Not What I Expected

When I started writing music, I thought I’d be doing something bluesy, but I keep writing things that are sort of like classical. I just finished one tonight. “Finished” is not quite right. I got it up to an acceptable length, came up with a beginning and end, and stopped. I can fix it up later.

I was thinking it might be useful for my church’s dance team. With that in mind, I repeated the catchier parts instead of writing new ones. I figured that if people were dancing to it, they would want some repetition.

I remembered to pray for help before I worked on it. That makes me happy. I don’t like engaging in a task without praying first, but I always forget.

When I started, I tried to write it using the viola da gamba sound from Finale. I have loved the sound of this weird instrument ever since I saw Tous Les Matins du Monde, which is a really depressing French movie (I repeat myself) about musicians. It’s like a cello, but it has seven strings. It turns out the Finale version refuses to do anything other than pizzicato, so I used a cello sound instead.

Here it is. I’m thrilled with it. Looks like a good first draft to me. I can’t believe I wrote it. It doesn’t seem like my personality at all.

Viola da Gamba Am Noodling 10 28 12

Breakthrough has me Butchering Standards

I have a new music teacher.

Longtime readers will remember that I bought a grand piano in 2003 or 2004. The main purpose was to learn about music so I could compose, but I ended up learning to play a few things and focusing too much on becoming a musician. After a few years, I quit. I forgot things as soon as I learned them, so at any given time, I had a repertoire of four songs. And I could not sight-read well or write music competently.

A couple of years back I started working on the electric guitar. I built most of a Telecaster, and I built a few amps. I worked on sight-reading and other skills. I went through two teachers. I got to the point where I could play a few things, but I wasn’t any closer to composing.

I started looking for a real teacher. Someone who really knew what he was doing. I checked out Craigslist, the center of all knowledge and enlightenment (after Wikipedia and Fark). I found a guy who wrote long, opinionated ads. He seemed to be truly disgusted with virtually everyone else who claimed to teach people how to play the guitar. He explained why their methods were a waste of time and money. He provided wordy insights into his personal philosophy of music teaching. Stuff I didn’t really need to read.

I was impressed. He reminded me of me.

As I told him later, I like opinionated people. Some are opinionated because they’re just stupid, and I’m not real fond of that group. But others are opinionated because they have had it up to HERE with BS. I figured anyone passionate enough to write an ad like that was someone I needed to meet.

Eventually, I called for an appointment. He wouldn’t give me one! Instead I had to talk to him for about half an hour, explaining my goals. Then he made me spend a week writing down goals and influences. I had to create two Word documents and send them to him.

Finally, I was cleared to go for a lesson. I drove all the way to Davie, and when I knocked on the appropriate door, an enormous human being answered. At first I thought he had to be standing on a box. But no, that was all him. We shook hands and got started.

The lesson went like this: I showed him what I knew, and he told me it was wrong. Then I showed him something else, which I was really pleased about, and he told me that was wrong, too. By the end of the lesson, I had learned that I was doing the following things wrong:

1. Playing position
2. Guitar position
3. Right hand position
4. Left hand position
5. Holding pick
6. Fretting
7. Picking
8. Foot tapping
9. Breathing

I think there were some other things I was doing wrong, but I can’t remember what they were. As far as I could tell, there was not ONE thing I was doing right.

Here’s something weird: he seems to share the personality of my buddy Aaron. If Aaron were a non-Jewish musician, he’d be this guy. It’s freaky how similar they are.

He gave me an exercise straight from hell, to enable me to stretch my left hand, and he told me to play the same scale a billion times in different positions, at glacial speed. And home I went.

I worked on this crap for two weeks, and the net result was that I was no longer able to play the guitar. I mean, I could not play ANYTHING. My fingers missed the frets. I forgot entire passages. My left hand was in constant pain, because I was using a couple of shriveled muscles I had never used before. It was bad. But I had faith, because he seemed to know absolutely everything there was to know about music. Plus he once spoke on the phone with Billy Gibbons. I was sure I was headed for a wax on, wax off moment.

My third lesson was last week. I could not play a thing, but we spent a very long time talking. This is how the lessons go. I barely touch the guitar. We discussed the correct mindset for making pizza. We covered our mutual disdain for Prince. And after a while, we got onto conservative politics. I told him it was hard to hold the guitar the way he had told me to hold it, because it rested on my pistol. From there, we moved into a discussion of things like labor unions and Chick-Fil-A. He’s way out on the right, which probably explains why he’s not a famous musician. He has played in some worship bands.

Last week, we got off on sight-reading and composition. He told me something I had never heard before. He said it was a mistake to start with sight-reading. He said I should start by transcribing things. I told him I would try, but that the software was a pain to use. He told me the problem was that I was using software in the first place. He said I should transcribe things on paper. That had never occurred to me. In the past, I tried to compose things on the computer so I could play them back immediately and check them out.

A day or two later, I decided to try transcription. But I hate transcribing on the guitar. So I sat down at the piano with some blank paper, and I started working on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in C major. I was amazed at how much I knew about music. I thought I had forgotten it all. I managed to write and play a very coherent version, and then later I made up a left-hand part.

You can’t imagine what a breakthrough this was for me. When I first started studying the piano, it was because I had music in my head, and I could not write music fast enough to capture it. It drove me nuts, especially at night. I’d lie in bed with wonderful original music playing in my head, and it would keep me awake for an hour and a half. When I started transcribing, I saw that there was finally some hope that I could save some of it.

I texted my teacher with a question, and he called me up. I told him I had bad news. He had driven me back to the piano. He didn’t care. He thought it was great. He helped me out with a few clues, and I fired off some files by email, so he would know what I was up to.

I am accomplishing squat on the guitar, but I’m finally getting a grip on music writing. And I learned something else: the software isn’t so bad, if you write the music on paper first. You use a pencil, and then you have a stationary (or stationery) target. The notes are written down, so they don’t vanish while you’re cursing Finale’s horrible interface.

I’ll post a MIDI file, so you can see what I’ve done so far. I’m thrilled with it. I’ll write more variations, but as far as I’m concerned, this is a wonderful start. The left hand part reminds me of Bach, and I’m no Bach fan, but I’ll take it.

Over the Rainbow Transcription

Now I have hope that I’ll succeed at this, so I have new motivation to go forward. And the music in my head is back. I laid awake for quite some time last night while variations of “Sweet and Dandy” roared through my mind. On the one hand, it was annoying, but it was also intoxicating. I know I can do this.

http://youtu.be/GopekAOMCE4

God is a restorer. If you’re on the wrong path, he may put roadblocks in front of you, and when he’s ready for you to succeed, he can remove them so fast, you won’t believe it. You may have a problem you think is insurmountable, but the answer may be a change you can make in five minutes. If someone had given me the right advice about music in 1998, I’d have a pile of original compositions by now. The advice was all I needed.

I’m practically beside myself, thinking about the things I’ll do. I feel like I’ve been turned loose in a toy store.

I know this will go somewhere. Sooner or later I’ll come up with something fit for use in a church. It’s only a matter of time. That will be a huge milestone.

It’s more evidence that prayer in tongues straightens out paths. The more I do it, the better things go. I knew this in 1987, but I didn’t get serious until about five years ago. So much time wasted. Since then, the progress has been continuous.

Try it yourself. You have nothing to lose.

Plus a Pork Tour de Force

I should be working on my amp cabinet, but I just can’t. I’m high on pork.

I made an impulse buy at Costco the other day. How shocking. They had two pounds of smoked pulled pork for eight bucks. How could I turn that down? Besides, I think I would buy a leaky bag of anthrax spores if it said “Kirkland” on it.

Today I decided to prepare it.

I was considering putting it in a calzone. It would work as lechon asado, so I could make pan con lechon with Swiss cheese. That’s an unbelievable sandwich. Or I could experiment: BBQ pulled pork calzone.

In the end, I went with Texas toast.

I made a loaf of homemade bread, which takes about four minutes of work. I threw some cole slaw together, and I bought a baking potato, which I nuked (cheating) and then stuck in the oven to finish. I made my own BBQ sauce, and I sliced an onion.

I fried the onion in some old beef fat/peanut oil I used for fries. I used cast iron. I tossed the pork in, flambeed it in Jack Daniel’s, and tossed it with sauce. I fried two slices of bread in butter, which is just plain wrong. Then I sat down and ate.

Oh, man. I can’t describe it. As sold by Costco, the pork is not quite as good as pork you smoke on your own. But it’s more than adequate. It’s tender, and it has a nice hickory flavor. The stuff I put in it just melted into the meat. The bread was crunchy and drippy and buttery and yeasty. I think I may faint.

The cole slaw was also a cheat. I bought shredded cabbage and carrots in a bag and added my own stuff. I don’t think it makes much difference. I can’t shred cabbage any better than a factory can.

The potato was not quite right, but the wonderful thing about potatoes is that screwing them up can make them better. This one ended up with parts that were a little too chewy, and it may sound stupid, but they were wonderful. If I were cooking seriously, I wouldn’t go near the microwave, but this was just lunch, and the potato was great.

This sandwich was so good, it was sobering. Sometimes food makes you giddy. When it’s really good, it’s almost scary. It will make you serious. It will make you wonder how good food can get. That’s the situation I am dealing with today.

I can’t believe God lets me cook like this. What is the purpose? I can’t eat it all. I threw out a lot of my lunch because you can’t eat like that and expect to live.

I have an idea. My new church is thinking about feeding the poor. I’m all for this, and I’ll help, PROVIDED they do it right. There is no reason the poor can’t have the best food in Miami. The cost of food has no relationship to the quality. It’s all in the preparation. I’m thinking pulled pork sandwiches might be a good way to go. At most, the pork will cost $1.50 per pound. Homemade bread is almost free. Sauce ingredients aren’t expensive. Neither is slaw. For three bucks a head, we should be able to pretty well stun the poor, as well as the volunteers and anyone else who comes around.

We would need a couple of chafing dishes plus a big propane skillet. That’s about it.

Speaking of the poor, I learned something about a local nonprofit today. My old church has a charity wing. I know someone who went to them for help. He claimed they sat him in front of a computer and showed him links to places that could help him out. Did they give him money or groceries? He said no, although he had given money to the church in the past.

In the recent Pentecost fundraising drive (“Five Victories of Pentecost”), the leadership said they were going to give the special Pentecost offerings to the poor, via their charity wing. I ran that by my dad, the non-Christian attorney. He said, “So he’s paying HIMSELF.” The conflict of interest was not subtle. If you run a church, and you ask the congregation to give money to a charity, and you run the charity, and the charity pays you, what are you really doing? Maybe you’re not taking any money out, but what if you are? Shouldn’t donors be told how much and for what?

Out of curiosity, I Googled, and I came up with a PDF of some Canadian government documents. They say the church’s charity wing lost its nonprofit status in Canada in 2010, because they failed to respond to requests that they open their books and show that they were doing what charities do.

