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.

How to Survive Internet Shopping

I come from white collar roots. My mom’s father was a judge. My mom went to law school and ended up getting a degree in social work. My dad was a lawyer. His dad was a bookkeeper who later became a sheriff. I know a little bit about some of my ancestors, and I don’t know of any who were tradesmen. Not one.

Because of my background, I don’t have anyone I can go to when I need information on things like metalworking, woodworking, and so on. I rely a lot on Internet forums. They’re very useful.

Today someone on a forum tried to make fun of me for buying a tractor attachment on Amazon, so I shut him down pretty good. I was polite, but by the time I finished explaining my choice, he looked silly. People who make fun of Amazon users in 2018 are like the people who made fun of the first firearms. Not smart.

In case you buy stuff online, which is like saying, “in case you live on earth in 2018,” let me tell you why you should use Amazon, Ebay, and Paypal. Some conservatives hate these companies for various reasons. I’m not going into that. I’m just going to write about the ways these companies can help you avoid being abused.

In 2009, I bought a used metal lathe from a company called Plaza Machinery. It’s now out of business. The owner died, which means that legally, I can’t be sued for libeling him. I will omit his name, nonetheless, simply because I think it’s what a Christian should do.

I wanted a Clausing 5914 lathe. He said he had one. He gave me a price. He sent pictures. He said it had seen very little use. He said it had a 3-phase motor. He insisted on payment by check or money order.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER pay for anything using a check or money order if you have a choice. Cash is even worse. Don’t do it. Don’t. You’re begging to be cheated.

I paid by check.

When the lathe arrived, I saw that it was a Clausing 5936. This is a pretty stupid lathe, for various reasons. It had a single-phase motor. It was beaten up. It had been used for decades in a prison, as a teaching tool.

When I complained, the seller was nasty to me. He made some feeble efforts to fix things. He sent me an ancient 3-phase motor. He said he would take the lathe back if I paid for half of the shipping. That’s a hefty three-figure sum, and I’m not the one who caused the problem.

He cheated me. It’s that simple. He may also have committed fraud. If he knew the lathe was the wrong model, and he misrepresented the condition, then it was fraud. Would an established machinery dealer know the difference between two lathe models? Would he be able to tell if a lathe had a lot of wear on it? Draw your own conclusions.

He eventually refused to communicate with me.

I could have sued him, but because of my religious beliefs, I chose not to. I made do with what I had.

Why did he refuse to accept credit cards? I don’t know, but I know that if you pay for something using a card, you may be able to get the card company to reverse the charge or at least dispute it. I wonder if he thought about that when he formed his policy.

It’s just possible.

Anyone who refuses to take credit cards is probably a crook. There is no other solid reason for refusing. Credit cards are convenient. They result in higher sales. They allow for easier bookkeeping. In order for a businessman to choose to forgo the profitable practice of accepting cards, he has to have a very powerful motivation.

Was the guy from Plaza Machinery a crook? Judge for yourself. I’m not taking a position. Maybe he was simply demented, and he really thought he was doing the right thing.

Plaza Machinery. Remember that name. They may resume operations. Put that name on your list of companies to think about if you ever buy machinery. I’m not saying you should reject or endorse them. Just think about them.

Personally, I would not buy oxygen from them if I were suffocating. It would probably turn out to be chlorine gas, and my estate wouldn’t get a refund. You have only yourself to blame if you step in the same anthill twice.

Because I paid with a check, had I wanted to take action, I would have had to go through the aggravation of suing. That would be easy for me because I’m a lawyer, but it’s not easy for most people. It’s a painful process, and it’s slow. Collecting is not fun, either.

Now let’s talk about the tractor attachment I just bought. I could have ordered it through various sites. I chose Amazon because I knew Amazon would make some effort to look out for me. I knew the dispute process would consist of writing a few emails instead of going to court.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER buy through a little backwater website when you can buy the same product from Amazon or using Paypal. If you want Lulu’s Famous Patented Eyebrow Tweezers, do not buy them from Lulu’s site unless she offers Paypal. Use Amazon, or put yourself at Lulu’s mercy.

The tractor attachment was beaten up when I received it. I complained. The seller took it back. They sent me another one which was beaten up. I complained again. They would have taken that one back, too, but I was tired of the process, so I accepted their offer of a discount.

Why did they do all that? Their company has a dubious reputation when it comes to customer relations. Why did they do so much for me? Simple. The power of Amazon. They don’t want bad reviews because they kill sales. They don’t want Bezos down on them.

Had I bought the same item from a small website, they might have told me to go get bent. Because I used Amazon, I had some leverage.

I’ve bought a lot of things off Ebay. I always use Paypal. When I have problems, I do NOT NOT NOT use the Ebay resolution process. It is completely useless, and it wastes days or weeks. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use Ebay’s resolution process.

When I’ve had problems with Ebay sellers, I have ended up using Paypal’s resolution process. It’s faster. It works. Paypal favors buyers, as they should. Most of their customers are buyers, not sellers. Paypal has stuck it to sellers for me. There was nothing the sellers could do. They had to eat my problems, as they should.

Why is it that some Ebay sellers don’t accept Paypal? A cynical person would say that it’s because they enjoy cheating helpless buyers. I’m not a cynical person, so I won’t say that.

No, no. I won’t.

If you’re shopping on the web, and you see something you want, your first move should be to look for a way to get it on Amazon or pay with Paypal. If you can’t do that, use the biggest, friendliest site you can find. If you have to use a crappy Wix-based site the seller’s nephew put together, make sure you pay using American Express, which has a fairly good system for helping customers. If you can’t use American Express, accept the fact that you’re dropping your pants for the enemy and hope for the best.

Last year, I bought some mulching blades on Amazon. I learned something interesting. While Amazon claims to have a great guarantee, every seller has variations on it, and in order to know what their policies are, you have to locate an obscure page where it is laid out. I found that out after I bought the blades. Think about it the next time you buy something there.

I’m getting off track.

I bought the blades, and then I found out I couldn’t use them. The seller wanted me to pay a very high restocking fee (also known as a “BS fee” or “customer abuse fee”). I sent the blades back, and then the seller didn’t acknowledge it.

I complained to Amazon. Guess that they did? They gave me a 100% refund. The seller had to eat a big plate of festering crow. I was out clean, but for the cost of return shipping. I’m not sure I even paid that.

What if I had bought the blades from the seller’s Homestead or Tripod site? I would probably still have them, or I would have a Priority Mail receipt and no money.

Why am I so pro-buyer? Simple math. Internet sellers cheat buyers all the time, day in and day out. It probably happens 30 million times a day. It’s much less common for buyers to cheat sellers. It’s not easy to cheat a seller. Once you pay, you’ve done your job. Your money can’t be defective or disappointing the way a product can.

Read this carefully, and remember it: when you shop on the web, do your best to use Amazon or Paypal. Never use a check or money order. Always use a credit card. If you read this and don’t do what I tell you, you will suffer, and you will bring it on yourself.

Reading Pat Conroy for the First Time

A week or two ago, I picked up The Great Santini on my DVR. I search for upcoming movies and set them to record so I’ll have something to amuse me during meals and when I have the birds out of their cages.

I’ve seen the movie many times. Years ago, cable movie stations had very few offerings, so when something appeared in the lineup, you were likely to see it 15 times before it went away.

If you haven’t seen it, I can bring you up to speed. It’s from a book by Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. It was inspired by his own upbringing. He was the son of a World War Two marine pilot, Don Conroy. In the movie, Robert Duvall plays the dad part. His character is Wilbur “Bull” Meechum. He’s an abusive alcoholic.

Meechum is extremely arrogant. He is controlling. He humiliates his kids. He can’t stand to see them grow up and outdo him. He drinks heavily. He provokes his superiors with sophomoric behavior. At one point, he comes home drunk and threatens his wife physically.

Michael O’Keefe plays the Pat Conroy part. He’s Meechum’s oldest son, Ben. The movie focuses on things that happen during his last year in high school, in the town of Beaufort, South Carolina.

While I was watching the movie, I felt a sudden need to buy the book.

I was watching a scene in which Bull Meechum gets angry because Ben is beating him in a basketball game. The family is watching while they play. Everyone is rooting for Ben. They’re even talking smack about Bull, but they’re careful not to go too far. At one point, they realize things are getting out of hand. One of them says Bull is getting “that look.” They expect bad things to happen.

If you’ve lived with abuse, you know what that means. Abusive fathers are like dormant volcanoes. Most of the time, you can sit by a volcano without worrying, but once in a while, signs of an upcoming eruption appear, and you have to do something. If your dad is abusive, you have seen him blow up many times, and you are familiar with the signs.

You can’t always predict an abusive event. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, and they pull the floor out of your stomach. But any kid or wife who has a brain will learn to pick up on any signals that may be available, in order to be ready for the times when it’s possible to prepare or escape.

I guess it’s cowardly to say it, but it’s a relief to be outside the room when the explosion comes. Learning the art of the quick, silent exit is very helpful.

Abusive fathers are like volcanoes in another way. When a volcano goes off, you can’t do anything to stop it. It doesn’t care what you do or say. It has to run its course. When an abusive father blows up, he won’t be interested in appeasement or apologies. Say you’re sorry a hundred times, and he’ll just get mad at you for apologizing. There is something inside him he wants to release, and you’re trying to interfere.

I watched that scene, and then I looked for the book online. I found out it was fiction, and then I learned there was a nonfiction version. It’s called My Losing Season. It’s about his senior year on the basketball team at the Citadel. It covers much of the ground the novel is based on.

I deleted the movie the same day I watched the basketball scene. I didn’t watch any more. It’s a depressing movie, and while I enjoyed it when I was young, I now think it’s overrated. The story isn’t stitched together well, and a lot of the dialogue is clumsy. Duvall is perfect in his role, and he gets all the good lines, but Michael O’Keefe is not a good actor.

