Parallel, or Knotted Together?

It’s a beautiful day, and I feel fantastic, and I just had to have some more coffee and goof off, so I’m writing again.

Last night, our church had a guest speaker. No point in saying who he is, but he runs a megachurch.

I was working as an “armorbearer,” which means I wander around with an earpiece, aggravating people. I tell them to quit propping the fire doors open. If an armed criminal comes in and tries to take the offering, I stand on a chair and scream in a high-pitched voice until he goes away. Stuff like that.

The sermon didn’t get off to a great start. He told two jokes we had heard the previous week from another evangelist. I don’t think anyone told him that, but the crowd laughed nervously.

His message, as I understand it, was this: we are supposed to “release” angels to help us. He said he did this all the time, and it was how he got a huge church with rich tithers.

I am extremely leery of this stuff. To me, it borders on sorcery. I have read the entire Bible, and I can’t recall a single instance of a godly person commanding an angel, unless yelling at demons counts. The impression I get from angelic encounters in the Bible is that the angels are polite and helpful, but that they really don’t want us getting close. They get upset when we kneel and bow. They don’t offer to serve us. They make it clear that they serve only God. One supernatural visitor told Joshua he was not on Joshua’s side. He said he led God’s angelic army. That’s pretty blunt. Joshua was a very righteous person, and the visitor (probably Jesus, because he received worship) wanted him to understand that there was a difference between being on God’s side and being on Joshua’s side. In any case, he made it very clear that Joshua’s army and God’s army were different organizations.

The angels killed the Egyptians when Moses crossed the Red Sea (according to some), but Moses didn’t tell them what to do. Presumably, angels destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but they didn’t need Abraham and Lot to command them. The angel that heralded the conception of John the Baptist was downright cranky with Zechariah. He made him mute. The angels that appeared at the tomb of Jesus didn’t offer to do anything for the disciples. An angelic army helped David, but he did not get to talk to them.

Jesus told Peter that what he bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. Many Christians think this means we can “bind” and “loose” events and angels. But the Jews interpret it differently. Messianics say it only means Peter, like rabbis before him and the Popes that followed him, was given authority to decide what was right or wrong. So if he made a mistake with regard to doctrine, people who obeyed him were excused, because God would back him up.

That’s a troubling thought, because it would suggest that all of us should belong to the Catholic or Orthodox churches, with all of their problems and errors.

Anyway, the guy I heard last night said this gave him the authority to loose angels. I am not ready to accept that. I have heard another prominent preacher say the same basic thing, and I don’t like it. It’s like the saints; it reminds me of voodoo. You command (or ask) spirits other than God to do stuff for you.

On the other hand, asking God to send angels to do things for us is very scriptural. Jesus made it clear that he could do that. He said he could call for legions of angels to protect him, so presumably, there is nothing wrong with asking God to send angels to make things work out for you. God promised us angelic help in the 91st psalm.

So the message I got last night was this: don’t forget to ask God to send his angels to fight for you. That, I think, is safe. But you will never catch me telling an angel to do anything. It scares me to death. I guess it’s like calling the police. It’s okay to ask the dispatcher to send a car, but you can’t call the cops directly and order them to come to your house.

I think there would be big problems if angels had to listen to us and do what we told them. It would be like giving Somalia the hydrogen bomb.

Last night I started wondering what I would do, if my church got into serious heresy. Then I remembered what happened twenty years ago. My church made mistakes, and I quit, and in the end, I was the loser. I think this angel stuff is unstable dynamite in a truck without shocks, but I will not quit again.

Every church has error. You have to latch onto the best church you can find, and relax. Maybe sometimes you have to turn up your nose at something it offers. I’m not sure. How much faith are we supposed to put in our earthly authorities? Division is bad, but becoming a slave to the erroneous doctrines of men can be worse. What is the greater sin: dividing the church, or practicing idolatry in a church that has lost its way? The Bible says rebellion is as bad as witchcraft, which is idolatry. But does that include rebellion against a badly confused church, or does it only mean rebellion against God himself?

Bringing evil doctrine into a church can be rebellion, which makes things even less clear.

The big win I see here is that I have matured enough not to let something like this blow me off the deck of the boat. That’s more important than resolving nonessential issues of doctrine.

Change Your Hopes

The Dow is bellyflopping again. Is this going to be the week when liberals say, “Hey, we put an undistinguished junior Senator in the White House, and he turned out not to be God”?

I wish I had had the guts to day-trade over the last year. I’d be retiring to the Caymans. But a little voice inside me kept saying, “Al Qaeda could bomb the NYSE tomorrow morning.” Then, I thought, I’d be retiring to an appliance box next to the landfill.

Of course, that wouldn’t affect day traders, because they sell out every afternoon.

So maybe I’m just stupid.

No, now that I think about it, a bomb during the trading day would wipe out a trader, even if he sold out every afternoon.

Funny story. I used to day-trade. One day I bought a huge amount of Cascade Communications. It went up. My policy was to sell out at the end of the day, but I thought Cascade looked really good, so I changed my mind. This is something you never do, if you’re a day-trader. Then I changed my mind again, and I sold, and the sale went through about a minute and a half after the closing bell. That happens. Cascade was at about 64 dollars per share. I forget the figure. I sold at the peak.

Next day I went into the SOES trading place, and everyone was staring at me. Someone asked if I had sold Cascade after the bell. I said yes. They pointed out the current value. It was about 42. Bad news during the night.

An experience like that will make you stop thinking adult diapers are funny. Some poor soul ate my giant loss while I sat at home, cheerfully waiting for the Domino’s guy.

I had a lot of lucky experiences when I traded. I sold Iomega at something like 54, right before it plummeted and died. Once an Internet error resulted in me ending up with twice as much of a stock as I was legally allowed to buy, and I made $4000 in one day, before I knew what was wrong. Schwab never caught that one. I went shopping for a digital piano that afternoon.

I had something like that happen to me at the SOES joint, and by law, they had to confiscate the profit. They must have loved me.

I went a whole year with only one loss. I dropped about $600 on Microsoft. No one believes that story. My law school registrar believes it. I gave my profits to her.

Overall, my SOES experience was a bust, so I quit. I should have stuck it out. It’s a very easy way to make money, if you have the disposition for it. You sit at the computer every morning, and you get up and turn it off when you’ve made at least a few hundred dollars. Sometimes you eat it, but my experience was that it was possible to make it average out in my favor. I screwed things up by making changes that added stress to trading, and stress leads to bad trades. I could have fixed that. In fact, I did. The year I only had one loss came after my SOES days, but by then I was in law school.

The main problem with day-trading, apart from the fact that 99% of the people who try it will lose all of their money, is that you don’t do anything productive or interesting. You just move stock around. Nobody quits his boring job as a jazz singer so he can live his day-trading dream.

“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.” “What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.”
“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw. Then I punched Needle-Nosed Ned Ryerson in the belly.”

