Healing for the Heel

My dad prayed for salvation a couple of days ago, and the results have been surprising.

As I have mentioned many times, my dad was always an enemy of God and Christianity. He wasn’t just an unbeliever; the very thought of Christianity made him very angry, and he felt compelled to insult it and ridicule those of us who believed. He seemed beyond reach, and given that he asked for salvation at 86, it’s obvious that there was good reason to consider him a particularly hard case.

I have had a lot of personal issues with my dad because of my beliefs. I started turning back to God in 2007, and worldly people–friends and so on–started rejecting me. I didn’t reject them. I still made an effort to socialize with them, and I didn’t preach to them. They pushed me away or simply dropped me. Family bonds are harder to break, so, of course, my dad and I did not abandon each other. Things grew tense, however.

Paul warned Christians not to be unequally yoked. The use of the term “yoked” comes from the practice of using oxen as draft animals. When you want to use oxen, you attach two of them to a yoke. Obviously, you can’t get much work done when the oxen want to go in different directions. Paul was telling us that unbelieving companions would pull us away from God and drag us into disobedience. That’s what my relationship with my dad was like. He treated my Christianity as an unfortunate eccentricity that had to be indulged. To him, it was as though he were dealing with an autistic child or a mental patient caught in the grip of a temporary delusion. Very often, he got angry with me. He thought I was unreasonable.

As he slid into dementia and I gradually moved into an undesired position of authority, he sometimes cursed me, and he delivered ultimatums he couldn’t follow through on.

He got especially angry when I refused to drive him places on demand. I had other things to do, and I didn’t have time to ferry him around without notice. I was looking after him and his interests, and that’s why I was busy, but he didn’t understand. He would yell that he wouldn’t be treated like a child. Even after losing his license, he would insist he was going to drive himself where he wanted to go. That was impossible. He doesn’t know his address, and he doesn’t know how to get anywhere. He would have come home in a police car.

He developed or continued bad habits that seemed to be designed to make me miserable. He rubbed spit on walls, counters, and anything else he thought was dirty. He put dirty dishes and utensils away without washing them. He did awful things in bathrooms. When we ate together, I had to move my beverages away from him, because he would pick them up with his dirty fingers and examine them, defiling the surfaces I had to touch with my lips in order to drink.

My solution, here in our new home, was to take over an upstairs den. I put the main desktop there, along with a TV, stereo, printer, and workbenches with tools. I also hid my personal stash of food where he couldn’t get at it and do appalling things with it. I set a downstairs bathroom apart for guests and kept him out of it.

He had a knack for making me feel soiled and violated. He broke boundaries people are supposed to respect. You don’t touch other people’s food. You don’t expose yourself to them unnecessarily. You don’t blow your nose on the floor. Abusive people have a way of forcing intimacy on others in disgusting ways. My belief was that the spirits that had made him abusive were targeting me with special behaviors they knew would drive me crazy.

I have been limiting the time I spend with him. I can only take so much. Every so often, I would think to myself, “It’s been a while. I should go and see what he’s up to. Maybe I should take him to lunch.” I would go and do my duty, and then I would retreat again to recharge.

Before I changed my ways, we used to spend time together for fun. We fished a lot. Lately, it has been a job. Every minute I have spent with him has been work.

Suffering the unending stream of senseless provocations was like being jabbed with a hot needle over and over, and he thought I had a problem because I didn’t want to be with him all the time. He was not able or inclined to consider how I felt. It didn’t matter to him; he was only concerned with what he considered bad service. As his dementia got worse, and he realized how much he needed me, he made certain adjustments, but for the most part, I think he was considering his own welfare. If I die tomorrow, he will fall completely apart, and some stranger will have to rescue him.

That’s how things have been.

Yesterday was different. He still called for me at random times with various demands, but I didn’t jump when I heard his voice. I didn’t struggle with anger. I was better able to feel concern for his welfare, because it was not masked by the sensation of being shocked with an invisible cattle prod. I didn’t mind spending time with him. It wasn’t work any more.

To say the change was welcome would be to understate things. Abiding anger is an iniquity. It’s poison for a Christian. Everyone gets provoked from time to time, but to live in a state of provocation is not acceptable. It interferes with your relationship with God.

I used supernatural tools every day, more than once a day, to get rid of anger and to help myself forgive. God showed me ways to deal with it, and that was very helpful, but it’s much better not to be provoked in the first place.

Provocation is temptation.

The strange thing is that my dad’s behavior hasn’t changed tremendously. He is more cooperative and less irate, but he’s still doing gross things around the house. They don’t bother me the way they did last week.

Last night, I asked God what was going on, and suddenly, I thought about words from Genesis. God said he would put enmity between the seed of woman and the seed of the serpent.

So the Lord God said to the serpent:

“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

This explains a lot.

The world is divided into children of God and children of Satan. There are no exceptions. The people who ran away from me were the seed of Satan. The pastors who abused me were the seed of Satan. There has been anger and tension between me and people who were against God, even when I tried to get along with them. Until my dad asked for salvation, he was on the other side, so friction was inevitable. We were trying to make a fatally flawed paradigm work.

Am I saying my dad was my enemy? I’m afraid so, although I’m sure he didn’t see it that way. He made life unpleasant and difficult. He added to my burdens for no reason. From the day I was born, he did things to poison my happiness and my progress. Even when he tried to do good things for me, often, he was also doing and saying things that exacted a high price.

How can I be surprised? In Genesis, God said he himself would put enmity between my dad and me.

Enmity isn’t always open, and enemies aren’t always aware they’re enemies. Often they believe they’re being helpful. That type of enemy is the most dangerous. It’s hard to motivate yourself to fight someone who insists he loves you.

Unequal yokings don’t work. The more you associate with an unbeliever, the more problems you will have. You may get along with them when things are going well, but introduce a few challenges, and things will break down. You will turn to God, and your associate will turn on you.

You can see this in America’s current state of polarization. The God-friendly right and the God-hating left are at each other’s throats. People who used to get along can’t be civil to each other any more. Your family can lose its business simply because you don’t want to bake a cake that celebrates an abomination.

It’s impossible to make another person understand the feeling of relief I have. No one wants to be at odds with a family member, especially if it’s a person you can’t avoid. Toxic relationships with parents are very damaging, and when those relationships are fixed, it brings peace and strength.

I don’t know how much time I have left with my dad. I hope we get a reasonable interval in which to enjoy a corrected relationship.

Do not develop close relationships with unbelievers. The secular world will tell you it’s open-mindedness and love. It’s not. It’s surrender. It’s currying favor from people who will betray you.

Be nice to them. Pray for them. Don’t date them. Don’t marry them. Don’t partner with them in business. You’re asking for trouble, and when you call on God for help, he may not listen. You know better. God has a long history of ignoring pleas for help from people who reject his warnings. He has done it to me. I am a witness.

I’m not going to have any more unequal yokings in my life. For a long time, I’ve been saying my dad was going to be the last one, and I haven’t been kidding. It’s rebellious and wrong, and anyway, I can’t take it any more. I’m too old for the drama.

Here’s something else: I understand why so many people have reacted negatively to me. For my entire life, I have put up with unexpected attacks from people I did nothing to harm. It still happens today. It doesn’t matter what I do. I don’t have to provide a reason. Now I get it. They don’t belong to God, or they are deep in rebellion, which, according to God, is as bad as witchcraft. Why would I expect witches to like me?

Never date an atheist or an unbelieving Jew. Don’t join clubs with weird mystical rituals. Don’t join fraternities or sororities. Limit your interactions with homosexuals. Avoid involvement in leftist politics. Be careful about the jobs you accept.

You may think you’re a Christian who has a successful, close relationship with someone who is against Jesus. You’re wrong. Either you’re a poor excuse for a Christian, or you’re in denial about the quality of the relationship.

Paul knew what he was talking about.

Did This Really Happen?

Tonight my dad prayed for salvation.

This is the guy who used to ridicule Christianity and Christians. He once called the pope a “fat greasy wop” in order to antagonize my mother and our Irish neighbor. As recently as a few weeks ago, he was insisting his conception of God was much more sophisticated than anything Christians believed in.

People with vascular dementia slip in steps. One day you’re on a certain step, and the next day, you’re on a lower step. It happens that quickly; overnight. You may stay on the new step for a month or a year. Then something happens, and you move to a step which is lower still.

At some point during the last week, my dad moved to a new step. His physical therapist pointed it out. I noticed it, too. Suddenly he was less argumentative. He wasn’t fighting with me all the time. For example, if I said he needed to stop messing with the mail, instead of insisting he was going to continue opening it, he would apologize for forgetting.

He has been contrary all his life. It has ruined relationships for him. Now, suddenly, he is listening.

Yesterday he said he would be willing to learn about salvation. Today I put him in the car and took him to the grocery to pick up something he needed, and I used the time to talk to him about God.

On the way to the store, he agreed to join me in prayer that God would show him he was real. On the way back, he prayed for salvation. He even recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart. I don’t know where that came from.

He wasn’t crying and begging God for forgiveness. He didn’t say he had had a sudden supernatural revelation. He simply said he trusted my judgment. That’s appropriate. We are supposed to be witnesses, and all a witness strives for is trust. New Christians listen to us when we give our firsthand testimony, and God helps them to believe what we say.

He says he’s willing to go to church. I want to find a decent church to visit. A Christian has to know more than one other Christian. Otherwise, the one he knows runs the risk of becoming a sort of idol. My dad needs to see God through multiple pairs of eyes.

I hope he understands what he did well enough for it to take effect.

As far as I know, this is the first time in my life I have gotten anyone to ask for salvation. No one else has ever listened to me. I am the world’s worst evangelist. I’ve laid hands on a couple of people so they received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but I never got anywhere with salvation.

They say God gives crowns to those who help people to get saved. Maybe I finally have one waiting.

Suddenly, my dad doesn’t look good. He didn’t look good last week, but he looks worse now. He is less sure of himself. The steam has gone out of him. He seems sort of transparent. It’s not pleasant to see. Today while he was out walking, he asked for a ride in my golf cart, but he couldn’t lift his foot high enough to get in.

Maybe I’ll be able to take better care of him now. Cooperation makes a big difference.

I’ll bet God says that about me all the time.

Clouds Dissipating?

Thank you, God. The weather is changing.

It’s 89 degrees here, but it took until after 12 p.m. to get that hot. A couple of weeks back, we were looking at low 90’s, and things heated up faster. It’s dryer now, too, and it’s much more pleasant in the late afternoon and evening.

Last night I went outside as the sun was starting to dim, and I didn’t begin sweating immediately. I could have stayed out and not suffered. I didn’t even get bitten by bugs.