I’ve been reading the book for a while. I have to say that I’m disappointed in Conroy. I never wanted to read his work before, and although I may possibly read The Great Santini in the future, I have no interest in looking at his other books.

Conroy is not a gifted writer. He doesn’t string words together well. He has no feel for the language. He can’t be funny or witty. The quality of his work is reminiscent of the stuff career ghostwriters do. You can tell writing is hard work for him. That may be the worst thing you can say about a writer.

It’s disappointing. Conroy is held out to be a gem among southern writers. That’s not true. He’s no Carson McCullers or Truman Capote. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m not sure he’s not all that southern. His dad was from Chicago, and he was a marine brat, raised in a number of different places. His mother was from Alabama, but that doesn’t make him James Dickey.

Why has he done so well? I think it’s because he was something of a leftist. His work appeals to leftists. He succeeded very early in life when his book The Water is Wide was turned into a movie. The theme was one that leftist moviemakers can’t stay away from: idealistic white man descends from white heaven and teaches poor black children. How many times have we seen that? Write a book like that, and you’re practically guaranteed to get film offers.

Such movies are, by their very nature, condescending. They exemplify the soft racism of low expectations. If you’re a black kid, and you want to succeed, find yourself a white liberal Jesus to tell you about Shakespeare, Beethoven, and basic personal hygiene. The implication is that black people will never be able to do anything for themselves. Somehow that is lost on the people who make the movies.

Moviemakers are crazy about teacher movies. The Dead Poet’s Society. Lean on Me. Teachers. The Principal. To Sir, With Love. The Man Without a Face. The Miracle Worker. Stand and Deliver. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Blackboard Jungle. I’m going to run out of space.

At least To Sir, With Love broke with precedent. The teacher was black, and the students were hopeless white kids.

Leftists are in love with teachers because they compete with ministers and parents and turn kids against God and capitalism. Leftists generally think belief in God is a serious problem, like blindness or cystic fibrosis. They see it as something that has to be treated. That’s the spirit of antichrist.

Conroy has almost no talent at all, but that’s okay, because sometimes what you have to say is more important than how you say it. My Losing Season is still interesting to me. He voluntarily gave the world a window into the world of an abused and neglected son, and I wanted to read it in order to feel less exceptional.

The Santini novel and movie are gentler than reality. In real life (if Pat Conroy can be believed), Donald Conroy was worse than Bull Meechum.

I’m not all that far into the book, but Don Conroy has already done a lot of vile things. More than once, he has hit his son in the face, hard, with no warning. He has told his son he’s a sissy and a loser, but he didn’t use the word “sissy.” He has bet his son his basketball team will lose. He has sucker-punched his son to the floor at a school event, in front of a crowd. He has thrown a glass of iced tea at his son’s face, opening up his eyebrow to the point where it had to be stitched.

I saw some and heard some very bad things when I was a kid, but Don Conroy is on another level. He truly wanted his kids to fail. I can’t say my situation, or my sister’s, was as bad as Pat Conroy’s. His dad gave his kids prolonged beatings. My sister and I didn’t have to deal with beatings or injuries. My dad was never out to destroy us; he hoped we would amount to something. I don’t think it pained him when we enjoyed ourselves. I don’t think he ever came home looking forward to tormenting us in order to blow off steam. Some people have had things worse than we did.

Don Conroy’s sowing produced quite a harvest. One of his sons was schizophrenic, and a daughter was institutionalized. You may believe a parent can’t make a kid mentally ill. I disagree. I think anyone can be abused into insanity, if you start early enough. Even during breaks from the abuse, an abused person suffers the lingering effects of the inner bruising. The echoes don’t die down the minute the mistreatment stops.

Pat Conroy himself suffered from depression, and he tried to kill himself at least once.

Abusers listen to demons. They don’t know the Holy Spirit. They have no one to counterbalance or run off the evil spirits that rule them. Many abusers don’t care. They don’t examine themselves. They feel no guilt. Spirits use them to torment their families, and that helps other spirits get into their spouses and kids. Secular therapists talk about “cycles of abuse” and so on. It’s all nonsense. Spirits follow families, and spirits that run your relatives will try to run you, too.

A good father helps his children to know the Holy Spirit and to increase his influence in them. If you’re not for the Holy Spirit, you’re against him. As Jesus said, there is no neutrality. A bad father helps demons gain control of his children.

Wikipedia says Don Conroy reformed, and that he and his son became close. Is that encouraging? No. The answer is no. It’s better than not reconciling, but the damage was already done. Forgiveness is wonderful, but it’s not restitution. When you’ve ruined decades of someone’s life, there is no way to make up for it.

If you’ve abused your kids or your spouse, there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can make the future much better than it would be had you not repented, and you have an obligation to do that, but you can’t pull healthy childhoods and marriages out of your ear and hand them to the people you hurt, to be inserted in the places of the experiences they actually had.

You can’t say, “Presto! Now you had normal relationships in high school and a wonderful prom. Presto! Now you graduated from college at 22 and didn’t quit because I drove you crazy. Presto! Now you married your college sweetheart at 23 and had three great kids. Presto! Now the cops never came to our house. Presto! Now you’ve never seen your mother with two black eyes.”

Think about this. If you change when you’re 60, and you become the best dad or husband on earth, what are you really giving your family? You’re giving them what you already owe them. You don’t deserve a medal for getting back on course and doing what you were already supposed to be doing. No matter what you do, you will die deep in debt, with nothing to be proud of and plenty to be humiliated about.

You have to change. No question about that. You have to seek forgiveness. You have to patch things up as well as you can. But don’t delude yourself. You still come up way short.

Redemption is magnificent, but it can’t compare to doing the right thing in the first place. Like God says, “Obedience is better than sacrifice.”

I don’t know if I can recommend the book or not. A lot of it is about basketball, and those parts are so boring it defies description. I don’t care who set a pick on whom in a playground in 1957. Even if I didn’t find basketball itself boring, I think I would find reading Conroy’s sports recaps tedious.

The way Conroy writes about other athletes is a little off-putting. There is a lot of description of other men’s bodies and movements. “Bobby Feeny’s supple form arched through the air as his soft hands cupped the worn Spalding, and I foresaw giving him a firm pat on his talented fanny after his successful jump shot.” I’m exaggerating, but only a little. You can write about a ball game without making people want to close the door and give you your privacy.

I have a feeling all of Conroy’s books are depressing. I’ve read a little about him, and he seems like a depressing person. I don’t think I’ll create a collection.

Be good to your kids. If you can’t manage it, leave and pray your spouse remarries. Your children will remember everything, and your actions will leave marks whether you can see them or not.

Dementia Update

I feel like providing some updates on life as a caregiver.

When you have a parent who is slipping, you have to make sure his estate is organized so there isn’t a bloodbath after he dies. One thing you have to do is to make sure he has his own representation. You don’t want to go into a courtroom after his death and say, “I did this or that because I figured it was a good idea.” You want to be able to point to his attorney and say, “He had his own counsel, and he did what he wanted to.” If a decedent’s estate plan is clearly his own, it will stand up to challenges. Besides, letting them make their own choices is the right thing to do.

My dad has an attorney, and one of the things he advised us to do was to take my dad’s properties out of his name. I have been going about this over the last couple of months. It’s finally done. It could have been done sooner.

I was reluctant to take the attorney’s advice, so I didn’t move as fast as I could have. Here’s the reason: I believe God has told me my dad will not last long after everything is in order. My dad is very stubborn about accepting salvation. I think God has accepted his decision not to repent and experience a long, redemptive period as a saved person prior to his death. I believe my dad will not accept salvation until death is staring him in the face, and I think God is not going to keep prolonging his life. It would serve no purpose.

This is consistent with his medical prognosis. He is several years into a type of dementia that typically kills within about 5 years of diagnosis.

When I worked on getting the properties fixed up, I felt like I was pushing my dad closer to the grave. I felt as though I had a certain amount of power over the amount of time he had left. You can understand why I would find it hard to get things wrapped up.

My dad’s type of dementia progresses in steps. He has plateaus during which things seem static, and then he changes perceptibly overnight. He is worse than he was a month ago. He has started shuffling very slowly now, and he sometimes has to be helped out of chairs. Taking him to the grocery wasn’t all that difficult last year. Now I have to move very slowly in the aisles. He takes a long time to move through a store. His feet move quickly, so he sounds like he’s marching, but his steps are miniscule.

I’m wondering if he needs an electric cart. He refuses to use the ones stores provide, though.

His manners are getting worse, although not as quickly as his other problems. He has always enjoyed blowing his nose on the ground and sidewalks, with people all around, and he has gotten worse with age. The other day he blew his nose on the floor of a restaurant. No one saw him, thank God. I had to let him know that if his manners deteriorate too much, I won’t be able to take him to restaurants because it won’t be fair to other people. In the past, when I reminded him that bad manners could result in his becoming isolated, he would say, “Who cares?” Now he listens, but I don’t think he can change.

I don’t know what I’ll do when he loses all restraint. I’m not going to be a public spectacle. That’s too much to ask. I’ll have to quit taking him out. It’s better for him to be bored and isolated than for me to be run out of every restaurant in town.

One of my big challenges is limiting his intolerable behavior. He rubs spit on counters in order to clean them. He eats food out of packages with dirty fingers and utensils. I don’t even want to discuss his bathroom. So far I’ve been able to find ways to reduce my exposure to an acceptable level, but when it gets to be too much for me, I’ll have to ship him out. I can only stand what I can stand.

He is also inclined to be more clingy these days. He keeps asking me to come up with some kind of device that would allow him to summon me to his side instantly, 24 hours a day. Of course, that can’t be done. He can go to assisted living, where they can confine him and keep close tabs on him, but a human being who has other responsibilities can’t pop up on command like a genie. Sometimes I have to mow the yard. Sometimes I have to run errands. I have to handle business. Often I need to be by myself, just to avoid having the same argument for the 10th time in a week. Until he’s ready for a new standard of care, he’s going to have to risk short periods when he’s out of my sight.