Okay, let’s be fair. This could be irresponsibility. This would not be a big surprise, given what I have observed personally. So far, what I’ve said doesn’t prove dishonesty. But here’s something one of the letters said: “The Organization’s only expenses for the period under audit were for non-charitable ‘Professional and consulting fees.’ The Organization did not report any expenses in support of the ‘ongoing programs’ as described in question C2 of its T3010s.”

You run an outfit which is supposed to be a charity; it’s supposed to give stuff to the poor. But as far as the Canadian government can tell, ALL–not some–of your expenses are for “Professional and consulting fees.”

You can see why it disturbed me. “Consulting” is a good excuse for organizations to funnel money to people who don’t really do anything of value. Michelle Obama made huge money “consulting.” And I think it’s fair to assume that none of the fees mentioned by the Canadians were paid to the poor (who are rarely hired as consultants). If a charity pays consultants, yet it gives nothing to the poor, what, exactly, is the point of the consulting? What are the consultants helping them do? Consultants are supposed to give advice. I think the obvious suggestion would be, “Stop giving all of the money to consultants and professionals and give something to the needy.”

Other websites say the charity received six figures a year. How can all of that money go to consulting and “professional” services?

Maybe there’s a legitimate explanation, but it doesn’t look good, does it?

A full-blown grifter–a charlatan with no intention of doing anything but getting rich–might leave a trail just like this. Money in, no services provided, and lots of expenditures for vague “fees.” So while the PDF doesn’t prove anything crooked is going on, if something crooked WERE going on, it would not look much different. I have decided to show the PDF to some friends and see what they think.

In any case, it shows I was right to quit giving them money. A long time ago, I realized they asked for money and then told donors nearly nothing about how it was spent. By “nearly nothing,” I mean I did not receive accountings showing how much money was taken in and how it was spent. I cut them off, apart from church offerings. I found transparent, trustworthy ministries and charities to give to.

They didn’t tell me where the money went. That’s bad. Reputable charities send out reports accounting for their donations. But failing to cooperate with the government of Canada…that’s another level of bad. It shows they don’t deserve money from anyone. If they’re that irresponsible or incompetent, how can you expect them to spend their money effectively?

What if they’re really helping the poor? Shouldn’t they keep books that prove it? What’s the down side? Jesus told us we were to keep quiet about giving, but he was referring to individuals, not ministries. Besides, before Pentecost, the pastor got up and told the congregation he and his wife were giving a thousand dollars in the Pentecost drive. Obviously, he is not concerned about hiding his good deeds.

This isn’t the only nonprofit that keeps things quiet. Kenneth Copeland refused to open his books when Congress came calling. On Youtube, there’s a video in which Copeland explains that Congress is full of evil people who do Satan’s bidding, and that he, as God’s representative on earth, is not accountable to them. That’s not really what he said, but it’s not that far off. If he’s not open with Congress, he’s not open with his donors, either, because if the donors had the information, it would have been impossible to keep it away from Congress, so he would have complied.

How can anyone give money to a man like that? What possible reason could he have for refusing to tell retirees and people on disability what he does with their money? He is incredibly wealthy. It didn’t all come from penny stocks and brilliant commodity trades made on a pastor’s salary; I guarantee that. Why won’t he tell us how he got where he is?

It’s sad, but Christians are so brainwashed about submission to authority, they can’t see it when the devil himself walks up the aisle and picks up the collection plate. Jesus said we should be as harmless as doves, but he also said we should be as wise as serpents. A man who won’t explain himself to his flock has no business handling other people’s money.

I pray for God to help the leaders at my old church get it together, but I also pray he throws them out and brings better pastors in. I hope they improve, but I don’t think the congregation should suffer while they learn. They’ve had a long time to get it right, and it’s not right for thousands of people to have poor leadership just so a few folks can hold onto their jobs.

My faith tells me God is replacing them, and as I have noted before, the scuttlebutt is that the head pastor is on his way out. I didn’t hear about that until after I prayed for the leaders to be replaced.

In other news, my latest amp now almost has a home. Here’s a photo.

I am not a great upholsterer, but it looks wonderful. I don’t know how to handle the inside corners in the ivory panel. I am considering experimenting with a heat gun. The vinyl will have to be stretched, if the job is to look professional. As it is, I may have to mask it with some sort of metal or plastic things I screw into the corners, over the vinyl.

The amp sounds magnificent. I can’t stop playing it. It sings. I still have some 120 Hz hum to get rid of, but it’s not bad enough to be a major concern. Once I get it fixed, I’m moving on to my 4-EL84 version.

Stay away from that Costco pork. I am just now starting to come down.

More

I’m really not sure what’s going on. I have been re-reading the Canadian government’s documents, which you can find here:

Link to Canadian gov’t documents.

The organization that had its nonprofit credentials revoked is headquartered in Miami, and it belongs (or belonged) to the head pastor of the church. But it doesn’t have the name the church’s charity wing uses. The Canadians were puzzled by this, too. In trying to get information, they looked at the current charity’s website.

Now I have to wonder: is it even the same outfit? Is it possible they let this organization lapse (irresponsible, but not inherently crooked) while setting up the new one? That would explain why they ignored inquiries from Canada.

If we were talking about a responsible organization like The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, there would be no questions. They publish and mail an annual report to their donors, and it accounts for all of the money they receive. I know Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s salary, because of that report. With my old church and its affiliates, who knows? Maybe they generally let people look at their books, but for some reason, they decided to shut Canada out. Maybe everything they do is legal and ethical. I have no idea. I don’t recall receiving any annual reports.

The organization the Canadians disqualified used this language in describing its purpose:

[T]o evangelize and educate young people and their families regarding drugs, suicide, and moral values

That doesn’t sound like what the current charity is purportedly doing. As far as I know, they occasionally round stuff up and send it to Haiti, and as I’ve said, they refer poor people to organizations that give them assistance. So maybe it’s a different body entirely.

Here is how the charity’s website describes its activities:

When a person in need enters our office we will immediately hear the person’s need and respond with appropriate resources. Often the response will be a referral to another resource. [Italics mine.]

Anyway, I don’t want to be unfair. The church’s charity has one name, and the organization in the Canadian documents has another, so they may be different entities, and it is completely possible that the church’s charity is doing more for the poor than I suspect.

Time to Flush

Life just gets more and more interesting.

Maybe instead of a relatively cohesive narrative, I should go over some highlights.

I had tendinitis in my left hand. It was caused by guitar practice. There is no cure for tendinitis. It is one of the most annoying ailments there is. You have to stop whatever it is that caused it, and then you wait. If it goes away, great. If not, there is nothing you can do.

I quit playing for a few weeks. The tendinitis didn’t go away. Of course, I prayed, and my faith said it would be healed. In my prayers and in my mind, I always said I was healed. I never went back on that.

Last week I started talking to the musicians at my new church. They may want me to play guitar. I don’t talk about this a lot, but if I could choose any career, music would be it. And you know God. He gives us the desires of our hearts (Psalm 37:4). I have some material to study, and we’ll see how it goes.

At around the same time I connected with the musicians, I resumed serious practice. I figured there was no point in waiting. Resting didn’t make the tendinitis better, and practicing didn’t make it worse.

Late last week, the tendinitis started going away, even though I was practicing again. Now I can barely feel it. God really does hand out miraculous healings, and I’ve gotten a bunch of them. My sister had extensive small cell lung cancer, and I fasted and prayed, and she’s still alive, with no detectable disease. Don’t ever think God doesn’t heal, or that it’s unusual when he does. You just have to know what you’re doing.

In other news, I started thinking about a mission my old church is pursuing. In 2010, the pastor got on stage and told us he had a “2020 Vision.” As I recall, he said God had told him to get 100,000 people saved by 2020. You can read about it on the web if you look.

I’ve seen so much cynical preaching at that church; they copy other people’s material and present it as though the Holy Spirit had just jerked them out of bed and dictated it to them. I thought about that yesterday, and I had to ask myself how likely it was that the 2020 thing was legitimate. So I entered “2020 vision” and “church” in the Google box. I had to exclude “vimeo” and “schools,” and after that, I got so many links to churches with “2020 visions,” it amazed me. And of course, my old church wasn’t the first one to get the idea. I found one outfit that has been preaching about it since 2001.

So discouraging. It makes you wonder if they ever believed ANYTHING they said. If they were willing to steal other people’s ideas and claim they came from God, were they totally incapable of getting a real message from the Father? Maybe so. There are plenty of preachers who hear from God in real time, but I guess the rest just steal from them.

Are they even Christians? If you are willing to make up doctrine, and you don’t mind stealing other people’s stupid gimmicks, can you honestly claim you believe in God? Could a real believer preach that garbage in front of Jesus, if he showed up in person and sat in the front row? Sometimes I tell myself the problem is that they’re not grown up in the Spirit, and they have a hard time discerning the things that really come from God, but that would not explain cribbing and fabrication. A person who lacks discernment may be fooled easily, but lacking discernment won’t cause you to lie.

I shouldn’t say they’re pursuing the mission. When I left the church in April, we weren’t hearing much about it. They have a way of getting very excited about things and then forgetting about them. That happened after the Haiti earthquake. We were TBN’s earthquake nerve center. Everything went through us. The pastor was on TV. We helped send a freighter to Port au Prince. We kept hearing that our church would be committed for the long haul, not just during the initial excitement. Then the cameras went away, and after a while, we didn’t hear much about Haiti. Even though the congregation is mostly Haitian.

The pastor may be moving on soon, to resume work as a traveling evangelist, so I don’t think the 2020 thing is going anywhere.

What else is going on? I’m angrier than ever at preachers who teach the get-rich gospel. It’s pure crap. I believe God gives people financial prosperity. I believe he rewards people with shalom, especially for giving to the poor and for helping the Jews and Israel. But I know he doesn’t make people rich just because they throw money at morons. Every Christian knows someone who has given money to ministries and ended up poor. It’s time to man up and admit it.

A couple of things occurred to me this week.

First of all, it makes no sense to go to God and tell him you gave stupidly and ask him to honor the offering anyway. You can’t ask God to honor your good intentions when you give money to an idiot.

Hosea tells us God’s people perish for lack of knowledge. The people who came before us lost a lot of knowledge, so now we walk in ignorance, and we do unproductive things. Then God lets the consequences fall on us, even if it means doing nothing while people die.

Why doesn’t God come in and teach us what our predecessors lost? Because that’s not his job. We are responsible for running the earth. We are responsible for teaching future generations. The system is set up so our failures can hurt our descendants. That’s just how it is. God isn’t going to round us up once a generation and tie us to chairs and teach us. We suffer because we don’t know what to do, even when our ignorance is not our fault. If you give to a fool, God isn’t going to come in and pretend the offering was a good idea, because to do that would be to permit the fool to manipulate God.

God is not all that interested in your intentions. Saul was trying to do a good thing when he took the place of the priests and offered a sacrifice, but God cursed him for it. Eve was trying to do a good thing when she tried to get wisdom from eating the forbidden fruit, and look how that worked out. Your good intentions don’t matter when you don’t do things God’s way.