I wasted a lot of good weather after the summer of 2017 died. I put outdoor jobs off. This time I plan to pounce. When it’s cool enough to work, I will cut, mow, or burn something, or I will take some guns out and shoot.

I keep thinking I would like to pull out and make a permanent move to Tennessee eventually. A few days back, I decided to check the weather up there. It was not as great as I had hoped. In fact, it was pretty close to what we were having here. Maybe September in Tennessee is just as hot as it is in Florida.

I checked the forecast for the upcoming month, and it looked considerably better. Where my area has lows in the high 60’s, Tennessee expects lows maybe 10 degrees lower. That means fewer bugs and more good weather for outdoor activity.

What I do will depend on my dad. It’s impossible to make solid plans when you’re dealing with dementia. This winter, my dad may be exactly like he is now, he may be worse (somewhat or a great deal), and he may not be around at all. As long as he’s living at home, I won’t want to move. If he’s not living here, I can do whatever I want. If he’s in a facility, I can move and then find a new facility up north. If the end comes, I’ll have no strings to consider.

There is good news regarding my dad. Yesterday we went out to lunch. I asked him if he ever thought about making plans for the hereafter. He asked what he could do, and I said he could receive salvation. He asked how to do that, and he said he was willing to listen to anything I recommended.

Did it mean anything? What demented people say varies from one day to the next. I can’t tell you whether this is an important development. I told him I would tell him all about salvation later. I didn’t want to hold a revival in an Indian restaurant.

Maybe I was wrong to hesitate. He could have passed away last night. I plan to bring it up again today.

I believe God has told me my dad will be saved, so I don’t feel I have to be in a rush. If God says he’ll be saved, it will happen.

My dad’s attitude seems to have changed during this month. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe a stroke affected some little part of his brain that generated anger and pride. Maybe God is restraining poisonous spirits that have always controlled him. His physical therapist says he has slipped over the last week, so maybe there is a physical explanation.

It would be fantastic to have a dad who isn’t angry and proud. I can’t imagine that. He has always released his negative feelings freely. When I’m angry at someone, I remain polite and work with them, and I try to spare their feelings. My dad has always vented his inner feelings directly onto people, with no hesitation. If he suddenly started acting like the rest of us, I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be like having him replaced with a different person.

People have always walked on eggs around my dad. Imagine suddenly being able to speak freely around a person like that.

It’s a strange thing; inner changes that would help him prepare for his departure would also make it harder to let him go.

Being around an angry and very vocal person is like being struck with a whip all day. No matter how much you love the person, you get angry, over and over. Repentance is something you repeat many times per week. You can’t help looking forward to spending time away from them.

It’s not hatred or vengeance. It’s fatigue and a desire for relief. What is it like when such a person puts the whip away?

I hope he’s serious about God. I have always expected him to wait until the last possible second, but maybe it won’t be quite that bad. It would be nice to have some time with the new version of him before he goes.

Kavanaugh Kerfuffle Disappoints

Here are my thoughts about the Christine Blasey Ford accusation. She accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of holding her down and trying to pull her bathing suit off. She says it happened about 40 years ago, when they were in high school. He says it never happened, and that he had no idea who had accused him until she gave the press her name.

1. When I was in high school, I was on an ultimate Frisbee team. One day a girl showed up. Her name was either Lisa Snapoff or Lisa Popoff. I can’t recall. She showed up with the team captain. He said she had told him I had had a crush on her in junior high.

She was not very attractive.

She kept talking to me as if she knew me well.

To this day, I have no idea who she is or whether we went to school together. My private junior high probably had 100 students per class. She was not in my class. I would have known her. Maybe she went to my elementary school. Anyway, you can’t have a crush on a person whose existence you’re unaware of. My guess is that she was something related to a stalker.

2. A woman who was angry with me swore a number of ridiculous lies to a court and made false claims to another authority.

3. My sister berated my mother, in front of her sisters and me, for letting my dad rape her all during her childhood. Never happened. Systematic rape of a sibling who shares a house with you is something one notices eventually.

4. My sister accused a boy of raping her, and my dad went to his house to give him a beating. He said he was very angry when he found out the story wasn’t true.

5. My sister’s dog was not housetrained. I chased it out of a room, and my sister turned my father and me in to the Humane Society, claiming we had kicked the dog. My father wasn’t even home when it happened. I don’t know what she expected the Humane Society to do. They started sending me letters asking for money.

6. My sister accused my dad of breaking her arm. I was present, but out of sight, when they had their disagreement. He didn’t break anything. When she called me about it, threatening to have him arrested, I had to listen while she placed an order at a drive-through, paid, and took a Coke from the cashier. With her supposedly broken arm.

7. Someone I know married a thief, fraud, and domestic violence perpetrator who ended up in prison. Before they divorced, the thief said a number of things in couple’s therapy. RE the Kavanaugh thing, my friend says the media needs to be aware that things people say in couple’s therapy (like the things Christine Ford supposedly said) are not necessarily true. This is the voice of experience.

8. The Innocence Project has freed over a hundred convicted rapists. Sometimes a woman says one thing, and the DNA says something else.

Women lie to get at men they want to hurt. Women who want attention lie about being abused. People lie in couple’s therapy.

Christine Ford is on the far left. Many people on the far left treat opposition to the murder of the unborn the way they should treat support for the murder of the unborn. It enrages them, and they feel anything they say or do to fight those who defend the unborn is justified.

Maybe he’s guilty. My guess is that he isn’t. If he is, it happened when he was a kid, it was brief, she was not stripped, raped, beaten, confined against her will, or injured, and she apparently had no problem pushing him off. After 40 years, it’s time to get over it. Even if he did one stupid thing when he was in high school, he has since proven he deserves to sit on the Supreme Court.

Any conservative who is nominated is going to face attacks like this. Feminists are insanely devoted to the perpetuation of the in-womb murder of their own children, as if having to bear a child one conceived deliberately were an unjust and severe punishment. They will stop at nothing to crush those who might make the murder of the unborn harder to do.

If leftists can tolerate Bill Clinton, who did far worse things, and who was an elected official when he did them, they can tolerate a man who groped a girl in high school and then behaved well as an adult. If they can tolerate Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, they can tolerate Kavanaugh.

I say it’s time to confirm him. Clarence Thomas made it, and this man will, too.

“Don’t Bother God; We’ll Tell You Everything You Need to Know”

Last night I watched an interesting video in which a woman gave her testimony. She said she had been thrown out of a bus and killed. She said she found herself in hell and started crying out to Jesus. He took her to heaven and talked to her.

I am suspicious of people who tell stories about visiting heaven and hell. Many of them are fabulists who are looking for earthly rewards. A good hell story can make you rich. You can spend the rest of your life speaking at churches and taking offerings instead of working, and you can write books that sell. Some people want money. Others have a bizarre craving for fame. Because hell stories tend to pay off in one way or another, you have to scrutinize them carefully and ask God whether they are true.

There are a lot of hell stories that don’t ring true. One famous “witness” I don’t trust is a young lady named Sarah Boyanga. She says Jesus took her to heaven a number of times in 2012, and that he told her things she was to share with the world.

Boyanga claims Jesus showed her heaven and hell. She says she saw Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse in hell. She says demons forced Jackson to dance, and while he was dancing, they threw spears into him.

She also says we need to pray for two minutes before we go to bed. Two minutes. She says this makes Jesus very happy.

I’ve been praying in tongues every day for years, and I can tell you it’s not a two-minute thing. You need to devote time to it. Around 20 minutes into it, it gets better. The more you pray in tongues, the better things go for you.

Jesus prayed all night before he was crucified. He criticized the disciples for refusing to pray “one hour” with him. Not two minutes.

When Elijah prayed for the drought to end, he sat down for quite a while, and he didn’t quit until he saw a cloud appear.

I don’t care who gets mad at me. I’ll say it. Sarah Boyanga is wrong. God is a father, and fathers want to spend time with their children. Prayer is the way we spend time with God.

Every successful parent knows there is no such thing as “quality time.” You can’t raise a child well, spending two minutes per day with him. I don’t care if it’s the best two minutes possible. Quantity matters, and no god who loves parents and children would create a system in which he only spent two minutes per day with his own offspring.

I suspect that her dad got her to make up stories.

Her dad is Benjamin Boyanga, and he runs a church in London. Obviously, a famous daughter can only help him make money.

I don’t believe Sarah Boyanga, but I think the lady who got thrown out of the bus is telling the truth. Her name is Paulina.

She was riding a bus. She was hurled out, and her skull was fractured. One hour after she died, she awoke in a hospital morgue.

Prior to the accident, she was a practicing Catholic. She went to mass. She confessed. She took communion. She prayed to Mary and the other “saints.” She had a big figurine collection. She tried to be good to people.

Paulina says she was thrown into hell, and evil spirits started ripping her flesh and telling her she was doomed forever. She didn’t believe she belonged in hell, because she was a Catholic. She cried out to Jesus, and he took her to heaven to talk to her.

She says she walked up a path to a waterfall, and Jesus was at the source of the water. She says the water cleansed her of “the dirt” from her past life.

That’s very interesting, because other people say water flows from the thrown of God, throughout heaven. The first psalm says a righteous man is like “a tree planted by the rivers of water.” Referring to the Holy Spirit, Jesus said he would cause living water to flow from within us, and that we would never thirst. Prayer in tongues is a sanctifying flow of living water. The words flow through us, from Jesus.

She also speaks of the peace of the presence of Jesus. When she was near him, she felt overwhelming love and peace surrounding her. That’s correct. I felt these things when Jesus visited me. I don’t think anyone could be near Jesus without feeling these things. It’s odd when anyone who claims to have met Jesus doesn’t mention the love and peace. Sarah Boyanga doesn’t mention feeling these things the first time she met him.

Paulina tried to tell Jesus she didn’t belong in hell because she was a good person, but he listed some things she had done to get herself in trouble. Her stepmother was a witch, and in order to get Paulina’s father, she had cast spells on Paulina’s mother, who died. Paulina had not forgiven her. Also, Paulina had led a worldly life, drinking and going to clubs and so on. Jesus also criticized her for worshiping Mary.

In the video, Paulina uses the words “Christian” and “Catholic” as though they were mutually exclusive. She says she used to be Catholic. She tried going back to her Catholic church after she met Jesus, and it didn’t work. She says she is a Christian now. That’s remarkable. She doesn’t just say her new path is a little better. She utterly rejects her old path.

Paulina claims she wanted to stay in heaven, but Jesus told her she had accomplished nothing for him on Earth. He said Christians obtained crowns in heaven for helping people receive salvation, and that she hadn’t done that. He said that if she made it to heaven, it would only be by the skin of her teeth. She chose to go back to Earth and serve God.

