One More Chance, Please God
This is a tough day.
Marvin, my sweet little feathered buddy of 28 years, had some seizures last night. I had to hold him and consider the possibility that he was dying in my hands. Seizures can be caused by things that are reversible, like low calcium levels, but they can also be caused by worse things.
I did what I could for him last night, and he pepped up and started playing with his toys, but in the morning, he was weak, so I took him to the animal hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That is where he is now, having tests and receiving care. I have been praying and commanding the illness to go. I have been speaking blessings over Marvin.
My county is extremely conservative and full of Christians. Gainesville is different. A typical university town, it is a hotbed of white-hot socialism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, DeSantis Derangment Syndrom, imperialist feminism, perversion, wicca, and, presumably, antisemitism.
My wife and I got into the car with Marv, and of course, our son had to go, too. The people at the hospital took a long history and started work quickly. They were very nice to us.
I was highly distraught last night, and I was only a little less upset this morning. Having harm come to one of my pets has always been one of my worst fears. I lost my cockatoo, Maynard, 4 years ago, and it was very, very painful. Now Marv is having problems.
It’s terrible when something you have feared and fought to prevent for decades comes to pass.
I speak blessing over Marvin twice a day, and we include him in our daily prayers. I try not to do anything to open myself or my family to dangerous spirits. I think this is the best a human being can do.
When we left the hospital, my wife asked me if I had noticed something. She saw several women who helped us, including a veterinarian, and every single one had a huge septum ring hanging out of her nose.
She didn’t see the receptionist, who was an older woman. I believe she didn’t have a ring.
Anyway, it was very disturbing to be told that 80% of the women who helped us had these off-putting ornaments. They looked like they belonged to a cult. It really bothered me. I felt like I had just discovered that I was living in a horror movie.
A septum ring is supposed to be a way of expressing your individuality and your contempt for conformity, but in reality, nothing says you’re a conformist like a septum ring.
My son, true to form, blew out in his car seat, so my wife had to use the “family” restroom to clean him up. There was a women’s room and an everything room, but there was no men’s room. I suppose that was a deliberate insult.
My wife was hungry when we left, so we went to a nearby pizza place. It was a dirty little place with good reviews.
We had to stand to order, and then we filled our own drinks and waited for the food. When I got our drinks, I couldn’t find the straws. The lids had weird openings in them, much larger than would be needed for a straw. I realized the obvious, but hoping against hope, I asked where the straws were, and a young black man behind the counter told me they weren’t allowed to put them out where people could see them. He said, “It’s kind of weird.” I nodded and told him I understood.
While we were waiting for our food, a couple of big young ladies in long dresses came in and sat near us. The dresses were very similar. The kind of thing you would imagine Auntie Em and her friends to wear back in Kansas. I think they may be called prairie dresses.
The women were not good-looking, and they had big feet. They didn’t appear to be wearing brassieres. They had fairly large breasts that needed, but lacked, support. One of them was wearing what I would call gladiator sandals. They had no makeup on. One of them had sideburns, which I failed to notice at first. I thought she had just combed her hair down in front of her ears.
They looked bizarre, dressed so oddly and so similarly. Like they had just escaped from a Mormon commune.
Soon after they came in, my wife let me know they were both men.
This shocked me. Ordinarily, trans-whatevers are obvious. I wasn’t in the mood to be observant, and I guess the sagging breasts fooled me.
The smaller guy had a great big septum ring. I believe the other guy had one, too, but I’m not sure.
A feeling came over me. It said, “This world is lost.” I realized my family lived in a precious bubble. There are children of darkness where we live, but the Christian population is very large, and the wicked haven’t been able to take over. It’s an unusual place. Gainesville is more typical of America. Although it’s small, the university’s presence gives it a culture like a big city. Most Americans live in and around cities, and almost all cities are lost.
No men’s room. No straws unless you ask for them. A hog ring in almost every nose. Men proudly wafting around in frumpy cotton dresses with little or nothing underneath. This is my country now.
Importantly, such people control the university; a type of portal just about every American is required to pass through if he ever expects to be successful and accepted. Going to college has become like joining the Freemasons. It’s like becoming a Mormon in Utah. You don’t have to do it, but expect to be blackballed if you don’t.