This sounds pretty bad. But here is the other thing that occurred to me: God is a redeemer. He restores things that have been taken from us. He even restores things we’ve thrown away in stupidity. So there is no reason you can’t go to God and ask him to restore what you gave to greedy parasites. Tell him you were fooled and robbed. The way you characterize your prayer matters. God is a judge, and judges require people to ask correctly.

Here is something else: God DOES return to us once in a while to teach us the things our predecessors discarded, even though it’s not his responsibility. If you look at the story of Josiah, you will see it. The ancient Hebrews became extremely ignorant. They even forgot what Passover was. But God gave them new teachers. Lately God has been doing the same thing through the baptism with the Holy Spirit and tongues. John, a man who knew what it was to be in the Spirit (Revelation 1:10) said, “You need that no man teach you.” If you get into the Spirit every day, consistently, over time, God will teach you the right things to do. Like Jesus said, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled, and as James said, if you ask God for wisdom, he will give liberally.

While this stuff was on my mind, I started to understand a strange scripture from the book of Mark:

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where ‘Their worm does not die And the fire is not quenched.’

And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where ‘Their worm does not die,
And the fire is not quenched.’

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire—where ‘Their worm does not die And the fire is not quenched.’

This stuff has been the justification for a lot of horrors. Men used to castrate themselves based on this passage. I believe it actually refers to the body of Christ: the church.

Jesus has parts, according to scripture. Some of those parts become corrupt and cause others to become offended and fall away.

Greedy, lying preachers tell people God will make them rich for giving them money, and when people comply, the money doesn’t come. What happens then? People get offended. They decide that if they were lied to about one thing, Christianity itself must be a lie. Crooked preachers drive people away from God.

I believe that when Jesus talked about cutting off body parts, he was referring to preachers he would cast down. This is something I pray for every day. I really don’t care if a corrupt preacher loses his job and his reputation. That’s tough. If you’re stealing from the poor, you need to be stopped. You’re harming thousands or millions of people. What do I care about one selfish man? Let him eat from a dumpster and learn something. If it will save one family from giving themselves into the street, then praying for the crooks to fall seems like a good thing. Sure, I pray for them to be corrected and restored. But I don’t pray for God to keep them in their pulpits while he straightens them out. They are doing too much damage, too fast.

So that’s where that sits, at the moment.

I applied to be a member of New Dawn Ministries. These people are flat-out nuts for the Holy Spirit. I don’t want to expect too much of them. I don’t know them that well, so I don’t know who is really hooked up and who just goes to church to dance and yell. Experience tells me not to assume everyone there is a modern-day apostle. But it’s an amazing church, and I’ve already met more Spirit-connected people there, out of maybe 200 people, than I met in several years at my old church.

I want to do things for the church, but I’m going to take it easy. My prayer life is going crazy. A bad day contains only two hours of prayer. A good day goes over three. That, in and of itself, is a ministry. I can’t spend twenty hours a week at church. So I will pray, pick, and choose.

I believe we are headed into a new age when Holy-Spirit-empowered people are going to have more prominence. I think we’re going to see a lot of pampered preachers with hair plugs and pompadours leave their ministries. I believe God will drive them out, as Spirit-filled people rise up and ask for his help. Cliques and guilds will dissolve. Surely God will not let his people chase mirages forever, at the mercy of men and women who are so stuffed with the wealth of the poor, they’re like stiff, swollen Thanksgiving turkeys. When that happens, we’ll see people get restoration and healing, and they won’t have to go to ridiculous crusades to get them. These things will happen in people’s homes, as they happen in mine. That’s my impression.

I guess that’s all I have time to write. I hope this is helpful.

Emmanuel Goldstein, at Your Service

Today someone accused me of being homophobic. And he (or she) was very nasty and rude about it. I made a joke about “trying not to feel gay” in a fabric store, and this person ordered me to keep my “homophobic” comments to myself!

In a way, it’s funny. Obviously, the remark was not hostile toward gays. If it is, La Cage aux Folles (“The Bird Cage”) and Will & Grace are hateful, as is The Ambiguously Gay Duo.

In another way, it’s not funny. The accusation itself was hateful, and it reflects the increasing boldness with which the enemies of Christianity are spewing their rage.

Satan managed to kick the Holy Spirit out of the church around 1700 years ago, and for centuries, the church was no real threat to him. The power was gone. The courage was gone. Look at the lists of the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit. All those things were gone from the church, except in piddling quantities. We were disarmed.

A little over a century ago, the Holy Spirit returned, in spite of our foolishness, and since then, Christians have been getting more powerful. Not all Christians. Only the charismatics. We should have realized God was preparing us for battle. The world is becoming a sea of filth. Humanity is turning against real Christians. Without the power of the Holy Spirit, the imbalance in power would put a quick end to us, and to God’s assault on Satan’s kingdom.

Now we have homosexual “pastors.” Not just the closeted kind we’re used to seeing. They are out in the open. We have “scholars” who twist scripture in order to justify perversion. The Old Testament and the New Testament condemn homosexual activity, and contrary to what the revisionists say, the criticism isn’t just directed to acts performed in rituals. It is a blanket condemnation.

It’s surprising, but it’s starting to look like this is going to be one of the biggest weapons that will be used against us when martyrdom returns. When unbelievers gas us and shoot us and loot our homes, this will be one of their excuses. Many of them will call themselves “Christians,” and they’ll say they’re doing God’s work. I guarantee it.

Do I hate gays? Of course not. Could anyone hate Nathan Lane or that kid who played Doogie Howser? I know some people feel visceral anger because other people are having gay sex. I don’t feel that way. When I was young, I thought homosexuality was perfectly fine. I have never felt rage toward gays. I admit, homosexuality can be funny, and the picture of two men entwined in passion will always be amusing to me, but that’s not hate.

Gays themselves realize how funny they can be, as The Bird Cage and Will & Grace prove. They joke about themselves constantly. Joking about feeling gay in a fabric store is not evidence of hate.

That doesn’t matter. People who point these things out will be told that the issue of whether a joke is hate depends on who made it. By that standard, all Christians (real Christians who do not endorse homosexuality) will be considered guilty, and persecution will be excused and encouraged. The presumption of guilt will not be rebuttable.

Here’s a funny thing about causes. People use them to justify cruelty and viciousness. Think of the PETA nuts who throw blood on women. Lots of people are against harming animals, but only a few use that conviction as an excuse to cause suffering. Homosexual rights constitute a cause, and that cause is already being used to ground hateful words and actions. It will get worse.

Today someone pointed out a scripture to me. Revelation 21:6. In it, God tells us the cowardly will “have their part” in hell, which is a lake of burning brimstone. Who are the cowards these days? Seeker-sensitive Christians. The people who let homosexuality (and positive thinking and cult methods and greed and…) into the church.

That’s sobering.

Hell is a hard thing to understand. The Bible doesn’t speak clearly about it. We know it exists. We know certain supernatural beings will be tormented in it forever. We know ordinary people will be placed there. What isn’t clear to me is whether it’s permanent for everyone. The Jews believe hell is a place where people go to be cleansed, and that we will not be punished forever. I’m inclined to believe that, and it makes me think there will probably be many self-proclaimed Christians there.

We know God punishes Christians. The Rapture will only take some of us, and the rest will be here during the Tribulation, when God’s ameliorating presence will be gone from the earth. If God would permit that, I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say some of us will suffer after we die.

If that’s right, it would make sense of Revelation 21:6.

In any case, you don’t want to be cowardly. Displeasing God and helping his enemies are bad things to do, with serious consequences for you and your house. The world is rapidly polarizing, and you don’t want to end up on the wrong side. God is the worst enemy you can imagine. There is absolutely nothing you can do to escape his anger, if he is determined to make you suffer.

How are we going to stand, when society changes and we are seen as parasites and troublemakers? When our Kristallnacht comes, how will we get the courage to affirm our Christianity before the mobs?

The answer is the Holy Spirit. He puts God’s character in us, little by little, as we pray in tongues, fast, read the word, and strive to listen and obey. Peter denied Jesus three times, after seeing him work miracles. That was before he received the fulness of the Holy Spirit. After Pentecost, he became a different man. He watched the Romans crucify his wife, and then he followed her, and all he had to do to survive was to renounce Jesus. Only the Holy Spirit could account for the change in him.

You can’t stand without the weapons and armor of God, and if you check the book of Ephesians, where these things are described, you will see that it refers to prayer in the Spirit. If you were born brave, that’s wonderful, but most people aren’t like that. God’s help is available, and we are expected–required–to accept it.

These things may sound crazy. So be it. I’m going to die, and it’s not going to be that long, because I’m already middle-aged. I can’t concern myself unduly with what people think of me here on earth. I have my future to think about. You are dying, too. You need to ask yourself how much you are willing to pay for temporary peace and approval from misguided human beings.

Corruption is already in the Spirit-filled churches. We teach greed and pride as though they were virtues. Other garbage will creep in through the cracks we have already made. One of these days, we’re going to see someone like Joel Osteen stand up and say he was wrong about gays or abortion or some similar issue. People who want to fill stadiums (and their pockets) will make up whatever lies they have to. They never cared about the flock. The desperation that drives them will eventually take control, unless they get into the Spirit.

Joshua was given to us as a symbol of Spirit-filled believers. He went forward to possess his inheritance–his place in the Promised Land–and before he did, he said this: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” You are going to make a choice, even if you do so by refusing to choose. You will be rewarded, with good or evil, depending on that choice. I say go forward with the Spirit. You can’t make it on your own, no matter how many positive thinking preachers you listen to.

Let the dogs bark. What’s right is right, and foolishness will not stand forever. Better to be slandered and insulted now, by simpletons, than to be blamed justly by God himself.

Homosexuality is wrong. If that looks like hate to you, it’s in your mind, not my heart. I don’t hate gays, gamblers, drunks, prostitutes, the greedy, the gluttonous, potheads, or anyone else who harms himself through iniquity. Believe it or don’t. God shares his power and his help with me every day, and he helps others through me. I am not giving that up so I can be your pal.

Little Box Full of Smoking-Hot Soul

I finished my latest amp.

This thing is called the Wingman. It’s a Fender Bassman preamp coupled with the output section from an amp called the Little Wing.

The Little Wing was created by an Internet forum dude who calls himself “Da Geezer.” It’s supposed to be a sort of small Bassman. It has two 6BM8 output tubes, and it dissipates 7 watts. I wanted more juice, so I built an amp with 4 tubes and two output transformers. Why two transformers? Because I failed to take the impedance into account. Going from two tubes to four, I messed things up, and by the time I knew it, I already had one output transformer on hand.

I mounted the transformers incorrectly. I got too close to the work, and by the time I pulled back and saw that the laminates on on OT were co-planar with the power transformer laminates, the holes were drilled. But there is a test you can do to determine whether this does any harm. You connect the PT to 120, and you hook a speaker up to the OTs. If there’s a problem, you will hear hum. I didn’t hear anything, so I knew I was okay.

I wanted to put a post-phase inverter master volume (PPIMV) on it. This is a potentiometer that allows you to reduce the signal from the coupling caps to the output tubes. It lets you run the preamp at full blast, without sending a huge signal to the output. In other words, you get the nice sound of a preamp working hard, without the incredible loudness it ordinarily causes.