Catholicism is very strange. Catholics don’t talk about their view of other denominations much, but they believe we all go to hell, except possibly for a few super-worthy exceptions. They think people are born damned because of something called “original sin,” and that Mary was somehow spared this at the moment she was conceived. They say she never sinned, and that she remained a virgin all her life, even though the Bible says Jesus had brothers.

Obviously, if Mary didn’t sin, she didn’t need Jesus. How can anyone believe that? She would have been capable of saving us, herself. She could have spared her son by submitting to crucifixion. No normal mother would allow her son to die when she could take his place.

Catholics have a very long document called The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and it spells out official doctrine. It’s unbelievably tedious, which is one sign God had nothing to do with it. It’s full of references to the works of “saints” and so on. It’s like the Talmud, which is another collection of carnal material whose adherents obey it and reject scripture.

The catechism says “tradition” rules. It’s talking about things celebrated Catholics have said in the past. Augustine was a former pagan who knew nothing about God and twisted Christianity to fit his Hellenistic beliefs, but to Catholics, he is as much an authority as Moses or Paul.

We all remember what Jesus said about tradition. He said the Jews, by their tradition, nullified scripture, which is the word of God.

The catechism says all revelation comes through the pope and his bishops. Apparently, God is not allowed to talk to anyone else.

Nothing has changed. The pharisees just exchanged their Jewish robes for mitres, and Satan still runs the biggest church there is. It would be remarkable if he didn’t.

The catechism contains the idolatrous material about Mary. Not helpful. It’s like a cyanide pill at the bottom of an ice cream soda.

It doesn’t matter what a church’s name is or what its doctrine is at the outset. Sooner or later, Satan will take over, and men’s fantasies will supersede scripture. It happened to the Jews. It happened to Catholicism. It happens to charismatic churches.

It appears to be a lot easier to get to hell than I thought it was when I was young. It’s important to stay on top of things and remain informed.

Time to Buy a Kevlar MAGA Hat

God gives me phrases from time to time, and last year, he said this to me: “The hate is already here.” I guess it sounds stupid to say God was right, but boy…was he right!

He was referring to the hatred of the Beast and his children. The Bible tells us the world will be given over to sin before Jesus returns. The spirit of antichrist will assume the function the Holy Spirit was intended to perform: it will fill human beings and bind them together as one.

We are seeing their unifying hatred expressed now. The fundamental purpose is to oppose Jesus, but the spirit of antichrist attacks indirectly as well as directly. We see it going after males, whites, conservatives, heterosexuals, Americans, hunters, people who eat meat, and southerners, even though you can belong to those categories without belonging to God.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children attack every day: Donald Trump, the NRA, the GOP, Fox News, George Zimmerman, every Christian denomination that isn’t Catholic and doesn’t support homosexuality, the Jews, and Israel.

We see the spirit of antichrist supporting sexual deviants, rebellious females and children, the proud, the violent, the trashy, atheists, pagans, Muslims, leftists, enemies of America, and the less-succesful minorities.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children support: the Kardashians, every major rapper, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, the Pope (leftist), the Clintons, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Bernie Sanders, Caitlyn Jenner, George Clooney, Stormy Daniels, CNN, MSNBC, PETA, Greenpeace, David Hogg, and the deceased felon Trayvon Martin.

The Beast’s crowd hasn’t been beefing all that much with the pope, and that makes sense, because he is one of them. He is very weak on criticizing sexual perversion, he swallows everything leftists say about the environment, he adores celebrities, and he has no supernatural power whatsoever. He teaches Christians to be weak and carnal, so he’s more of a Beast asset than enemy.

It’s too bad Christians don’t label the opposition. Too many of us are caught up in political conflict. We label the MSM and the SJW’s, but we don’t have a name for the body of people who are controlled by the spirit of antichrist. My own name for them is “ACC.” The Antichrist Community.

We overuse the word “community” now. Everything has a community. The LGBTQetc. community. The black community. The People Named Fred Community. People who are completely unaware of each other’s existence or their bond have communities.

The world will be ruled by a human being the Bible calls the Antichrist, but in order for him to get anywhere, people will have to be susceptible to control by deceptive antichrist spirits. The body of Christ needs the Holy Spirit to unite and empower them, and the ACC needs spirits of antichrist for the same purposes.

The hate is already here, and it’s strong enough to drive things like massacres. We already see it at work in physical attacks on people the ACC doesn’t like. GOP offices are vandalized and burned. An ACC member shot up a baseball diamond while GOP members were playing. A man shot up a Trump property. Another man attacked Trump and had to be restrained. There have been numerous beatings of Trump supporters by ACC members. There are neighborhoods where a red hat will virtually guarantee that you will be attacked. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the other tech powers are doing their best to silence non-ACC people.

There is no corresponding hate apparatus on the other side. There are a few nuts who go off the rails, but you can go nearly anywhere in America wearing a T-shirt that says, “Black Lives Matter,” or even, “Satan is God,” without any fear of harm. There is no huge tech effort to silence Keith Olbermann, Spike Lee, or Michael Moore. It doesn’t matter how much Lee or Moore lie in movies and interviews. They are safe.

It’s going to be a real spectacle when the ACC slips its restraints. Right now, you can’t march on a Christian’s home, drag the family out, and kill them on the street, but there are plenty of people who are itching to do that. When the atmosphere changes sufficiently, we will see things like that. Take away the threat of arrest, and the ACC will express itself fully, as it did in Cambodia, Austria, and Germany. We think people behave because they’re not really that crazy. That’s wrong. They’re just unwilling to do time. There are millions of people in America who would kill God’s children today if they knew they would get away with it.

Would you hesitate to wear a shirt with Trayvon Martin’s picture on it in Utah or Wyoming? Of course not. You might get some nasty looks, but you would be safe. Would you wear a MAGA hat in Baltimore or Compton? There is no way you could get away with it. Sooner or later, you would be harmed. In places where human beings have already been trained to ignore the law and give in to their impulses, the batteries are already happening.

I don’t understand why the ACC associates white Caucasians with God. Jesus was a Semite whose ancestors were from Iraq and Egypt, so he probably had fairly dark skin for a Caucasian. Maybe the association comes from the fact that white people spread Christianity throughout the world.

Maybe 10 years ago, God showed me that we build our own enemies. Our enemies are like hurricanes forming way across the ocean where we can’t see them. We refuse to pray. We sin freely. We deny God. Many of us take up false gods. When we do these things, our enemies are conceived and fed. Eventually, they appear and overcome us. Then we ask stupid questions, like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

God’s children used to be dominant in America. For all our failings, we were still doing well enough to receive God’s favor. He limited the power of the ACC. Then we turned away. Now we’re so corrupt we stink, and ACC factions that ran from us decades ago sit in positions of power. They play the tune, and we dance, and many of us are dumb enough to think voting for Republicans will fix things. Political problems are just expressions of problems in the supernatural. As long as we are against God, he will limit the good things he does for us, and he will let our enemies torment and humiliate us.

It’s upsetting to live in a country where the paradigm is one of endless retreat. I moved away from Miami, to a place where Christians are safer. I didn’t conquer Miami for Jesus. That was not possible, because people there want sin and have no interest in God. Eventually, the county where I live now will be as filthy as Key West or Seattle.

Maybe I’ll be able to move again, but the water keeps rising, and the islands will keep getting smaller and farther apart. Eventually, there will be no place on Earth where we can stand without suffering more than God will permit, and we’ll have to leave.

I wonder if I’ll be able to see what goes on here on Earth after the ACC declares total victory. I almost hate to miss the show. When history is made, for good or bad, it’s natural to want to watch. I suppose the suffering would be a little too much to stand, though.

Help is Coming

I had the weirdest dream last night. This morning, really.

I ordered a second refrigerator for this house. That’s not part of the dream; it happened. My dad does disgusting things around food, and I could not take it any more, so I ordered a fridge from Home Depot’s website. They were having a sale.

The delivery people called and told me they would arrive today some time between 7:30 and 11:30 a.m. You read that correctly. To arrive at 7:30, they would have to call me by no later than 7:15, and that means I would have to be up, around, bathed, and clothed by 7:00 in order to leave a margin of error. No prayer. No breakfast. No attending to my other responsibilities. They refused to work with me.

I was not happy. You don’t force customers to roll out of bed to accommodate your schedule. No one does that. You give them options.

Last night, I dreamed that the delivery people called. I was in an apartment that belonged to me. I realized I had to rush to my father’s house to meet them, so I took off running. Oddly, it was attached to my apartment. I ran through a door, and I was in the house.

I heard a Hispanic guy talking loudly in my garage. Many delivery people here are Hispanic, so that made sense. I ran to the garage, and they already had the door open. A guy with a crazy robotic exoskeleton the color of a school bus or construction machine had the fridge in the machine’s arms, and he was charging up the garage steps. He was really moving. All I could do was get out of the way. There was some kind of railing, and I had to grab it with both hands and somersault over it. That was easy for me. In my dream, I was in shape!

It didn’t seem strange to me that he was encased in a hydraulic suit. We have self-driving cars and delivery drones now, so I figured it was another sudden advancement I hadn’t kept up with.

A few minutes later, I was awake, talking to a Hispanic delivery guy who was on his way to my house.

I asked God if the dream meant anything, and here is what I got: he’s going to send strong spirits to get things done for me, and they will act quickly and without a lot of warning. It has something to do with provision, which explains the refrigerator.

I’ll take all the help I can get. Being an heir is a lot better than working hard.

I felt I should blog the dream. If I’m wrong, I’ll look stupid, but if not, God will get the glory.

I’ve already moved things to the new fridge. I’m going to put a lock on it if necessary. I’m really going to enjoy opening a refrigerator and not seeing greasy fingerprints on everything, along with dried-out food in packages that have been left open.

In other news, the Dade clerk’s website posted an update today. It says my former pastor will be pleading guilty on September 25. I’m still amazed at how things turned out for him.

I’ve Seen Living, and This isn’t It

Today has not been the jolliest of days.

I toured two assisted living facilities earlier. This is my first foray into the world of parent storage. It’s hard to think of it as anything other than storage. Once you move to one of these places, you cease to accomplish anything of worth on the planet. You sit in God’s waiting room, killing time until his receptionist calls your name.

This was my first visit to this kind of business since maybe 1990, when my dad and I visited his mother. I don’t call her my grandmother because she had no interest in my sister or me. Her facility was a small hospital. They didn’t try to make it look like anything else. My grandmother lived in a hospital room, not an apartment. Some patients there were mentally okay, and some just made grunting sounds and wandered around. The air smelled like urine, feces, and ineffective cleaning chemicals that failed to mask odors.