American kids think they have to go to college, even if they’re going to become cops or Burger King managers, and nearly every college is controlled by perverts, socialists, witches, minority members who hate whites, antisemites, militant atheists, man-haters, America-slanderers, backers of Islamist terror, and every conceivable type of pagan. “You want your child to be a success? You have to give him to US first.”
It’s like putting your baby through the fire to Moloch, except the baby comes out alive with a diploma that entitles him to a fair shot at employment as a fungible cubicle occupant.
America is done. It is absolutely finished. It’s nice that Trump won, but it doesn’t mean the climate or the trend has changed. If the Democrats hadn’t put two vegetables in a row up against him, we would be looking at a fourth Obama term. America will probably elect a Democrat in 2028.
I told my wife we have no place in this world.
I had this feeling that our situation was like living in America while we were at war with Japan, supposedly in the Pacific, and suddenly noticing that people around us here were Japanese and looking forward to taking over.
I told her about the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
People have decided they don’t need God in order to have pleasant lives. Worse, they have decided God is an obstacle. They have decided he is evil and that the world will progress and suddenly make a great leap forward (to borrow a phrase) when the world is rid of Christians as well as Jews.
Somehow Muslims aren’t considered problematic, in spite of mutilating girls’ genitals with kitchen knives, beating women for going outside with their faces uncovered, and murdering and hypocritically raping homosexual men.
I don’t know why the people we saw bought septum rings, apart from conformism. Maybe one or two of them think they’re close to God, and adopting a signature adornment of the children of darkness was just error. But seeing so many of them made me feel as though I were in a horror movie, waiting for someone to send an attack signal through the rings and yank the wearers into battle by their noses. A huge swarm of nose-ringed Agent Smiths.
To say I felt left out was an understatement.
It’s normal for younger people to make the mistake of altering their dress and appearance to upset older people, but it is very strange to see so many of them choose exactly the same ornament, as though they were threatened with prison time if they didn’t comply. Back in the Sixties, young people made all kinds of ill-conceived fashion and grooming choices, but there was way more variety. There was no single accessory nearly everyone felt compelled to wear.
While I thought about these things, I thought about the way my prayers have changed. These days I keep saying, “Yeshua, please come back and rule the world.” I want to cavalry to come save us. The waters are rising around us, and I don’t know how we are supposed to carve out futures for ourselves here. I don’t want us to become like Christians in Rome under Nero and Domitian.
As I was thinking about these things, I started to feel great peace about Marvin. I want Marvin to come back home and spend more years with us, but on the other hand, this world is a very bad place, and if God has decided Marvin should not have to be here when things get worse, then that’s how it is. Even a bird should not have to suffer here more than is necessary.
In somewhat-related news, I heard from my aunt the other day. The one who has been so abusive, and whom I believe uses the stubborn unsold remains of my grandparent’s estates to enrich herself and her family. She called about selling an inconsequential piece of land.
She couldn’t have been nicer. She behaved as though she had never attacked and insulted me, and she clearly expected me to act as though it had never happened.
I was polite.
She wanted to know if I still had my wife, which was a jarring question.
Now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense. I think her has been married three times. I have met three wives. There may have been others for all I know. Adultery and divorce are like musical chairs in her area. In most places, you ask a man how his wife is doing. In Eastern Kentucky, you ask if he’s still married to her.
My wife will have to sign things in order for the lot to be sold. Ostensibly, this is how she came into the conversation. My aunt asked if she were here with me. In America, I think she meant.
She asked about children, and I told her we had a son. She asked for photos, so I sent a couple, and she said he was “the cutest baby,” which is actually true. She asked if she could forward the pictures to her daughter, which was fine by me.
Before she hung up, she said it was good talking to me.
That could be the Parkinson’s talking for all I know. She has admitted she has some dementia because of it, and maybe she doesn’t remember insulting me and telling me she was going to do whatever she wanted with my inheritance regardless of my wishes. Strange thing for a fiduciary to say.
She likes bragging about her family; people whose relationships with me she helped end permanently. She told me she had an enormous grandson who was being recruited by Harvard for football as a high school sophomore. Harvard actually does that, although Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships.
