My Rebuttal to Dale Carnegie

I had the funniest dream last night.

I use a lot of Internet forums because I have a lot of interests. I can’t just conjure up friends and relatives who can tell me how to wire up a guitar amp tube socket or change an oil seal on a tractor axle. I have to look elsewhere.

Something about me attracts insults and abuse. Internet forums are full of jerks. Anyone who participates in a typical forum will eventually be bullied and provoked. My strategy is to try to show humility and patience from the start, and I use self-deprecating remarks to keep the jerks from waking up, but to many jerks, humility and self-deprecation are like the smell of poop to flies, so they pounce.

Eventually, if someone will not leave me alone, I will respond in kind. I am much better at this than most people, and forum moderators don’t like it. You can let a complete ass insult you over and over for weeks, and you can count on forum moderators to leave him alone, but when you get fed up and snap back with a penetrating shot from a larger caliber, you get in trouble.

These days, more and more moderators are ignorant young wokesters, so things are worse if there is any kind of conservative or Christian smell to you. It doesn’t have to be overt; a slight hint will serve just fine to get you disparate and unfair treatment.

Some old crank has been needling me on a forum for saying it’s a good thing to expose people who give consumers a raw deal. It’s like he’s a dog and the neighbor’s shar pei is in heat. He can’t move on. I responded to his obnoxious remarks civilly several times, and he can’t shut up.

I quit going to the forum, but after a week or two, I decided to visit again, and he was still at it. I told him the first of the month was coming up, so I was glad I wasn’t paying rent on his head.

Personally, I would rent a house, not an efficiency, but let’s move on.

Now some woke kid moderators are sending me email messages. I responded once, and now I just put them in the Archived folder. Maybe I’ll read them in a month or two, or maybe I’ll use other forums.

There are some seriously non-woke forums out there, so that’s nice. One example is Arborist Site, for people who need help with forestry tools. Gun forums are also pretty good. I wouldn’t go near a Christian forum, because I can’t handle the self-righteousness from people who do nothing but quote fools like Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes. Few things are worse than being scolded by ignorant, disrespectful people.

Some people are drawn to Christianity by a desire to change and get close to God. Many more, however, are drawn by the desire to be God’s Karens and HOA presidents. Yeshua was murdered by self-promoting, self-adoring Karens.

A Youtube preacher named Tom Fischer lectured me for criticizing TV preachers and their prosperity nonsense. Well, he lives in a camper that was a gift. I am not making fun of him. Poverty is no joke. But he lives in a camper, he has had this standard of living for many years, and he essentially called me an enemy of Christ for criticizing the prosperity gospel.

He told me I had discipline coming. I was living in a nice house. I had a wonderful wife. I didn’t have to work. I lived in a fantastic area with warm, kind people. Since he gave me his warning, I have had a magnificent baby son who brightens every day of my life. Things get better all the time.

As I have told my wife, if this is discipline, I want more of it.

He has a lot of company. A lot of people have told me God was either getting me or going to get me. Most ironically, Alberto Lee Santiago, the child-rapist pastor from my last church. He told me God didn’t like what I was doing. Within a couple of years, he was put in prison, his wife (who agreed with him) died from a brain tumor before he was sentenced, and of course, he lost his church.

His brother-in-law Sander was also enraged at me, although of course, he claimed he was praying for me. Sometimes I think that’s the ultimate Christian diss.

Sander was an illegal alien; maybe he still is. He got furious at me for calling Osteen a grinning jackass, which I stand by. He got even madder when I said illegal immigration was a Biblical curse, which is a hundred percent true. When Santiago was arrested (after doing his level best to discourage the victim’s mother from forgiving him), Sander posted a meme criticizing church members for abandoning their “shepherd.”

There are a lot of things a good shepherd does with sheep. What Albert did is not one of them.

I would like to see Tom Fischer and his wife in a big, beautiful house with a pack of cute kids playing around their feet, but it looks like the prosperity gospel is keeping him where he is. It was designed by Satan to do that. It works beautifully. As Satan’s tools go, it is unsurpassed in its effectiveness.

The more you give to prosperity preachers, the less you prosper, and the less you can give to the poor. That’s the scheme, in a nutshell. In a way, it’s almost beautiful. So simple and powerful.

Fischer also lays into the Jews all the time, which is beyond disappointing.

Anyway, that’s just an example of what happens when I speak up around Christians. Religious people murdered Yeshua, and they want to get rid of everyone else who shoots down their idols and superstitions. Jewish or Christian, it’s the same kind of people.

I really hope no one hits me with “Judge not” for the rest of this year. I don’t know if I’ll be able to restrain myself. I’m going to get a shirt that says, “‘Judge not’ is not the only verse in the Bible.”

Like Yeshua and the apostles, I judge people all the time. It’s extremely helpful to me and whoever hears it. I don’t care who the person is; the other day I judged Billy Graham for saying Muhammad Ali was a follower of Jesus Christ. That was a stupid and dangerous thing to say. I don’t care how many people went to Graham’s crusades.

Billy Graham is probably close to the top of the Christian idol totem pole. He was so relentlessly inoffensive, he drew the admiration of hundreds of millions. What did Yeshua, an unpopular person, say about popularity?

If I’m willing to knock Billy Graham, you know I’m hard core.

My wife saw Graham say this, and she was mortified. We listened to him, and the impression we got was that he denied the necessity of the cross, which could mean he was not saved. Denying Yeshua is the absolute surest and quickest way to lose your salvation.