I’ve written about this place before. While we were there, my dad whispered that if he ever ended up in such a place, I should kill him.

The people were very nice at both places I visited today. This is northern Florida, so one would expect them to be nice. I have no doubt that my dad would be treated with kindness, consideration, and patience at either one.

The first place was relatively upscale. They had private rooms which were really suites. They showed me one. My dad would have a small living room, a kitchen area, and a separate bedroom. He could have his own refrigerator. The living room would have a TV, and he could have another one installed in his bedroom.

The halls in this place are maybe a hundred feet long. At mealtimes, the residents make their way to a dining room which is probably 60 feet square. Attendants sit along one wall, like ball boys at a tennis match, waiting to jump out and help anyone who falls over or chokes.

There were a lot of women at the tables. Men do themselves a favor by dying younger than women. It seemed to me that most of the people were a little more frail than my dad, but maybe I’m just used to thinking of him as strong and vital.

While we were walking around, a man left the dining room with a walker. He moved very slowly. He was wearing funny socks with little rubber things knitted into them for grip. No shoes. An attendant carrying a walker chased him down. She had another walker in her hand. His. He had taken someone else’s.

They had a room with chairs and a DVD player. They also had an activity room with a piano, lots of books, and plenty of games.

They didn’t have much in the way of outdoor facilities. They allow residents to walk beside the road in front of the place. Not sure how good an idea that is.

The lighting was a little gloomy, and the paint was somewhat yellowish. The air wasn’t all that fresh, but the aromas of things like diapers and disinfectants were muted.

If you store your dad at a place like this, you can visit whenever you want. You can check him out and take him to lunch. You can bring him home on weekends. You can use it as a firewall to keep your dad away from you while you try to get things done, but you don’t have to leave him there all the time.

I suppose the danger is that you’ll check him out so often, the home will fail to serve its purpose. I started thinking about how I could take him out for lunch and bring him home for visits, and then I realized I wouldn’t benefit much from moving him in if I overdid those things.

The second place was less expensive. The rooms were just rooms. No suites. They opened onto little living room areas with kitchens. There were no stoves or conventional ovens, for obvious reasons, but they had microwave ovens and refrigerators.

They had a little courtyard where people could garden or sit in the sun. They had some barbecue grills. One still had stickers on it, but another had been used. They didn’t have any place for people to walk. My dad takes long walks every day. He would have to walk in circles in the courtyard.

The second place had two levels, a la Dante. One was for people who weren’t too far gone mentally. The other was for people who were completely out of it. The lady who gave me the tour said my dad would be given an assessment to determine where he belonged. He is clearly in better shape than the residents of the second place, but six months from now, he may fit right in, or he may be so far gone he’ll be in a hospice.

The second place had two smell levels to go along with the care levels. The area for people who could dress and feed themselves only smelled a little bit. The other area smelled like what it was. The more feeble people get, the dirtier they are, even when attendants are scurrying around behind them wiping things up.

I “met” three ladies who live in the memory care area. One seemed very happy. She was smiling and engaging the attendants, enjoying the attention. She was in a wheelchair. She was wearing black pants that had white discolorations in the crotch area. I knew what that was. Prolonged contact with urine bleaches fabrics.

I’m not accusing anyone of failing to look after this lady. For all I know, fabrics get bleached like that after attendants remove them promptly and put them in hampers.

There was another woman who seemed very young to be there. I would guess she was around 65. She looked like she must have been beautiful in her youth. Her jaw was set, and she sat staring at the TV with a grim expression. Her hair was mostly white, with some brown areas. Most women that age dye their hair, so it was a little strange to see one whose vanity was being ignored. It was a quiet admission of surrender. Her hair color wasn’t important any more.

I asked the lady giving me the tour things about getting my dad installed there. I wanted to know how long it took and so on. I told her he was determined never to be put in a home. She started telling me how people adjust. Some of them ream their kids out every time they visit, calling them traitors and so on. Then when the kids go, they forget all about it, literally, and go back to palling around with their new friends.

It made me think of my first day of school. No kid wants to start school, but once you’re there, you don’t mind it. If you’re lucky. My first “school” was more like a pre-K day camp, so I enjoyed it.

I feel like I’m considering sending a kid to camp. At first, you look forward to having some time to yourself, but then you think about the days when you’ll be alone at home, wondering what he’s up to.

My dad is making some effort to avoid causing me problems, but he still does a lot of things to make moving him to assisted living easier to face. He does unbelievably filthy things in the bathroom and kitchen. Sometimes he is abusive. He offends my friends, not with his disability, but with insulting or gross remarks.

I am somewhat grateful for his bad behavior. It must be very, very hard to put a considerate, cooperative parent in a facility. It will be harder than I expected when my dad’s time comes, regardless of how difficult he makes life here at home.

I don’t think he’ll be happy in a home. Not while he still has some of his marbles. He’s very smart, apart from the dementia. He will understand exactly what’s happening. He will know what it means. He will feel the sting of the loss of status and power. It will be harder to maintain the shield of denial.

I’m wondering about home care. I was advised to get him evaluated for home hospice care. Today I learned that Korean War veterans are eligible for $1800 per month in assistance. That would pay for a lot of personal attention. Maybe it would be better to have someone come here for a few hours a day to look after him. It’s hard to say. In a home, he would have people his own age to socialize with, and they would have activities, but it would still be a home. Here, he would be able to stay in his house and be around me, but he could forget about karaoke and all that other nonsense.

There is no good answer. I need to stop looking for one and settle on the best bad outcome. He’s going to suffer. He’ll suffer the indignity of regimented life in a thinly disguised asylum, or he’ll suffer boredom and increased isolation here.

When my mother got cancer, no one expected or looked for a perfect solution that would avoid all pain and grief. We just looked for the best deal we could get, which turned out to be 8 months of unpleasant, expensive, utterly pointless treatment followed by death.

Dementia is like cancer. When you get it, you will suffer, no matter what anyone does to help you. The suffering probably varies in direct proportion to the size of your ego.

When you become demented, the best thing anyone can do for you, apart from helping you receive salvation, is to give you up to laziness and the diet and activities of your choice. Trying to fix you is cruel. It prolongs a bad experience for no constructive purpose. My dad’s doctors should take him off his blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood clot medications. I should let him drink 5 shots of hard liquor a night, the way he used to before I got his doctor to stop him.

His new cardiologist is talking about the possibility of more “aggressive” treatment. Cynical me, I see that as an effort to milk more money out of Medicare. My dad is like a toothpaste tube full of tax and insurance money, and medical professionals want to squeeze every drop out before giving up on the tube.

He doesn’t know his address or phone number, and he wears a diaper. He can’t get better. He will continue getting worse, and then he will die. If treatment accomplishes anything at all, which is not likely, it will only be the prolongation of his struggle and humiliation. It may keep his heart beating longer, but his dementia won’t even be slowed down. It is 100% incurable and impossible to retard.

When we go to the grocery store, my dad stops in the bakery and ice cream areas. I let him buy what he wants. If he forgets to get ice cream and baked goods, I remind him, because he bugs me about it if we run out. He probably eats a gallon and a half of ice cream every week, and he likes pies and cookies. That’s fine. It’s not making anything worse. The problem is the ice cream he ate when he was in his fifties and sixties. That’s the ice cream that made him demented, and he can’t uneat it now.

If I tried to stop him, I would have to hear about it every day. When he starts demanding ice cream, I take him to get it.

He reminds me of my aunt. One day her neck started to itch, and she went to her primary care physician. She had a skin rash, and it turned out to be caused by small cell lung cancer. After she was diagnosed, she continued to smoke. It didn’t make things any worse. She was killed by the half-million cigarettes she smoked before she got sick.

My grandfather had a heart attack at the age of 85. He was strong and healthy at the time. He was still practicing law and enjoying life. He got angry at a hired man who disobeyed him, and he got out of his car and chased some cattle on foot. Later on, he had chest pains, and they took him to the hospital in Lexington. A few days later, he was dead. He was lucky, and so was my grandmother, who would have had to look after him. Look what they missed. Even my mother was lucky, compared to my dad. And what if she had been cured of cancer? She would be 83 now, struggling with the job I’m trying to do.

Tomorrow I visit another home, and then I’m done with that for the week. I’ll be looking into hiring an attendant, and I’ll eventually ask his doctor about home hospice care. Tonight I may tell my dad where I went today. I’m not sure. He has to know sooner or later.

I don’t know what can be done when a patient refuses to move into a facility. Do they Baker Act them and hogtie them? The people I talked to today didn’t seem ready for angry patients who are determined to escape.

The sooner we start talking about it, the sooner he will accept it. I think.

I strongly advise people to take care of their brains. Lay off the booze, don’t smoke, and avoid obesity. If you start to slip, draw up legal documents indicating you don’t want your shell to be propped up forever with blood thinners and beta blockers. Otherwise, get ready to see your family suffer needlessly and your estate drained. Even with Medicare, you may shell out $75,000 per year. How long can you keep that up?

This stuff is real. We hide it behind hedges and fences and drawn blinds, but it’s coming for us. Might as do what you can to prepare. It’s better than letting your selfishness cause your family to be blindsided.

Exiles From Ruptured Church Sift Through the Ashes

Today two friends from my old church, North Miami’s New Dawn Ministries, came by to visit. They’re a married couple. I will call them Pepe and Lourdes. Pepe is the uncle of the pastor’s wife.

If you read my blog regularly, you know the pastor was charged with several counts of child molestation. He started molesting his sister’s daughter when she was 5 or 6, and it continued until she was in her teens. He confessed in front of the church. It’s not like his guilt is in doubt.

I am told it happened like this: a friend of the victim told the pastor’s sister, and she went after the pastor. She told him she would keep it quiet if he resigned and stopped preaching. He continued preaching, so she called the police. She hit Facebook and exposed everything, and she accused the pastor’s wife of turning a blind eye.

Today I learned something new: the pastor is still preaching. My friends say he even preached in jail. Is that commendable? You tell me. A truly repentant rapist could tell other prisoners about his filthy deeds, and he could talk about how he failed God and how God was helping him go forward. Is that what’s happening? Doubtful. Based on the pastor’s past behavior, it would surprise me.

Anyone can repent. Anyone can change. People have to be permitted to change. They have to be forgiven. None of this means we have to take them back or restore them to their former positions.

He killed his church, so if he is preaching outside of jail, some idiot who runs a church must be allowing him to speak. I hope he’s not receiving offerings. God will only stand for so much.