My aunt’s family has had the misfortune to fall under the spell of Catholicism, the quasi-pagan and dominant branch of nominal Christianity. Her daughter married a Catholic, and my aunt converted. The city where my cousin lives has several prominent Catholic high schools dedicated to producing pro athletes, which is an extremely perverse goal for a Christian organization.
I don’t believe or disbelieve her. I don’t know what the truth is. This is the same aunt who said her daughter was likely to become Miss Kentucky, which wasn’t anywhere near true. She also said her son had been accepted by the University of Michigan’s prestigious law school when it was actually the University of WEST Michigan, which is the single worst law school in America. He ended up going to the second-worst.
Maybe the boy really is being courted by Harvard. This is not a school known for good football teams, so it wouldn’t be that remarkable if a big, smart kid who was playing pretty well in the 10th grade seemed like a fine prospect. They can’t get really good athletes because they all go elsewhere.
My understanding is that his dad is an accomplished individual and a good family man.
It amazes me that any Christian allows his son to play high school or college football, and no Christian should be in the NFL. Football takes a toll on the body, it causes brain damage, most players don’t get rich, most who get rich lose their money, it develops negative character traits like aggression, competitiveness, materialism, and pride, and it subjects players to armies of aggressive sluts. Combine all this with the fact that college and NFL football only exist because of gambling, and it’s a very unwholesome picture.
I thought about the horrible atmosphere at Harvard. I would not be happy if Harvard wanted my son. I want him to have a business and investments, and I want him to have a wonderful Christian wife and Spirit-led friends. I don’t want him to be tormented and assimilated by sick, vicious freaks for three years and eight months at my great expense.
She said another grandson was getting degrees in anthrolopogy and archaeology. I said, “I guess he’ll be a professor.” I thought that sounded positive.
Try and imagine a field more worthless and anti-Christian than anthropology. And archaeology sounds like employer repellent to me.
I had to take anthropology as an elective while I was getting a physics major and a math minor, and I found the whole business contemptible. The professor taught us made-up, implausible, unclever theories from a thin paperback text, and my studies for the entire semester took up less than one day. The final was a multiple-choice test. I got an A for breathing. Physics took about that much work every week. Physics was so hard, math seemed like a gut major in comparison. I spent about 4 hours a week doing homework for multiple advanced math courses, and I put in several times that much work for physics.
These things I say are literally true. Even good physics students are often unable to finish their homework, and my math courses, while hard by college standards, at least generated homework people could reasonably be expected to complete in a few hours a week.
With math homework, you quit when you know the problems are solved. With physics, you quit so you can get three hours of sleep before showering and going to class. You hope everyone else did as badly as you did, and usually, they did.
At the University of Texas, as a grad student, I asked my quantum professor about a particularly hard problem he had given us. I found it so hard to finish the math, which, I believe, was a long string of vector operations that would be easy to fumble, I bought a program called Mathematica and made my computer do it. I didn’t know if the result was right. I felt panicked.
He told me he hadn’t been able to do the problem. He asked me what I had come up with. True story.
His CV says he got his master’s at Cambridge with first class honors. Cambridge is where Newton and Hawking worked. Couldn’t do the homework he assigned.
His name is Fitzgerald. He’s still there. I should fly out there and egg his house.
Anthropology is just gossip, like the Talmud or the theories aborigines made up around campfires to explain their universe to their children. Giving your life to it is an appalling waste. It’s an insult to God, like playing golf. It says you have no idea how valuable your time here is.
It’s like going to college to become a phrenologist.
It also challenges the creation story, which is factual.
I’ll give you an example of anthropological science. You can Google to find out the actual details so you can repeat them in a comment as though you’re smarter than I am, although I’m actually just too lazy to check. A theory named after someone who may be named Hanson or Hansen says that people close to the equator have dark skin and long limbs, while the opposite is true in colder regions. Well…Eskimos. Mongolians. Thais. Indonesians. Slavs. Scandinavians. Amazon Basin Indians. See if you can see how they violate the theory. That’s some great science, that is.
Archaeology is a legitimate field of study. My main problem with it is that every time shaky research tends to discredit the Bible, it is lauded as proof, and then years later, the research is always discredited, after the damage is done. And academics who have been shown up don’t make any effort to inform the public. People keep quoting their nonsense decades later as though it were fact.