Muhammad Ali, a Muslim, named himself after a pedophile rapist gangster who was physically dirty and encouraged his followers to perform acts of terrorism against non-Muslims. Ali was no follower of Yeshua. He was an extremely ignorant man, he lived a life of defeat, and he is almost certainly in hell. Graham saw no point in correcting him. In fact, he reinforced his eternal itinerary by lying to his face. Great job, Billy.

Believe it or not, warning people about hell is important. Is it controversial to say that? Can that possibly be? Slap yourself hard in the face and think about it.

To get back to my dream, I dreamed someone emailed me a link to a new forum, and I visited it. All of the posts were reposts of things I had written on forums. All the horrible non-woke things that had sent snowflakes running for their weed stashes and power crystals.

One of the posts was very funny. The guy who created the forum was furious at me for using the phrase “crazy people.” You can’t say “crazy” any more, even if you’re describing a bona fide psychotic who has to be kept strapped to a wall.

This useful, accurate phrase is considered offensive. That’s just crazy.

God has blessed me for giving up secular entertainment. I did it earlier this year, and although my life was very good beforehand, it is much, much better now. Years ago, he blessed me for giving up social media. Now I wonder if he wants me to quit using Internet forums.

I feel like I need them for the purpose of getting information, but that may be an excuse. I also use them for socializing.

Now that AI is freely available, I have found that it’s a better source of help than Internet forums. Forum people like answering questions about which they know nothing. They also drag threads off topic. Maybe I should drop forums and stick with AI as much as I can.

Participation in the world’s culture is unequal yoking, so it has to be minimized.

Is using AI unequal yoking? I hope not. It’s pretty woke, i.e. deluded. AI bots aren’t people, though, so I treat them like the inanimate objects they are. I don’t try to get along with them. I don’t use good manners. I never joke with them. It would be like trying to befriend a shovel.

The world’s culture is a minefield. It was designed by Satan. He puts little temptation mines in TV, fiction, movies, sports, music, and the news. When you walk through it, the mines blow up under your feet. Demons get permission to enter your home and go after you and your family.

The most pleasant thing about abandoning secular entertainment is that it put an end to my lust issues. I didn’t realize it, but websites that don’t seem sex-related have little bits of erotic content in them designed to pull you further astray, and it works. News sites are full of erotic clickbait about whorish female celebrities. This one or that one shocked the crowd at Sundance by going to a viewing naked! This one has an incredible “bikini bod” at 57! That one wore a CHEEKY dress to the Golden Globes! It’s all over sites like The Daily Mail and Yahoo News.

I don’t need to see professional sluts all day. Sorry; that’s what they are. I wouldn’t let them be part of my social circle or walk onto my property, so why read about them on the Internet?

I didn’t realize reading the news or watching shows like Clarkson’s Farm could lead to problems with lust, but it does. It must lead to other demonic issues, too.

Being delivered from demons is wonderful, but it’s a second-rate blessing. The better blessing is to avoid having demons in the first place. Secular culture brings them in, and if they are cast out and you go back to secular culture, they enter you all over again.

I would rather stay free than watch Fox News. The Catholic news channel.

Any channel where more than one host refers to an old celibate socialist elected by gays as the holy father is suspect.

I’m not going to fit in with this world. If I started to, it would be a sign that I had backslidden and lost my relationship with God. Changing my behavior to avoid offending won’t help. The real offense is my existence. I’m like a Jew. The problem people have with me isn’t my behavior. It’s my existence itself.

Currying favor won’t make anyone like me. It will just strip me of the favor of God and grieve the Holy Spirit.

If I try to make people like me by being less honest, they will still hate me, but I will lose my relationship with God.

Go ahead and dislike me. They will never build a microscope powerful enough to detect my respect for your opinion of me.

Welcome to Nonbinary Day Care, Little Tyler Routh Mangione

My baby son grew up this week. He is now 47.

Three big things have happened.

1. His crawl speed has increased by about 300%.

2. He tried to climb up our stairs.

3. We are pretty sure he was trying to say “Dad” in the car yesterday.

All of this took place over about two days. I don’t know what’s with this kid.

Yesterday, I planned to have a pleasant day of testing country ham and procrastinating, but I had to go to Walmart get a baby gate and a real playpen. It couldn’t wait until today.

The crawling thing was a shock. I used to be able to put him on the floor and come back and find him pretty close to the same location. Now we get–literally–two seconds before he drops the clutch and crawls completely out of the room. For the first time, if he is on the loose, we may not know where he is.

When we’re on the bed together, I have to grab one foot of his romper and hold it, because he may launch himself like a Trident missile to get at the stuff on my night table. He may also launch himself over the side completely, head first.

There is no warning at all when he takes off. Suddenly, he’s somewhere else.

I don’t know how anyone can crawl quickly. It’s hard on the limbs.

When I hold him by his romper, he keeps groaning and straining. He never looks back to see what the problem is.

My wife found him at the bottom of the rec room stairs, pawing at things I had left on them because I was too lazy to move them all the way to the second story. She had to move everything away from him.

Now when I receive .22 ammunition to try out, I’ll have to take it all the way to the storage room. Otherwise, he’ll turn himself into a human magazine.

On the way home from the trip to get the gate and playpen, he started saying, “Da da da da da da DA!” I have been trying to teach him to say “Dad.” I touch my chest and say, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” He thinks it’s wonderful. It appears he is trying to imitate me.

My wife says she thinks it’s great because she’s a patriarchist.

If only a feminist would come, deprogram her, and save her from happiness. She, too, could have 7 cats named after famous socialists and witches, an apartment all to herself and a fatherless son, dated Seventies rainbow hair, and a bellyful of Zoloft, Klonopin, semaglutide, and fattening bagged organic snacks from Trader Joe’s.