And if your Internet connection craps out, you pretty much have to shoot yourself in the head. Or scramble to sell your stocks over the phone, which is lots of fun, pushing one button at a time.

You have to be a real psycho to sell short. You can sell a stock at 1 and then have to buy it back at 100. Ouch. The losses are unlimited. If you buy Ford at 4, all you can lose is 4. Sell it short, and you have to worry that the next day, they’ll invent a car that runs on something inexhaustible, like mainstream media distortions.

What are we all going to do, if the inevitable bear market is finally here? I think I have some magic beans in a drawer somewhere. Maybe I can train Marv to lay golden eggs. I don’t think that works very well. You probably have to feed the bird gold to get gold out of it, so you come out behind.

Grass is edible, right?

Maybe I’ll set a thousand dollars aside and buy three or four houses with it in June. Or I could just trade mangoes for them. Or just walk in and take them, because no one wants them.

I shouldn’t be flippant. People are suffering, and their numbers will increase.

Up the road from me, someone built a condo complex. It is not a nice place. It’s in a comparatively seedy part of South Miami; the buildings around it are full of small apartments packed with college students. The condos aren’t much to look at.

They have a sign up. It says prices start at $775,000. Every time I see that, I wonder when they’re going to catch the misprint. These little places are probably a thousand square feet each, and the area is nothing special. They’re not close to downtown Miami, so the commute is bad. What were they smoking when they made that sign? My guess: they’ll sell for under $100,000 each. Well, my real guess is that they won’t sell at all. The builder will grit his teeth and hold onto them because he refuses to take a loss. Then the bank will get them. Then they’ll sit empty, because the bank is afraid to flood the market. After that, I think monkeys and possums move in and Denzel Washington walks by with a Bible in his backpack.

Miami is full of new construction. I can’t understand it. No one wants this stuff. Why build? My dad thinks people are building because they took loans, and they have to do something with the money.

Oddly, people in construction say they have no work. Can that be possible? The new construction proceeds at a snail’s pace. Maybe that means they’re putting up lots of buildings, but they’re not hiring enough workers.

Pretty soon American bricklayers will be standing in the parking lots at Home Depots in Mexico.

Maybe people are building because they think they timed the bottom of the market. Talk about blood sport. It’s like jumping out of a burning building, only to see the firemen move the airbag.

I will be praying for America today. I’ll pray we turn this around through faith and obedience. Misfortune is only misfortune if you don’t profit from it. We could reap a harvest of joy and blessings from this mess. If the only help God gave us was in the form of prosperity, we wouldn’t benefit at all in the long run. Fleeting blessings are nice, but lasting ones are better.

If you’re taking a beating today, be encouraged. Nothing can hurt you if you’re in God’s will. Things that look like defeats will turn out to be victories. It may not be easy to feel blessed when things look bad, but that doesn’t mean the blessings aren’t there. God can throw you off a bridge onto the deck of a yacht. He can force you out of your job the day before a disgruntled employee shoots everyone in the place. He can drive you to trade your mansion for a shack with a chest full of diamonds buried in the front yard. He makes things work out.

Still, I think I’ll quit refreshing the page with the Dow Jones average on it.

Sorry

Should have posted these sooner.

From Heather:

Need prayers for my mom, Penny. We got a call from the gyno-oncologist today and there was a lesion on her pap last week. She has to have blood work today and then a PETScan next Tuesday. Please ask the Lord to cleanse this cancer from her body.
I need you to know that my grandmother was treated with a synthetic hormone called DES while she was pregnant with my mom. DES was taken off the market in 1971 because it causes cancer. Many of you know that my grandmother did die of breast cancer. Somewhere along the way in the daily business of life, we forgot about the DES diagnosis until Penny was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Penny NEVER had the venereal warts that have been advertised to cause the cervical cancer. Nor was she promiscuous-she has been celibate since her divorce, because of her deep and abiding faith in God.
Paedric and I need her in our lives and need God to cleanse this cancer from her body.

This next one is about some babies that disappeared in Haiti. I would assume you can find out all about it at Mercy and Sharing. Philanthropist Susie Krabacher has been going nuts over this. Evidently, most of the babies have turned up. Reader Cindy says:

Steve,

Most of our prayers have been answered. 30 of the 32 missing children from the abandoned baby unit have been locate. Keep praying for the two who are still missing.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_14298637

Thanks
Cindy

I don’t know where my brain was when I wandered off without posting these, but there you go.

Not by Sight

Pizza, pizza, pizza.

I keep thinking about it.

I have my recipes fixed up, so I no longer have to make pizza every day. I used to make it every day because I wanted to eat it. These days, it’s just puzzle drive. But my gut doesn’t know the difference, so I wanted it to end. I haven’t put on weight, but it made me nervous anyway.

I have a burning urge to buy a defunct pizzeria, but I am trying to squelch it. Do I really want to work sixty hours a week, dealing with the public? Ack. That’s not an inviting prospect. I like the idea of squashing all competitors and becoming the pizza king of the Southeast, but I would have no time for myself. No tool time. No piano. No cornet. No music theory. No writing, period. Leave that stuff for the next life, because you can’t do it here AND run a pizzeria. God gave me some natural gifts, and I would have to abandon all of them, except the ability to make good food. It would be like cutting my legs off. I’d have to say goodbye to big parts of me.

I would much rather write. I got a couple of offers to write Christian books, but the people involved have not followed through. My pastor is just too busy to work on the book he and I were doing, and the other guy–the former addict turned rehab director–just wandered off. This is one of the frustrating things about Christianity. People start things they don’t finish. Even Paul did it. He started to travel to Asia Minor to spread the gospel, and the Holy Spirit put the kibosh on it, so he had to go somewhere else.

Another frustrating thing about writing for God is that you need a divine spark. You can’t just decide to write a book. God has to be in it. He has to give you the concept. Otherwise, it’s just you, doing what you think is right, without his guidance, approval, and favor. It’s not like being a Christian air conditioner repairman or a Christian car salesman. Those people just go from deal to deal without pausing. When someone comes in and asks to look at a used Taurus, you don’t have to get down on your knees and ask if it’s God’s will that you sell a car. The founder of Chick-fil-a is a Christian. I very much doubt that he requires his employees to pray before they agree to take people’s orders.

By the way, that company proves what God can do for you, if you’re receptive. I can’t understand why anyone would eat at Chick-fil-a, but they do. The food is ridiculous. A bland fried cutlet on a damp hamburger bun. Come on. How could that work? But it did, even though they refuse to serve on Sunday.

I remember seeing my first Chick-fil-a, years ago, in a mall. I thought, “Man, those people are idiots. That will never work.”

People said the same thing about the ark. “Water from the sky? Are you crazy? That will never happen. And what do you know about naval architecture, pops? Nothing, that’s what. I’m going to go home and sacrifice goats to Baal and make fun of you.”