I don’t think that’s a big problem. A certain amount of risk is unavoidable, and even in a hospital or a home, it would be impossible to protect him every second. His best friend from law school died in a hospital. I think I’ve written about it before. He got up to use the toilet because he was too mule-headed to call for help, and he fell and hit his head, right there in his room. I don’t think my dad is any less safe here than he would be in a home, and he gets to enjoy his property and spend time with me.

I can get him one of those panic buttons old people carry, but he won’t remember what it is. He has a cell phone, and he can’t use it.

I think he’s going to come unglued when he has to move. He wants to be with me. If he goes to a home, I will probably see him for a couple of hours three times a week. You can’t attend to your responsibilities if you spend half of every day at an assisted living home.

It’s hard to decide how much of myself to give to him. I’m entitled to a life. I’m not part of his body. But I want to do what I can.

He’s going to suffer. That’s inevitable, no matter what is done for him. He didn’t play his cards right in life, so he ended up with brain damage and a dysfunctional family that can’t do much for him. My sister is gone, and if she were around, she would make things so much worse he would want to die. I have no wife to help me look after him. He has no grandkids to help him pass the time.

I can’t insulate him from all consequences, and that isn’t my fault. No one is obligated to give a parent a perfect world. I couldn’t do that even if I had five married siblings sharing the load. But no one has provided me with clear rules about what to give and what not to give. Am I doing enough? I hope so. I have to make choices all the time.

He’s not able to enjoy reading any more, apart from newspapers and magazines. He gets bored watching TV. At the same time, he’s intelligent enough to need activity and things to think about. That’s the problem.

He’s in an impossible situation. Even if he were surrounded by servants all day, and they did exactly what he wanted, he would still be unsatisfied, because he simply can’t do what it takes to keep himself occupied and content. That’s the cold reality of it. He is going to suffer, no matter what anyone does for him. It’s not the nature of the world that makes him suffer. It’s the disease itself.

The only real remedy would be to be magically transformed into the able person he was 25 years ago. He wouldn’t be happy, because he was very, very unhappy then, but he would be unhappy for reasons he would like better.

He’s bored and lonely, and he’s angry because he’s bored and lonely, but he can no longer do the things a person has to do to maintain relationships and stave off boredom. He can’t enjoy books. He can’t use a computer without someone sitting beside him the whole time. He can’t ride his bicycle or even a tricycle. I don’t think he could manage shuffleboard because of his balance.

In a facility, he would be doing what he does here. He wouldn’t be able to play games. He wouldn’t read books. He wouldn’t be able to focus on hobbies. He might get more conversation, though. That would be a plus.

I’ve learned something disappointing: when I feel like I’m not handling things well, and I call in “experts,” their solutions are generally worse or no better than mine. The main difference is that we have to pay them. When you lose your mind, you’re not going to be able to go to a doctor, write him a check, and get all your problems fixed. There is no safety net out there, waiting to take all your cares off your back. There is no system. Your children or spouse, with no training at all, will be much more helpful to you than professionals. Even if they screw up.

My dad let himself down. His doctors let him down, not that they could have helped had they done things right. For all my mistakes and failures, I’m doing a better job than anyone involved. I’m not bragging. I’m making a disturbing observation on the way the world works. Get ready for it. If you’re obese and you drink too much, this is the paradigm you’re going to be dealing with. Hope someone in your family loves you.

I’ve come to believe we do too much to keep demented people alive. We can’t fix dementia itself, but we can keep people on drugs that keep their bodies working after their brains have shut down. I wonder why we do that.

My dad will never practice law again. He will never have a date or another wife. He will never travel. He won’t make any new friends, because he would keep forgetting who they were. Is it a good idea to keep feeding him pills to keep his blood pressure down and his arteries clear? I wonder if I made a mistake when I got his doctor to make him stop drinking. Maybe if he had continued, he would be with the Lord now, in a perfect body with a clear mind.

I pushed him to get a CPAP a few years ago. I thought it would prevent dementia. That didn’t work out too well.

It’s strange; I procrastinated with his property issues because I felt like I was killing him by getting things in order, but I feel funny working so hard to keep nature from taking its course, when the only result is increased suffering.

I have one major goal for him, and it’s not a cure. I just want him to receive salvation so he can go to heaven. I want him to accept Jesus. After that, what happens during his remaining time on earth will not be that important. He can’t be made happy. He can’t be made strong. He can be saved, however, so that’s what I pray for.

Learn from my experience. You are going to die, so get ready. Think of your spouse and kids. Prepare so everyone can relax.

Tide of Filth Continues to Rise

I’m not sure why I still look at the news at all. For a while, I really cut back, but I started to drift back into it after God showed me a few things, and now I read a fair amount. I can’t say it’s as damaging as it used to be, but it’s still gross and unpleasant.

Today’s menu: the destructive perpetuation of black victimhood politics, the promotion of outright hatred for white people, and a famous actress pushing the delusional notion that comments from actresses will cause men to find overweight women attractive.

I can probably find an article about “slut-shaming,” too, if I look for a few seconds. “Principal gives braless teen detention; Twitter isn’t having it.” Something like that has to be in there somewhere. The left has decided that young girls, who are not to be objectified sexually, are empowering themselves when they do everything humanly possibly to assure that they are…objectified sexually. And teachers and principals who object are somehow out of line.

Let’s see. “White privilege” article. I’m still waiting for my weekly Caucasian stipend check. “Whitewashing” article. White people are no longer allowed to use chopsticks in movies, I think. Not sure.

Well, I don’t see any new articles about spoiled girls in tube tops, but I did see this, from a well-known, big-time outlet: “Trump’s Matter-of-Fact Fascism.”

What?

I’m wondering if the person who wrote that headline has any idea what has happened under real fascist regimes. I also wonder if they understand that the biggest purveyors of fascism are leftists. The term “fascism” is not tied to the right or left wing. It’s very vague. It refers to all governments that are oppressive and cruel.

Think about this: China and the USSR. Game over. If right-wing fascists did their best to promote their ethos, starting today, and they succeeded beyond their fondest hopes, it would be decades before they caught up with the big dogs.

I’m not sure right-wing fascist can even exist. Right-wing people support freedom of contract, freedom of religion, capitalism, private property, and the right to own and carry guns. How can you reconcile those things with fascism? Leftists, on the other hand, believe in socialism, central control of all wealth, disarmament of all citizens, and tightly regulated trade. How can you have those things without fascism? Cuban is a fascist state. So is North Korea. So is Nicaragua. So is Vietnam. So is Burma. Hmm.

I have to point out a few things.

Unattractive women are going to remain unattractive regardless of how many Yahoo Lifestyle articles criticize men who find unattractive women unattractive. Even if I wanted to find Melissa McCarthy attractive, I could not make myself do it. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to, and there is no reason why I should try.
God made some people desirable, and he also made the others. That’s how things are. Some people are smart. Some people are talented. Some people are charismatic. Some people were born with a huge genetic edge over the rest of us. Part of maturity is accepting what you are and refusing to blame other people for treating you…wait for it…appropriately.

I don’t understand why leftists want to force men to like unattractive women. When did this become a legitimate, useful project?

Where is the movement to force women to be attracted to short men and unsuccessful men? Can I have an update on that? Women say men are shallow because we like beautiful women, yet men under a certain height find it very hard to get dates, even if they’re real catches. Men who don’t earn a lot have trouble landing women, too. How come no one ever bemoans the loneliness of Gary Coleman and Vern Troyer? Maybe it’s because women who reject short and unsuccessful men aren’t doing anything wrong.

The rules of attraction are what they are. It’s not wrong, and it’s not a conspiracy.

Men–even men who are not attractive–prefer attractive women. They always will. People like chocolate bars better than liver. People like silk better than burlap. There is no use raging against things that can’t be changed, and using inalterable conditions of life to justify tormenting innocent people is immoral and cruel.

As for black victimhood politics, all I can say is that it’s a great strategy for making potential employers look for ways to reject you without inviting lawsuits. If, before you even start to work, you have a chip on your shoulder and an entitlement attitude, plus some overt racism, your resume is going to the bottom of the pile, and that’s not discrimination. That’s common sense. No one wants to hire a lawsuit time bomb.

Spoiled girls in tube tops…where do I begin? Men look at women. It’s not because we’re pigs. It’s biological. If we could turn it off, a lot of us would. I certainly would. I’ve learned to avoid sexual provocation; I don’t encourage my own desires. It leads to spiritual problems, and I don’t like being controlled by sleazy women with IQ’s that resemble my house’s thermostat settings.

Stop blaming us for something we can’t control. You are not helping. But then women who tempt men aren’t trying to help. They’re looking for power and an excuse to cause suffering.

It’s disrespectful and thoughtless to expose yourself at school or at your job, and it makes you look like a bimbo, which, if you do expose yourself, you probably are. Boys going through puberty need all the help they can get, and dressing like a whore in order to get attention from boys, and in order to control them, is not something a quality person does. School administrators realize this, and if they tell you to put on a longer skirt and stop showing your underwear (if you are thoughtful enough to wear underwear), it’s not oppression. It’s sound educational policy, and it’s also in your best interest.

Being thought of as a whore will curtail your social and employment opportunities, and it will eventually lead to misery. If you want to peak in 11th grade, slut it up, but in a couple of years, you will be an object of ridicule.

Slutty women have no idea how people talk about them when they’re not around. That’s too bad.

When I was in college, I visited Georgia Tech with a friend. We stayed in a frat house. The frat guys had a sort of mascot. I have no idea what her name was, because they called her “the whore.” She was a student. She was a cute little blond girl. She liked hanging around with the boys. When she was present, they treated her nicely because she provided a service. When she was out of the room, they would say things like, “Where’s the whore?” She probably never found out. This is what life is really like when you’re promiscuous and provocative.