I learned something else, about a branch the church tried to open while I was a member. The branch was in Winter Haven. People from the church supported the place with offerings. New Dawn Winter Haven closed, and no one informed the members in Miami. The pastors kept the branch’s Facebook page open. I wondered why they didn’t inform us and take the page down. I think I know the answer. Today my friends said they continued accepting offerings after the branch closed. A cynical person would say they kept quiet about the branch’s collapse so they could continue taking money from donors.

Pepe was eating with the pastors, and a relative who didn’t know the church’s failure was a secret mentioned what had happened. The pastor’s wife’s eyes opened wide. She knew they had been busted. Pepe had been supporting the dead church. He asked where his donations had been going.

Sounds a lot like wire fraud, but it looks like it was par for the course. It was not the first allegation of financial corruption.

I don’t know what to make of my former pastors. People who deal with addicts say they reform only when they hit rock bottom. My pastors don’t seem to be that teachable. Rock bottom is when you’re sitting in jail charged with numerous counts of molestation. If you’re still trying to hold services after that, there is probably no hope for you.

The pastor’s wife is dying from a brain tumor. Their petty criminal son is keeping Twitter hot with crazy posts insulting God in profane terms. Looks like he is still not very close to the moment of repentance he needs. The whole family is crumbling.

If I had to guess, I would say the pastor is preaching in order to make money. He had a government job as an inspector, but he quit to preach full-time. That job is gone forever, so he has to preach or start mowing yards. Maybe he is preaching because he doesn’t want a minimum-wage job that requires exertion. He’s a very lazy man, and his pride makes him a poor fit for a zero-turn mower.

On September 12, he is expected to take a plea. Pepe says he was looking at 25 years. He was eligible for more time than that, but maybe the prosecutors told him to expect 25. The clerk’s website mentions a plea, so maybe he’ll do better. If he’s certain he’s going to prison, he has no motivation to develop a new career right now. He could still pick up some offerings while he awaits sentencing, however.

He’s not going to get probation. He can forget that. He’s going away. You can’t confess to raping a 6-year-old or even a 14-year-old and get probation.

Maybe when he preached in jail, he was sounding other prisoners out to find out if preaching can protect him from beatings. Maybe he hopes prison inmates will overlook the nature of his crimes if he preaches convincingly and develops a following.

His continued preaching is a mystery to me. I don’t know what the explanation is. I very much doubt he has turned a corner, so I’m looking for other motives.

Pepe and Lourdes got pushed out of the church. It didn’t matter that they were the pastor’s wife’s uncle and aunt. We had several positions in the church. Armorbearer, deacon, and minister were positions. Pepe was a minister. This was as high up as one could get without running the place.

Pepe got upset because the pastor’s wife booted people off the prayer team. We had a team that prayed together over the phone. A lady named Daisy had a mentally impaired daughter named Bianca, and they were on the team. They left the church, and the pastor’s wife said they had to leave the team. A friend of mine in another city also got kicked off. She got the boot because she was my friend. That’s my impression, anyway. Pepe was not happy, and he said so. The pastors drove him out.

Pepe is retired. He worked for the government, fixing diesel equipment. He somehow ended up with a double pension at a relatively early age. He left Miami last year and moved to Kissimmee. He loves it up here. He and I were extracted from the snakepit of Dade County, and our lives are very pleasant now. The pastors are still down there, and you can see how things worked out for them.

It’s almost as if being persecuted by these people is an indication that your life will go well.

Maybe it is.

I’m not better off than the pastor because I’m a good person. I am far from good. My hope is that God is helping me because I keep confessing and repenting. Today Pepe said the pastor once told him he thought the grace the church was experiencing was so great, there was no need to confess. It appears that he was wrong about that.

Human beings impress me, for good or bad. Some people do unselfish things I can’t imagine doing. Some people behave so stupidly, I can’t comprehend it.

In a few days, the pastor will either plead guilty or go to trial. If he pleads, his sentence will be on the clerk’s site shortly thereafter.

I never thought I would see something like this happen to him. It has to be the power of pride.

Levi’s Joins the Fight Against Civil Rights

I have two points to make:

1. The Levi’s people are pushing gun control and even pressing employees to take part, so they are now on my list.

2. The CEO of Levi’s, one Chip Bergh, never washes his pants and thinks he’s doing a good thing, so he probably smells like a bum in August.

3. Levi’s jeans aren’t very good.

Okay, three points.

Today I read that Levi’s is getting on board with Michael Bloomberg’s anti-civil-rights campaign. They are going to push for “sensible” laws, i.e. the eventual confiscation of all firearms. I’m not sure how many pairs of Levi’s I’ve seen at gun ranges. A lot, for sure. I wonder if Mr. Bergh is aware that many people who stand up for their civil rights do it in Levi’s.

While I was reading about Levi’s doing its best to kill sales, I came across a disgusting article. Mr. Bergh says it’s wrong to wash jeans. EVER. If you must do something about the filth, you’re supposed to do it as rarely as possible. Says the fragrant Mr. Bergh, “A good pair of denim doesn’t really need to be washed in the washing machine except for very infrequently or rarely.”

In a way, he’s right. The jeans don’t need to be washed. They don’t need anything. The people who wear them need them to be washed.

Let’s get real. Jeans cover the pelvis. This is where genitalia and anuses are found. In an ideal world, the contents of these body parts would never, ever come in contact with one’s pants. This is not an ideal world, however. Things go wrong. Our digestions have bad days, resulting in fecal issues. Urine goes where it shouldn’t. Unfortunate things that emerge from our genitals go where we don’t want them to. Things like this happen to everyone, including people who lie about it. Over time, anyone’s pants will eventually develop smells and even stains.

Then there is sweat. It contains oil, salt, and bacteria. It lifts dead skin off and onto our clothes. You can’t just leave it there.

Wearing filthy clothes will eventually cause people to avoid you and maybe even fire you, and it also leads to things like boils and skin infections. I don’t know, but I would guess that lice prefer dirty clothes, too, and lice are not things of the past.

The fact that Bergh thinks filth is okay tells you his values are not in line with those of relatively sane people, i.e. conservatives and Christians. He is way off in that “calling evil good and good evil” area. He works for a major corporation in San Francisco, so no big shock.

Imagine standing next to a man who has defecated maybe 600 times and urinated a couple of thousand times without washing his pants. No, don’t.

If it’s not obvious to you what’s wrong with Bergh’s plan, there is no point in talking to you. Either it’s obvious, or you are under a delusion.

He’s wrong. That’s what I’m getting at.

He’s also wrong when he uses the term “good denim” to refer to Levi’s.

Levi’s uses crappy fabric. Not all cotton is the same. Some cotton has long fibers. Some has short fibers. Long fibers are stronger and nicer. I’m sure there must be other characteristics that set good cotton apart from bad.

Cheap cotton falls apart faster. The way Levi’s do. If you wear a pair of Levi’s long enough for them to fade from WASHING (Mr. Bergh), they will start to tear at the crotch. The buttonholes on the fly will start to fail. The belt loops will tear the pants. You may get other rips even if you don’t make them deliberately. This happens because Levi’s fabric is not “good denim.”

I have Carhartt jeans. I started buying them last year, when I realized dressing like a Miami boat bum was not going to work on a farm. I have some pairs that are around a year old, and I have some pairs I got last month. I wear them every single day. I wash them after almost every use. I use them for farm work and hunting. It’s hard to tell the new ones from the old ones. That’s “good denim.”

Carhartts also fit better than Levi’s. They sit at the waist, not down at the hipster level where they cut you in half every time you bend. Levi’s sit right where a beer gut makes its first fold. This is why so many men with beer guts are able to wear size 30 Levi’s, and it’s why they look so bad doing it. Levi’s make your legs look short, and they slice into you every time you move. Carhartts make your legs look longer, the way pants are supposed to.

Here’s what you can put in a pair of Carhartt jeans: a Glock, a big knife, a big cell phone, a bunch of car keys, a wallet, a bandana, some cash, and whatever fits in the remaining secret pocket. You can also put something in the hammer loop. You can put more stuff in two Carhartt pockets than all the pockets in a pair of Levi’s. You can’t even fit one Glock in there.

Carhartt jeans have triple seams. Levi’s jeans…not.

Carhartts run about $40. For that you get a pair of jeans which is stronger, longer-lasting, better-looking, more comfortable, much more useful, and less of a threat to the Bill of Rights. I don’t know what Levi’s (which are made in China in spite of their liberal pretensions) cost, but it’s more than $40.

The choice is obvious. If you’re a 9-year-old girl who wants to look like Rihanna, and your sexually ambiguous parents don’t care if your overpriced jeans fall apart in 6 months, you want Levi’s. If you’re a grown American who cares about civil rights and wants superior pants at a good price, you want Carhartt.

I can’t say I’m going to boycott Levi’s because I don’t wear them. I found something much better a long time ago, so Levi’s are no longer a factor in my life. I just thought I’d let Levi’s wearers know what they’re missing. Levi’s are the Budweiser of jeans. Great advertising, at least in the past, but no substance.

People say great things about Wrangler and Lee, which are also cheaper than Levi’s. Something to think about.

Demons

I just read something interesting. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, claims a demon drove him to torture and murder people for sexual gratification.

A 2005 interview aired last night. I didn’t see it. I read about it today. I don’t see much of the material online. I do have a quotation.

I personally think, and I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me. At some point in time, it entered me when I was young, and it basically controlled me.

What is it that bothers me about this quotation? Two things.

First, this man’s life, and the lives of his victims, may have been destroyed unnecessarily by ignorance about demons.

Second, he says the notion of having a demon inside him is “not very Christian.”

This man was a churchgoer. He presumably sat through a lot of sermons. Why didn’t he know how common demons are or how to get rid of them? His religion let him down, just as it lets everyone else down. The people in charge of doctrine teach powerless garbage they steal from secular and pagan sources, and they fail to tell us how to lead victorious lives.

Jesus cast demons out of people, and so did his disciples. His followers are supposed to do it today. Many do. Yet there are preachers all over the world who seem to think demons are rare or even imaginary, or that they can’t afflict Christians.

It’s as if we have roach problems, and when we hire exterminators, they tell us roaches are imaginary, or they come to our houses and spray distilled water or even pancake syrup on the baseboards.

Demons love church; they filled Italy’s churches with nude sculptures and paintings. They love infesting Christians. They love warping our desires and harming our bodies. They enjoy killing us with diseases. They rule over us, like the gentiles who occupied Jerusalem and Israel. We’re supposed to be the head and not the tail, but we are servants in our own flesh houses. We can’t even rule our minds and bodies.

Some people are skeptical of claims like the one BTK made. They see them as efforts to evade blame. Does that make sense in the context of the story of a man serving multiple life sentences? He says he’s a serial killer. He confessed. He has no hope of ever seeing the light of day again. What does he have to gain by saying a demon was involved?