I’ve been reading about The Book of Eli. It’s a big hit. Guess what that means? More Christian movies in a year or so. Almost all will be bad. Almost all will be packed with wrongness. Maybe two or three genuinely anointed films will squeeze out while the window is open. Is that God’s plan? Hard to say. It’s obvious, and God specializes in subtlety and unpredictability.

I read about Gary Whitta, the screenwriter. Judging by what I read, he’s not a Christian. Or maybe he is, but he’s not hardcore. He says he doesn’t think The Book of Eli is a Christian movie. He’s a video game expert. Can you believe that? But he wrote a movie that is extremely consistent with principles of charismatic Christianity, which non-Christians and even non-charismatics know almost nothing about. A mainstream Baptist or Catholic could never have the same understanding of this movie that a charismatic can have. Even if they understood, they wouldn’t agree with it. In fact, this morning I read a review by a well-known Christian blogger, and she clearly had no idea what the movie was about. It might as well have been two hours of quantum mechanics explained in Navajo.

The non-charismatic take appears to be this: God tells a guy to preserve the Bible, and God takes care of him while he does it, but there is a lot of mean violence, and there are dirty words, and the stuff that happens is not very plausible, so why are people going to this movie? That’s way off. If you’re worried about the movie’s premises making sense, you missed the whole point. For that matter, when you watch any movie, it’s generally a bad idea to let things like that bother you. Imagine trying to enjoy Bugs Bunny with an attitude like that. “Rabbits can’t talk! I want my money back!” Forget the Wizard of Oz. Forget Star Wars.

It’s kind of dangerous to start thinking God is sending you messages no one else can see. On the other hand, he does it all the time. The psalms are full of things no one could fully understand until after the crucifixion and the events in the Upper Room. Jesus spoke parables to ordinary people, and they didn’t understand, but the disciples got the true meanings. You don’t want to become a nut who thinks his toaster is commanding him to do stuff for God, but encrypted messages have been a big part of worshiping Jehovah since the dawn of history. He gave Nebuchadnezzar dreams he couldn’t understand. He wrote an incomprehensible message on the wall in Babylon. This is just how God is. It’s part of his modus operandi.

If you think God doesn’t speak in riddles, explain Ezekiel and the Revelation to me. Good luck with that.

Yesterday I heard a message from Perry Stone. He reminded listeners that Jesus predicted that many would be offended before his return. I understand “offense” to mean anger or strong disagreement aimed at God or the church. The Book of Eli may well provoke a lot of offense. Many charismatics are thrilled, and we’re saying, “We get it.” Some non-charismatics seem upset by the violence, and they think the movie is shallow. Unbelievers are just mad all the time, whenever Christianity makes it into a movie theater; they don’t need a particular reason. People like me will say, “This is what real Christianity is like. This is what walking by faith is.” Some non-charismatics will say, “Christianity is not about hitting people with swords and talking dirty!”, because they can’t comprehend the movie, and they won’t understand what we’re saying.

We’re seeing all sorts of offense already. Satan turns good into evil, in people’s minds. The church is under heavy persecution for opposing homosexuality. Millions are offended by our defense of God’s will. Suddenly, people who believe the Bible are bigots. We’re also under attack for teaching our kids that God created us. Suddenly, real Christians are ignorant. Faith equals rejection of logic. We’re anti-knowledge! We want to break into pharmacies and destroy the antibiotics. We want to smash all the computers. Evil! Evil! Christians are a plague!

One of the most plausible premises of The Book of Eli was that after the nuclear holocaust, people burned Bibles, claiming religion had caused the war. I find that completely believable. To an unbeliever, Christianity is just as silly and evil as wahhabist Islam. That’s a classic type of offense. The ancient Romans exemplified it.

This movie will probably be a powerful vehicle for offense. It will be a sword that divides. Oh, well. God took care of the fictional Eli, and he will take care of real Christians, too. People will attack us, but if you think about it, the longest any Christian can suffer here is about a hundred years, while God’s postmortem judgment lasts forever. We’re on the sweet side of this conflict, even if that isn’t obvious at the moment.

Inevitable

It never ends.

Tonight I’ll be making pizza for dinner.

The other day, I realized my quest for small pans was not really necessary. You can make great rectangular pizza in a pan bigger than the pie. So tonight I’m going to make a 9 x 6 pizza, which is really the perfect size for a single diner. I want to see how it comes out. It will have a slightly higher crust-to-cheese ratio than a bigger pizza.

I also want to try putting cheese directly on the dough. Some northern pizzerias do that. But I don’t want to do it their way. They put mozzarella slices on the dough and then pour sauce on them. I want to put sliced cheese on the dough, add sauce, and then apply more cheese. The idea of sauce with nothing over it seems wrong to me.

This should be a marvelous pie. The cooking technique and other details are polished to the point where I can’t do much better.

My church has everybody on a 40-day project. Some are fasting every day. Some are doing a Daniel fast. I set aside one mid-day hour for prayer every day, and every Monday, I fast until six p.m. So when dinner time comes tonight, I think I’ll be in the right frame of mind.

There are so many things you can do to pizza, beyond what I’ve done. You can add preferments (stuff fermented in advance) to the dough. You can keep the dough several days to let it age. You can buy expensive yeast. None of that seems worth messing with. I admit, sourdough would be a nice option, but other than that, I can’t imagine anything making my pizza better. It’s that good.

Most cooks like to investigate every option and go through endless ingredients. They like to consult the foodies and crib from TV. That has never interested me. If you know what you’re doing, you can take three or four ingredients, use them correctly, and make something that will drive people wild. If you can’t make a dynamite dinner for four for $20, you have no business fooling with expensive ingredients, fancy theories, and foodies. They won’t help.

This is one reason I love Cuban food and Southern food. A Cuban joint can sell the best Cuban dinner on earth for ten bucks plus tip and make a profit. The meat Southern cooks love best is so cheap, it’s almost free. There is nothing wrong with taking the fancy route when it’s justified, but most people do it not because they’re enlightened, but because they can’t compete without crutches.

What do biscuits and gravy cost? Pennies a serving. How many people can do it right? Very few. I have never had good biscuits and gravy in a restaurant, but I make them at home, over and over. In a Southern breakfast, it’s better than the vast majority of $75 meals you can buy in Miami.

I can pay 99¢ per pound for tough pork and make wonderful barbecue. I can get ham hocks for nearly nothing. When it comes to food, “good” and “expensive” and “complicated” are things that have little relationship to each other.

Food is like anything else. There are sheep who think external trappings and jargon are what count, and then there are people who actually know what they’re doing.

I have to decide whether to have Stanislaus or Cento tomatoes on the pizza. I’m almost out of Cento. I don’t think I have enough for a pie. And it’s raining.

Stanislaus!

I am so grateful for the success I’ve had. Even if I never cook professionally, it is extremely satisfying.

While Waiting to Whack Satan

Last week, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Then a couple of days later, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Today, just to mix it up and avoid monotony, I did the following: I made the best pizza I have ever eaten.