Because I had four output tubes, I ended up with two PPIMV pots. This is probably unnecessary, but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t take a chance. It seemed to work fine when I ran everything through one pot, but pots are cheap, so I bought two.

I machined the chassis out of 6-inch aluminum channel. I used the mill to make the holes. While I was doing all this, I realized I needed end mills exactly the right size for tube sockets, and I managed to find some on Ebay. Next time, the tube holes will be a wonder to behold.

I put the amp together, and it barely ran. I got oscillation and low volume. I fought with it for days. Finally I realized I had the output tubes wired up wrong. Each coupling cap has to go to both OTs, and I had it rigged up the other way.

When I fixed that, I found that the bass had a sound sort of like a synthesizer. I went through the amp, adjusting voltages. The Bassman uses a 355-0-355 PT, and this amp has a 275-0-275 job, so the preamp voltages were pretty low until I got rid of the Bassman-sized resistors.

I also had to adjust the cathode resistor on the output tubes, since I was running four tubes into one resistor. The Little Wing has one resistor for two tubes.

Even with all this work, the amp did not make me happy. The bass still sounded off, and the amp did not have the clarity I wanted, also, when I cleaned up the wiring, I got noise, including heater hum.

People said I needed a bigger PT, so I ordered one. The 6BM8 tubes suck a ridiculous amount of current.

I went back to the drawing board, and I reviewed some stuff I had learned about heater wiring.

The heaters on amp tubes run at 3.15 VAC. They generate 60 Hz radio waves. If you don’t run the wiring corrrectly, the amp picks up the waves, and you get hum. A well-known guru named Merlin Blencowe says you can’t have heater-wire loops around the tubes, which is the easiest way to do it. With 12AX_ tubes like the ones I used in my preamp, that means you have to run the wires across the tube bases. This is what I did. Stupidly, I would guess. A lot of people don’t bother, and their amps don’t hum.

It turned out I had gotten too close to the work again. I had made an obvious mistake. There are jumpers and resistors across the preamp tubes on this amp, and if you use heater loops, you can put the jumpers and resistors right down on the socket. This is what I did. Unfortunately, the heater wires were there. So I had a resistor lying ON a heater wire, and two jumpers running very close to other heater wires.

So I fixed that.

Strangely, it improved the amp in ways beyond the hum. Now it’s clear. The high-frequency noise is gone. It’s beautiful. Like a little Bassman, with less low-end grunt.

With the PPIMV, you can get all sorts of singing distortion. If you were quick enough, you would be able to play this thing without a distortion pedal. You can crank the volume and turn down the PPIMV to get loads of distortion with no volume increase.

It’s a very bluesy-sounding amp. Exactly what I wanted. It’s hard to stop playing it. It impressed me so much, I went back and stuck a PPIMV in the Bassman.

I’m not going to need the new PT, so I may use it to make a four-EL84 version of this amp.

Here’s the latest photo. I might actually put a cabinet on it. I got the normal and bright volume labels mixed up.

I may let my new church use this one. They have a cruddy old solid state Crate. I was talking to one of my friends–the new head deacon–and he said they might actually want to use me as a guitarist. That would be phenomenal. Lead is out of the question right now, but I might be able to do rhythm in a month or so.

I love the new amp so much, I’ve been working up arrangements and practicing more. It’s great for any tune that brings out the sound of the amp. I worked on “Secret Agent Man” today. Lots of grit and reverb. It may be corny, but I like it.

We’ll see where the amp business goes from here. I can’t wait to get started on the next one.

Plus Negative Feedback

The new amp is done, except for some soldering and the installation of the cord and fuse.

I think it came out very well, given that I started with a piece of aluminum that had been banged around in a metal dealer’s establishmen. Here’s a photo.

If you’re an amp guy, you will see a potential problem there. When you work on projects like this, it’s easy to get too close to the work and forget what you’re doing. I accidentally mounted one of the output transformers in such a way that the laminates are coplanar with the power transformer laminates. Supposedly, this can cause a coupling effect, so the 60 Hz buzz from the AC goes out through the power tubes.

I don’t know which way the bobbins inside these things are oriented. The wire coils inside go around bobbins, and the magnetic fields generated by the transformers are parallel to the axes of the bobbins, as they exit the metal. I think. That’s what my physics background suggests. I believe the fields would be strongest at the ends of the power transformer bobbins, so if it’s pointing at the OT, it could be bad. But maybe it’s pointing the other way, which would be okay. Maybe.

I have found out about a way to test for hum. Before you put the amp together, you stick the transformers in place, and you connect the OT to a speaker or a set of headphones. You connect the PT to an AC source, and you listen to see if it makes the headphones hum. If so, you have to move the OT around until it stops. I guess I’ll do that tomorrow.

I feel like writing some more about my new church. I have been a little reluctant to do that, because it has been suggested to me that certain people at my old church are under the impression that positive remarks about New Dawn are “Trinity-bashing.” I hope that’s not true, but if it is, they’re going to have to hitch up their diapers and take it. There is only so much I can do to avoid offending them, short of wearing a muzzle.

Last week I suggested a friend of mine visit the new place. I’ve already covered some of this in posts I took down. He didn’t fit in at the old church, and he was part of the little circle of people who were excited about prayer in tongues. The Holy Spirit worked a shocking change in him after he started praying in tongues regularly, and he started getting all sorts of revelation. A number of people noticed it. Anyway, he was in a slump, and I thought the new place would suit him.

When I got to church on Sunday, he had already been there for 50 minutes. He said he already knew the pastor. He also had relatives all over the church. His nephew was an usher. He had been there before. I didn’t know any of this. I just thought he would do better there.

The pastor preached on John 15 and Matthew 7. In John 15, Jesus said he was the vine, and that branches that didn’t abide in him would be cast into the fire, and in Matthew 7, he said false prophets would come and take advantage of the flock.

Let’s see if I can remember the important points.

The pastor said the bit about casting people into the fire was not about us. It was about the false prophets. He said God “pruned” us, as a gardener would prune useful branches to improve the yield, but that he would not discard us. That makes sense to me. We are taught that it’s pretty hard to lose salvation, but we also know that if we pray in the Spirit, God will change us from inside and help us bear fruit.

False prophets, on the other hand, are not part of the vine, so they may be cast aside. Makes you wonder about Steve Munsey’s status, since he is clearly making up doctrine that makes him money, serving his own belly instead of the Lord. I assume he’s a Christian, but you never know.

He also taught about Luke 16, in which Jesus told us that if we were not faithful with other people’s things, God would not give us our own things. He said he had worked in other people’s ministries, and that he had been faithful, and that now he had his own ministry.

Naturally, I wondered if he was going to say something indicating that my friends and I had blown it by not sticking with our old church, but on the contrary, he said that if you can’t be fruitful under one man’s ministry, it’s time to pack up and move to another.

My friend Alonzo had moved to New Dawn before I had. He and his wife were sitting across the room when the pastor said the bit about packing up. I looked toward them, and she was looking at me and my other friend. We were all thinking the same thing.

Later in the service, the leaders were getting into prayer and prophecy. There was no tightly scripted service at this point. If you’re Spirit-filled, you know how a minute-by-minute schedule can prevent the Holy Spirit from working. They were calling people up, and somebody called Alonzo and his wife.

For a long time, they have wanted to have a ministry helping people with marriage. They want to write a book on God’s advice for couples. When they met me and learned that I was a writer, they asked for my help. At the old church, they had tried to work in the new ministry for couples, but their ideas had been shot down. I’m not saying they were right or wrong, but they were shot down.

While they were at the front of the room, the prophecy started. They were told they were going to have a ministry for married people. They were told that God had not given up on them. The message seemed to be, “You may have thought you were going to be be ignored forever, but I’m going to bring you through this.”

That was amazing. They’ve had some really tough times, and they’ve had to deal with rejection and discouragement, so they needed to hear that God was still with them. And the pastor had no way of knowing they wanted to run a couples’ ministry. He hadn’t seen them in two weeks. They weren’t planning to join the church. He barely knew them.

There is one other person I’ve been trying to bring to New Dawn. He’s a musician. He’s looking for a place where the Holy Spirit is free to act. While I was standing around after the service, the music director came over and asked if any of us were musicians. They’re recruiting! So now I had some ammunition. God saw the need, and he put this tool in my hand.

Since Sunday, I’ve been Facebooking, as usual. The Holy Spirit keeps doing great things in my life, and I write about it. I write about the power of tongues. Guess what? The pastor has been “liking” my statuses. He believes the same things I do! I had no idea. It’s so strange to have my doctrine ENDORSED by a pastor. It’s like the first time I watched Fox News. I thought something was wrong, because they weren’t slanting the news way to the left. I thought it was a momentary aberration, but eventually I realized they were different.

My new pastor really believes in the Holy Spirit. When he posts on Facebook or writes on his blog, he says things I agree with. I don’t have to hide and scurry around by the baseboards. I can say what I know, without worrying about what people will think.

I know he thinks like I do, because when he thinks he’s not getting a good response from the crowd, he’ll call them “this Methodist church” or “this Baptist church.” He’s kidding, but I know what he means. He means we shouldn’t be like backward churches that teach salvation but stop short of the Holy Spirit message.

I sincerely believe that while my old church is nominally Assemblies of God, which means “kooky charismatics,” in practice and belief, it’s closer to the Baptists or Presbyterians. If you say God healed you miraculously or did some other supernatural work in your life, people in authority don’t seem to buy it. They preach that God will work miracles in order to give you a huge return on your tithes, which isn’t true, but other than that, they don’t seem to think he’ll do much for people. They teach self-reliance. Very strange.

I got an interesting revelation about the Holy Spirit. Jesus told us that you can be forgiven for speaking against the Father or the Son, but that those who spoke against the Holy Spirit would not be forgiven. Here’s what I believe God told me.

God told ancient people about the Father, and some did okay with that, and others fell away. So he sent Jesus. Some went forward with Jesus, and others fell away. Jesus asked the Father to forgive those who put him to death, because they did not know what they were doing. When Jesus left, he sent the Holy Spirit. This is all God has left. There is no fourth manifestation. Every Spirit-baptized charismatic knows about the Holy Spirit. When the churches persecute and exclude and slander him, as they do, daily, no one can say, “They know not what they do.” If they reject him and lie about him and suppress him, while speaking in his name and fleecing the sheep, they will have no excuse, so they will be judged.

Churches are teaching that tongues are of the devil, or that they are just “evidence” of the Spirit’s presence. They deny Paul, who made it clear that prayer in tongues builds us up, and who linked the Armor of God to prayer in tongues. They are depriving people of the only means of receiving improved character (the fruit of the Spirit) and supernatural weapons (the gifts of the Spirit). As a result, people remain in what the Bible calls “iniquity” and “lawlessness.” The Holy Spirit isn’t powerful in them, so they don’t receive his guidance, so the law is not written on their hearts. They don’t have God’s GPS.