By its very nature, archaeology is incomplete. We have only dug up a tiny fraction of what’s out there. But archaeologists love to draw firm conclusions based on fragmented evidence.
These fields are bad choices. You shouldn’t pay for your kids to throw away years of their lives so they can become Uber drivers or do data entry, which is where liberal arts people often end up unless they become academics and try to join the opposite sex. Or they go to law school.
My mother got a degree in social work, so she had to become a realtor. You know those people you end up talking to when you call Mastercard about a charge you don’t recognize? Liberal arts majors.
If you want to have a revealing conversation, get together with a bunch of college graduates at least 35 years old and ask them what their majors were and what they do for a living. See how many of those history majors became historians. See how many of those philosophy majors became professional philosophers.
I don’t know this grandson. His name was not familiar to me because my family’s interest in including me in anything dried up and fell off years ago.
The family I loved and treasured lives only in my memories. He must be my aunt’s son’s son. I don’t know his siblings’ names or how many of them there are. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. I hope he finds a career that pays well. We prayed for my aunt’s whole family last night.
College should serve some purpose, but I would estimate that for most kids, it does not. I think most college kids major in fecklessly-chosen dead-end fields. The lofty notion that learning for its own sake justifies college rings a little hollow when the learning can cost half a million dollars and leave you years older, penniless and in uncancellable debt, filling out applications at Marshall’s and Walmart.
Liberal arts degrees made little sense even before the Internet, but now you can stuff your head with all sorts of knowledge all day for nearly nothing, so why would you pay someone thousands to tell you what Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice were about? And then end up not reading them and cramming from Cliff’s Notes.
Before I gave up secular entertainment, I saw some clips from a movie called The Company Men. It’s about a company that built ships. The white collar employees weren’t brilliant naval architects and engineers. They were unremarkable people who did work anyone could do. Negotiation. Sales. Submitting TPS reports.
Future AI targets.
America’s manufacturing base collapsed. Nobody wanted to build ships in America. The company cut lots and lots and lots of jobs.
Ben Affleck played a young executive who made 6 figures, had a nice house the bank owned, drove a Boxster the bank owned, and belonged to a country club. He was cocky. He thought he was important and too valuable and just plain wonderful to fire. Then they canned him without warning, and after being rejected by a long list of potential employers, he ended up getting a pity job from his brother-in-law, a carpenter.
I watched this movie and thought, “What do you expect to happen when you get paid a ton of money to do a job anyone else can do? What do you expect to happen when you’re not remarkable, you got a liberal arts degree, and you never developed any actual skills or learned anything useful?”
If this were a real company, the people who had important skills and knowledge that couldn’t be picked up in a month by a random Circle K clerk would have kept their jobs to the bitter end. If the company had gone under, other companies would have gone after them. They wouldn’t have chased the sociology or art history majors.
A doctor can always find work. An accountant can always find work. A guy who writes conjecture-filled papers about Sumerian poetry is not so blessed.
To circle back around to the point, I don’t see how anthropology and mainstream archaeology could have any importance to a Christian. They promote all sorts of faulty anti-Christian notions, and to make it in these fields, you pretty much have to buddy up to people who hate your religion. I don’t think an informed Spirit-led Christian could want anything to do with these fields.
My cousin the lawyer is not Spirit-led. That is obvious. The most reasonable guess is that his son is far from God and never had a chance to get to know him. I have a feeling law school is in his future.
I feel extremely distant from my family. They live in a different universe. Nearly all of them are in real trouble, but they don’t know it. I wish I could help them.
When my dad died, I took his ashes to Kentucky to be buried. He had an astonishing testimony of conversion and reconciliation with God. At the sparsely-attended viewing, I told the whole story to my cousin the lawyer as well as his wife and another male cousin. Didn’t make a dent. My aunt wasn’t there, but I’m sure I told her the story by phone, and she only got worse after that. One cousin visited me for Christmas the following year, and I baptized her in my pool, so I have hope for her.
I have heard from the animal hospital, and at the time of the call, Marv was perking up. They had run a number of tests. Marv had eaten a little. They seem to expect him to make it through the night.
What a privilege it has been, owning that sweet little bird. I have been a miserable excuse for a caretaker. I hope God sends Marv home to me so I can do better and better every day.