One of the reasons I visited was that I thought I was in love with a girl who went to Emory. My friend got to Georgia Tech a few days before I did, and being the kind of friend he was, he invited her for a visit and made out with her. At one point she had quite a few drinks and sat on some bleachers above the guys, and she did not sit in a ladylike manner. When they looked up, they saw a lot more than they needed to. From then on, she had a secret nickname, too, and it’s too crude to mention here. The implication was that she omitted her undergarments and displayed her privates. My friend (someone I ejected from my circle years later) would probably still use that nickname today if we discussed her.

It’s not easy for a provocative woman to get respect from men or anyone else. She may get tolerance, and she may intimidate with social pressure, but she can’t get respect.

Incidentally, I say “dressing like a whore” with considerable forethought. I’ve seen how actual whores dress. Many mainstream women and girls of 2018 dress the way prostitutes dressed in 1995, and this is especially true of celebrities. Leftist heroin Chrissy Teigen appeared on TV wearing a dress that exposed her genitals and then made fun of people who were upset.

“Whitewashing”…who cares? Is it really a big deal if Tom Cruise stars in a movie about samurais? Is it going to bring back railroad coolie camps? I don’t think so. All movies are silly, when you get right down to it. Actors hate hearing that, but it’s true. It’s maladjusted, angry people playing make-believe. We make too much of it.

No one minds “blackwashing.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I thought it was weird when people talked about hiring Idris Elba to play James Bond. He’d do a bang-up job, but James Bond is half Scottish and half Swiss, and he has always been played by white men, so watching Idris Elba play him would be like sitting through a pointless, carping lecture which would go completely against the politically incorrect underpinnings of the James Bond universe. It would be like going to a Stones concert and having Keith Richards stop the show and give a lecture on temperance.

I think Tom Hardy will be the next James Bond. Who else could follow Daniel Craig? And he’s young enough to make an investment in him worthwhile. Idris Elba is pushing 50.

Anyway, no one cared when Denzel Washington played the Equalizer, a character that was originally white. No one cared when Jaden Smith played the Karate Kid. It’s hard to believe people get agitated about things like this.

What was I referring to when I mentioned hatred of white people, above? I was talking about a woman named Sarah Jeong. I assume she’s Korean. The New York Times (which really is failing, as the president says) hired her the other day. Problem: she has a bunch of fairly recent racist tweets. And they’re not mild. They’re not “arguably” racist. They are worse than most of the things Nazis said about Jews. At least the Nazis pretended to have reason on their side.

You can go look the tweets up. I am not going to quote them.

Her excuse is that she was being provoked by vicious racist tweets aimed at her. Does that really fly? No. If a Jewish extremist tweets that all gentiles are monkeys, it’s still not okay for me to call him a kike or say Hitler was right. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it did, why did she leave the tweets up for two years? No, that dog won’t hunt.

People are defending her. That’s disturbing.

God told me something a while back. He said, “The hate is already here.” He was referring to the hate that will eventually cause mainstream Americans to torment and murder Christians. For some reason, leftists conflate Christians and white people, so Jeong’s bizarre tweets appear to be symptomatic of the hate God was telling me about.

It’s scary that she was tolerated for two years after tweeting these things, but it’s a helpful warning, too. Buy guns if you want. Buy a plot of land in Idaho and learn to grow your own food. Can’t hurt. But what you really need is to get close to God and learn how to get his protection. Guns and homegrown carrots won’t be the best answers when things get really bad. Carnal tools have never been the best choice.

Leftists, some of them prominent, now use the Internet to call for the slaughter of conservatives, whites, and Christians. It’s just words now (unless you get beaten up for wearing a red hat), but what people need to understand is that the tweeters and Instagrammers aren’t kidding or bluffing. They are fully willing to do what they say should be done. They are being restrained right now, but that won’t always be true.

People do what they’re given permission to do. When the government and our famous bellwethers give Americans permission, we will be beaten and killed, wholesale. Don’t think for a second that Americans are above it. Americans can be just as vicious, sadistic, and self-righteous as anyone else, when they lose touch with God.

I’m glad I moved to the country, but as long as I’m on this planet, I will never be far from the kooks and crazies. Ever notice how many leftist-nut stories come from Texas? Texans are WAY overrated. They will lie down for just about anything these days. They hire all sorts of poisonous educators now, and when there’s a conflict, they roll over and play dead. How did that happen?

I’m glad I’m not closer to the flames, but I haven’t escaped. I’m just retreating and enjoying temporary cover. If you think you’re doing better, you’re out of touch with reality.

The Bible says that if riches increase, we should not set our hearts on them. It’s the same way with everything that belongs to the earth. Our bodies. Our nation. It’s all temporary. I no longer feel attached to this life. I can’t wait to leave. I am not depressed, and I would never even think about suicide, but I know this place is messed up. I’m like a Peace Corps volunteer who can’t wait to come home from Sudan.

I look forward to being out of the reach of leftists and violent crusaders forever. I look forward to being surrounded with like-minded brothers and sisters in perfect, immortal bodies. I look forward to not needing reading glasses any more, now that I think about it.

Northern Florida is a glimmer of the life to come. I see very little hostility or disagreement here. I experience a lot of warmth and kindness. I hear people talking about God, without shame or reluctance. Heaven will be like this, only many times better. If they had an Internet in heaven, it wouldn’t be polluted by the sordid antics of Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen. It would be full of love and agreement.

I feel like I’m in a lifeboat, watching the Titanic sink. I can’t do one thing to stop it. All I can do is pull people aboard.

I guess I’ll close now. I need to go catch up on pithy articles about society’s great need to promote topless breastfeeding in restaurants.

Ninth Circuit Experiences Brief Spasm of Lucidity

I always tell people they’re…misguided…when they don’t realize it’s impossible to vote for an individual in a presidential election. People say dumb things like, “I vote for the man, not the party.” They don’t understand that a president isn’t just a man. He is also part of a team, and when you vote for the captain of the other team, you gut everyone on your own team. Conservatives who voted for Hillary Clinton or who refused to vote at all weren’t just attacking Donald Trump. They were attacking every conservative politician in America.

One of the president’s most important jobs is to appoint federal judges. These people are very dangerous. They are accountable to no one, and they rule for life. I say “rule” because that’s accurate. They decide what the law means. If a federal judge says a law against arson actually bans cheating at tiddlywinks, that’s what it means, until another judge overrules him. The text of a law means nothing until a judge tells us what it means.

We have a bunch of federal circuits. Each circuit is composed of areas from several states. Some circuit panels are more sane than others. The worst circuit in the US is the Ninth Circuit, which rules over California, Hawaii, and some other western states. They are completely unhinged. They routinely agree with far-left eccentrics, and their decisions can be very damaging.

This week, the Ninth Circuit did a shocking thing. An appellate panel changed the law in Hawaii, and the ruling applies to all other Ninth Circuit states. The court held that OPEN carry of weapons was protected by the US Constitution. Not concealed, mind you. They say regulating concealed carry may be okay. They decided to protect OPEN carry. We don’t even have that in Florida, which has a reputation for loose gun laws.

Believe it or not, Hawaii and California were already open-carry states. In Hawaii, you could carry openly with a carry permit. The problem was that carry permits were impossible to get. The new case makes it much easier to get permits.

Prior to the decision, Hawaiians were not allowed to have weapons in their vehicles. It was open season on people in cars. Can you believe that? Now they can walk down the street with holsters on their hips.

The opinion is startling. In its lengthy endorsement of the famous Heller case, it firmly, decisively rejects the “militia” connection liberals have tried to tack onto the Second Amendment. All cases holding that 2A doesn’t apply to individuals are now bad law in the Ninth Circuit. They were already bad law because of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, but now the Ninth has expressly adopted Heller just about as hard as possible. Courts can play games with rulings from higher courts. They can deliberately misconstrue and delay. “Sorry; your transmission was garbled.” This new case is an unconditional surrender.

The opinion also defines the phrase “keep and bear” very clearly. As I have often said, and as some courts have said, “keep and bear” means “own and carry.” This is obvious to anyone who owns a dictionary, but liberals dispute it. The Ninth Circuit now says its subjects are allowed to carry outside their homes. It points out that the right to carry means nothing if it doesn’t apply outside the home. The founding fathers didn’t include the word “bear” so you could carry your rifle in circles in your living room.

The most satisfying part of the case is a long passage in which the court compares deprivation of the right to carry with Reconstruction-era confiscation of firearms from freed slaves! You really have to read it to believe it. Leftists want us to forget something very important: the right to own and carry arms is a CIVIL right, and people who support 2A are civil rights activists.

It’s interesting to look at the history of the case.

The suit was filed by a man named Young. He was upset because Hawaii did not like issuing permits. Hawaii would only give permits to people who were special. Security guards were able to get permits. Magnum, P.I. was able to get a permit. Probably Higgins, too, because of his MI6 connections. Maybe Don Ho. People who showed extraordinary, urgent need could (supposedly but probably not really) get permits. Mr. Young sued the state and his county.

The lower court judge is named Helen Gillmor. See if you can guess who appointed her. I’ll tell you: Bill Clinton, husband of the unelected woman who anointed herself healthcare empress. Gillmor is an undistinguished lawyer who went to school in New York and Boston. She is a former PD, which speaks volumes. PD’s are delusional in their hatred of everything good. Perhaps I exaggerate, but the job attracts real kooks.

Gillmor made some crazy rulings. She appears to have had no respect for Mr. Young’s pro se lawsuit, so she did some frivolous things in order to turf his case into a black hole, surely hoping the Ninth Circuit would back her up. For one thing, she denied that 2A granted rights to individuals. That’s not even close to what the case law says.