Some Christians teach that you get the whole Holy Ghost package as soon as you accept salvation. That’s just plain stupid. Martin Luther believed, yet he hated Jews. Is that the fruit of the Spirit? Jimmy Swaggart is a charismatic, so he has received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which puts him one step beyond mere salvation. Does he strike you as a person whose nature is like that of God? Is he mature? Is he even honest? Of course not. Kenneth Copeland is a charismatic, and he’s downright mean. So where are the fruit and gifts of the Spirit, which these people and many other carnal Christians supposedly received in full measure?

Don’t even try to tell me they’re supposed to TRY. If it comes from human effort, it’s not the Holy Spirit. Anyone can try. The fruit and gifts of the Holy Spirit have to be more than that.

Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God was within us, and that it grew gradually, like a mustard tree. He also called tongues “living water.” What do trees need in order to grow? Use your head.

I think the big lesson here is that no matter how easy God makes it, we will find a way to rebel. Sadly, the most influential rebels run the churches of this world. That may be about to change. God is patient, but we may be about to see a little judgment.

Relief is in Sight

As usual, too much is going on to write about.

First of all, I finished the JTM45 clone I was building for my friend Joe. The JTM45 is a Marshall amp which is a pretty faithful copy of the Fender 5F6A Bassman. The version my friend chose uses KT66 tubes, which are fundamentally similar to the Bassman’s 6L6s.

We had a number of problems. He bought a Mojo Tone chassis, and it didn’t fit the Classictone transformer he chose. I’ve been getting help from amp builders, and they have convinced me that Mojo is not a good place to get chassis. The cutouts and round holes are not well thought-out, so you can end up with things that don’t fit.

To make the power transformer work, I had to enlarge and move the existing opening, and I had to machine (from scratch) an aluminum spacer to connect the transformer to the chassis. This was a lot of aggravation, but the result was beautiful. Looking at the amp, you would never know the transformer didn’t fit. I’ll repost a couple of photos.

I also had a problem with one of the power supply capacitors. The JTM45 is a box of components that sits in a wooden cabinet with a flat bottom. The box is supposed to rest directly on the wood. But Mojo predrills holes that situate the capacitor below the box. It projects down out of the box about half an inch. This is just crazy. There is no way on earth to make it fit the cabinet (which Mojo makes). Last week I got the amp running, and Joe brought me the cabinet. I had never seen a JTM45 cabinet before. I just assumed there was a way to make it fit. But incredibly, there was not.

We looked at the chassis for a while. I loosened the screws holding the cap, and I swung it up out of the way. It fit perfectly. Here is the mystery: why didn’t Mojo drill screw holes that put it in this position? I thought there had to be a reason, but I couldn’t see it.

I got out a punch, and I made two dimples on the inside of the box. Then I used my Jobmax right-angle drill, some WD40, and a nice cobalt drill bit to make two new screw holes. We screwed the cap in place, and everything was fine. What a relief. If it hadn’t worked, we would have had to use different capacitors, or I would have had to undo a bunch of wiring and move the cap across the box.

We put the amp together, and Joe fired it up. The sound is incredible. Maybe as good as the Bassman. It’s clear. It’s pretty quiet. It’s sweet.

We had some noise problems at first, and that scared me, but it turned out the JJ 12AX7 in V1 was the issue. Evidently these tubes are inherently noisy. Joe put a Tube Amp Doctor 12AX7-SC in there, and the noise dropped, and the amp also sounded better. It had a sweeter, creamier tone, somewhat like a 12AY7. Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of photos I took that day.

The other guy in the photos is Zach. He’s a blues guitarist. He wants to build a Trainwreck clone.

I’m not totally sure what my next project will be. I want to build a Bassman-based amp with 4 6BM8 output tubes. A guy who calls himself “Da Geezer” designed a 6BM8 amp called the Little Wing, and it’s based on the Bassman, but it lacks the second channel and added inputs. It’s limited to 7 watts because it only has two output tubes. He says I can put the Bassman front end back and add extra tubes so I can have more juice when I want it.

I’m also looking at a wrecked Fender “The Twin” red-knob amp. This is a 100-watt amp with a switch that cuts the power to 25 watts. They were not popular, but they’re very good amps. I found one on Craigslist for $200. It needs about $320 in parts to get it working. I’m considering offering $50. I don’t think anyone else will buy it. It’s too messed up.

It’s nice to be able to rebuild and redesign basket-case amps. It really doesn’t matter what I buy, because I can turn anything into a good amp.

I’m also considering moving to a new church. One of my buddies–the head Armorbearer at my church–had some issues he had to address. His wife is a very nice lady, but she felt my church was too cliquish. She couldn’t really connect, even though her husband had a position of prominence. This is not a big shock. Our church tends to promote young, good-looking, hip people, as well as people who make money or have connections. There is a big concern with what’s cool and trendy. And it also helps if you can do something the church really needs. I don’t think she fit in the desired categories. She’s not an MTV type. So she may well have been excluded.

She found another church, and she started attending, even though her husband was still volunteering at Trinity. I started hearing good things about it. Lots of prayer during services. Focus on the Holy Spirit. No yammering about self-help and money. I envied my friends, but I thought the church was near their home, up in Coral Springs. I was not going to drive that far. Also, even though I’ve become completely disconnected from the teaching at my church, I have strong attachments to the people, and while I wasn’t receiving much from the church, I felt fulfilled with regard to giving and interacting with others.

Now my buddy is done with Trinity. He’s cutting ties and moving. And this weekend, he told me the church is in North Miami. I was shocked. How could I have been unaware of this? It’s a shorter drive than the one I make now. When I heard that, I felt like a weight slid off my back and a door opened before me. Maybe God had been preparing this place for me during the months when I was praying for a better church.

I had assumed that God wanted me to stay at Trinity for at least a few more months, and I was content with that. I love the people. It’s not like I’m miserable there. But it’s wonderful to know I may be able to get out sooner. I’m visiting the other church this weekend. I have very high hopes.

Ending a relationship is funny. Until you make the decision to quit, you may not realize how much you’ve wanted out. I still remember dumping a maladjusted girlfriend when I was in law school. Before the breakup, she didn’t seem all that terrible, but after I pulled the plug, I realized what a mess she was, and how annoying her nasty side could be. I had stifled those thoughts when we were together, in order to make it work. I guess the same thing happens when you leave a church. You realize it’s okay to feel relieved, so the stress just melts out of you without warning. Suddenly you feel like you’re standing straighter.

I can tell you what I look forward to.

It will be nice not to have to hear Steve Munsey’s self-serving money-based doctrine. There are no authentic lists of “seven blessings” associated with giant cash offerings at Passover, Pentecost, and Yom Kippur. That’s something he made up, and we hear about it all the time. Jews never had to give big cash offerings on the feast days, and they were never promised “seven blessings” in return. If your church is in debt, the answer isn’t manipulation, legalism, Judaizing, and gimmicks. The answer is to please God and obtain his help. My church can’t get prosperity the way we’re supposed to, so we’re trying to do it the Munsey way. And it doesn’t work. We still have debt.

It will be nice to be able to talk. Kids run our sound and media department, and a young, headstrong pastor is in charge of them. That means we hear obnoxious disco music even between services. It drives people crazy. Many, many people complain about it. People come to church and leave on the first visit because of it. It’s probably killing our growth. The new place has loud music, but they shut it down after worship, the way you’re supposed to.

I look forward to having my freedom back. If I were doing what was demanded of me, I would be serving at two services on Sunday, attending a Saturday service, attending a volunteer “DNA” meeting once a month, attending a 6 a.m. Armorbearer training session once a month, serving several days in a row at our yearly Rendezvous conference (for which I would be expected to buy a ticket), serving extra days when asked (with short notice or no notice), and cooking on demand. That’s too much. We’re told we have to tithe our time. Well, I pray two to four hours a day. That’s 14 hours right there, minimum. I guarantee I spend at least 16.8 hours a week with God. So anything I give my church is above the tithe. And prayer is much more important than anything I do at church.

I’m hoping I will never have to hear the word “VIP” again. It’s disturbing that I ever heard it in church. We reserve seats for holy people like Luther Campbell and Tim Hardaway (a basketball player). We chauffeur visiting speakers around, and it’s understood that we’re not supposed to talk to them too much, because…they’re VIPs. Which makes you wonder what we are. I call us “VUPs.” Figure it out.

We have actually had secure areas for VIPs, with special food other people can’t have. Aren’t VIP areas for strip clubs? Am I crazy? Why would you have one in a church? I can understand having a place for people to put their feet up and collect their thoughts. But that’s not the same thing. We have never had a lounge for volunteers, even when we worked 15-hour days.

I hope I’ll actually be able to talk to a pastor once in a while. And I don’t mean talking about volunteer work. I’d like to KNOW these people. Right now, I don’t talk to any of our pastors. They’re busy. Half the time, they’re on planes or staying in other cities. And they have no interest in talking to me. They say hi and so on, but when I go home at the end of a service, I know for a fact that I won’t have any communication with a pastor for seven days.

I would like to know that I won’t be badgered for money. Christians talk a lot about tithing. Here’s a terrible secret: God doesn’t require us to tithe. Preachers hate hearing that, but it’s true. Tithing comes from the Jewish law, which does not apply to us. It’s a good IDEA to tithe. But really, you’re supposed to develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit, and you should give (or withhold) as he directs. I am really tired of being goaded. Every Sunday, we put a pastor on the stage to give a pitch, and they tell us God will give is a big ROI. I realize we have a lot of cheap people who need to learn to give, but if we introduced them to the Holy Spirit and helped them grow, the giving would come naturally. We wouldn’t have to jawbone them like reluctant car buyers.

I want to hear about the Holy Spirit, and I want to experience his presence in church, as I do at home. I’m tired of backward self-improvement nonsense masquerading as doctrine. I can’t believe we let Brian Klemmer come to our church and teach the same stuff they used to teach at EST seminars. Find that in the Bible for me. I’ll give you a hundred years to look it up.

I guess this is a horrible thing to say. Brian Klemmer came to our church (selling expensive secular self-help seminars), and he told us he had a 500-year plan for his life. As a Christian, he had plans for what he would be doing hundreds of years into the future. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but can anyone seriously believe that right now, he’s working on that plan? He died from a torn carotid artery a while back. Is he really in heaven, carrying out a plan his tiny human brain made, in a place he could not understand when the plan was made? Is anyone stupid enough to believe that? But we sat there and lapped it up.

I know there are no perfect churches. But not all churches are sick. There are ministries you can support and be part of without feeling like a sucker.

The main thing that bugs me about my church is that I can’t recommend it to people. New people come in, and I’m glad they’re trying to get to know God, but I know they’re headed for some serious disappointments if they stay. I have friends who get discouraged. I can’t tell them to stick it out. Not in good conscience.

I’ve been praying for the church to change, and my faith has been telling me it will, but I still think I’m leaving. I think a bunch of us will leave. Two Armorbearer families are gone. I’m on the way. If it works for me, I’m going to go after my friends who are discouraged. Maybe the heart of the church will leave, and that will provide a much needed wake-up call that leads to restructuring under new leaders.