I don’t know what his intentions were, but I’m sure he wasn’t expecting people to think more highly of him because of demonic influence.

It’s interesting that sex drives so many serial killers, and it is perhaps more interesting that most people don’t know it.

To a normal person, tying someone else up and killing them would not be sexually rewarding. The thought of it would tend to kill arousal and make sex impossible. To Dennis Rader, it was the height of sexual expression and pleasure.

When people talk about Ted Bundy, they rarely mention his practice of burying dead girls in secret places so he could go back and have sex with their decaying corpses. We talk about him as though anger were his big problem. It’s not that simple. He had a powerful sexual fetish involving dead bodies.

Jeffrey Dahmer was driven by sex. He was a homosexual, and he wanted mindless sex slaves. He experimented on his victims, trying to turn them into obedient servants. He injected things like hydrochloric acid into his victims’ brains, hoping it would destroy enough tissue to make them obedient.

Some child murderers get tremendous sexual pleasure from torturing children sexually. There was one who nicknamed himself “Pliers” because of his fetish. He used pliers on the private parts of teenage girls. He was proud of it.

Satan’s children seem to think it’s very important to play down the link between sexual perversion and violent crime. I suppose that’s because Satan doesn’t want to stink up his bait. He uses sex to lure people into demonic oppression. He doesn’t want people who indulge fetishes, including homosexuality, to connect their practices with things like rape, murder, torture, addiction, or disease. He hides behind a flag decorated with a rainbow, not a dead child.

BTK left DNA evidence at the scenes of his crimes, and I don’t mean blood or hair follicles. You can guess what it was. He was so aroused, he did what aroused men do, right there at the murder scenes with freshly killed bodies.

The Bible says Jesus’s followers will cast out demons, but very few of us are doing it. It should be a staple on the menu at every church. Strange. How did we get here? We worship an exorcist, but most of us can’t do what he told us to do.

I believe BTK. His claim makes perfect sense to me. I doubt it exonerates him, although it is possible for a demon to override human will. It’s definitely a contributing factor.

Jump Before Your High Horse Gets too Tall

I had a fun visit from my friend Amanda and her kids today. When that was finished, I thought I would sit down and study mechanical engineering for pleasure. I was mistaken. I ended up watching a movie called Mrs. Skeffington.

Spoilers lie ahead.

The movie is good but not great. The star is Bette Davis. The movie starts in 1914. Unbelievably, Davis plays a gorgeous girl from a rich family. Bette Davis was not gorgeous, so some suspension of disbelief is required. The makeup people did a bang-up job with her, but she was still a B- on her very best day, even through a lens smeared with vaseline.

There is a reason why homosexuals like her more than straight men.

Bette’s brother loses the family fortune, and then he goes to work for a brokerage. He steals money by submitting false orders.

Claude Rains plays Job Skeffington, a rich Jewish man who runs the brokerage. He comes to see Bette and her brother, and he ends up telling Bette what happened. Bette tells him the family can’t cover the debt because their fortune is gone. Rains agrees to let things ride for a while.

Davis chases Rains and gets him to marry her, in order to get the debt canceled. He moves into her family’s mansion, saving it from creditors. Bette likes him, but she doesn’t love him. She has a bunch of desperate suitors who continue to pursue her after she marries, and she doesn’t discourage them. She loves the attention. Men are crazy about her. Wherever she goes, they trample each other trying to get to her.

Davis and Rains have a baby. Their marriage gets worse. The irresponsible brother dies in World War I, and Davis becomes bitter because she is stuck in a marriage she only created in order to save him.

Davis steps out on Rains with other men. Eventually, she finds out he has been cheating on her with his secretaries, and she divorces him. He gives her a huge fortune, purely because he’s a kind person. She practically forces him to take the daughter and raise her. Rains and the daughter take off for Europe, and Davis avoids her for years.

The Nazis overrun Europe. The daughter flees to America. Rains stays behind and gets put in a concentration camp.

Davis goes sailing with a man in his late 20’s. She is about 50, but she looks 30, so he is in hot pursuit. She catches a chill out on the water and contracts diphtheria. When she gets over it, she has the wrinkles of a 70-year-old, and a lot of her hair has vanished for good.

While she recovers, she sees Rains sitting in the room with her. Bothered by the hallucinations, she goes to a rude therapist. He tells her she needs to take her husband back. He says her suitors never really cared for her. She gets mad and says she can still get attention from men. He dares her to prove it. She throws a party and invites her old beaus.

At the party, people are horrified by her appearance. The wives of her former suitors are overjoyed. She tries to seduce one of the men, and as tactfully as he can, he makes it clear he has no interest at all.

One of her suitors is broke. He shows up after the party and pretends to be in love with her. She pretends to be broke, too, and he takes off. This is when she realizes things are not going well.

The daughter tells Davis she is marrying the young man who took her mother sailing. Ouch.

Davis ends up alone, miserable, and ashamed to take her ugly face outside.

In the end, Rains returns from Europe. He has been in a concentration camp, and somehow he ended up broke and blind. He still loves Davis. She takes him back.

Shorter version: beautiful woman uses looks to control men; then she becomes ugly very quickly and has to adjust to the loss of her powers.

Why did I watch this movie? God shows me things for reasons.

I feel it was about my dad. He used to be a powerful figure in a number of lives. His family and his employees had to toe the line. People who didn’t really like him all that much treated him well because they had to or because they wanted something from him. Now he has no power over people, and no one is kissing up to him any more. He has to ask for things instead of giving orders. If he’s not nice to people, they don’t have to be nice to him or even suffer his presence.

I only have two friends I see regularly. One has a strong maternal side, so she doesn’t mind dealing with him. Not that much, anyway. She doesn’t pretend his behavior is acceptable, but she tolerates it out of kindness. The other friend is a man who, obviously, lacks a maternal side. He is nice to my dad, but that’s largely a courtesy to me. He comes to visit, and he realizes that in order to spend time with me, he has to endure a certain amount of rude behavior from my dad. He humors him and invests some time talking to him, but he only does it to keep things going smoothly. We look for excuses to do things without my dad.

In the past, he spent more time with my dad, because they had common interests and enjoyed talking about them. Things have changed. My dad’s behavior is worse, and the conversation isn’t good.

There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to get away from my dad. My friends are my friends, not his, and they come to see me, not him. They’re not obligated to let him mistreat them or impose on them. Also, if he is indulged, he will dominate the conversation to the point where I am cut out of it completely. He would see nothing wrong with having a long conversation with my friends, in which I did not get to talk to them once. He has done it in the past. It was bad when he had all his marbles, but when it’s a dementia conversation, it’s even worse.

He doesn’t have a single friend, unless you count another dementia sufferer he hasn’t spoken to in months. He uses me to get contact with other people. It’s as if I’m growing apples and picking them for myself, and he is taking them off my plate and eating them in front of me.

He didn’t grow any apples for himself. His friendships were phony. His friends were people he did business with.

Mrs. Skeffington could not wrap her head around the obvious. She looked somewhat grotesque after her illness, and there was nothing wrong with her vision or her mirrors. She could see herself clearly. Nonetheless, she pretended she was still a beauty who could gather crowds of adoring men simply by showing up. She had to have her denial shoved in her face before she admitted what was already clear to everyone else.

My dad’s biggest problem these days is dementia. His second-biggest problem is his refusal to admit he has it. He is not so demented that he can’t see what’s happening. He knows he can’t drive. He knows he can’t practice law. He knows he can’t take care of himself. Obviously, he understands these things. Still, a few times a month, he insists on telling me there is nothing wrong with him.

Because he refused to admit he had a problem back when things weren’t so bad, he didn’t prepare at all. He thought he would die at 100, still at the top of his game. He didn’t tell me anything about looking after his investments. He didn’t plan his estate to any great extent. He didn’t give away cash every year to beat the IRS.

He never made any plans to wrap up his law practice. He simply stopped getting business. People he had represented for decades hired other lawyers.

His investments got messed up. He couldn’t keep records well. He got in trouble because he refused to pay a just debt. I had to step in and figure it all out, instead being brought in 10 years ago and being allowed to modernize everything.

After the transition was made, he insisted on interfering from time to time, and he was always wrong because he was no longer fit to run things. He finally reached the point where he could not interfere much, and it made things go much more smoothly. I no longer had to argue with him in addition to doing his work for him.

He made no plans at all for his eventual deterioration. He refused to make a living will. He didn’t educate himself about assisted living and so on. He never thought about leaving Miami in order to avoid dying surrounded by old Cubans who could not converse with him.

He tells himself he’s a great guy who was a fantastic husband and father. He tells himself his family consisted of three total screwups and one saint. He says he’s a good person who hasn’t done anything wrong. Who says things like that? Virtually everyone is willing to own a certain number of misdeeds and admit regret, even if they aren’t completely honest.

I believe God wanted me to see the movie so he could tell me this: “Your dad put himself where he is today. He did this to himself. Whatever happens to him now is completely his fault. It was to be expected. And he is still making his problems worse.”

Sometimes you have to watch people sink. It happens to us all, many times in life. We have to stand by and observe while self-destructive people crash and burn in slow motion. I marvel when I think how hard I worked to try to get my sister to let me help her.

The fact that someone else is failing and suffering badly doesn’t mean you are supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t mean you failed. God does everything that can be done to help people, and he still watches them burn in hell. You’re not more capable than God.

We try to help people, and often, it works. But there are many people who can’t be blessed because the blessings can’t get through the thick armor of pride. You can’t always help.

I can do a lot to make my dad’s life better, but there will be a great deal of suffering I can’t touch with my best efforts, and I have to feel in my heart that this is not my fault.

When I was teaching physics at the University of Texas, my head T.A. told me about the written exam. We let students work together on lab reports, but they had to take the written test alone. He said we were uncoupling the cars in order to see who was pulling the train. God is uncoupling the cars. My ability to help my dad is decreasing week by week, and soon it will disappear. Then he will be alone with God, and I will be sitting on the sidelines.

We all end up alone with God eventually. The earlier you meet with him, the better off you will be.

There is nothing wrong, abnormal, unexpected, or unjust about my dad’s situation. It’s a small taste of the justice we deserve for abandoning God. We all deserve hell. My dad isn’t in hell. He’s getting a mild preview in order to motivate him to come clean.

These unsubtle lessons keep coming. I have one father who didn’t prepare himself or me, but I have another one who is preparing me very thoroughly.

I don’t recommend the movie. It’s okay if you’re tired and you just want a reason to eat popcorn, but that’s about it.

New Correction From God

This week my copy of The Death of Santini arrived.