I’m actually freaked out, it’s so good. Not only is this the best pizza I have ever eaten; I did not realize it was possible for pizza to be this good. I know I sound like a nut when I say this, but I am genuinely shaken.

Funniest part: the pizza was mangled. I was lazy when I detached it from the pan to put it on the stone, and I put a hole in it. Then when I took it off the stone, an entire side tore off. I stuck all the pieces on my serving pan and ate it anyway. The torn-up, crusty pieces may have been the best parts.

The crust…

I am trying to describe it. Airy. Hot. Yeasty. Crisp on the edges. Crunchy on the bottom. Perfectly browned. Full of the buttery taste of cheap olive oil.

It got a tiny bit soggy under the cheese, and that actually made it BETTER.

I altered my usual cheese bill a little. What a change. My cheese is now unbelievably stretchy. Just sour enough to be interesting. Bland enough to work with the sauce instead of fighting it. Highly resistant to browning, but nicely crunchy at the very edges.

The sauce…I got lazy and used the Cento San Marzano tomatoes suggested by reader HTRN, all by themselves. I drained off the puree to make the flavor stronger. I was afraid they would be too weak, but the buttery cheese and yeasty crust combined perfectly with the comparatively mild sauce. I’m sure Stanislaus would have been just as good, in its own way, but this was shocking.

Let’s see. A pie has 12 ounces of cheese in it. That’s about $1.75, at Costco prices. That is not excessive. I can put that in a pizza for two people and charge enough to cover the cost. Not only would people line up to buy this stuff; they would trade their children for it. I would. Trade other people’s children for this pizza, I mean. But then I would also trade them for a glass of water.

It’s so good, I am worried about posting the changes I made. No one will use them anyway, and they are suddenly starting to look like trade secrets.

Pizza is a wonderful thing. If you open an ordinary restaurant, you don’t have to make good food, but you have to do a lot of other things. You have to pick a good location. You have to be nice to customers. You have to have great service. With pizza, quality is all that matters. If it’s good, people will do whatever it takes to get it. They’ll rappel up a cliff, to the worst location on earth. You can slap them when they order and make them pay with Burmese currency. They won’t care.

I thought I would go crazy and eat the whole pie, but I quit. When food is this amazing, you have a burning desire to eat it, but once you have a reasonable amount, you’re so satisfied, you don’t have to keep cramming it in.

This has to be from God. HAS to be. I could not do this.

Now I have to go put Shout on my shirt.

I Live the Dream

I have this pizza thing totally figured out.

Today I made a pie, and I made adjustments to make sure the crust was cooked correctly. It worked great, although I didn’t time it quite right.

Here’s what I made. First the whole pie.

Now the crust. Those indentations are from my fingers. I made them intentionally.

I made the sauce with a 50/50 mix of Stanislaus Saporito and Cento San Marzano tomatoes (no puree included), and it was excellent, but truthfully, I think either product is better alone than with the other. You gain some of each product’s strengths, but you also lose some.

As for the crust, I rotated the pan once while it was cooking on the bottom rack. I had a hot stone on an upper rack. After nine minutes, I moved the stone to the lower rack (turned out to be unnecessary) and put the pie on it. I left the pie there for two minutes and yanked it. The crust was crisper than a crust finished in the pan, and it was darker.

Oddly, pizza crust always looks more done in photos than it is in real life. This crust was just barely darker than I would have liked; I should have pulled it after one minute on the stone. But it wasn’t brown, the way it looks in the pictures.

You don’t really need a pan with steep sides to do this. The edges that rested against the pan are good, but the edge that stood on its own was also good, in a different way.

If you do this, make sure the stone is hot before you put the pie in the oven.

The reason I moved the stone to the lower rack is that I was afraid it would cool when the pizza hit it, and I wanted it over the heat. But the stone held more than enough heat to get the job done.

By the grace of the good Lord, I have utterly defeated Sicilian pizza. Now I have to find something to do with the rest of my life.

Someone Slipped Up

In pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, there is a thing called “walking by faith.” A famous verse says, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” We also refer to “the sword of the Spirit.” And we say that when we receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit, it leads to God writing his law on our hearts, so we will obey him in a very direct way, instead of relying chiefly on our interpretation of written law. We also believe the Holy Spirit makes the Bible comprehensible to us, as God permits (he doesn’t want the entire mystery to be revealed yet, so some things are withheld). A person who doesn’t have the Holy Spirit whispering revelation into his ear might as well be blind, when he tries to understand scripture. Your mind won’t get you there, because the Bible was written to be impenetrable to earthly reasoning. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hard you try.

Nobody outside the church understands any of this stuff. It’s like Chinese to them (unless they’re Chinese), because you have to live it to understand it. You can’t explain sunlight to someone who lives in a mine.

The Book of Eli appears to have been written by a person who understands these things. Either he’s a Christian, or God handed him this understanding for some divine purpose. Sometimes the Holy Spirit acts through unbelievers or people who are at odds with God, as he did through Caiaphas, the high priest during the time of Jesus. Caiaphas prophesied, even as he was persecuting the Messiah.

The problem with writing about the movie is that I can’t tell you much about it without ruining it for you. This is a movie which is very sensitive to spoilers.

I can say this much: it’s about a post-apocalyptic world, in which only one copy of the Bible is known to exist. A man finds the Bible, and he believes God has assigned him to carry it through a hostile world, to a chosen destination. He encounters a villain who wants the Bible, because the villain knows it can be used to control people. If you can convince people a command came from God, you can make them obey it.

While I watched, my impression was that God had authored this movie in order to reach out to people, to bring about revival. But I’m not sure that’s right. If you’re not a Spirit-baptized believer, you can’t identify with the truths the movie presents. It won’t resonate with you the way it did me. Or if it does, it will be for a different reason. If it doesn’t resonate, it won’t draw you to God, so it won’t be much of an evangelizing tool.

I’m certain of this: it will strengthen anyone who knows what it means to walk by faith. It will confirm what you think God has been telling you. You’ll look at this Hollywood-made movie, created by worldly people in order to turn a profit, and you’ll realize it could only have happened if God had brought it about.

Throughout the Bible, God tells us he will order our steps. He will light our paths. He will give us assignments, and if we take them up and try to carry them out, he will see to it that we get where he wants us to go. He will make us succeed, even when it looks like we’ve failed. He cannot be stopped, no matter how bad things may look.

It also gives a glimpse of what life in the Tribulation may be like, when nearly all believers and Jews are gone, and there is little to restrain Satan’s hatred or God’s wrath. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah tells us God withholds judgment because of the prayers of the faithful. What happens when those aren’t in place? Look at Burma for your answer.

If you’re a Spirit-filled believer, you’ll love this movie. You will see God’s hand and hear his voice in it. If you’re not a believer, you’ll still enjoy the violence and the interesting story.

There is some foul language in the film. That’s about the worst thing I can say about it. Other than that, it’s pretty safe. I highly recommend it. It will restore your faith that God is in charge of this increasingly secular world.