Putting a gate on the rec room stairs may be hard because we have a high baseboard. I bought something anyway, and I’ll see if it fits.

Playpens are now called “playards.” It’s not a real word, it makes no sense, and it looks stupid. When I saw it, I smelled wokitude.

Turns out I was right. Evidently, suggesting a child can be put in a pen is non-woke, microaggressive, and extremely hurtful. In the view of utter pinheads.

A playpen is nothing like a yard.

I call it what it is: a playpen. I will always call it that unless I can come up with something that invokes colonialism and manspreading.

Why do young people have to opt for idiocy every time? Is there anything millennials can’t ruin?

We already had a playpen for him, but it was no good, because it wasn’t a real playpen. It was a bassinet. The mattress can be lowered close to the floor, so that supposedly makes it a playpen. No; it’s just a weird bassinet. It’s small, and he can’t be expected to learn to walk on a foam pad.

I wonder when they’re going to come up with a new word for “diaper.” Maybe “pooyard.”

“I was chestfeeding little Lenin Snoqualmie when I realized zhey needed a fresh, sustainable, gender-neutral, tuck-friendly, soy fiber pooyard.”

This brings me to disturbing woke baby names. My buddy Mike already has granddaughters named Fern and Wren. I am not kidding. A boy is on the way. This was Mike’s chance for a normal name.

I won’t give you time to brace. They chose “Oak.”

Fern, Wren, and Oak. Where is Christopher Robin?

I almost miss the days when all liberals named their kids Dylan.

Oak isn’t a name. I don’t care if there have been people named Oak. There have been people named Raspberry and Osprey. Doesn’t mean these are real names.

Here is his future:

1. “Could you repeat that for me? Again?”

2. “Class, I thought I told you to stop throwing Oak on the ant pile.”

3. “Is it okay if I call you by your middle name?”

4. “Honey, I’m just not comfortable with ‘Oak, Junior.’ Let’s pick something else.”

I hope he’s big and strong, because he will need to be. A boy named Oak.

They gave him three names plus a surname, and only one is normal. Unfortunately, the normal name is sexually ambiguous. By design? Wouldn’t surprise me.

You have to give a kid an escape hatch unless you like putting cold washcloths on black eyes.

It was predictable that they wouldn’t consider “Michael,” even after all the things Mike has done for them and paid for. It fits in perfectly with all the things I have heard about them.

My understanding is that his son is a very smart and talented young man and an extremely conscientious and dedicated father. Mike says he is very concerned about morality and tries to improve himself. He appears to have a blind spot in one area, though.

Seems like an undeserved slap in the face to me, but what do I know? Mike would have been on cloud nine, but never mind. I would have loved to hear they named the baby after him.

I would have given my son my dad’s name, but because of my dysfunctional upbringing, hearing it makes my blood pressure spike. It’s like I’m a baby sparrow in the nest, and my dad’s name is the shadow of a hawk flying over. I gave my son my grandfather’s name, and I told my wife we should give the next one her dad’s name.

She rejected that, however, because he did not behave all that well in life. She has demoted him to middle-name status.

Christians name children to honor older people they know, or Biblical figures. Leftists name children to one-up other leftist parents.

Leftist 1: Our son has an Algonquin Indian name.

Leftist 2: Be better. My unassigned offspring has a sub-Saharan click-language name.

Leftist 3: How 2020 of both of you. We chose “Sinwar Bud Light Luigi.”

Is the last-names-first fad over with? Are leftists still naming their daughters awful things like Wilson and Flannery?

I am not in love with my first name, but it’s not bad, and at least it’s a name. It’s much more dignified than I am, so that’s a win.

“Tyler” is probably trending among leftists right now.

I think I should take a page from an old Bloom County strip and name a son Trump T. Trump. Or Reagan T. Trump.

It’s startling to see a baby make sudden leaps in development. Of course, it’s encouraging, but it also reminds me he will only be a baby once. When babyhood is gone, it’s gone. It has to be savored while it lasts.

We will try to teach him to have a little gratitude and respect instead of criticizing and putting us on trial every day of his adult life while expecting us to support him and do things for him well into his thirties. I hope it works, because I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

Things are just about ideal here. My son is a joy. My wife and I love each other; we are more like parts of each other than separate beings. God’s presence comes to us over and over. Our area is peaceful. We lack for nothing.

Everyone was miserable back in 2020, but we both loved it. Then we found each other in 2021, and while a lot of people were worrying and being held prisoner in their own homes by Democrat governors, we were having long video calls, praying together, getting married on Zoom, and flying to exotic destinations to be with each other. Every year has been better than the last. As happy as we were with just each other, we are even happier now that we have a baby, and we expect every new baby to make us happier still.

God keeps giving us correction, and I believe anyone who keeps receiving and applying his correction will find that his life gets more pleasant as years pass. I am optimistic because I have a loving benefactor who is patient, eager to bless, and slow to punish. He has been right about everything.

Today we will be taking the baby to the dermatologist for a followup, and then we plan to go to our favorite restaurant: Costco. We hope to be home when the anniversary ring I bought my wife comes back from being resized.

If you’re not happy, keep asking God to tell what you’re doing wrong. It worked for the ancient Jews, and it is certainly working for us. God loves you as much as anyone else, so he is ready to start when you are.

Spam is not a Dish That is Best Served Cold

Yesterday I wrote about a startling and disappointing spam text I received from Erika Kirk, and I was very critical. Some people have questioned the legitimacy of the text, suggesting I fell for a scam.

I didn’t. I will teach you a few things.

The text is from Turning Point, and it links to their official donation site. The language in the text is repeated on that site word for word.

Here is a link.