If you read this blog, you know I have been reading about the dysfunctional family of the author Pat Conroy. The movie The Great Santini was based on Conroy’s dad, but the real-life Santini was much worse than the Robert Duvall version. He was a habitual wife-beater, and he beat his children with his fists. He even beat strangers who tried to stop the beatings.

I bought Conroy’s autobiographical book My Losing Season because I found out it contained material about his dad. I felt like I had to read it.

Something supernatural is going on. Conroy is not a skilled writer, and he can be annoying, but I still feel compelled to read his books.

Today something odd happened. I went to Youtube to watch a couple of Christian videos, and as might be expected, I drifted off into garbage video. I watched some Jack Reacher clips. For some reason, I clicked on a video from a show called True Detective. I have never seen the show. The caption said the video was about a character named Ray Velcoro, beating up a bully’s dad. That appealed to me. Morbid curiosity.

The video is easy to summarize. Velcoro’s young son is a fat victim. He had some expensive basketball shoes. Another boy stole them and cut them up. Velcoro berated, insulted, and threatened his son (like Pat Conroy’s dad) until he gave him a name. Velcoro went to the boy’s house, got his dad to bring him out for a lecture, and beat his dad senseless in front of him.

The bully’s name was Aspen Conroy.

That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be. Pat Conroy is a well-known writer who appeals to soft left-wing males, and soft left-wing males are the kind of people who get hired to write TV shows.

The writers chose that name for a reason, and I came across the video for a reason.

My dad was a bully. My sister was a bully, too. She always found people to torture, wherever she went. She probably has some victims right now. She always liked picking on homosexuals. She and her friend used to torment an effeminate young man when we lived in Miami Shores. I thought his name was Sally because that was what they always called him.

She also tried to feminize straight men who attracted her abuse. Like a bull lesbian, she likes men to be small and weak. Maybe that’s a response to her aggressive, assertive, intimidating father.

My dad was a bully, and now that I’m in charge, the bully aspects of his nature cause problems. He curses me when I tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. He tries to make me think I’m crazy when I disagree with him. He holds me responsible for things like his boredom, his incurable back pain, everything that goes wrong with the house…you name it. I am the genie who has a duty to appear on command, wave a wand, and make all discomfort and resistance vanish instantly.

He also has some extremely filthy habits which derive from a lifetime of treating other people like porta-potties.

To me, the big problem with my dad isn’t the way he treats me. It’s the way I respond. I get angry with him. I’m not saying I scream at him or physically abuse him. I just get angry. I behave like someone who isn’t angry, but I still feel it, and I have to fight it using supernatural means. I don’t want to be a place where anger sits and festers. What happens in the world outside of me is beyond my control, and I have low expectations, but I don’t want the filth inside me.

I believe God is telling me it’s wrong to hate bullies.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I hate bullies.” We say it without guilt, as if hating bullies makes a person righteous.

Bullies are horrendous. They taunt. They rape. They invade our boundaries and put their hands on others. They look for the things that disturb us most, and those are the things they do. The humiliation of others brings them joy. They do things like shoving people’s heads in toilets and holding people down and spitting in their mouths.

A bully doesn’t just hurt you while he’s with you. He leaves pain inside you and makes you hate yourself for losing. Nonetheless, we’re not entitled to hate them. If you accept hate, you damage yourself and grieve the Holy Spirit, so it’s another victory for the bullies. It’s the biggest victory a bully can get.

Cursed people who serve demons are always looking for dance partners. They latch onto others, and if they succeed, demons join with the others, and sick relationships are established. This is why beating a woman is one of the best ways to keep her from leaving you. The demons want to keep dance partners together.

I have to get over the idea that it’s okay to hate a bully. Self-righteousness is poisonous. Besides, I have bullied people. Not a lot, but I have done it. Something came over me, and I yielded. I did what I hate. Who am I to feel like I’m in a superior class?

Two things are true, and at first glance, they may seem inconsistent. First, we are not to develop relationships with bullies. It’s correct to cut them loose instantly and to refuse to take them back when they whimper and beg for forgiveness. Forgiveness and taking people back are different things. As for taking up with a bully, it’s like dating a pimp; you’ll get what you asked for, and God won’t listen when you ask for deliverance. Second thing: we are not supposed to hate bullies. You can cut a mentally diseased person out of your life without hatred.

Unless I am literally forced to accept relationships I don’t want, my dad will be the very last abusive person in my life. I wasn’t to blame for being born in a house with two bullies, but I am responsible for the problems caused by new bullies I choose to tolerate.

I have to keep a watchful eye on my social circle, but I can’t harbor active malice toward those who mistreat me. It’s like a break in the skin where demons can enter.

If you’re not submitted to God, he will put people who hate you over you. The Bible says so. It leads to bad marriages, horrible jobs, tyranny, and toxic friendships. God will make you the tail and not the head. I put contemptible people in positions of power over me, and I didn’t know I was doing it. The reason I didn’t know is that I wasn’t close to God. He would have advised me, had I been spending time with him.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be my dad or my sister.

My sister is vicious and mentally ill. No one can stand her. She has no law license, and there is no way she’ll ever meet the requirements to get her license restored, because she would have to admit what she has done, apologize to the bar, and complete a rehab program. She used her looks to control men when she was young, but now she is old and physically repulsive. She was disinherited 14 years ago. Her cancer is in remission, but cancer comes back.

My sister thinks she’s a holy woman. She thinks God and the world have cheated her. Everyone who knows her thinks she deserves worse and is glad to be free of her. Her relatives dread contact with her, as do many of her former business contacts.

My dad’s life has no meaning. He wakes up in a smelly bedroom, bathes in a filthy bathroom, puts on the same basic outfit every day, and then thinks about nothing except his own comfort and pleasure until he falls asleep. He can’t do anything to entertain himself. He can’t have a real conversation. He doesn’t have a single friend, and he can’t make new ones. He doesn’t have the comfort of prayer.

I think the only reason he has for living is fear of death. He can’t be thinking about heaven. He may die this year, but he refuses to think about the afterlife. He is dying from a terminal disease, and he insists he’s in great health and ought to live to be a hundred.

I can’t help thinking of David Carradine, a screwup and human cipher who met his end in a closet in Thailand, naked, obsessing on his own base pleasure.

My dad and my sister have no one they can talk to about their thoughts and feelings, and if they did, they wouldn’t do it. They think they’ve done everything right, so there is nothing to talk about. I’ve never heard my dad say anything introspective. I don’t think he permits that kind of thought.

Whatever. Regardless of what happens to the people around me because of their bad choices, I don’t want their poison to contaminate me.

Pat Conroy’s parents had 7 children, and 5 attempted suicide. One succeeded. His dad, the bully, wasn’t suicidal. What he did to his family must not have bothered him much. He died from cancer. He must have succeeded in pushing his poison into his kids permanently.

I will continue listening to God and trying to get correction, and as for my dad, I look forward to the day he accepts salvation. There is nothing else of value he is capable of accomplishing in this life.

If Reality Calls, Say I’m not In

I had an interesting experience this week. I came up against a startling example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

In case you don’t know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, I will tell you. It’s a strange syndrome in which people who aren’t bright or capable believe themselves to be smarter and more capable than others. I run into it all the time, and I’m sure you do, too.

You could also call it the Appleby Syndrome. In the novel Catch-22, the character Orr says character Appleby he has flies in his eyes. He says, “How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?”

I don’t know if Dunning-Kruger is a form of projection or what, but it’s exasperating. It’s annoying to get in a squabble with a person who is not smart enough to be right about anything and not smart enough to know it.

I can understand lacking intellectual power. What I can’t understand is going through life getting C’s and D’s, getting a 900 on your SAT’s, ending up running a backhoe for a living, and still thinking you’re smarter than doctors and scientists and everyone else. How can you fail to notice your limitations?

People like to blame tests. “They’re biased.” No, they’re not. Unless you mean they’re biased in favor of smart people.

All over the US, there are slow black kids who sincerely believe they’re brilliant and that white people have rigged tests to keep them down. They go on social media and write about the intellectual superiority of the black race, and they call white people “Neanderthals.”

Educators tell them these things. Maybe I should put “Educators” in quotation marks. White kids are lucky they have a less-powerful excuse-making industry working on them.

Dunning-Kruger people aren’t rational. Lack of intelligence isn’t their real problem. There are lots of slow people who don’t try to tell the rest of us what to do. Dunning-Kruger people have psychological problems. They bully and pout and control, because they are crazy and insecure.

I was participating in an Internet forum. Someone asked a question about physics. Incredibly, a bunch of ignorant people started weighing in, as if their wild and pitiable guesses, which they presented as fact, were anything but ludicrous and useless.

You may be the smartest layman on earth, but if you haven’t studied physics, you don’t know the first thing about it. When you talk about physics, it’s as if you suddenly decided you could play the cello or speak Urdu. You’re going to make a fool of yourself, and even worse, you lack the ability to understand people who try to explain why you’re wrong.

If you say stupid things about physics, you then need to take at least two semesters of calculus and two semesters of university physics in order to be able to understand why what you said was stupid.

I decided to chime in on the forum, and I gently said people who didn’t know anything about physics should be quiet and let people who knew some things talk. One forum member is a physics major, and he was trying to be helpful, but an insecure, bullying blowhard kept interjecting with infantile nonsense.

Naturally, the blowhard homed in on me, and he made a bigger fool of himself than he already had. He was so determined to find something to be right about, he even “corrected” my English. I referred to electrical engineers as “EE’s,” which is correct. When you refer to something by its initials, and you pluralize it, you put an apostrophe before the S. It’s not mandatory, because people keep getting dumber and grammarians are now dumbing down the rules to suit them, but it’s right.

Soon writing will disappear entirely, and we will simply grunt and point.

He finally managed to get his milligram of flesh. I said “EE’s” was an acronym and told him to look up the rules, and after what must have been an all-night Googling session, he said it was an initialism. Hooray. Victory. But he was wrong about everything else, including the apostrophe. The apostrophe rule applies to initialisms.

He sent me a private message, as if he thought I craved even more exposure to him, and he filled it with links on initialisms. I told him never to bother me again, and I blocked him by all means possible.

Some people are just too crazy to live. This guy is more obsessive than an ex-girlfriend who can’t handle rejection. This must be how James Woods felt after he dumped Sean Young.

The enemy likes anger and conflict, so he sends annoying people to God’s children. The way to handle it is to take the supernatural approach. Forgive them, speak defeat to them and the demons that run them, and pray for God to help them and also keep them away from you until they shape up. Unfortunately, I did those things after he had already started to dig into my skin. I didn’t get into a flame war or sink to his level, but I put things in the wrong order. I responded first and took the supernatural approach afterward.