One Performed & One in the Works

I just saw The Book of Eli with my prayer group. I was shaken when I left. No movie has ever affected me so much. I can’t recall seeing another movie that demonstrated an insider’s understanding of Spirit-filled Christianity. Movies generally prove that the people who made them know virtually nothing about Jesus and Christians. It’s like watching Amos and Andy to learn about black people.

I don’t know if the screenwriter is a Christian, but however that script materialized, it is as though a very serious charismatic wrote it.

Unfortunately, I have not eaten today, so I can’t write about the movie until I make what I expect to be the finest pizza in the universe. I’m going to mix San Marzano tomatoes with Stanislaus sauce, and I’m going to put the pie on a hot stone for a minute or two after it bakes. If my understanding of the physics is right, this will be a pizza that has no equal. Hope it works.

The Summit is in Sight

The Sicilian I made was beyond description, and it was STILL flawed. I don’t know what to make of it.

I tried Cento San Marzano tomatoes on one half and Stanislaus Saporito on the other. I used a heavy dose of Costco cheese (13 ounces on 9 x 12). I baked it on my cheap, thin GFS cookie sheet, on the bottom rack.

This time, instead of forcing the tomatoes to stand on their own, I added sugar and white vinegar, just as I do to my regular sauce. Last time, with the fake San Marzanos, I held back the sugar and vinegar, because the tomatoes were touted as superior and fit to be served with only salt, pepper, and oregano.

This pie is now the best pizza I’ve ever eaten, beating the mark set by a pie I made earlier in the week. The heavy cheese, more than the sauce, made the difference. That Costco cheese is pure magic. I think elves make it. It brings out the best in the sauce and crust. It melts beautifully. It’s stretchy. It’s a pretty, uniform white. Can’t beat it.

The tomatoes were surprisingly good. If I am tasting what I’m supposed to be tasting, San Marzanos have a strange and satisfying aftertaste that goes perfectly with cheese and pizza crust. It adds a dimension to the pizza. Still, they’re a little weak. If I were making this again, I’d just use the tomatoes and dump the puree that comes in the can with them. As it was, I used very little of it. I suppose a real psycho would reduce the sauce.

The extra punch of the Saporito makes it better than the San Marzanos, but I would be very content to save the driving distance and use Cento tomatoes instead of driving all the way to Gordon Food Service. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say Stanislaus Saporito is 15% better.

I learned something new about baking Sicilian. You need to rotate the pie, just like they do in pizzerias. Until now, they’ve been pretty uniform on the bottom, but this one was a little off. From now on, I’ll give them 10 minutes, with a turn at 5. No, 7. The first two minutes probably don’t do anything.

Another thing I did to make it brown better: before I slid it in, I opened the oven door and let it cool until the bottom element turned on. I waited until it was red hot to put the pizza in. That way, I was sure I’d get a lot of radiant heat on the bottom of the pan.

I’m positive a disposable aluminum pan is the best thing you can use for Sicilian, but I don’t plan to try it any time soon. I’m thinking I might start using a flat aluminum cookie sheet. Aluminum carries and distributes heat better than steel, and tonight I noticed that the unsupported side of the pizza, in the middle of the pan, was very good. It didn’t have the fried nature of the sides that were supported, but it was browned more. That’s acceptable. To make good Sicilian at 550° in a home oven without a lot of aggravation and tricks, you need a pan that will get hot really fast and spread the heat well.

If there is better pizza than this anywhere on earth, I have yet to encounter it. I am astonished by it. I guess I could let the dough poof up a little more, or I could make a sourdough or something, but there is such a thing as gilding the lily.

I think I’m done making thin pizza. I love it, but it can’t compare to this stuff.

I’ll give you the sauce recipe.

INGREDIENTS

4 ounces Cento San Marzano tomatoes (real ones), beaten to a puree
1 teaspoon light olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sugar
generous sprinkle of salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dry oregano
1/2-1 teaspoon white vinegar

That’s all you need to know.

Now I have to throw out half the pie. I should be arrested for defacing art.

I’m convinced God gives me recipes for a reason. Food this good, cooked by someone as ignorant as I am, can’t be a pointless accident. But what’s the purpose?

Joseph was Better at This

I had the funniest dream this morning, not long before I got up.

I was in an old house that had been converted into a school. A little girl was in a room on the second floor. She was a demon-worshiper. She believed it was possible to be a Christian and worship other “gods” and benefit from all of it.

She was giving a presentation to her class, about the ways she worshiped this “god” and that one. She had colorful costumes, and she wore a different one for each demon. Each one required different rituals, and she demonstrated them, throwing things into bowls and so on.

Her teacher and I were downstairs, and we were pretty disturbed. We noticed that the ceiling was bulging down toward us, from the classroom above. Something extremely heavy was in that room. The pressure of its weight made a circular bulge in the ceiling. It was some sort of spirit, sitting in the room among the kids. They couldn’t see it.

We went up the stairs to help this girl. A black man was with us. I guess he worked with the teacher. We were going to make this kid understand that you can’t be a Christian AND a demon-worshiper. If you have even one other god, you’re not a Christian. Or you’re a Christian, but you’re going to have terrible problems.

When we got in the room, everyone was gone except the girl. She was dressed normally. She was unconscious, but she was standing in a far corner, facing the wall.

While we were there, food was served. It was chicken that had been fried in breading and then covered with sauce. There was rice under it. Someone asked me how it was, and I said it was okay, but the rice was a little overcooked.

When I woke up, I tried to figure out whether this dream meant anything. I prayed for an answer. I have never had a dream that turned out to be a message from God, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Here is what I came up with. The room is Haiti. The girl represents Haitians who worship demons yet think they’re also Catholic or other types of Christians. The problem with the ceiling is a problem with the rock under the island. It’s the reason they have earthquakes. The presence of the demons–their spiritual “weight”–causes it.

People who go to Haiti to provide spiritual guidance will have their physical needs met in abundance. That’s the food. There was nothing in the dream that I could apply to humanitarian aid.

Is this right? I can’t even guess. Maybe I just dreamed about a confused little girl.

The teacher was attractive. I don’t know her in real life. I don’t know the black man. He didn’t seem like a Haitian, although many Haitian-Americans have no accent.

I can only recall one instance of a dream that had application to the future. My friend Ivette gave me a Cohiba Esplendido, from Cuba. That part had already happened, for real. In the dream, I smoked it, and it had a wonderful flavor like cloves. Later, when I smoked the actual cigar, it had that same flavor, only with much less intensity. That was extremely odd. I had never had a cigar that tasted anything like cloves, but some Cubans have that flavor.

That was a pretty stupid dream, I admit. But it came true. And it’s all I have to offer.