Anedot is TPUSA’s official donation processor. Go to TPUSA’s site, click a donation link, and see for yourself.

I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I don’t believe everything I see on the web or in texts or emails. I never click on links I can’t verify. I have never bought a timeshare. I don’t fall for organic food. I have never wired money to a Nigerian. I have never paid a gypsy to put “leftover” blacktop on my driveway. I don’t follow the Omaha Steaks people back to their trucks. I haven’t left a tooth under my pillow in around 60 years. I know the difference between “made with real cheese” and “uses only 100% real cheese.” I have never responded to an infomercial. I would never get a reverse mortgage. I have never even considered getting a Herbalife franchise. It doesn’t scare me at all when a guy with an Indian accent calls and claims he’s with the IRS. When I receive envelopes with warnings saying things like, “OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION! OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”, I throw them out without opening them. I have never put my Social Security number in an email or spoken it over the phone. I don’t buy anything endorsed by Oprah Winfrey or Shark Tank. I don’t answer misspelled emails thanking me for huge purchases I never made. I have never paid anyone money because they sent me an email claiming they turned my webcam on and filmed me watching porn. I will never pay anyone to clean my air conditioning ducts. I don’t take methylene blue. I don’t believe a mediocre old socialist in Rome, elected by homosexuals, is even dimly acquainted with Yeshua or can send anyone to hell. I don’t open mail from companies offering to buy my house for half the market price. I don’t buy extended warranties except in rare cases. I don’t tip on tax. I don’t believe racking a pump shotgun will scare a burglar off. I don’t trust AR-15’s. I don’t believe Brigitte Macron is a man. I am positive Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and I know for a fact Charlie Kirk was not bumped off by Israel.

I have made some real sucker moves in my life. I gave money to Robert Tilton, and I also dated a Brazilian who told me she would never date a Brazilian and gave me solid reasons. But I have checked this spam text out, and it’s the real thing.

As long as I’m in a lecturing mood, I want to comment on something more personal. I had an epiphany this morning.

Once I got past a certain age, older women started paying attention to me. I was never attracted to them. No apology. You don’t apologize for things like that. It’s like apologizing for not liking yogurt. It’s not something that results from a choice.

Who insists women apologize for their preferences? No one. Feminists think Brigitte Macron is practically a deity.

She put an end to the Macron line. Emmanuel Macron will never reproduce unless his wife leaves the picture and he finds himself someone who can still have kids. She deprived him of a great deal.

She’s a bit of a husband-beater, so she and Macron may part ways. If that happens and he goes on to have kids with someone young, feminists will probably cruficy him.

I have also turned down women of childbearing age, not just in recent years, but when I was young. It would be crazy to apologize for that. You don’t marry people you don’t want. It’s wrong, and it leads to misery. I don’t owe marriage to anyone. I am under no obligation as a Christian to save women from their problems, even if they’re nice single women.

Marriage isn’t musical chairs. You don’t leap for the only remaining option just because there is no choice. There is always a choice. It’s called bachelorhood. It worked for Paul. It worked for Boaz until the time was right.

I never felt I should marry someone because I was old myself and should be grateful anyone would have me. That would have been pathetic. A Japanese robot would be an order of magnitude less pathetic. At least I wouldn’t be using another human being. I would be objectifying an object.

I was completely prepared to remain single until I died. That was better than burdening myself with the human equivalent of chopped liver and burdening a woman with a man who only stayed with her out of duty.

More than one older lady tried to turn other people against me. Women will do that. If you reject a woman, she may go to your common friends, and they may conspire and decide you’re a wicked person for not wanting ONE woman out of 4 billion. A cousin of mine broke up with a girl in high school, and other girls in his small town decided no one else should date him.

I’m sure some were willing to jump in and undermine her, though.

It’s gaslighting. The victim is the problem. If the victim agrees to be victimized, everything will be as it should be. Take one for the team. The other team.

Today I was lying in bed, and I looked at my son. His crib is between our bed and a sliding glass door. He was standing in the sunshine, in his romper, eagerly awaiting his day with us. He seemed to glow with innocence and love. My own love poured out toward him, as always.

Suddenly I had a realization: this is what irrational, selfish older women wanted to keep me from having. Maybe they never articulated it to themselves, but this is what they offered me: life without my beautiful son and whatever siblings God might provide later. Life without any hope of a grandchild.

In exchange for that, I would get to pay someone’s bills and maybe the bills of their kids and relations, and I would get to lie next to someone who was as attractive and who brought me as much pleasure as another old man.

No; I won’t say that. Women are difficult; they even find each other difficult. Men are easy to get along with, and we share interests. It would be much better to share a house with another man than a woman I didn’t want. We could shoot together. We could do metalworking. We could smoke ribs and make beer. We would be happy with crummy furniture and doing small engine repairs on the kitchen table.

Two Oscars and no Felix.

No woman ever thought, “I want to make sure he never has kids.” Surely. But every woman who can’t or won’t have babies knows this is the sentence she imposes on potential husbands. A considerate person would have thought about that, and she would have backed off and encouraged me to find someone suitable. I was willing to die a bachelor, but if married, I wanted to have children.

If I had given in to the pressure, which was never even a remote possibility, I wouldn’t be waking up every day bathed in the presence and love of my very own family. I wouldn’t get to hold my baby son and kiss him. I wouldn’t get to pray for him and speak blessings over him.

My phone wouldn’t be jammed with pictures of my wife and son. My boy fresh from delivery. My boy swaddled in the bassinet. Taking his first trip to Home Depot. Being bathed by my wife in the utility sink. Going to his first restaurant. Sitting up by himself. Crawling. Standing up while holding a chair leg. Sitting in a grocery cart outside Costco while my wife beams with joy.