I hate to say it, but I just realized Dunning-Kruger has blossomed in my dad. My biggest problem with him is his belief that he can win arguments and be the leader. He can’t accept what he has become. He even hits on women. After a certain point in a man’s decline, all women are out of his league. All of them.

Nobody will date a demented man who is pushing 90, apart from sociopathic whores and possibly demented women.

Romance, sex, and marriage are out of the question for demented people because they lack the capacity to consent. It’s like statutory rape.

My dad is mentally hobbled, but he is still smart enough to realize it, and he is able to yield to me and stop questioning what I do. There are times when he defers without any hesitation and admits I have to be in charge. Unfortunately, there are many times when he gives in to his habits of pride and bullying.

I should be able to get cooperation by saying, “We have discussed this many times, and you have forgotten, but it’s taken care of, so please let me handle it.” If he truly respected me in his heart, he would accept that.

The other day he decided he wanted to write short stories on the computer. He can’t use a computer. I wish he could, because he needs activities, but there is no way. He used to use Wordperfect and Word to write legal briefs, but now he asks if there is a “machine” he can use for writing or to “look things up on.” That’s how little he remembers. I showed him his laptop and reluctantly agreed to spend some time showing him how to use it, but when the appointed time came, he had forgotten, and I didn’t remind him.

If he had remembered, I would have been put through an hour of hell. “Goddamn it, stand here next to me and show me how to do this!” Pardon the language, but that’s what used to happen before he gave up using computers.

“Just show me.” “I did show you.” “No you didn’t!” “I did; you just don’t remember.” “Just give me a chance, damn it!” “Dad, we’ve done this many times, but you forget later.” “Just try it this time, and if it doesn’t work, to hell with it.” “Dad…that’s what you said last time.”

Most of the time, he doesn’t tell me to go to hell, but sometimes he does. Then he forgets about that. He forgets he was angry. He resets so the process can start over again. One of my challenges is to break cycles of futility.

My dad cannot write fiction. He never could. He has never written a book or short story, as far as I know. He has STARTED stories. He has always wished he were a writer, but you can’t write unless you have something to say. Like most people, he does not, and even if he did, he is demented now. If I don’t help him use the word processor, I’m not preventing him from having a good time writing. I’m preventing him from driving both of us crazy while he wastes his time.

He couldn’t write even if he used a pen, and he can’t use the computer for any purpose. He can’t save files. He can’t open applications. He can’t do it.

He quit using the computer long ago, on his own.

I have never understood people who wished they were writers even though they were not motivated to write. Such people are much more common than actual writers. Go figure.

“Writer” doesn’t mean “person who identifies as a writer.” It doesn’t mean “person who wears a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, smokes a pipe, and lives in New England.” It means “person who writes.” If you don’t write, you’re not a writer. Best to admit what you are and look for something else to do.

I write, but I don’t tell myself I’m going to write novels or short stories, because I know I’m not.

While the forum discussion about physics and Dunning-Kruger issues was going on, there was some mention of engineering and how it differs from physics. One big difference is that physicists can’t do anything. An engineer may be able to fix a broken lawnmower. Most physicists wouldn’t stand a chance, because we study variables and chalkboard models, not real objects.

If a physicist is able to do anything practical, it means he went beyond his education. It’s that simple. Physics prepares you to understand engineering, but it’s not engineering.

I feel I should have majored in mechanical engineering with an EE minor. I was not cut out to unravel the mysteries of the universe through physics, but I’m smart enough to design and build a guitar amp or a tractor implement.

I decided to take a look at ME major curricula on university websites, to see what ME’s (apostrophe) had to learn. I was surprised at how basic it was. When I was in school, I had to take a bunch of advanced stuff undergrad ME’s never have to conquer.

I may try to learn a few things. I found a Youtube Ph.D. who teaches engineering, and I looked at his solid materials course, which is one of the first courses engineers study. I found out I was supposed to be familiar with a topic called statics, so I dropped solids and looked at that. In maybe 45 minutes, I was up to lesson 21. I kept skipping lessons. Statics is very, very simple for a physicist. Even a bad one.

I don’t know how far I’ll go. It’s nice to see how accessible it is.

I am not Responsible for Anyone Else’s Reward

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences coping with my dad’s dementia. I stood up for myself, and I said I was putting myself first for practical reasons. I wondered how people would take it. It would certainly look better to say, “I don’t care what happens to me; I will sacrifice everything to make sure he has the best experience possible.” But I am not suicidal, nor am I obsessed with making other people think I’m a saint.

It’s perverse and unnatural for the young to sacrifice themselves for the old. The old are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the young. That’s one reason why abortion is an aberration. New generations are the future. The old are supposed to set the young up to survive. Parents don’t throw their kids in front of cars to protect themselves. They lay down their lives for their kids.

So far, I have only seen three responses, and they were all positive. I thank the two commenters who backed me up. The third response came as a text message.

I’ll tell you something about the way my family has always worked. My dad and my sister have always gotten their way by putting other people on the defensive. If you don’t like the way things are going, accuse someone else of selfishness or some other shortcoming, and keep the pressure on until they give in. Come to think of it, even my mother, who was a much nicer person, was not above this. I faced a constant stream of accusations when I was a kid, and after I grew up, the flow didn’t completely stop.

There is a word for this: “gaslighting.” If you have a problem, make someone else think he’s the one who is screwing things up. If you succeed, you skate away, and the person you gaslight is left with the burden and self-doubt, not to mention the burden of disproving the slander.

Leftists are great at this. If you believe in Jesus, it’s not humility or a desire to see God’s love spread. It’s hate. Somehow. Christians have to defend themselves against ridiculous hate charges all the time. Refusing to bake a cake is now considered hate. I wish refusing to bake me cakes were the worst thing my enemies could think up for me.

It’s good to have people who back you up against gaslighters. Even if you know you’re being libeled, it’s helpful to have someone else confirm it.

I’m pretty good about goaltending, when it comes to gaslighting. When my dad accuses me of things, instead of responding, I’ll say, “Don’t try to put me on the defensive. I know you like to do that, but I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m trying to fix a problem you caused.”

Try that with a gaslighter some day. It’s like a karate kick that sweeps their legs out from under them. They collapse. They usually have nothing left to hit you with. They don’t expect you to go on the offensive against their unfair tactics, so they don’t prepare.

This is a great tip. You won’t understand how great it is until you try it.

Putting innocent people on the defensive is a powerful tactic for narcissistic, selfish people. When you do it, you put the burden of proof on the other person. Instead of discussing the real issues, the victims feel like they have to put energy into defending themselves. Don’t fall for it. The fact that someone else goes off on a tangent doesn’t mean you have to go with them. Keep talking about the subject at hand, or bring up something the accuser is desperate to keep off the table.

Jesus was great at this. He was the king of the non sequitur counterpunch. People would make crazy accusations against him, and he wouldn’t respond to them. Instead, he would say whatever he thought people should hear. It made him a very unpleasant person to accuse.

If you have a jealous sibling, whom we’ll call Bob, and he accuses you of, say, using hints to get your parents to help you buy a car, there is no reason why you can’t say something like, “I don’t need a thing, mom and dad. Don’t worry about me. Maybe you could help Bob out, though. He needs a lawyer to get a DWI dismissed.”

Yesterday, my dad said something off the wall. He said I didn’t do anything for him. That’s serious, jaw-dropping gaslighting. He didn’t mean it. He knew it wasn’t true. He was just looking to knock me off balance and make me defend myself.

I decided to respond, since it was a softball. I said I drove him to restaurants, stores, and doctor appointments. I said I did his laundry and cleaned his house. I said I changed his bed for him. I said I took care of his business affairs. I said I maintained his property. I didn’t mention hauling bags of goods covered with reeking excretions to the dump.

It’s kind of hard to think of anything I don’t do for him. He makes himself meals, bathes, and dresses himself. That’s all he does. He can’t do anything else.

A gaslighter will say nearly anything, whether they can prove it or not, so sometimes they really step on a landmine.

Here’s a great moment in gaslighting. Maybe I’ve mentioned it before. My grandmother was around 90. I knew she loved country ham, but she was no longer able to cure her own. I ordered her a great ham from a website. One day I was at her breakfast table, and my sister, who was about 40 at the time, said, “Why don’t you fix some of that country ham Steve bought so you could cook it for him?”

That’s a beauty. She banked a gaslighting shot off my grandmother in order to hit me. No one saw it coming. Everything was cordial up to that point, and then BANG! There it was. JFK couldn’t have been more surprised when the first bullet hit him.

Of course, everyone in my family knew my sister was a fool and a liar, and I took care to respond and set things straight, so I came out unscathed. Still, you have to marvel. What kind of person even thinks of saying a thing like that?

I appreciate it when people tell me the gaslighting is nonsense. It helps.

I am not especially militant or selfish when it comes to looking out for myself when dealing with my dad. I could have said worse things. Here’s something longtime reader Ed Bonderenka said this in a comment, about someone he knows:

I pray he goes peacefully, and if God won’t heal him, soon.

I didn’t go that far. I didn’t say anything like that about my dad, but it’s perfectly moral and acceptable. It’s not selfishness. It’s love.

Sometimes I feel like I blew it by looking after my dad so well, because had I allowed him to keep drinking and sleeping without a CPAP, both of us might have been spared these years of destroyed dignity and disgusting sights, sounds, and smells. The only profit he can get out of life now is salvation, so that’s all I ask for. I used to pray for healing every day. I quit a long time ago. God cut my dad off because of his stubbornness, and I respect that. I just want him to make it to heaven.

My dad’s sister’s dementia went quickly, and she died after a couple of years. She suffered less than he will, and her kids and grandchildren suffered less than I will.

I don’t push things any more. I accept his mortality. I take him to doctors and give him his pills, but if he wants to eat ice cream and cookies every day, I let him. I couldn’t stop him without extreme measures and a lot of fighting. I don’t look for supplements for him. I’m not looking for experimental dementia treatments. If he exercises, great. If not, equally great. I’m not going to struggle to keep him alive in this state. I’m not required to try to make up for someone else’s decades of willful self-neglect.

He apparently agrees, because when I got him his own lawyer, he got himself a living will, rejecting extraordinary measures to support life. I was surprised. In the past, I could never get him to come down on one side or the other; he always told me to decide for him when the time came. I kept telling him it was not my place. Now I don’t have to worry.

I am trying to look after myself today. No restaurant trips. No long conversations about my crimes and failures as a son. No doctors. No business. I hope it pans out. If not, I’ll move it to Sunday. In any case, I will make sure I get what I need. I’m the only one here who has to go on living.