-date, scientifically-sound theory, which is that the virus was man-made and accidentally released by incompetent CCP scientists in Wuhan, China.

I know the world is crumbling, but it’s nice to get an occasional glimpse of what it would be if it were really turning around.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.