I’m sorry life doesn’t work out for everyone. My own life was a disappointing mess until I was well into middle age, so I know how it feels. Doesn’t mean I’m the catcher in the rye for every woman who is in the same boat. I can’t do it, and it would be wrong to do it. Your problems are not my fault. They’re your fault.

Choosing the wife I did doesn’t make me immature, insecure, a fetishist, selfish, gullible, domineering, or unwilling to face reality. I chose a magnificent helper, and we could not love our baby more. You know all those miserable couples on Facebook who post glowing entries about their wonderful lives together? That’s not us. Our lives really are wonderful, thanks to our patient, forgiving, generous, reliable father.

There are a lot of women out there who don’t think at all about the welfare of their potential husbands. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Save me. Save my kids. Serve a man’s proper purpose. You should love me because I want you, or, worse, because I need you.

Actual love is not selfish.

I used to pray for God to give me someone to pour myself out for. Like most husbands and fathers, I take pleasure in sacrificing for my wife and child. I didn’t say, “Please make her rich. Give her a nice car. Give me a warm body so I don’t feel lonely at night. Make her good at fixing our house and vehicles. Send me someone to solve the problems I caused.”

I’m not a good person, but I genuinely wanted to give of myself. I didn’t pray for God to send me someone who would make sacrifices for me. I wasn’t like a Titanic survivor pleading for God to send me a piece of floating wreckage I could cling to until a ship came along.

A man should sacrifice for his family, but a woman shouldn’t pray for God to send her someone to sacrifice for her. She should pray for someone to whom she can be a good helper. A woman should be a good helper, but a man should pray for God to send him someone to make sacrifices for.

And she should be someone he actually wants.

I apologize for nothing except dating people who could never have been good Christian wives. That was unfair to them. I don’t apologize for rejecting anyone, and I don’t feel even the tiniest trace of resentment toward women who rejected me. They were right. The ones who rejected me when I was young dodged a bullet.

If you’re a female troll, and you think I’m still a bullet, all I can say is, my wife sees me very, very differently.

My son is on the floor at my feet, moving the end table around and grabbing my leg while I type. He coos and grunts with pleasure. He explains what he’s doing with incomprehensible babble. What did I ever do to deserve to be so blessed? Nothing.

This is what some women thought I should give up on and do without, forever, so I could give them everything and get precious little back. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s not me.

Don’t marry the wrong person. It is literally worse than cancer. Get to know the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues. Beg God to clean you up for marriage, and ask him to send you the right person.

On your own, you have no chance.

Current Population: Three

The Wonder Baby is nearly 8 months old. What should I say about him?

I suppose I should write about his personality.

He is possibly the funniest baby that ever lived. It seems like everything he does is funny, from screaming with joy for no apparent reason to breaking wind in my face when I’m trying to bond with him.

He puts everything in his mouth. He really loves charging cables and TV remotes. He puts live charging cables in his mouth and sucks on them. I tell people that’s why he has so much energy. I just ordered a new remote because after he got done chewing on the old one, it didn’t work.

He loves people. He makes eye contact with anyone who talks to him, and he smiles and giggles at them. He trusts everyone.

Enjoy that while it lasts, my son.

He sleeps between us, and he wakes up before we do. He stares at me and waits for me to wake up. When I snore, he thinks I’m talking to him, and it makes him happy.

He has learned to reach over and scratch my shoulder to wake me up.

He finds my attention overwhelming. When I look at him and talk to him, he opens his mouth in a big, toothless smile, and his whole face lights up. He gets so excited, he has to turn away and bury his face in his mom’s shoulder.

At some point during the last month, he decided he wanted to stand, so he grabs things and pulls himself to his feet. He can’t walk yet, but he loves standing, and he will do it for long periods.

He crawls a lot, and he takes off suddenly, so if we’re both on the bed, I have to hold onto a leg or something to keep him from launching himself over the side like a depth charge. He has started crawling out of the bedroom and into the hall.

He holds his own bottles, and he holds his sippy cup and drinks water from it. He’s a big eater. It seems like his mom is shoveling food into him all the time.

He eats and drinks ferociously. He gets very agitated when his bottle doesn’t come immediately, and he screams and cries. Then when he gets what he wants, he sucks like he just crawled out of the desert.

When he poops, he growls like an angry Rottweiler. He likes to poop at the table, during meals. We can pretty much count on hearing that growl when we sit down to eat. He also likes to poop when he sees Dad.

He adores his mother. Sometimes he gets very upset because she has left the room. He will stand in his crib, facing the door, and yell until she returns.

He can’t stop scratching his crotch. I keep telling him we’re not Italian, but he does it anyway. When I change his diaper and put zinc oxide on his crotch, he shoves both hands into it and smears it on other parts of his body. I try to restrain his hands, but it’s impossible.

He pulls his mother’s hair. He thinks it’s wonderful. He especially likes pulling it while she’s trying to sleep.

He likes putting his mouth on his parents and making gross noises. He thinks this is fantastic.

He screams when he’s happy, but he also screams when he’s upset, so sometimes we have to try to figure out which it is. Overall, he is a very happy baby.

He is fascinated by everything. He is extremely aware of his surroundings. He looks around constantly. If he sees that something interests us, he wants it. This is why he likes chewing on remotes and phones. He has a rubber baby remote, but he has figured out that it’s not the real thing, so he doesn’t have much interest in it.

We took him to Costco, where they have enormous ceiling fans around 15 feet across. We noticed he was leaning back in the cart, looking up, and my wife realized he was staring at the fans.

He thinks Costco ice cream is the best.