The appellate judges who fixed things were named Ikuta and…some Gaelic name I’m not going to go back and look up. One is a Bush II appointee, and the other is a Reagan appointee. The third judge dissented. Bush II appointed him. Oh, well.

Why talk about the judges? Because their history is more important than the law. Their biases determined what they ultimately decided. Clinton’s girl bent over backwards to distort the law to suit her frustrated wishes, and two judges appointed by Republicans straightened things out.

If you didn’t vote for Trump, you voted against your 2A rights. Even if you stayed home, you helped activist judges who don’t mind if their actions give criminals the power to kill or rape you at will. You should be ashamed of your ignorance, your childishness, or both.

One of the most beautiful things about Trump’s victory is his work to appoint conservative judges. Obama appointed all sorts of crazies. Now Trump is working to dilute the cesspool. He can’t fire the nuts, but he can fill spots with people who will fight them. That’s very important.

We’re about to see Kavanaugh seated on the Supreme Court. No one can predict what a justice will do once he has no one to answer to (Reagan appointed Kennedy), but more likely than not, Kavanaugh will be very helpful to us. Ruth Ginsburg is in bad health, and Clarence Thomas is getting old. We may have a chance to get rid of a socialist who has said she wants to repeal 2A, and we may be able to replace a faithful servant with someone younger. This is a very big deal. But the never-Trumpers don’t get that. They would rather be petty and watch their rights disappear so they can tell the rest of us they told us so.

The never-Trump plan is not working out well. The economy is strong. Trump is doing a lot of great things. He needs our help, because he runs again in two years, and the alternative will be someone like fake Indian Liz Warren or Kamala Harris. I wonder how long the pouters will sit on the sidelines and pray for Trump to fail. The more he succeeds, the dumber they look.

Enemies are bad. Treacherous friends are worse. That’s why armies have traditionally fed and sheltered POW’s while hanging spies. The GOP has a lot of spies right now.

I completely understand that Trump rubs people the wrong way, and that he is disappointing on a personal level, but that doesn’t justify turning on the rest of us.

I have never seen a candidate I supported in the primaries win a presidential election, but that didn’t drive me to sit in a corner and suck my thumb. I held my nose and voted for McCain and Romney. I preferred Cruz to Trump, but I voted for Trump in the end. You have to buy off the rack. You can’t always have the candidate you want. It’s important to grow up and do what you can.

The Hawaii case shows what can happen if we keep Republicans in the White House. Why are so many of us working against that?

I don’t know why I write about this stuff. In reality, prayer and repentance are what matter. If people are voting stupidly, it’s because we have turned away from God and opened ourselves to deception. If we don’t turn back to God, all the conservative policy in the world won’t help us. Still, it’s nice to see America’s decline retarded.

No One Really Knows How to Do This

I haven’t written as much lately as I usually do. My dad’s accident caused a lot of problems. I’ll provide an example. On Saturday, I had to do something like 8 loads of laundry, and my dad’s laundry is not simple. We have a horrible “high efficiency” washer that takes two hours to do a load with a prewash.

I want to get an old-fashioned washer that takes half an hour. I do not care how much water it uses. I have a well, and our water goes back into the aquifer through the septic tank. Not that I care whether it goes back. If Al Gore can have a compound with a $3000 monthly electric bill, I can have a real washer. If Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t like it, he can come here on the jet he uses to fly to environmentalist events, and he can lecture me about it.

The earth was provided by God to make my life easier, so if I damage it a little, tough.

High efficiency washers don’t work all that well. They will accept larger loads than normal washers, but they don’t get them clean, because the stuff in the middle stays dry. Try it yourself and see. In reality, you have to baby them and be careful not to put too much in them. Then when your clothes come out, they smell like mildew. There is nothing you can do about this. You can minimize it by running cleaning cycles with various chemicals, and you can waste your time cleaning the gaskets, but a certain amount of mildew will always remain, and when your clothes get hot and wet enough during the day, they WILL smell, and people will think it’s you.

It’s hard to find a decent washer. Everything is made in China, and nothing is reliable. Horror stories abound. Even Speed Queen makes questionable washers now. I think the best option is to get a mid-priced agitator washer and accept the fact that it will probably die after three years.

I keep learning things about being a caregiver. Here’s one: demented people should not have complicated bedding. My dad used to have a quilt and a blanket, which is a lot for Florida. Right now, he has a synthetic polar fleece blanket which weighs less and is easier to wash. I don’t think he liked giving up the heavier bedclothes, but once the blanket was in place, he forgot all about them. The blanket is a lot easier to wash.

That’s another important thing to remember. No matter how upset a demented person gets about something, he will forget about it in a day. Very often, you will find yourself in ridiculous circular conversations about nonsense that seems very important to the patient. The proper goal isn’t to resolve things. The resolution will be forgotten. The proper goal is to end the conversations peacefully. I don’t lie, but I try to say what will stop the boat rocking.

If you really have to, you can walk away and leave the patient angry. It will pass, because he will forget.

The other day my dad decided we had to go to Sears, right that minute, and get him a lift recliner. There is no Sears near here. There was no place except La-Z-Boy, it was early Saturday evening, and their cheapest offering was $1600, which Medicare would not help pay for unless it was cleared in advance. Was it even in stock? Who knows? I wasn’t going to drive 10 miles just to find out. And who was supposed to deliver it and carry it into the house?

I could not get him to accept the fact that we could not get a recliner at that instant, and I finally had to go away and leave him with his annoyance. There was nothing I could do, and he would have gone on for hours or maybe all night.

Another thing: a demented person with chronic pain will never be quiet about it. Every time they notice the pain, they think it’s a fresh topic that needs to be discussed. My dad’s back is bothering him, so we have repeated discussions about it, in which I say the exact same things: we have an appointment with a doctor, all he can have is Aleve, he already rejected surgery, and maybe he will have to live with pain from now on.

Demented patients may worry a lot, about things that will never happen. The other day he was worried about getting stuck in bed. He can get out of bed without help now, but I discussed various solutions anyway. Mechanical devices.

Ultimately, no matter what strategies we choose, short of assisted living, I am the fail safe. When he asked what would happen to him if something happened to me, I didn’t have anything positive to offer, so I said I guessed we would both die. I said there were some risks I could not avert.

He’s not completely gone. I couldn’t say, “Superman and Tinkerbell will fly in and look after you.” My response had to make sense, so I told him the truth. If I die, he will have very serious problems. Nothing I can do. We can get him some kind of alert device, but will he be able to use it? Maybe.

He didn’t seem all that worried about the “Steve dies” part of the scenario! Not at that moment. He was troubled by the thought of the adverse effect on him.

Should I be determined to make sure his life will be perfectly safe no matter what happens to me? Let me ask you this: have you had kids? Have you ever lived alone with a baby or small child? Did you feel it was irresponsible to live alone with a baby or child, knowing they would be in real trouble if you died suddenly? No. There are limits to what we can do, and we accept them. If I’m severely injured, my dad won’t be able to do anything for me, but I’m not putting MYSELF in assisted living in order to prevent that. Life is full of unavoidable risk.

Think about this: old people, like everyone else, can fall down. Their bones are more brittle than young people’s, and they are more likely to receive brain damage or to break hips. Do we make them wear motorcycle helmets all day? No. Do we force them to live in rooms with padded floors? No. We get them canes and walkers, we keep them off stairs, and we hope they don’t fall. Just because you CAN do something to make someone safer doesn’t mean you should. Death and injury are facts of life, and all you can do is take reasonable precautions.

The only way to keep my dad “safe” is to put him in a wheelchair. Then lack of exercise would kill him in 6 months.

I decided against putting a ramp in front of the house, because ramps don’t work well with people who are still walking. My dad can read. I have signs telling him to stay off the steps. I need to get a little work done on his bathroom, and I’m going to get all the information I can from his doctor today. Until he loses the ability to walk, I think that will do.

Here’s another issue: what kind of vehicle should a caregiver have? I persuaded him to replace his ancient SUV with a new one, and it has worked out extremely well. Would I make that choice now? I don’t know. He could be in a wheelchair a few months from now. How will I get him in and out of the car? In retrospect, I wonder if a van would have been better. You can have them fitted with wheelchair stuff. On the other hand, when he reaches that stage, won’t assisted living be the better choice?

I have to make all these decisions myself. If you’re a caregiver, get rid of the delusion that you have to listen to your patient and give their opinions and desires real weight. You have to talk to them and get useful input to make their lives better, and you have to be considerate, but you can’t let them make final decisions. You wouldn’t hire a demented doctor or even a demented TV repairman, so why would you let a demented relative tell you what to do?

I used to try to persuade him to go along with things. These days, I only do that when it’s appropriate. For example, I used to try to get him to throw things out or give them away. Now I do those things without consulting him. He doesn’t need the NordicTrack any more. He doesn’t need 50 pairs of underwear dating back to Bill Clinton. He doesn’t need a pistol beside his bed. He doesn’t need half a cubic foot of old napkins and paper towels on his dresser. I get rid of things that cause problems, and he rarely notices.

There is one area in which he does whatever he wants. When it comes to legal representation, he’s his own man. I got him his own lawyer, and the last time we consulted him, the lawyer put me in the waiting room so he could talk to my dad privately. He’s still competent to discuss certain things. I don’t know what they said. I didn’t ask. That was necessary, in order to avoid issues with his estate down the road, and we didn’t get the solution I wanted. So be it. Other than that, I butt into his affairs all the time. It makes the wheels of life turn smoothly.

I always feel like there should be some source of ideal advice. Someone out there should be able to give me a list of things to do. It’s not true. I hire professionals, and truthfully, their ideas are sometimes worse than mine. I’m sure I’ve wasted money on them. Everyone who plays this game is winging it, regardless of what you might think. If you’re a caregiver, don’t expect yourself to be perfect. The earth is a corrupt place where things go wrong all the time. You can’t look after yourself perfectly, so hoping to take care of someone else perfectly is fatuous.