Man, I look forward to dropping the loads I’ve been carrying. I want to be in a church where I can support what they’re doing. I don’t want to bite my tongue all the time. I don’t want to have to tell my friends what they’re hearing is wrong, or that they’re right to feel used or mistreated.

I told the Armorbearers I would not be in church next week. I have learned not to ask permission. I informed them I would not be there, and I said it would be nice if someone filled in. One of the young guys volunteered. I’m covered. At our church, there’s a lot of pressure to show up and work, as if it were a job, so we really feel like we have to get approval to take time off. I managed to get over that.

I may not be able to wait for Sunday. There’s a Tuesday night service. While the kids at my church are dancing to secular music and trying to hook up, I may be at a normal church service.

Here it is, the week after Passover, and I may be on my way from a place of profitless servitude to a place where I can work for God. How appropriate.

A Mighty Fortress is My Garage

The Garage of Blues has undergone yet another metamorphosis.

I could not deal with my old Clausing lathe, so I started shopping for a new lathe that actually worked. I got tired of shopping, and I prayed for God to send me a good lathe at a good price. The next day, I got a sudden email message advising me that a reputable seller had knocked thousands off the price of a machine, and that it had been equipped with some stuff I like, and that stuff I did not want had been removed.

SOLD.

I took some photos while the riggers were moving it in. They gouged it slightly, but having seen what BAD riggers do, I was still satisfied. Here it is.

That thing is a 16 by 40. It can swing a part almost 17″ wide. It’s not packed with features, but the quality is very good, and the construction is heavy. It only has 12 speeds, but the range is nice: 20-2000 RPM. The motor is 7.5 horsepower, which is insane. The threading options are a little limited, but change gears can be had. The ways are a foot wide, the castings are Meehanite. It came with a neat light and a DRO. No complaints here.

Og told me to get a 12 x 36, and he was probably right. He was right when he told me to get a Grizzly instead of the Clausing. But come on. This baby has a 2″ bore. I can part stuff that would otherwise require a saw. You know I needed that.

I actually wanted a 14 x 40 with variable speed, but the seller I had in mind would not give me a quote. He kept saying he’d get around to it. He said he sent it, but it must have gotten lost in cyberspace. After two months, I gave up on him. I think the smaller lathe would have been fine, and it would have had a big bore on it, but I can’t hold people at gunpoint and force them to do business with me.

I could not get him to sell me the smaller lathe I wanted, and once I had decided on the big lathe, people told me not to use a VFD, which is the cheapest way to run a big lathe on single-phase power, without derating and other potential issues. They told me I needed a digital phase converter, which is pretty ridiculous. They cost a lot. I was determined to get a VFD, but over time, I decided to bite the bullet and do it right. So now I have the phase converter on my wall. Right now it’s only connected to the lathe, but if I feel like it, I can add the mill to it and bypass the existing VFD, which does absolutely nothing except provide three-phase power. I can also put up sockets and run whatever three-phase stuff I get later. This is advantageous, because a lot of great three-phase equipment goes on the market for low prices, and it’s generally better than single-phase machinery.

I went with Gator chucks. Ordinarily, the lathe would have come with no-name Asian chucks, but they were not included, so I got to pick my own. Gators are made in mainland China, but the company has a very good reputation. I got an 8″ adjustable 3-jaw chuck, which is practically my fiancee now, and I also got a 10″ 4-jaw which I haven’t even tried, because the 3-jaw is so great. I can’t measure the runout on the 3-jaw, and so far, that has held true on diameters of 1″ and 1.5″, so it appears to work well, at least within that range.

I was going to get cheapo Chinese carbide holders, but I got yelled at when I mentioned this to actual machinists, so I found a great deal on two Kennametal 3/4″ holders, and the seller threw in 10 inserts. Very nice. Super rigid.

The lathe isn’t leveled yet. I was going to use the famous “Rollie’s Dad” method, but research led me to conclude that it wasn’t really that great, so I reluctantly ordered a good level. I went with Tools4cheap. I’m hoping the level lives up to the hype.

The lathe is a DREAM to run. It scared the crap out of me when I first got it going. I accidentally started the giant chuck spinning at 2000 instead of 500. But it does what it’s supposed to do. The repeatability on the 3-jaw chuck is a wonder to behold. The worklight is bright and very easy to position. The controls work MUCH more smoothly than the ones on the Clausing. It just does what it’s supposed to do. I don’t fight all day to make the tool work. It’s just like my gorgeous milling machine.

I finished up my 304 stainless garlic press. It works great. You stuff it with garlic and whack it with a hammer, and pureed garlic poomps into a little chamber. Then you pump the piston again, and the garlic pops out on your cutting board. This is the first decent garlic press I have ever seen. And I’m improving it. I’m making a big base that includes the pulverizing holes and the chamber for the crushed garlic, and it’s going to thread onto the main housing. It will come off easily to go in the dishwasher. I love it. It’s so cool I can’t stand it.

After this I may make a nutcracker. I don’t need one. I just hate nutcrackers. They’re wimpy. They slip and shoot nuts across the room. They break. I’m going to make one that will open a golf ball, if that’s what turns you on.

Today I used the lathe to bore out a 1 1/2″-wide piece of stainless, for the garlic chamber. I saved my old 1/2″ Albrecht chuck from the Clausing, and I got an adaptor sleeve to make it fit the new tailstock. I drilled the work with three bits, creeping up to 1/2″, and then I went to a boring bar that would fit in the hole. Then I put it on the mill and flattened the bottom of the bore. Going back to the lathe, I turned on the DRO, put in a bigger bar, and set the bottom of the bore as zero. After that, it was a simple matter to open the bore up until the walls were about 3/16″ thick. The bar screamed like hell–nothing I do seems to change that–but the finish is really nice, so I guess it’s okay.

I have to figure out what to use for the internal threading on the end that joins the press body, but other than that, this will be a cakewalk. God willing.

I wonder if cooks would pay for stuff like this. It would be pointless to make these things for less than thirty bucks. But they would last forever and work like nothing else on the market.

I love the garage more every day. I have a guitar amp out there, which I’m halfway done building. I have my tools set up in a nice ergonomic way. I have peace and quiet. I have air conditioning and comfy chairs. I have hundreds of albums on the MP3 player. And I have the ultimate place to pray. I generally do at least an hour and a half out there in the evening.

I have been asking God to tell me what my job is. Crazy as it sounds, I think he answered. I think prayer is my job. Some people go to Calcutta. I go to the garage. It suits me to a tee. Prayer is the most powerful thing anyone can do, even if no one appreciates it. And if you’re in God’s presence every day, for long periods, good stuff is going to happen to you, regardless of whom you pray for. It’s a little like being God’s treasurer. You’re distributing his supernatural wealth. Some of it is going to stick to you.

I believe God has given me a fortune, and the substance of that fortune is faith, which is much more valuable than money. If God gives you a fortune, you have to share it. So, unless I’m wrong about what he wants me to do, this is going to be my primary function for a while. Pray for others. Pray for the country. And of course, pray for yours truly. Come on, man. I need a little piece of the action. You can’t muzzle the ox that treads out the corn.

Life has changed a lot. Things work better. Things that used to cause me stress are turning into blessings. Even the collection calls from student loan servicers and collection agencies are kind of pleasant now. I executed a release, so they can never get another dime out of me, but they still call from time to time and ask–very courteously–if I know where they can find the borrower. Now I feel I can relate to them, instead of seeing them as relentless sources of aggravation.

If you’re a cosigner for someone who won’t pay, for God’s sake, ask about executing a release. Not a settlement. A “release.” Trust me; this advice is gold. I got my freedom. Get yours. They will negotiate. You may lose some money, but thereafter, you will sleep well while the person who took advantage of you has to worry about things like wage garnishing, lawsuits, and debts bankruptcy doesn’t affect.

I don’t think I’m going to be here too long. My faith tells me I will find a better place to live. I don’t want to budge until I get a clear indication. I truly look forward to kissing Miami goodbye forever. My family endured so much sorrow here. I don’t need to look around me and be reminded. My life is in the future, so I don’t want to be wrapped up in the past. I think God has given me the Garage of Blues so I can have a little comfort while I wait.

I think my dad is coming around. He sees how I am blessed. That has to have an impact. My sister…another story. Some people are extremely hard for God to teach, so they go through shocking trials. I’m not worried. I keep asking God to do specific things to bring her around, and he keeps doing those things. Whatever happens, she will have the best shot prayer can provide.

I have to go work on the amp. I can’t wait to hear it!

MORE

People are asking about the garlic press. I have really bad photos. The end result is what matters, so here are two photos of the garlic on its way out. This should give you an idea of what it does to the garlic. The press is one inch in diameter, to provide scale.

The garlic may look solid, but that’s because it was mashed into a cylindrical space. It has passed through several 1/8″ holes.

Get With the Program

I haven’t written in a long time. Sorry. Back in the dim past, I thought this blog might be my ticket to a writing career, and apart from that, I just enjoyed the work. I got to know a lot of interesting people. I got myself on national TV. I felt that I had a voice. That was swell, but I no longer feel drawn to sit here every day.

I may be having too much fun in real life to allow me to devote myself to blogging. I’m getting to do so many things I’ve always wanted to do; I can’t tell you how wonderful it is.

Things I used to fail at suddenly work. Doors are opening. Problems are fading. My hope keeps increasing.

I keep seeing the answers to my prayers, as they materialize. It’s very odd, but I’ve learned that I have to pay attention, because very often, God will give me exactly what I asked for, but because I couldn’t anticipate the form it would take, I won’t recognize it immediately. You have to recognize these things and thank God and glorify him, if you want them to keep coming.

I had a dream–not the kind you have when you sleep, but a hope–that I would some day have a big garage-like room where I could put my tools and my musical instruments, and I wanted it to have seating space. I wanted it to be a place where I could do the things that I do. Creating things. Fixing things. Playing music. Socializing with friends. One day not long ago, I looked around my garage, and I realized God had already given me a small version of it.

The garage used to be out of control, and there were things I could not get to work right. The milling machine had some problems I couldn’t figure out. I couldn’t find a decent air dryer for the compressor. The lathe lacked tooling and threading options. I enjoyed the garage, but it didn’t work as it should have. I prayed for God to help me organize it and to help me get the tools working as they should.

Suddenly, the clutter is disappearing. There is space to work. I have an air conditioner. The air dryer is installed. Both compressors work, and I have a hose reel on each. The table saw and router are ready to go at a moment’s notice. The drill press and band saw are on wheeled bases so I can use them whenever I want. The workbench is positioned where it should be, so several people can work there at once. The mill is fixed. I’m working on choosing a better lathe. The scrap pile, which was like a beast I could not tame, is about to be subdued. I couldn’t get this stuff going on my own, but now it’s happening.

I’m also having barbecues. My friends and I have great food and good times, and we spend time in prayer and talk about God. It unifies us and helps us.

I think I have the guitar figured out. I’m using fingerpicks now, like Freddie King, and I’m even playing the banjo to get my picking skills back.

The guitar I started last year is finally nearing completion. Look at this.