He hasn’t spoken any English yet, but he babbles in his own language all day. He talks to us, to himself, to the windows…he is not picky.

He likes being tickled, and he loves it when we rub his belly with our heads. He pulls our hair and shrieks with joy. He never gets tired of it.

He’s still very strong. The other day while I was in bed, I felt someone grab my arm and move it. I thought it was my wife, but it was him. His hands are thick and muscular. He has what millennials call “core strength.” When you hold him horizontally, he is as straight as a board.

He loves the shower. His shower is our utility sink, which has a special plastic seat and a sprayer on a hose. He loves having poop hosed off of him and being washed with hand soap. He likes lapping at the hot water as it comes out of the sprayer.

He takes things apart, so he is definitely male. He unscrewed a knob and removed it from a drawer. He has learned to remove rubber caps from doorstops, so we had to get baby-safe doorstops so he wouldn’t choke on the caps.

He gets tons of affection. He is with his mother most of the time, and she sings songs to him and holds him over her head. The “Changing Baby’s Diaper” song. The “Baby and his Mommy, They Love Each Other” song. There are others. He can’t get enough of this stuff.

I had to tell his mother he would like having his hair combed. I didn’t realize she didn’t know. It’s easy to run a comb through most types of Caucasian hair, but it doesn’t work for most Africans, so they have no idea how it feels. When I was little, my mother used to sit me down and comb my hair slowly, and I loved it. Now my son loves it. His hair is curly, but a comb will go through it.

This is a great tip for black parents of biracial kids.

We squeeze him and rub him and toss him around. He likes being thrown on the bed over and over. He’s a rough-and-tumble kid. He prefers being thrown around to being handled gently.

He likes making music. He has a little keyboard, and he likes to bang on it and stare at it.

He has a crew of stuffed animals that keep him company when we’re out and about. Mr. Bear. Mrs. Cow. Mr. Polar, the other bear. We have three Mrs. Cows because they get dirty and because we don’t always know where they are.

Mrs. Cow was originally Mr. Cow, but my wife changed her name because she was concerned about the consequences of misgendering.

I don’t know if women who don’t raise their own kids know what they’re missing. My wife wants to be with her son all the time. They’re always busy together. She shows him numbers. She takes him for walks and shows him the trees and birds. She puts little outfits on him. She shows him to her relatives on video chats. She sings her songs to him. He always wants more; he seems to think they are parts of one creature. The thought of getting a job is abhorrent to her, understandably.

It seems wrong to me, too. I can’t believe any woman would prefer a job to her own children. I think we are doing things the correct way.

We pray with him. I tell him Yeshua is God, and I tell him Yeshua loves him even more than we do. I speak blessings over him in the name of Yeshua.

We don’t work on Sundays any more. Sundays are for God and family.

Whatever his future holds, he will be better off than his mother and I. My mother rarely took my sister and me to church, and she taught us almost nothing about Yeshua. My dad either slept late or played golf on Sundays, and I never saw him pray until he was 87 years old and dying from dementia. I grew up in a house that was empty of purpose and hope, and we were all miserable. My son lives in a house of love and God’s favor.

He will be walking at talking soon, and that means we will be able to tell him about God.

Depends on Which Pole You’re On

I had a spectacular day.

I was going to go outside and remove the nasty old rocks around an unwanted flowerbed, but instead, I ordered country ham over the web and took the family to Costco for pizza. We actually like having dinner at Costco, and it runs us about 10 dollars.

I love country ham, but it has to be good. My grandmother used to cure her own hams back in Kentucky, and she aged them a couple of years, so they were magnificent. They were also fatter than today’s hams, so there was no lack of grease for gravy. If you go into a grocery store that sells country hams, you’re likely to end up with Smithfield or Clifty Farms, which are aged very little and lacking in flavor. Also, Smithfield ham smells a little bit like manure.

One of the pleasures of having a foreign wife is introducing her to American food. My wife loves barbecue, Ruth’s Chris, Lee’s Famous Fried Chicken, Dr. Pepper, and a number of other things, but she has been a little slow to embrace country ham.

A country ham is supposed to be fermented. The aroma is supposed to have a little funk to it, and when you slice the ham, you should have to scrape some mold off of it. It’s also supposed to be very, very salty. It’s supposed to contain enough salt to prevent harmful bacteria from growing. After all, country ham was invented in order to help people preserve pork so they had meat during the winter. People made it as a survival tool.

When my wife tried country ham, she did not think much of it, but I fried a piece yesterday, and she liked it. She keeps telling me she is becoming Americanized. She has quit eating the flavorless corn mush Zambians call nshima, for example.

A few years back, I ordered samples from several ham companies so I could compare them. Sadly, I failed to record the results of this important research, so I was forced to repeat it.

I used to order hams from a company called Gatton Farms, but they went out of business. After that, I uses Scott’s hams, but they tanked, too. This is why I needed to find a new source.

My second cousin Wade, who is now gone, liked Colonel Newsom’s hams, made in Princeton, Kentucky. He once told me walking into Newsom’s was like entering a shrine.

I’m sure he knew what he was talking about. Everyone from the hills knows a good ham when he tastes one, and it seems like no one else does. My grandparents and all of their daughters knew what a good ham tasted like. I know. But people on food websites make deplorable recommendations.

Newsom’s doesn’t use curing salt. Just table salt, brown sugar, and hickory smoke. My understanding is that curing salt speeds up the cure process. Personally, I have nothing against it, as long as the ham gets plenty of aging time in spite of it.

I have never had a Newsom’s ham. They are extremely expensive, and Gatton Farms and Scott’s made top-notch products for way less. I used to get a whole ham, sliced, bagged and shipped, for under $70. I couldn’t persuade myself to spend more for Newsom’s.