I rely on God for guidance. I know that if I maintain my prayer life and use the tools he has given me, I’ll end up where I need to be. I may get off course, but things will work out. I don’t know how people who don’t know God survive.

Actually, I know a little bit. They fail. They flounder. They suffer humiliation and regret. Even when they look successful, they’re face-planting.

I keep having supernatural experiences. As I’ve mentioned before, God gives me little phrases which I write down. I go to them later and repeat them to myself. When I do this, I feel God’s power going through me. It brings peace very quickly, which is something I can’t do for myself.

Today I started doing this, and my insides started gurgling and making other rude noises immediately. I felt a little nauseous. By now I know that these things indicate the presence of enemy spirits.

I don’t force this stuff. It’s not possible. Try to make your stomach growl. Good luck. Can’t be done.

I’ve had this experience before, while casting spirits out and so forth, but this was the first time it happened while I was doing other things. Apparently, the spirits I brought into my life through decades of rebellion are very disturbed by the phrases God gave me.

I decided to see if it happened while I read the Bible. I brought Psalm 32 (appropriate) up on my phone, and I started reading. Sure enough, the same thing happened. That’s new.

Christians don’t fight demons. It’s tragic. Paul told us our primary job was to battle spirits. He said we don’t wrestle with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers and so on. Remember? Yet we focus on powerless rules and positive thinking, which help no one.

In the post-2000 world, people who believe in spirits are considered crazy. I could probably have my sanity called into question because of the things I write here. Think about that! God is a spirit. If it’s crazy to believe in demons, it’s crazy to believe in God, who told us demons exist and who cast them out, personally.

In the future, and I don’t mean the far future, Christians will be declared incompetent because of their faith. That will be interesting.

Joy Behar thinks Mike Pence is nuts because he believes he hears from Jesus! And she wasn’t afraid to say it on TV, in a country where God used to be honored by default.

She’s a Jew. Her people turned their backs on Moses after he talked to God. They turned their backs on God, too, after he appeared to them every day in a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. Her attitude is not something that should shock anyone.

Most Jews are atheists. That’s one reason so many Jews love leftism. Mommy government is a substitute for God’s help. It’s a false messiah. The Jewish prophet Samuel told them what to expect from that idol, but they didn’t listen. American Christians are headed the same way. We want to suck on that black, toxic nipple because we love sin too much to quit.

To get back to my situation, I have to avoid focusing too much on strategizing with my own mind. God gives me solutions when I take my hands off problems. No one can foresee all the problems a caregiver will face, and no human being can come up with the right answer every time. I have to put these burdens on God, who, after all, asked for them.

I need to do some business and get ready for a doctor’s appointment. Hope what I wrote helps someone.

New Progress

The dad saga continues to unfold.

Today we had a breakthrough. Generally, when people tell my dad he has dementia, he uses profanity to dismiss their remarks. If you gently remind him that he doesn’t know his address or have a driver’s license, he comes up with explanations. This morning, he finally listened and accepted the diagnosis.

He was trying to start his day, which took two hours of OUR time. He started asking me things about his condition, so I laid it on him. I said his doctors believed he had vascular dementia. I said he wouldn’t improve. I told him he would continue to get worse, in discrete steps. I told him the worst part: it shortens lives. I said he could be looking at a couple of years.

I don’t believe in soft-soaping people about their medical problems. It’s disrespectful, and it’s a way of controlling them and ignoring boundaries. He needs to know his time is short. He needs to accept salvation and understand his limitations.

I don’t want him to go to bed thinking he has all the time in the world and then die in his sleep and wake up in hell. It’s not a joke or a fable. It’s real, and I know people who are there right now.

Oddly, he wasn’t disturbed at all by the notion that he might not be here in a couple of years. He was much more upset by the increasing difficulty of functioning. He said he might as well kill himself.

He doesn’t mean that. For some reason, he and my sister are incapable of self-harm. Neither of them could seriously entertain the idea. But he’s not happy about his situation.

He still speaks of God, heaven, and hell with total contempt. He thinks it’s all a fairy tale. He says that if heaven exists, he’ll go because he’s a good person. He doesn’t think about bad things he’s done. And being “good” won’t keep you out of hell. You have to accept Jesus.

I’m happy for any improvement in his attitude. If he can accept his diagnosis and prognosis, he can also accept salvation eventually.

I also tried to make him understand that his life can’t necessarily be made easy or comfortable. We may not be able to get rid of his back pain or maintain his mobility, and I can’t promise him he won’t be bored. He has been blessed so far, but God never promised us we wouldn’t have chronic pain or boredom. He may end up in a home where he lacks stimulation. Society provides mechanisms for caring for the demented, but it doesn’t guarantee their entertainment. And entertaining demented people can be difficult or impossible due to their inner limitations.

After he’s gone, I will not accept involvement with other unsaved people, except to tell them about God and move on. I will not become intimate with people who reject God, and I won’t partner with them. I’ve had enough. My relationship with my dad will be the last unequal yoking in my life. And I’m the kind of person who means it when he says things like that. Ask anyone I’ve cut off. I never go back.

A buddy of mine started turning to God, and then he got into a relationship with a Jewish lady. It’s a real mess. She has a mentally ill son who complains and talks about suicide all the time. He’s in an institution right now. My buddy can’t get them to consider prayer and church, which would help. It will never happen. Many Jews conflate Christianity with Nazism, which is insane. You can’t break the spell with persuasion, because it’s supernatural.

Missionary dating doesn’t work. It’s disobedient, so you can’t expect God to honor your choice. Also, he will not violate free will and force an unbeliever to change.

My friend cuts his girlfriend’s grass and helps her out in many ways. He comforts her. He had to cancel a visit to Florida because her son was committed. He has been holding her hand for a week or two, but she won’t take his advice. It’s like he’s watching a ship sink and he can’t do anything to help. Meanwhile his own life is on hold, as if it has no importance.

This is what happens when you yoke yourself to people who reject Jesus. Me, I’m all done with unequal yokings. I can’t take it any more.

On top of all these issues, she appears to do absolutely nothing for him. He was laid up a while back, and she was nowhere in sight. He had to fly to Mexico for dental surgery before that. He went alone.

Here’s what happens when you have vascular dementia: you get worse in steps. You lose the ability to recognize familiar people and perform basic tasks such as bathing. Then you die. It may come from a stroke or heart attack, or your brain may just shut down from lack of blood flow. My dad is several years into an illness that usually takes 5 years to kill. My guess is that blood pressure pills are the only things that have kept him alive. Statins don’t help.

I don’t know whether my dad will wither over a period of weeks or die suddenly. I don’t know whether he’ll last long enough to go into assisted living. I can’t plan that well. I can’t say, “I’ll need to move him into a home on September 5.” Maybe he’ll go to a home, or maybe the coroner will pull up to the house one day and take him. I have to look at the possibilities and plan as well as I can. I count on prayer to make it work.

Honestly, a sudden departure would be easier on everyone concerned. In a facility, he will be reminded of his status every day. He will be powerless. He will be surrounded by people who don’t care about him all that much, and he’ll know it. His desires won’t matter much at all. He’ll do things on their schedule, at their convenience.

I’m not afraid of death. Not even a little bit. I’ve seen a lot of it. You miss people, but losing them doesn’t ruin your life, especially when they go after a long period of sickness or infirmity. When a person has been ill long enough, his relatives will start to feel that death is better than what he is going through, and when he goes, they will feel relief as well as grief. People don’t like to admit that, but it’s true. Suddenly the house doesn’t smell like diapers. You can leave for a day and not worry. You can get rid of the ugly, depressing medical equipment. You can sleep a whole night. You no longer worry about the patient’s future.

When my mom died, my aunt and I put her clothes in the car the next day and gave them away. BANG. Like that. That’s how you do it. You don’t sit around in your moldy, cobwebbed shrine and worship the dead.

I can’t relate to people who are afraid of death, so maybe I don’t understand how they feel when I write bluntly about it. Maybe they think I’m inhuman. Fear of death is a symptom of immaturity, though. It’s not something we should cater to and encourage.

My dad will never drive again. He will never ride the bicycle I bought him. We will never go fishing again. We will never have another real conversation. We are done traveling together. There isn’t much to hope for while he lives. All I want is to see him receive salvation. That will satisfy me.

I don’t like to think about his wasted potential. How different our lives should have been. But if he makes it to heaven, a hundred years from now we won’t be concerned about the things that happened here on earth.

At least he’s starting to acknowledge his mortality. That’s a start.

Give Masonry its Proper Place

My dad’s recovery continues. He fell this week, and he came back from the hospital day before yesterday. I finally got what I consider to be a good night’s sleep last night.

I have been working on his master suite, throwing out crap he has held onto. This is a problem that never stops. He hoarded crap in Miami, and he hoards it now. Wet naps from restaurants. Napkins from restaurants. Receipts from restaurants. Empty water bottles. Toothpicks. You name it.

While I was tossing junk, I came across something disturbing: materials from the Masonic lodge he joined in 1961. A book and a couple of cards.

My dad was never much of a Mason. He probably never gave them a dime or set foot in a lodge after he left Kentucky. Still, I wish he had never joined. Freemasonry is a cult that competes with Christianity, and its ability to draw applicants is based on the belief that it’s okay to cheat non-Masons out of economic opportunities. Reminds me of Islam, which got its start as (and remains) a protection racket. Like a fraternity, the Mason organization is affirmative action for mediocre white men.

I took a quick look at the book. I wondered if I should keep it and learn about Masonry. While I was reading, I saw a laughable passage saying you have to swear you’re not joining for economic advantage. Ridiculous. That’s the only reason for joining. Masons give each other work and blackball everyone else. Look it up. You can be more honest, more skilled, faster, and cheaper and lose work to a Mason, and you will never be told why.