It’s going to be really beautiful, not to mention unique. I couldn’t get it done on my own. All it lacks now is shellac, nitro, and hardware. I already have the HVLP guns to finish it. It’s moving right along.

I don’t believe in the TBN prosperity gospel AS PREACHED. I do not believe we’re all supposed to be rich, or that God gives us money in exchange for paying off Kenneth Copeland. I don’t believe the self-help gospel, either. There is a big difference between a man of faith and a man of positive thinking. But I know–I KNOW–that God will give you good things if you get into his will. He DOES heal. He DOES open doors. He DOES give you the desires of your heart. Not because you wrote checks to Benny Hinn or Steve Munsey, but because you prayed in the Spirit, helped the needy, fasted, stood on the word, and put God first in your life.

This life is not supposed to be miserable. Your body is supposed to be an embassy; a piece of heaven itself. Heaven’s laws, not earth’s laws, are supposed to rule your life. You’re going to have a certain number of problems, because the earth is a battlefield, and you’re a combatant. You can’t live here without being affected. But you are supposed to live in victory. That, I’m sure of.

For me, all this has flowed from praying in tongues. It put a foundation under my life, and everything else grew from it. It may not conform to your doctrine. I’m not talking about doctrine, though. I’m talking about what my God has done for me. There is a ton of support for it in the Bible, but you pretty well have to be full of the Spirit to see it, and if you choose, it’s very easy to deny it. At the moment, I don’t feel like writing a term paper to support my observations, but if you try what I’ve done, you will see whether or not I’m right.

God told me about this over 20 years ago, and I still walked away. I paid the price. I should have been married and doing something fulfilling by now. Instead I wandered in blindness. I got involved with a completely inappropriate and hopeless woman who would have ruined my life (she gave it a good try), had God permitted the relationship to continue. I fiddled with career moves that were doomed for lack of blessing. But now I am fortunate enough–sufficiently blessed–to see redemption in the time I have left. There is still quite a bit of toothpaste in the tube, and God is making the most of it for me.

I won’t complain. I caused my own problems. And things are going extremely well now. I feel like a young man. I have energy. I don’t have pains. I have no prescriptions. I don’t wear glasses or sweat about what I eat. I can lift the things I need to lift. I don’t get back aches or sore feet.

I don’t sit around wondering if this is all there is or why I should go on. Every morning is Christmas morning. Life is a succession of undeserved gifts.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m gloating. I’m not. I’m just amazed at God’s power and generosity.

God is going to take me out of this place. My faith tells me I’m headed north, to a place with a Garage of Blues bigger than this one. It will be dedicated to him, as my current garage is, as will the rest of the property. The whole place will be a sanctuary. A place of peace and rest. Wait and see.

This weekend I’ll be cooking again. I’m smoking a Boston butt, and I’ll be making fries fried twice in beef fat. I’ll also make cole slaw and a mango cheesecake. The cheesecake is beyond description. I use my own mangoes, which I freeze. You can’t get mangoes like this in a store.

Friends will come by, and we’ll start the day with the blues and good conversation. Later on, we’ll have Christian music and prayer, and we’ll let the Holy Spirit lead. It should be great. It’s really God’s party, so I am counting on him to make it work.

I better get up and do something worthwhile. I just felt like providing an update. If you like what you see, try it yourself. I will help if I can.

Festival Seating

Let’s see if I can recap all the stuff that has gone on since my last post.

I’m ramping up the machining. I quit for a long time. My milling machine was acting up, and I was irritated because the lathe I blew a pile of cash on turned out to be incapable of cutting metric threads. Now I’m back. I’ve been writing about this.

I’m trying to choose a new lathe. The old Clausing I bought doesn’t cut the mustard. No metric threads, overpriced and rare tooling…I’m done.

I’ve been looking at all sorts of stuff. The most appealing new machine is the Grizzly G0509G gunsmith lathe. It’s a 16 x 40 with a 2″ bore, so it would be a long time before I came up with a project that wouldn’t fit on it. It has higher tolerances than other Chinese Grizzlys. It has NSK bearings, not the La Choy or Joyce Chen or whatever brand that goes in most Grizzlys.It cuts a million different threads. It has a short headstock suitable for gunsmithing. Everyone loves it. It’s a good safe bet.

Still, I am considering older machines, provided they’re in really good shape.

This week I found a Mori Seiki on Craigslist for $3800. I was stunned. It’s not far away. I emailed the owner the same day the ad appeared, and naturally, I haven’t heard a peep. Very annoying. I assume some dealer pounced on it as he was typing up the ad. I’ll probably see it listed at AM Metalmaq in Hialeah, for $15,000. They always have astronomical prices.

The Mori Seiki is 17″ by something. I don’t know what. It’s an MS-1250G. If it’s in good shape, it will last longer than I will. The headstock is long, so it’s not ideal for gunsmithing. But it’s real quality, and if the bed isn’t too long, it will fit in the garage.

Same guy is selling a Webb lathe and a Webb mill. He has good taste.

I finally got an air dryer for the compressor. I wanted one that would do at least 20 CFM, and I was scared of the Chinese ones on Ebay. Some guy listed an Arrow Pneumatic 20 CFM dryer on Ebay, NIB, for $410. That’s an acceptable price as-is. New, a dryer with this capacity costs well over a thousand dollars. Even an Eaton would be a four-figure buy.

The seller insisted on using freight, which is expensive. I couldn’t get him to respond to messages about using UPS instead. This is a very small machine; freight is overkill. He wanted $155 to ship it. I got disgusted and made a lowball offer, subtracting the difference between freight and UPS. Surprisingly, he jumped on it, and when the freight bill came, it was $120. I would have been happy to pay the asking price. So because he didn’t feel like answering my messages, he ate a big loss and gave it to some freight company.

This will allow me to use the compressor the way it should be used. I don’t like to use the plasma cutter because of the water problem. It also discourages me from painting and blasting. I had checked into cheap inline dryers, but they seemed like the chintzy, problem-filled approach, so I let the whole business drop. I have seen okay deals on used refrigerated units, but most of them are huge, and they run on 220, and I just didn’t want to get involved in any more giant, worn-out machinery.

Hopefully, next week, I’ll be firing the new one up.

I am working on a 304 stainless garlic press on the lathe. This metal is supposed to be a pain to machine, but it’s working almost as easily as aluminum. Go figure. The press is basically a piston with holes to let the garlic out. As far as I know, it is literally impossible to buy a decent garlic press made in a factory. The steel ones are wimpy. The pot metal ones snap. The aluminum ones stain the food. I’ve had enough.

I was working on the bore the other day when the lathe went nuts. It started making horrible noises, and I shut it down. The motor belt had come apart.

When I looked it over, I found that I had mounted the motor so that the motor pulley and the speed-change pulley between the motor and spindle pulley were not in the same plane. They were way off. I have no idea how I managed to do something this stupid. When I was installing the new motor, I must have taken a break and forgotten that it needed to be shifted. The setscrew in the pulley had come loose, possibly from vibration caused by the belt problem, and it had slid halfway off the motor shaft.

I had to buy a new belt, pound the pulley back into place, set the screw, and install the belt. To install the belt, I had to take the speed-change pulley off its bearings so I could slip the belt over it. What a nightmare. I was covered in grease. I shifted the motor and got everything put back together. Then someone told me I could have bought a linked belt which came apart and could be installed without removing anything.

Arrggh.

Anyway, the lathe runs more smoothly now, and I feel like an idiot.

I’m working on a follow rest. I needed to make an angled cut on the aluminum block it’s made from, and I realized the only way to do it was to use my rotary table. Then I discovered a new problem. The clamping set for my mill doesn’t fit the rotab. It’s too big. And I really don’t like lifting the 120-pound rotab from the floor to the mill for little jobs. I decided to add a third rotab to my collection. I wanted a 6″ job, but for reasons known only to Enco, the 8″ ones are cheaper, so I got myself one, and it’s ready to be put to work.

I also got lathe dogs, radius gages (“gauges”?) and telescoping gages/gauges/whatever. Little stuff like this can really slow you down when you don’t have it.

The garage is turning out to be a gift from God. I used to call it the Disco Garage because it had a TV and Stereo. Now that I’ve opened it up and organized it to some degree, adding an old MP3 player with hundreds of CDs, I’ve rechristened it the Garage of Blues.

I ordered two hideous camo backpack chairs from Amazon. They discounted them heavily because no one would buy them. When they arrived, I found that the seats were about ten inches off the ground. I couldn’t send them back, because the shipping cost more than the chairs. I thought it was a terrible buy, but I put them in the garage, and now I love them. I turn down the lights, open a Coke, put on Freddie King, and drift off into a state of total bliss. I really can’t describe the peace I feel out there. There is something about the smell of concrete and tools and oil that does things to a man. It’s better than Valium. I assume. I don’t know much about Valium.

I stuck my creaky old laptop out there, and I have it on wireless. Now I can listen to the blues, machine off and on, and post crap to Facebook without leaving the garage. It’s paradise.

Here’s a photo. I guess it can’t capture the ambience, but seriously, I sit out there thanking God over and over.

Speaking of God, I saw Perry Stone on TBN this week. I can’t believe they let him host their show. TBN is largely about money and ego, and Perry Stone is starting to be highly critical of the hairspray-and-Mercedes crowd. He is saying the same things I keep saying to my friends. This week he had Paul Zink and Damon Thomas on his show, and they started saying the same stuff! They FLOGGED the moneychangers. It was glorious. It showed me that the things I’ve been saying really do come from God.

Damon Thomas said we use the term “megachurch” to describe a place that’s full of people (and therefore tithe money and glory for preachers), instead of focusing on the presence of the Holy Spirit. Perry Stone said we should be looking for the “mega-presence.” They laid into preachers who sit around and brag about attendance, and who spew comforting, politically correct, Dr. Phil-type garbage instead of introducing people to God. It was wonderful. I often tell people I know that we are hearing a lot of Dr. Phil nonsense, and Damon Thomas actually mentioned Dr. Phil, the same way I do! Amazing.

My church goes way overboard on the self-help stupidity, and we have become obsessed with filling seats and getting tithes and offerings. We talk very little about supernatural things, even though we’re charismatic. We bring idiots in, and they teach an inferior version of the self-help that’s available from secular sources. We bring Steve Munsey in, and he teaches his ridiculous lies about the Seven Blessings of This or That Jewish Holiday, and we put up with it because when people hear it, they give money. It still amazes me that no one has called him out on his bogus claim that all the Jews in Israel went to Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. Anyone who can work Google can prove that’s a lie. And any observant Jew can tell you there were no extravagant money offerings, except those people gave on their own initiative. The offerings were generally small, and God scaled them down for poor people.

Watching TBN, I felt ashamed for not being more outspoken. God put me here to be the salt of the earth, and although I am definitely saying enough to annoy people, I am not blunt enough. The salt is not having its intended effect. So I decided to say exactly what I think from now on, when it comes to things that happen in our church. We have been taught to condemn people who say anything critical, and it’s easy to get caught up in that. Legitimate godly criticism has been compared to gossip and grumbling. But it’s not. Find me a Biblical leader who sucked up and pleased men, and who never criticized. There is no such person. But there were plenty of bootlickers who earned God’s wrath.