My cornet arrived last night. It’s incredible. It’s a professional-quality horn, and it’s essentially new, even though it was made the year I was born. It has had a couple of minor dents repaired, and the seller thought they probably came from being bounced around in the case, but that’s it. Other than that, there isn’t a scratch on it. You could put this thing in a store and claim it was made last month, and no one would know the difference.

It’s too bad pianos aren’t like brass instruments. You can pick up the brass equivalent of a nearly new Steinway for under $500, because so many people buy horns and quit using them almost immediately. I paid $150. I’m sure this thing would cost at least a grand, new.

Now, if only I could play it.

I have practiced my embouchure for two days. I can go about fifteen minutes without fainting or losing my mind. I figure that’s enough. When you’re working a muscle and building a callus, it does no good to overdo it. That’s what I tell myself, because fifteen minutes are all I can stand at this point. I can make the mouthpiece do a few things, but the horn sounds like a cow with the scours.

My dad says I ought to be able to make a sound that isn’t horrifying within a week or so.

That’s all I have for now. I’m just enjoying my coffee and relaxing.

Smell That Fresh Air!

This is an amazing day.

Steady readers will recall the post I put up at the end of August, announcing that after a fast, I found that I had been supernaturally delivered from compulsive overeating. It had been a problem for me all my life. It wasn’t one of the issues to which the fast was dedicated, but afterward, I found I didn’t feel the overpowering urge to stuff myself. I lost 20 pounds, pretty effortlessly.

That has stayed with me over time. The holidays worried me, and after that I got sick, and I spoiled myself. The illness dragged on interminably, and I was afraid that when it was over, I’d be huge. I still have little traces of symptoms. But today I got on the scale, and my gigantic weight gain amounts to 1.5 pounds. And now that the symptoms are virtually gone, I’m back on my routine, so I expect progress to continue.

I still can’t believe God would do something this nice for me. This is just as miraculous as being healed of cancer, even if it’s not as dramatic. I feel like I’ve been freed from a slavemaster. And in my opinion, I have. Either God increased my discipline throught the Holy Spirit, or he drove off something evil that was goading me.

No one cares. I know. No one wants to hear about a guy whose big miracle is a drop from a 36″ waist to 33″. But if you’re fat, and this happens to you, believe me, you’ll be as amazed and grateful as I am. You won’t think it’s a small thing. You ought to listen to me and see if you can get the same kind of deliverance. Maybe your problem isn’t food. Maybe it’s cocaine or booze or women. I don’t think it makes any difference; it’s not like one thing is a bigger challenge to God than another. And he wants everyone to be free.

When I got freed from gluttony, I also found I had better self-control in a couple of other areas. I was less crabby, which was a big blessing. Being annoyed requires energy, and it’s an unpleasant state in which to live. After I got my miracle, I felt peaceful. My mind was quieter.

Unfortunately, the food thing lasted, and the peace did not. I eventually found that some of the irritability had returned. Maybe that was because of some sin I committed. I don’t know. I can’t see the supernatural world. I can’t hear God’s voice or the voices of the angels. I can only guess.

Today during my morning prayers I felt anxious for no good reason, and I took it before God, and I kept praying about it, hard. I exerted my faith. I prayed in the Spirit. I stuck to my guns. I felt as if something foreign was pressing into me, in the region of my sinuses. I know that sounds nutty. But I’ve felt that many times. It’s an oppressive, annoying sensation. I think it’s something that has been with me for decades, and I suspect that it’s a supernatural being.

After I had been at it for forty-five minutes or an hour, I felt that this thing had been pushed back. The anxiety left me. I felt peaceful. There was no hostility or irritability in me. I felt as if something was holding it back, like a bodyguard fending off an autograph hound. The peace I found back in August returned. I felt like I had been released from a stuffy room. And to make it even stranger, my breathing had improved. I generally get some nasal congestion in the early morning, and last night was no exception, but suddenly, everything was wide open.

As I went about my morning routine, over and over, the magnitude of the change came home to me. As it hit me, I would grab things for support and hold on. It’s like I’ve been released from prison. It’s incredible.

I hope I don’t do anything to mess it up. I don’t know what I did wrong last time, but I’m going to watch it. This is a tremendous gift. When you’re under psychological oppression, and it leaves, you resume your normal state, and in comparison, it almost seems euphoric. The difference is wonderful.

It may be that giving in to hostility, out of habit, caused me to lose my freedom. I will try to keep that in mind.

Here’s what I think. Over time, prayer in the Spirit fills you with something that overpowers and displaces hostile beings that affect your life. It fills you with something that “binds the strong man” so his house–you–can be spoiled by God.

Every person on earth has demons assigned to him; it’s not just people who bend steel bars and live naked in graveyards. These creatures warp our judgment. They cause diseases. They prevent our blessings from getting to us. They compel us to do evil. They addict us. They give us depression and other mental illnesses. They even cause wars.

These ancient things are far more powerful than unaided human beings. We can’t get rid of them in our own strength. For that matter, our own flesh can be more powerful than we are. It can be impossible to control. The answer is God. He “grows” us, like mustard seeds, to be more powerful than our enemies. He increases our faith. He improves our character so we do more good and less evil, which leads to fewer chastisements and more blessings. He gives us the gifts of the Spirit to fight the enemy supernaturally. And in the Bible, he provides the Sword of the Spirit: his promises, which we can cite, whether in defense or offense. God gives us the tools to get free.

I think we’re going to see a lot more teaching in this vein over the coming years. This is what Satan is afraid of. It’s why he worked so hard to get the church to deny and even ban the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The best way to get rid of God’s servants is to get religious people to crucify them and excommunicate them and burn them alive, and that’s what Satan got the church to do. He even got the church to ban possession of the Bible, which was the Satanic equivalent of gun control (unless gun control is the Satanic equivalent of gun control). But he can’t repress God’s work forever. He’s the weak, limited one, after all.

I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but I got something great, so even if I’m alone here, I have cause to celebrate.

And When I Die With Them, I Keep Them

Last night I watched Jazz with Marv and Maynard, and I enjoyed some Knob Creek and a Coke chaser. Then I went to bed, and while I was getting ready to sleep, I started thanking God for all the little pleasures in my life.

It was quite a list. It seems like the more mature I get, the better I am able to enjoy things. I eat less than I used to. I drink less. I quit smoking cigars. I try to curb my baser appetites, and I try to be more responsible. And I believe God works in me, making these things happen. As excess disappears from my life, the things I enjoy stand out more, perhaps because they’re not lost in the background noise of constant overindulgence.

Let’s see. I enjoy squeezing my pets and conversing with them. I enjoy the food I cook. I enjoy working on my musical skills. I love listening to good jazz and classical music. I love shooting and reloading. I look forward to having breakfast with my dad once a week. I love using my tools. I smile every time I see the ridiculous diesel pickup I bought. Every time I walk into my church, I feel like a kid running through the gate at Disneyland; I always know something good is going to happen.

The time I set apart for prayer and study is wonderful. Every session is a miniature Sabbath. It’s a sanctuary no one can intrude on, and more often than not, I sense God’s presence, and I feel like I’ve gotten a breakthrough.