I wonder what happens when a grown frat boy (oxymoron?) Mason has to choose between giving work to a frat brother or another Mason. It must be hard, deciding whom to cheat.

Masons are cowards when it comes to business. They have enough courage to deprive competent people of work they deserve, but they don’t have the guts to admit it. Maybe that’s the worst thing about Masonry (and fraternities): the cowardice. Secret signs. Secret handshakes. Secret sweetheart deals for hacks who do inferior work. Masonry supposedly teaches people how to be morally superior. I guess gutless, clandestine blackballing, and rewarding irresponsibility and incompetence, are signs of good character! Way to go, Masons!

Actually, I think the worst thing about fraternities is the persistence of forced sadistic homosexual rituals for heterosexuals.

I asked God what I should do with this stinking book, and then I threw it out. I happened to have a trash can that contained a misplaced dirty diaper and a mixing bowl one of my pets pooped in, and I could not think of a better place to put the book. That will be where it will rest from now on. Until it disintegrates completely, it will be next to a dirty diaper in a landfill.

It’s appropriate. God likes turning areas used by idolaters into garbage dumps and latrines. Look at the Bible and see.

I didn’t want that filthy book in my home. It’s an insult to God, and insulting God brings consequences. As the Bible says, God is not mocked. Surely honoring God by putting that book in the trash will also have consequences.

You can claim Freemasonry is compatible with Christianity all you want. Any group that makes you partially disrobe and swear loyalty, and which requires you to participate in supernatural rituals, is a problem for Christians. If it’s not obvious to you already, then I can’t explain it to you. Also, Freemasons believe you can only get to heaven through works, and that is the opposite of what God teaches. Hell is full of nice people who rejected Jesus, and heaven is full of thieves and murderers who repented.

There are concentration camp guards in heaven, and some of the people they tormented are in hell. Works don’t get you anywhere.

Corrie Ten Boom told an interesting story. As you should know, she was a Christian woman who was put in concentration camps for hiding Jews. Years after the war, she preached about forgiveness, and a former Nazi she knew from the camps came up to shake her hand. He didn’t know they had already met. He told her he had been a guard, and he asked for her personal forgiveness. She knew she had to accept him, although she didn’t feel like it. When she obeyed, she felt God’s “healing warmth” flow through her. A man like that could never make up for what he did. Not in 10 lifetimes. But God accepted him anyway.

If you need an auxiliary cult to get you through life, you don’t have God’s favor, and something is wrong with your approach to Christianity. It’s that simple. That’s the hard truth.

The Jews used to have synagogues with two altars: one for Yahweh and one for “the Queen of Heaven,” which means the disgusting female false god they worshiped in the Middle East. They also burned their children alive as sacrifices to Molech, in an area which later became a dump. All the while, they called themselves Jews and prayed for God to look after them. Things are no different today. Christians join cults all the time, and they think they’re still Christians.

I feel very good about that book and its resting place with the diaper. I will feel good about it for the rest of my life, when I think about it buried deep inside a reeking landfill. I will feel like it’s an investment I have working for me, just as it was a curse that worked against me when it was in my home.

Life is full of investments. We invest in life and our future dignity, and we invest in death and future humiliation. We even invest when we think we’re not taking sides.

Every drop in the bucket helps. If you have Masonic garbage, astrology materials, yoga equipment, magical crystals, tarot cards, or any other idolatrous paraphernalia in your house, I encourage you to dump it now. Don’t sell it or give it away. Make it unusable. Burn it. You’re going to pick a side whether you want to or not, so try to pick the right one.

Whose Side are You On?

It is 8:18 a.m., and I have been up for almost three hours.

A little before 5:30, my phone started ringing. I assumed it was a robocall, but it was from the hospital. My dad is still there, being observed after taking a fall.

When you have an elderly parent in the hospital, and they call you before dawn, certain ideas flow through your head. You know it’s not good news, and you can’t think of anything trivial that might generate a call.

It turned out he was still among the living. They told me he was combative and that he was cursing the staff and refusing to cooperate. Security people were in the room. They asked me to come and deal with him.

I thought it was 3:27 a.m. I had read my clock incorrectly. I wondered how he could possibly be up that early.

I had them put him on the phone, and he told me the people at the hospital were ignorant and that they were refusing to let him get out of bed purely because of ego. He wanted to use the bathroom in his room, and they wanted him to stay in bed.

Needless to say, it was not long before I found myself driving to the hospital.

When I got there, he was in bed with his feet facing the head of the bed. I started asking him what was happening, and he gave me his opinion of the staff again.

What a mess. He didn’t have any interest in hearing about the medical or legal reasons for discouraging him from walking around. He asked me if I was taking their side.

I don’t know what they did. Maybe they were tactless or heavy-handed. In any case, there wasn’t a whole lot of merit to his complaints. When you’re in the hospital, you work with the staff unless they’re completely crazy. You don’t curse at them or get in physical confrontations with them.

They said they had given him some kind of “medication,” which I took to mean he had been given a sedative or tranquilizer.

I worked with both sides, and we helped him use the bathroom and settle himself into a recliner. I turned out the lights and sat with him, and eventually, he slept. Unlike me, he can sleep in a hospital chair. Finally, he asked to be moved back to the bed, and once he seemed to be inclined to sleep, I left to get some breakfast.

I reminded my dad about what happened to his law school friend Joe. He had surgery to fix an abdominal aneurysm, and while he was in the hospital, he insisted on going to the bathroom by himself. He fell, hit his head on the sink, and died. This is what my dad’s nurse wanted to prevent. I don’t think I made an impression on him.

I’m about to go lie down with ear plugs and a sleep mask and see if I can sleep for a couple of hours. I had been looking forward to a full night of sleep, so I was not happy when the phone rang. I left the hospital after 2 a.m. on his first night there, so last night, I figured I was going to make up the deficit.

If you like to fight with people and get your own way, you need to get over it while you’re young. The last thing you want, when you become demented, is to have the habit of pushing people around. It doesn’t work after life takes all the face cards out of your hand. You may be a big shot today, but when you lose the ability to look after yourself, you’ll be just another patient in a gown, and people with very little status or education will be telling you what to do. You’ll also be wrong consistently, so your battles will be a waste of time, serving only to make other people miserable and motivate them to mistreat you.

You may be the boss today, but there is no way you’ll be able to tell people what to do when you get close to 90. You may lose all your clout a lot sooner than that.

If you’re grateful and considerate, health care people and your relatives will treat you better. They’re human. They can only stand so much crap, and they will reward seniors who make their lives easier.

As for hospitals, they are funny places. They are dedicated to improving people’s health, yet they make it impossible for patients to sleep or walk. Isn’t sleep important to health? Of course it is. But if you go to a hospital, you will find that they leave your door open all night, with the light streaming in. People who work there will walk up and down the halls all night, talking loudly and socializing. You’ll start to drift off, and someone in scrubs will yell, “HEY! TINO! WHASSUP?!”

If I ran an institution that gave care to crabby patients, I’d do everything I could to help them sleep. When hospitals keep patients awake at night, the staff pays for it during the day.

Patients need to walk, too. Obvious? But hospitals don’t make much provision for it. They are actually causing health problems by forcing ambulatory patients to lie in bed.

Hospitals are monuments to mankind’s failure. God wanted to take care of us and keep us well, and we didn’t listen. Now instead of divine health, we have things like catheters and staples and amputations.

I found a nice access ramp I can install to keep my dad from falling on the steps again, and I am sorting through ways to help him get on his feet. We might need to look into an electric cart eventually. I wonder if they can be rigged with GPS so he can only go so far.

The physical side of his problems can be addressed fairly well. I can’t do anything about his attitude or his perceptions, and I don’t think he can do anything, either. He could have changed his way of thinking 10 years ago, but now it’s too much to hope for.

If you don’t get along with people, change your ways now, while you can. Eventually, they will have the upper hand almost all the time. You will be at their mercy, and you better know how to make it flow.

I’m off to bed. Let’s see how long I go before the next phone call.

“Cool Preacher” is an Oxymoron

I just read an interesting article about Carl Lentz. I discovered that he is Justin Bieber’s pastor. Or was. Not surprising.

Who is Carl Lentz? If you don’t know, good for you. I’ll tell you, though. He is part of the hip preacher movement. I used to attend Trinity Church in Miami, and the head pastor’s son, Richie Wilkerson, was a hip preacher who networked with Lentz and other hipsters such as Judah Smith. Their message? “Make me rich.” Well, there was more to it than that. It was more like, “Think I’m cool and make me rich.” They were extremely ambitious people, and their main mission in life was self-promotion. Quite honestly, they were also very ordinary people without much talent or brains.

These kids want to make Jesus cool. Remember, now, Jesus was crucified. He was not popular. He never sought admiration or acceptance. He was the head, not the tail. He led. He never followed. He said what God told him to say, and when people got mad, he didn’t care. Jesus said, “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” The hipsters think they know better than Jesus.

Actually, they may not think they know better than Jesus. They probably have no idea what Jesus said. They don’t know a whole lot about God or the Bible. They’re very busy flying around to conferences and pumping up their profiles. They don’t have a lot of time for God.

Lentz allowed himself to be interviewed by Joy Behar. That’s amazing. This woman is openly hostile to Christianity. I can already hear the excuses. “Jesus wanted to use her platform to get the word out. Jesus wanted to use Carl to plant a seed in her heart.”

God hates excuses, and he doesn’t need Joy Behar’s TV cameras. Paul and the apostles spread Christianity around the world on foot, without cameras, in a few decades. The idea that God has to go to Joy Behar or any other TV host for help is absurd.

Carl Lentz didn’t go to Joy Behar to convert her or help humanity. He went to drum up business.