Obviously, if we teach people to pray in the Spirit and walk by faith, they will receive success and healing and happiness, and that will draw people to the church. This other stuff is filth and ignorance. It’s misdirection. It will never work. I keep praying for God to change my church, and he’s going to do it. My faith tells me that. If I get on people’s nerves, good. I pay the church’s bills. It doesn’t pay mine. I’m not going to worry about the consequences.

We tell people to live by faith, but the church itself operates without faith, according to the world’s rules. That’s no good.

On Sunday, the church tried to get people to sign a pledge, swearing to tithe. Needless to say, I didn’t fool with that. Jesus and James told us not to swear. Anything beyond yes or no is from Satan. He sees the stupid oaths we swear, and he uses them as nooses to hang us. It’s amazing that churches and ministries can’t see the obvious hypocrisy of requiring Christians to swear.

I guess they would say a pledge isn’t an oath. That would be weaseling and hair-splitting. The dictionary equates swearing and oaths and pledges.

God continues taking care of me. He gives me things I will never deserve, and he withholds the bad things I do deserve. It has very little to do with being good. It’s a reward for faith, and even that faith came from him. Anyone can have this, but they will never find it as long as preachers lack the guts to teach them. Very sad. I wish Damon Thompson had a church down here.

What else is going on? I’m building a new guitar amp. A young friend from church is coming to the Garage of Blues tomorrow, and we’re starting work on a JTM45 clone. I can’t wait.

That’s about all I have today. If any of this sounds good to you, follow my example. Pray in tongues copiously every day, and try to communicate with God in private. This is the foundation of a successful life, and everything else grows from it.

Fresh From the Time Capsule

Someone on a forum asked for photos of my damaged Powerstat 116 autotransformer. Since I have them, I’ll put up a blog post. Here she is.

It looks so good, it’s freaking me out.

It looked perfect on Ebay. Naturally, the Postal Service was not satisfied with that, and the seller packed it so badly the boys in blue had no problem wrecking it. It must have landed on the socket side, because the rim of the socket was shattered, and the terminal board lost its lower corners.

I have been dithering about keeping it or sending it back. I am told the plastic stuff is Bakelite, which is very hard to mend, supposedly. I got a lame response from the seller, so I tried to put it back together with super glue for plastic. Surprisingly, it worked. Here you can see the mend. The cracks are highlighted because there is excess glue that needs to be taken off.

I couldn’t make myself give up on it, because it’s so strange to see a product roughly 60 years old, looking this good. And I paid about 20% of the cost of a new one.

Actually, there are no new ones. The models that came after this have three prongs. I can get a replacement terminal board, but they don’t stock these old 2-hole sockets. I’m going to have to modify a Home Depot receptacle and cram it in there. I hope the machine still looks pretty when I’m done. I shouldn’t care, but come on. That’s a neat-looking variac.

Nerd Resurrection

I’m practically giddy.

First of all, I got my Garnet Herzog clone working. The Herzog people released a couple of schematics which are widely available as a PDF. If I had to guess, I would say the originals were drawn on cocktail napkins, and they were intended to be practical jokes. The one I used was just plain nuts. But I worked hard on it, and I got help from experts, and I prayed over it, and now the amp runs. That’s astoundingly cool.

Second: I just received my Schaum’s Outline of Basic Circuit Analysis. Ohhhhh…this is too much.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to decide, at the age of 31, that you want a degree in physics. This is especially true if you don’t know algebra very well and failed math in high school. Not that I know anyone like that. I feel like I climbed Mount Everest in a greased sleeping bag tied to a junk car. There is no way to describe what I went through, sitting at home with an algebra outline and a calculus outline in front of me while I tried to do my calculus homework. And getting into grad school…that was like parting the Red Sea. Granted, I got brain-fried and quit. But the fact that I was there to begin with…inexplicable. It’s as if the Jamaican bobsled team took a bronze.

Really, if you haven’t been there, you can’t imagine. If you think you know something because you got an A in calculus, you’re like a mule that thinks it can run in the Kentucky Derby. To a physicist, first-year calculus is only a little more impressive than addition and subtraction. It’s the kindergarten of real math.

I made it to a top grad school and then crashed. I have never felt so cursed, before or since. Nothing I did went right. Almost no one helped. People at the University of Texas worked against me, if anything. They were as unrelenting as stones. I believe they were eager to see me quit. And when I tried to pray, I felt as though my prayers bounced off a brass ceiling.

Of course, I was not much of a Christian at that point. I had the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but I rarely prayed in tongues, and I had no real relationship with God or Christians. I believe God blighted what I was doing; too many things went wrong.

I went to law school and graduated cum laude without doing much of anything. I had a great time. I drank a lot. I hung out in the law school courtyard, shooting the breeze with friends. When I got out, I enjoyed practicing, although it wasn’t my dream. It was definitely better than digging ditches, and had I gone on to become a full-blown patent attorney (possible because of my physics background), I could be charging $400 an hour right now. In fact, I could still do that if I had to.

I felt that physics was behind me, and that my opportunities in that direction had been crushed. The time and study had been wasted. The shocking amount of information and skill I had crammed into my brain would dissipate and lose its value.

Now I’m building guitar amps. People are asking me to do it for money. I have all sorts of electronics tools. And it all happened because I went to a church where the guitarists were interested in amp-building.

I have to get up to speed on electronics. I only took one electronics course in college, and it prepared me to build things like integrators. Small, useless circuits. I built current controllers and temperature controllers for diode lasers used in gas cooling research, but I didn’t really know that much about the circuits. I have to take the small, crumbling foundation that remains and build on it. Hence the Schaum outline and the REA Problem Solver that will be here later this week.

Ezekiel tells us of the valley of dry bones. The symbolism applies to just about anything God touches. Living water means prayer in tongues and living in the Spirit. Dry bones are Jews and Christians who lack the Holy Spirit. The nation of Israel was dry bones before the Jews returned. I was a pile of dry bones before I turned back to God. Now the flesh is returning. The lost opportunities are being dusted off. Salvage is underway.

I almost feel smart again. Maybe God will help me to recover to the point where I understand math and physics again. That would be amazing.

I have to go get batteries for my HP 32S calculator, for the first time in 16 years. I hope the drugstore has them. I saved the manual. It’s in the garage. I used to play that thing like a fiddle. I may be able to use Mathcad again.

Continue in your own way, which leads nowhere, or follow the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night and cross into your own Promised Land. Whether you act or not, you will choose, and you will live with the consequences.

I am Controlling Transmission

Tonight I got my Herzog clone running. It still has a few bugs in it, but it functions. This is really neat. I never dreamed I’d be doing this. Look at all the stuff God is allowing me to do.

Today I wrote about going through dusty items from my past. One such item is my $50 Hitachi oscilloscope. This is one of the coolest things I own. It amazes me that I know how to run an oscilloscope. I felt I needed it to diagnose the amp.

Here’s my tidy workbench.

You know you’re in full-blown mad scientist mode when you fire up an oscilloscope in your garage.

From the Tomb I Arise

People sue me all the time. I haven’t written about it, but I’ve been sued 5 times over the last few years. Most of it has to do with real estate. All of the lawsuits were ridiculous. None went anywhere. I believe two are still active, but they’re hopeless. I have relied on God to deliver me, and he came through every time.

I have refrained from countersuing and from reporting anyone to the authorities; I believe that if you want God to deliver you, it’s important to avoid getting in there in your own strength and mud-wrestling like a moron. You can’t glorify God by delivering yourself.

I was praying about one of the cases in my truck, maybe in 2009, and I felt a wave of faith rush through me. It was so powerful, I grabbed the center console and held on. I felt as if I were being washed away in a flood. From then on, I knew that suit was over, regardless of how it looked. I mention it now so God can receive his glory. I think it’s extremely important to credit God in front of other people when he helps you out.

I had a dream which I believe was about one of my enemies. In real life, my involvement with this person really got into gear in an event that took place next to the kitchen sink. Seriously. One night years later, I dreamed a big female roach was on a canister by that sink. It was about six inches long. It had two arrays of eggs under its forelegs, like the missiles on a helicopter. It also had a big brown belly which reminded me a great deal of my enemy: a plaintiff with a round pot belly and skin the same color as the roach’s.

I hate roaches, especially when they come toward me the way this one did. I live in Miami, where you will see roaches occasionally no matter what, so I keep a spray bottle full of alcohol handy to blast them. It usually knocks them out so they can be dealt with at leisure. The alcohol didn’t work. The roach was enraged, so it took off (Florida roaches fly) and flew over my head, across the kitchen. I kept blasting it, trying to get it to go away. It refused to let up. It turned and started descending, facing me, and as it did, it dropped slowly toward the back of a fan.

You can imagine what happened. That big belly got sucked into the fan, and the guts went all over me. The roach destroyed itself because it could not leave me alone. I was covered with disgusting roach guts, but I was unharmed.

After that, I found myself wandering through an old apartment belonging to my parents. They’ve never had an apartment during my lifetime; the apartment in the dream doesn’t exist. It was full of dust, and I was salvaging old things that had been set aside and forgotten. Dust poured off of them as I picked them up.

The reason I mention this is that I feel like I have new insight on the dream’s meaning.

I recently ended all involvement with this enemy, at considerable expense. I didn’t have to. I was in no danger. I felt that the Holy Spirit wanted me to. I needed to close the door on a malignant relationship and get rid of any handles that could be used to get me involved again. Part of the reason, I felt, was that God wanted to clear the playing field for a new relationship. And today I found myself rummaging through dusty items from my past, because of new opportunities God is bringing my way.

I started building guitar amps a while back. A friend wants me to build one he can use professionally. I just repaired one of my church’s Vox AC30CC2s. The other day a guy in Texas asked me to build him a Bassman clone. I don’t know where this is going, but it’s starting to look like it means something.

I keep many of my old math and physics books in the garage, on a suspended platform. I got a degree in physics and then went to grad school, but I got burned out and quit, and for a long time, I felt it had all been wasted. Lately I’ve been looking for ways to get up to speed on electronicis, and I’ve been ordering books. Today I had to go out in the garage and make sure I wasn’t duplicating anything I already had. While I was dealing with the dust on the boxes, I remembered my dream.

I used to think the last part of the dream suggested I was never going to recover the potential that was taken from me earlier in life. I was never going to get another shot at the missed opportunities. Now I think I may have been wrong. What’s a little dust? There was dust on King Tut’s tomb, and look at the riches they pulled out of it.

I just ordered an REA Problems Solvers book on electrical circuits, plus a Schaum outline. I got expedited shipping. I can’t wait to dig in.

I know there are very few people who will find this blog post interesting, but I felt I should put it up and let God have his glory. If you don’t document these things, no one will listen to you later on when they turn out to be from God. Never predict the past. God gets no honor from that.

The symbolism of the roach eggs is not lost on me. I could have been in real, lasting trouble, but for God’s protection.

If you have ears to hear, take something away from this. If not, sorry I wasted your time.