Yesterday I decided to make sure I wasn’t missing out. I ordered a whole Newsom’s ham. Life is short. When my wife saw me looking at the website, she increased my joy by suggesting I order sausage, too. She used to refuse American sausage. She’s coming around!

It wasn’t a cheap purchase, but it will be nice to find out whether these hams are as good as some people think they are.

I also ordered slices from Broadbent’s and Benton’s; two other famous ham companies. My hope is that they will turn out to be as good or better than Newsom’s. If so, I won’t have to pay Newsom prices in the future.

The important thing will be to record the results of the experiment. If I could remember what I thought of Broadbent’s and Benton’s the last time I compared them, I wouldn’t need to spend more money.

My wife was also critical of Southern-style collards, which I love. I boil them forever with ham hocks or neckbones or whatever other smoked pork products are available, and they are heavenly.

Zambians are like yankees. They barely cook their greens. Sure, they look nice, and they have a less-wilted texture some people like, but that slow-cooked flavor is not there. It’s a giant waste of potential.

Yankees always say Southerners turn vegetables into mush. They don’t know what slow-cooked vegetables are supposed to taste like, so they don’t know what they’re missing.

Now my wife says she loves Southern-style collards. We have been going to a place called Fat Boys BBQ, and they serve collards. They won her over.

Sadly, Newsom’s doesn’t slice hams, so I will have to do it myself or find a butcher who has a machine. I can vacuum-seal the slices, but the tedious job of slicing is mine. Another reason to root for the other two contenders.

I ordered the Newsom’s ham yesterday, and I ordered samples from Broadbent’s and Benton’s today. Feeling satisfied with my accomplishments, I forgot all about moving the rocks and told my wife we were going to Costco for dinner.

We drove down to Sumter County, to the Villages. This is an enormous retirement community. It’s as close to heaven as an old person can get without dying. There are all sorts of stores, restaurants, and golf courses, and the old people zip around the community in golf carts.

There is no Costco in our county. I belonged when I lived in Miami, but I had to quit when I moved here. Last month, the Costco in the Villages opened, so I renewed my membership.

The drive is very pleasant. It was relaxing. Lots of little farms. Oaks arching over the roads. You would never know you were in the same state as Florida Man or Miami’s aggressive hordes.

It was very different from our recent visit to Gainesville for P.F. Chang’s.

To get to Gainesville, you have to use I-75, which is crowded and full of pushy drivers. Florida’s population keeps growing, and the main roads have not kept up. The pushy drivers are from South Florida, along with some from Georgia. People here don’t act like that.

We visited Trader Joe’s, P.F. Chang’s, and Bass Pro, in that order.

Gainesville is in Alachua County. It’s where the University of Florida is located, so it’s full of miserable people. College students from other places. Angry, cynical leftist academics. On a visit prior to our last one, we saw two young men in prairie dresses and work boots. We ate at a restaurant where they gave us paper straws. What more do I have to tell you? But I will tell you more anyway.

Trader Joe’s was packed with leftists. Young college students; not the kind of people who build Charlie Kirk memorials. Old ones who looked like worn-out communists. Freaks by choice.

In the parking lot, people were driving aggressively to get as close to the door as they could. That never happens here.

The atmosphere was cold and unfriendly. I would even call it tense. People seemed rushed. I asked my wife what she thought of the people, and she told me she would tell me when we got outside.

When we take our baby out in our county, people always want to see him. They tell us how cute he is. They say they want to take him home. At Trader Joe’s, precisely one lady noticed him.

At Bass Pro, the atmosphere was completely different. It was peaceful. We felt calm. Everyone was friendly. We took our baby to see the aquarium, and he loved it. Other families were showing their little ones the fish.

Today, before we went into Costco, we checked out Fresh Market, an upscale grocery my wife hadn’t seen yet. The people were wonderful. Everyone wanted to see my son. They talked about how cute he was. The employees loved him. They spent a lot of time telling us about the store and ways to get deals.

At Costco, my wife occupied a table, and I went to pick up pizza and a chocolate sundae. While I was gone, the old man behind my wife turned around to talk to her about the baby. He noticed how aware he was of his surroundings.

We only bought three things, so we weren’t there long, but a number of people wanted to see the baby.

He smiled at people. He loves meeting them.

The drive home was just like the first drive. No hurry. The golden light of late afternoon. A baby full of ice cream.

We could be living among sour, furious University of Florida professors who frown to the point of injuring their faces over the existence of Christian and conservate students and their beloved president. We could be in Miami, being insulted and scammed by aggressive, rude illegal aliens. We are extremely blessed to be where we are, surrounded by warm, loving people. We are blessed to have had our priorities changed so we aren’t still mud-wrestling with people whose only pleasures in life are being unhappy and making others unhappy.

This morning, we watched videos about Singapore. We both said we wished we were there instead of in the US. As much as we love our area, Singapore has some big advantages. No one is killing Christians, or anyone else, there. The air isn’t filled with hatred.

We saw a video about the huge underground developments in Singapore. They are building a vast network of tunnels attached to their clean, safe, comfortable train system. I told my wife that if anyone tried to build something like that in the US, enraged hippies would glue themselves to the pavement and scream bloody murder.

I noted the difference between videos about Singapore’s trains and videos about American subways. American videos are about terrorism and other crimes. Black people shoving whites and Asians onto the tracks. Turnstile-jumpers. Ghetto kids terrorizing passengers, doing stupid dances and demanding to be paid. Gropers. Daniel Penney being prosecuted for saving strangers from a disgusting bully.