You can have too much stuff in your life. You can have so much going on, you can’t appreciate any of it or do any one thing well. That’s very natural for me, as anyone who reads my blog knows, so I’m very glad God is adjusting me. Who knows? One day I might actually sell one of my motorcycles or even my flamenco guitar.

I’m keeping the milling machine and the Powermatic 66, however.

Covetousness. That was my problem. It’s not so much that I wanted what other people had; it’s that I wanted things that wouldn’t really bring me satisfaction. I used to buy stuff and then fail to enjoy it, because I thought too much about the things and not enough about the effort and time involved in deriving pleasure from them, so they sat and rotted. I still like to get toys, but now I get good use out of them, and I think that is because God is changing me and guiding me. It’s pretty unusual for me to regret spending money or time these days. I generally get a good return.

Somewhere in the Bible, it says something about how sad it is when a man has something he can’t enjoy. That’s what life without God is all about. You get rich, but you end up in rehab. You become famous, only to find that the thing you want most is privacy. Things like that happen. We don’t know which way we should go or what we should do, so we turn up blind alleys and end up with things that don’t bring us happiness. On the other hand, God promises us that if we’ll listen, he’ll guide us. He says, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.”

We don’t know what we need or what we want. We can’t know. The world is too complicated, and we’re not smart enough to see all the angles. Only God can know. So he gave us a system in which we obey him and listen to him, and he gives us what we should have. He gives us things that are truly satisfying, and which have lasting value. And at the end of our time, we don’t stand before God poor and blind and naked, which is what happens to people who amass the wrong kind of wealth. The stuff we take wrongly, we lose. We only keep that which we were intended to have.

I wish I could go back in time to about 1971 and slap myself. But like the relatives of the rich man in the parable about hell, I would not have listened.

Long ago, when I thought I was about to have a comic strip syndicated, I cut photos of sportfishing yachts out of magazines, and I taped them to walls and so on, to give me motivation to work. That seems funny now. What if I had succeeded? I’d be a big, fat, conceited (more than I am now) lout who thought he made it without God’s help. I’d have shallow friends who drank all the time and never set foot in a church. I’d have no relationship with God, because I’d think I didn’t need one. The yachting crowd is coarse and venal; I know them. I would have gotten sick of them in two seasons. I’m much better off with the folks who attend church on Saturday night.

I thought I knew what I needed, but I wasn’t even close.

I don’t know where I’m going, and I admit, I wish God would hurry up, but I know that things are better than they used to be, and the trend is positive, and it’s a trend I can trust. I’m not building on sand.

I don’t know if buying a cornet was a good idea, but it will be fun for at least two months, and it will cost very little. I actually prayed about it, and I really felt like I should try it. Weird.

I feel like a piece of rough lumber somebody is jointing and planing and sanding into shape. Life gets more enjoyable all the time. I even appreciate the problems and setbacks. Now they seem to have meaning, and every one ends up blessing me. It’s hard to harm someone who walks with God, because God takes everything you throw at him and makes it a help to him.

All that stuff Jesus said; it looks like it’s actually TRUE. That’s wild. I never thought he was lying, but it’s still impressive when I see his words confirmed.

Woe to Thee, O Land, When Thy King is a Child

Are we finally reaching the point where gravity catches up with us and we have to admit we can’t finance the future by eating it?

The Dow is down over eighty points, and we just had two days that were even worse. Sooner or later, before we can have a real recovery, somebody somewhere has to make some money–has to create some wealth–and given our unemployment figures, that doesn’t seem to be happening. And we still have a gigantic glut of foreclosed homes the banks are sitting on. They can’t hold them forever. Eventually, they’re going to be put on the market or bulldozed. It will be interesting to see what happens to home loans and property values.

Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery, in the future, we have to make more money than usual in order to have the same prosperity we had in the past. It’s just like a student loan; you borrow money when you’re 20, and by the time you pay it off, every pizza you ate in college cost $50. What happens when you graduate with debt and then can’t get a job? That’s America’s situation.

Where is the evidence that we’re going to do better in 2015 than we did in 2005? Why would anyone think that was possible, let alone likely? And if we try to solve the problem by inflating the currency, we’ll just end up with larger numbers of smaller dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, and nobody will have a second pair of shoes. It’s still poverty, no matter how you look at it. We may be able to cheat the Chinese via inflation, but we’ll also be burning our cash reserves.

I don’t know why God provided me with silver coins, but it looks like I should be happy about it. I inherited a bunch of circulated silver coins from my grandfather. He snapped them up after Johnson turned our money into steel slugs. Seemed crazy at the time, but if we have a depression, I’ll be able to buy bread.

People think silver coins are worthless. They’re ignorant. The coins are 90% silver.

I just looked it up. My nickels are worth a dollar each. The dimes are worth over a dollar. The quarters are worth over three dollars. Wish I had enough of them to keep me alive for a year or two. Maybe I should buy some.

Gold is fine, but in a depression, it would be hard to spend. Owning gold would be like carrying thousand-dollar bills. A piece the size of a sesame seed would buy a dozen eggs. That’s useless. They don’t make coins that small. And what are you going to do, if you own it? Run a smelter in your kitchen? Forget it. Even if you could cut your gold into small pieces, no one would trust it. This is why mints exist. The purpose of a mint isn’t to make coins. It’s to make coins people can trust. Otherwise, private enterprises would be making gold coins diluted with copper and brass.

A silver coin, unlike a gold coin, will have a useful value. One of my dimes is worth a dozen eggs. Spending gold will be very difficult, but handing over a dime and grabbing a dozen eggs will be simple. Gold will only be useful if you’re buying a car or real estate. Or you’ll be able to trade it for silver, at a loss.

People say you don’t have to have precious metal in your possession in order to use it. You can trade it electronically. Good luck with that. If things get weird, I don’t want my money in the vault of some metals dealer three thousand miles away, waiting for him to declare bankruptcy and disappear. Savings accounts are insured by the government. Gold? No. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can have private insurance, but would you trust it? Look at AIG. And the insurance wouldn’t compensate you in gold. You’d get worthless paper dollars. Better to stuff a few bags of silver in a deposit box at a local bank. If the bank fails, money will vanish, but goods in deposit boxes will remain.

If Obama and the Fed manage to eat our savings by printing money, what will we have left? Subsistence agriculture and bread lines. People in cities will starve. It may be especially bad in Florida, where we are suffering an unprecedented wave of blights and exotic pests. Oranges are probably going to get very scarce over the next five years because citrus greening is incurable. We may lose our bananas. Growing tomatoes here is already very hard; without chemicals, it can’t be done.

What do you do when you live in Miami and times get hard? The fish and peacocks and ducks would disappear in two months. Squirrels and pigeons would follow. You can’t grow enough fruit to live on, if you have a typical lot. It’s hard to grow vegetables here, and most lots are small anyway. Many homes here have topsoil six inches deep. Under that, it’s pure coral.