Hip preachers have a disturbing crush on celebrities. If you’re famous, they want you to come to their churches, and they don’t care whether you’re sincere. Richie’s dad welcomed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian–the famous sleaze merchant–into Trinity Church, and he bragged about them on Instagram. Richie glommed onto them and officiated at their wedding. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian went on posing naked. Richie had no problem with that. He couldn’t get attention on his own, so he stuck with her and fed on the dirty crumbs that fell from her table.

If God wanted Richie Wilkerson to get attention, he would give it to him, just as he gave it to Paul. The fact that Richie had to kiss up to two of the most ungodly celebrities in America to get attention proves that God was not on his side.

I’ll tell you what life at Trinity Church was like. They had a green room behind the stage. When anyone remotely famous (or wealthy) showed up, the Wilkersons took them into that room and sucked up to them, trying to get them to join the church and give money. They did it to the Wests, Luther Campbell, various professional athletes, and more than one college athlete. They tended to be clumsy and transparent, and famous people are used to being conned, so the Wilkersons didn’t do very well except for the Wests. Kanye West is not the smartest person on earth, and he has mental issues, so maybe he was especially vulnerable.

Is that how life is at Carl Lentz’s church? I don’t know, but I know that any minister who allows himself to be associated with Justin Bieber, and who allows people to get the impression he approves of Bieber’s lifestyle and personality, is useless and corrupt. Bieber is all about arrogance, sexual confusion, self-promotion, and rebellion. A pastor who is a role model to kids should not pal around with someone like that.

I can hear the response already. “Judge not. Take the log out of your own eye.” You know what kind of people respond to criticism that way? People who want to keep on sinning and who resent being exposed. That’s a little tip for you. Serious Christians love correction.

When I was associated with Trinity, Lentz came and spoke. Church volunteers always helped with events and speakers. The church runs on free labor. People had unpleasant things to say about Lentz. They said he was a diva. They said his favorite shirt didn’t make it to Trinity, so he made someone drive around looking for the same shirt before he would speak.

I am thinking about Lentz because a recent story says Justin Bieber is engaged to a famous model, and Lentz is not enthusiastic. They say Bieber and Lentz had a falling out. I’m not sure what to think. Is this a good thing? Does it mean Lentz started to feel cheap and realized courting celebrities made him look desperate?

Somehow I doubt it.

Bieber just put a photo on Instagram. It’s Bieber and his fiance in a hot tub. They are wearing very little. The model is sitting on his lap, straddling him. They are kissing. This isn’t the kind of thing informed Christians put on social media. It may be a testimony to the weakness of Carl Lentz’s doctrine.

Lentz belongs to Hillsong, a huge, profitable corporation that plants megachurches and sells bad music. Hillsong is becoming the default church for hip young celebrities. That tells you everything you need to know about it. Modern celebrities are extremely ungodly. If they flock to a denomination, it has to be because they know they will not be required to repent.

Without repentance, there is no closeness with God. There is no revelation. There is no power. There is only pride and foolishness.

Christians need to learn to get away from Christian celebrities. Famous preachers do a lot of harm. They have a conflict of interest. They love fame and money, and they turn Christianity into a business. When Christianity becomes your job, and money and fame are your gods, you will do just about anything to keep the business running.

God wants to work through all of his children, and he doesn’t want us to make Christianity a job. It’s not necessary. People who think God needs cameras and money have no faith. Jesus used to gather crowds in the thousands, and he didn’t even have a bullhorn.

God doesn’t want Christianity to be cool. It never will be. We’re against fornication, pride, and rebellion. We’re against greed. How can we ever be cool when we reject everything cool people love?

Jesus told us we would be rejected. Anyone who tries to make his words fail to come to pass is a fool and isn’t obeying him.

I wish the hip preachers would take their salesman skills and leave the church. They should sell cars or real estate, or they should become motivational speakers. They would do a lot less harm.

The World is not Enough

I’ll tell you what. If Earth had a bus terminal, I would be sitting on a bench right now with a ticket in my hand.

God keeps helping me get cleaned up. He keeps showing me the things that are wrong with me. He helps me to be honest with him about myself. It’s like cleaning out a storage unit someone filled with seafood in 1922 and then forgot about. It’s a real mess.

I keep hammering away at the spirits that have taken the place of the Holy Spirit all my life. Pride, anger, lust, and so on. I feel that God has given me new tools to yank these spirits away from the steering wheel so I can take over.

Today I was working at these things in prayer (asking God to do everything for me and trying to avoid “helping” him) and I took a break to look at the news. Oh, man. What a mistake. It was as if I lived next to an ocean of sewage and I opened the door just as a wave was coming in. I read about crime. I read about the sick people who are tormenting conservatives in restaurants and on their own property. Do I even have to tell you what the news looks like in 2018?

Suddenly, the things I had subdued wanted back in. Anger. Discouragement. Self-righteousness. I had to return to fighting to make sure I didn’t slip backward.

What a rotten place this world is. You can’t even read the news without being inundated with temptation. I thought about this, and I wondered if I should quit reading the news.

A few years back, I got rid of Twitter and Facebook. I felt God wanted me to do it. I called it “the little rapture.” It was wonderful. A lot of people wondered where I had gone, and I lost contact with many, but it was worth it. Sorry to say that. Then I moved from Miami to Ocala, which was another little rapture. Now I’m seriously considering minimizing my visits to news websites.

No one wants to be ignorant. On the other hand, how much is awareness worth, if every piece of information comes with provocation or a picture of a Kardashian’s rear end?

Do I really need to know everything that’s happening in the world? God is looking after me. My own knowledge is of limited value. Relying on it is a huge mistake. The more you rely on yourself, the less God does for you.

The more contact you have with God, the more you will want to isolate yourself from this world. God brings peace, love, protection, and success. The world brings fear, anger, worry, and failure. Leaving God’s presence and going out among people is like leaving a comfortable air-conditioned house and walking out into a hurricane. This place is disgusting.

Catholics believe sinners go to a place called purgatory. It’s a temporary hell. God punishes you there until he feels like you’ve had enough, and then you go to heaven. They couldn’t be more wrong. We already live in purgatory. We just don’t realize it because we’re used to it. We live in denial. Even the worst pessimist sees the world as a better place than it is. We make the most of our pleasures and successes, and we avoid thinking about the agony and failure that surround us.

You don’t get to go to a special place to have your iniquities purged after you die. The Bible says hell is eternal, and there is no mention of purgatory. You have your opportunity to get purged right now, and you will never get another chance. If you didn’t care about God here, you won’t care when you’re dead, either. There is no point in giving human beings an eternity of probation.

This is purgatory, and I’ll tell you something else. We are demons, or at least we are the same type of hybrid.

What are demons? Fallen angels? No. That’s what religious authorities who make things up tell us. Demons are our brothers and sisters. They are dead human beings whose bloodlines were polluted with the genes of fallen angels who had sex with women. God sent the flood to get rid of them, but the only pure person on the boat was Noah. The rest were tainted, and they went on to breed.

In English, Bibles say Noah was “perfect in his generations.” In Hebrew, the word translated “generations” literally means “generations,” but in Hebrew, it is used to mean “genealogy.”

In all likelihood, angels have sired more people since the flood. As a result, many of us–maybe all of us–are supernatural bastards. We carry cursed DNA. We are not really God’s children. Not until we accept salvation and repent. This is why the Bible calls the Holy Spirit a spirit of adoption.

Those of us who are currently alive can’t possess people or manifest in them as diseases, but we are still full of evil. We live in bondage to sins we can’t give up, because that’s our inheritance from our evil ancestors. Only the Holy Spirit can remanufacture us.

This world is a nuthouse. You are lucky if you can walk two blocks without witnessing depravity or being tempted. The things we witness cause us to open doors and let demons in. Then we become like them, and we end up with diseases, mental illness, addictions, and other problems.

Every day we get to choose between peace, power, healing, and victory and a pile of shiny objects soaked in poison. We take the shiny objects nearly all the time, and we think we’re doing the right thing.

A human being is like a bus full of idiots. You’re supposed to drive responsibly, but the idiots–spirits of the dead–keep shoving you to the floor and grabbing the wheel. If you don’t know God, you have no authority, so the idiots will win until the day you die. Your choices give them power. Then when bad things happen to you, you go to God and cry, “Why me?”, as if something odd has happened.

Churches pretend demons don’t exist. Churches that admit demons exist claim they’re rare. Christians think only “bad people” can have demons, so they’re insulted when you suggest they have them, too. They turn down relief because they prefer pride and self-righteousness. God is running a free clinic, and we sit outside and fester because we think we’re too good to be sick.

I may have to forget about news sites and let the world take care of itself. I have the delusion that I’m helping humanity and looking after myself when I read the news, but that’s probably not true. There are things I’m better off not knowing about. The world is packed with people who cause their own problems, doing the same counterproductive things over and over, so I shouldn’t get to close to it. I’m trying to become a different kind of person. God moves me forward, and then I get caught up in the world’s issues, and I slide back. I am not cooperating with him the way I should.

Like a friend of mine says, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I know that’s how God himself feels, except possibly for the “monkeys” part. God says Satan is the god of this world, so it makes sense that he limits his own interference in the drama.

Salvation is for individuals, not worlds. This place is terminally ill. Focusing on nations and cities is a mistake. You have to think about one person at a time. People can be saved and filled with power, but the world as a whole (or hole) is going to continue to rot. If that were not true, the apocalypse and the Messianic Age would be pointless.

Why did God promise to destroy and remake the world, if we’re going to fix it before he returns? In one part of the Revelation, he kills a third of humanity at one whack. That’s not God giving us an “A.”

I do not want any more sewage tsunamis. I generate enough sewage of my own. I don’t need to take in sewage from leftist criminals and the Kardashians.

I’m so glad I’m out of Miami. I can’t describe it. I wish I never had to think about that place again. I’m going to feel the same way about the earth when I leave.

You can have God or you can have the world. You have to choose, and you are going to choose, whether you want to or not.