I never pray for God to fix things for us. Not exactly. I pray that we will turn to him and submit to him because of our problems, and that he’ll give us recovery only after that happens. We won’t learn anything from an unconditional handout. It would be a false kindness, and God doesn’t deal in those. I actually pray he will maintain the recession until we have revival. Otherwise, the suffering will be in vain. I also ask that he end the recession for those who have turned to him already.

Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs. Everything he tells us goes against common sense, history, and basic economics. Borrowing only leads to prosperity when you reasonably anticipate that the borrowed money will enable you to make enough money to repay it. Otherwise, the result is bankruptcy. Can a nation declare bankruptcy? I guess so, but it won’t protect us from harsh consequences. We may weasel out of our debts by devaluing the currency, but we’ll all become poorer, and we’ll have to pay higher interest to China the next time they lend to us. This is how bad credit works. Everything costs more. But it’s worth it, so we can have essential government services, such as the subsidy of multimillion-dollar studies to tell us why trout can’t fly.

I think we’re going to have labor pains for a while. Things will get better and then worse, over and over, until the big collapse comes. The fluctuations will warn people and help those who are teachable to make preparations. Hopefully I’ll be ready. Life isn’t perfect when you’re in good standing with God, but it’s a whole lot better.

I am Now Self-Actualized

I think I have the pizza-pan situation figured out. I need thin steel, not cast iron. And I need three sizes. First, 12 x 18, to serve more than one person. Then 12 x 12, for a serious meal for one person or a small meal for two. Then 9 x 9, for a normal meal for one. Cast iron is out. Steel works, so there is no need to look for another answer.

I don’t know what to do with all this power. I pretty much have pizza under my thumb, so I can’t continue eating it every day with research as my excuse. I guess the smart move is to bag and freeze the cheese and sauce and have pizza maybe twice a week.

I’ve reached a point where it’s hard to think of anything new I want to learn to cook. I guess cheese poori and certain Indian appetizers and entrees would be good, but I can get a good cookbook for that; I don’t need to be original. Same for Chinese.

It’s unbelievable, now that I think about it. I can make the best pizza in Miami. I can make the best cheesecake anywhere, as far as I know. My barbecue is the best I can find anywhere near me. Prime rib is a joke. Aged steaks are simple. I can cook everything I really care about. God has really blessed me.

If only I could eat this stuff every day.

I guess now I should focus on small, healthy meals that are easy to fix. To me, that means meat or fish, plus non-starchy vegetables. Dull, but cheap and fast.

My dinner menu is embarrassing. Here’s the kind of thing I fix: two tiny pork chops fried in olive oil with no breading, half a can of greens, and Brussels sprouts with salt and butter. I really can’t eat more than that without fattening up. My current routine (admittedly derailed by pizza research) is one serving of oatmeal at breakfast, a sandwich and some pickles at lunch, and a little-bitty dinner. I’m changing that now; the small, sad-looking dinner, which is the largest meal, will come in the middle of the day.

I like vegetables, so eating things like greens and sprouts is not a problem. As far as I know, all Southerners like vegetables. I don’t know why. I always hear about people who won’t eat vegetables. They hate broccoli. They hate spinach. I don’t get it. No one in my family is like that. One of the best Southern meals is hot cornbread, soup beans, and fresh, raw vegetables. Southerners aren’t fat because they don’t eat vegetables. They’re fat because they also eat Moon Pies and chili-cheese-slaw dogs.

I’ve been watching Ken Burns’s Jazz for a few days. I love this documentary. I own a copy. Sometimes the BS can be hard to take; I don’t know why so many successful young black men talk crap, when their achievements stand for themselves. But generally, it focuses on the music, with a surprisingly fair approach to race relations.

Actually, I do know why so many successful young black men talk crap. It’s because Martin Luther King died and Jesse Jackson lived. They pattern themselves after the sideshow act, instead of the greater man who preceded him and died without leaving a substantial video or audio record. King didn’t live long enough to make the kind of impression Jackson has. That’s truly unfortunate. Slogans and chants and doggerel and transparent sophistry are no substitute for character, brains, and dignity.

Now that I think about it, Malcolm X was about fifty times the man Jesse Jackson is, and he died young, too. He had a weakness for slogans, though.

Anyway, I keep watching these videos and marveling at the music. Louis Armstrong is astonishing. He’s like Mozart. He was so good, it didn’t even make sense. Greatest jazz instrumentalist who ever lived. Arguably the greatest vocalist, although you would never know it from garbage like What a Wonderful World. I think THC had pickled his brain by then. They say he smoked every day. Some defend his later work, but far as I can tell, he said all he had to say before he hit middle age.

And people say dope won’t hurt you.

I’m glad I never cared for drugs enough to stick with them. I have never understood the appeal of pot. Sometimes I think other people smoke dope to be more like people like me. Some people have no sense of humor and no creativity and no ability to relax unless they’re high. If you have those things naturally, maybe dope seems pointless. People take drugs to compensate for shortcomings, so my theory makes sense to me. I admit, I’d love to have natural self-confidence comparable to what stimulants provide.

To get back to jazz, Bix Beiderbecke was another superhuman talent. Seems like he could do absolutely anything except quit drinking. He didn’t consider himself a pianist; his instrument was the cornet. But I have a couple of his piano recordings–stuff he played on the spur of the moment, almost as a lark–and the things he did are like nothing anyone else was playing at that time. It’s like a fusion of Debussy and Thelonious Monk.

He was never able to get it together, and he drank himself to death before he turned thirty. Maybe some people are too talented and too creative to lead happy, successful lives. Maybe the human body can’t contain them.

As I listened and watched, I wondered why Christian music couldn’t have this kind of quality and creativity. It’s not as if musical creativity didn’t exist before jazz. Stuffy classical musicians killed it, out of ignorance and misplaced worship. In the times of Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin, a classical musician was required to improvise. It’s virtually forbidden now, but the greats used to sit and make up melody lines on the spot, just like jazz musicians do now. Liszt could take sheet music for an orchestra and play it on the piano, at sight, while making suggestions and criticisms as they occurred to him.

American popular music was pretty weak (Turkey in the Straw, heaven protect us) before jazz and the blues, and improvisation in classical music was essentially banned, so it’s no wonder most popular music, including the Christian variety, is second-rate. Why can’t a Christian pianist sit and improvise brilliantly during a worship service? No reason at all. They used to do it. Maybe blue notes and certain jazz rhythms would be somewhat out of place, but those things aren’t essential to spontaneous music.

I keep banging away at sight-reading. Yesterday I amazed myself by playing a triplet correctly, while staying in time. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before. I used to break measures into twelve beats and practice slowly, I think. I need to start journaling my progress, so I don’t get discouraged. I still can’t play anything, but I’m making substantial headway.

I should thaw out some tiny pork chops. I hate to miss out on a fine feed like that.