We loved the trains in Singapore, and also in Hong Kong, for that matter. So clean, safe, and pleasant. I went to college in New York, and I can’t tell you how strange it seems to me to go down into a subway system and not be immersed in the intense aroma of fermented pee.

I told my wife Singapore reminded me of the New Jerusalem, in the Revelation. A perfect city full of peaceful, well-intended, like-minded people. Maybe that’s why it appeals to us. In our spirits, we know we are supposed to live in a place like the New Jerusalem.

We have been to Egypt, Turkey, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, Switzerland, and Italy. After Israel, we both agree that we would rather go to Singapore a third time than revisit any of the other places.

Egypt is dirty and crazy. Ireland is pleasant but boring, and the food is not good. Turkey is nice, but not nice enough to make you dream of going back soon. Rome was one giant tourist trap, and it was full of pushy illegal aliens who had no manners. Switzerland is gorgeous, but they have jacked prices up to the point where tourists feel insulted, and it’s also filling up with Indian and Chinese tourists who are not always fun to be around. Staying in Cancun is like sleeping in a college bar.

I never thought I would say this, but I am not interested in seeing Switzerland again. I used to love it, but that has changed. You only have to charge me $7.50 for tap water once to make me understand that I’m unwelcome.

My wife doesn’t want to go back to Rome, ever. The illegals really got to her. She says she would make an exception so our children could see it. I liked Rome a little better, and I like Italians (real Italians in Europe), but I’m not hot to go back.

Singapore feels like home. When we arrived for our second visit, we felt like we were home again. It’s the strangest thing.

Singaporeans do everything well. They shame Americans every day.

To get back to the day I just had, I don’t know what I did to deserve a life this good. Actually, I know I didn’t do anything. I was rotten and immature. I deserve evil, and the Lord gave me the good he deserves.

I look forward to a bright future. The millennium. The New Jerusalem. Seeing God face to face. And maybe before the rapture or the day my body gives out, I’ll get to see Singapore a few more times.

You’ll Need the Official Hat and Shirt

I need to stop looking at the news. My general rule is to avoid it. Sometimes people tell me about stories, though, and occasionally, I see something I feel I need to look into. When Charlie Kirk was murdered by a liberal Mormon boy who cohabitated with a homosexual transvestite, I looked at a number of stories.

I am cutting back again, but I still heard about Ryder Corral, a sloppy, spoiled leftist baby man who trampled the objects set out as a tribute to Kirk in front of the offices of Turning Point USA. He did this in front of Fox News cameras along with a crowd of conservative and Christian mourners, one of whom slung him to the ground and put a stop to his antics.

Corral was wearing a shirt featuring the same design the coward Tyler Robinson wore when he shot Charlie Kirk with a deer rifle in front of his young wife and two small children. The design shows a flying eagle in front of our flag, along with the words “Land of the Free Home of the Brave.”

Pretty ironic, on the front of a sadistic, chickenhearted leftist punk who shot a man for exercising his freedom.

I would guess Robinson picked that shirt so he would look like a harmless conservative as he moved around the campus of the university where he shot Kirk.

Corral’s infantile rampage isn’t the big story. I don’t think people realize this. His shirt is the story.

Kirk had his neck blown apart on September 10. Corral threw his sociopathic tantrum on September 15. He already had the shirt. How did he get it so fast?

Sick leftists are selling copies of the shirt online. That’s how Corral got his shirt. In order for him to have it to wear on September 15, he must have ordered it no later than September 13. That’s how quickly Democrats seized on the opportunity to celebrate a brutal, bloody, public murder.

Today I Googled, and I found all sorts of ads for Tyler Robinson shirts. I took some screenshots on my phone, and I will show them to you now.

For a while, you could buy them on Walmart’s site.

This isn’t the first time this has happened during the last year. When another leftist coward, Luigi Mangione, shot down an insurance executive, other leftists lined up to buy hats identified with a video game character named Luigi. They wear them at their events. Not a few of them. Many of them.

If you don’t understand that America is in a very bad state, you need to wake up. Stop comparing today to yesterday. Compare it to the 20th century.

Imagine it’s 1963. John Kennedy’s brains have just been scrubbed off the car he was riding in when a communist shot them out of his head. Then imagine seeing people walking around in hats and shirts celebrating Lee Harvey Oswald.

Imagine it’s 1981. President Reagan is still hospitalized after being shot by a lunatic who thought it would impress an actress. Then imagine seeing people wearing T-shirts with the assassin’s picture on them.

We are going to have a civil war. Leftists will not leave it alone. For all their “coexist” bumper stickers and lying about peace, they are going to keep tormenting the rest of us until there is a nationwide reaction.

While I was taking a shooting class (not a killing class or militia preparation class), one of my instructors said something to us about how people were going to have to rise up and do something about America’s situation. He was talking about going to war.

There are a lot of problems with his thinking. One big one is that he’s talking about a war that can’t be won.

In order to truly win a war, you have to have a sane enemy, or at least one whose sanity can be restored. Otherwise, after the battles are over, you have to occupy his territory forever. A sane enemy will come around and let things drop. The Japanese, Austrians, and Germans were vicious and disgusting, but they made peace with us because the demons that motivated them were not told to keep going. American leftists are ruled by apocalyptic demons, sent to figuratively raise hell until after the tribulation. They are not going to stand down.

Another problem: there can be no front. Even in states that are fairly politically pure, the population is mixed. We work alongside lefists. They sit around dinner tables with us. They are our groomsmen and maids of honor. Our close relatives. They’re not going to show up as a separate force at a clearly-defined border. Americans will be killing each other all over the place, and they will be sneaky about it, just like the Viet Cong. You’ll be sitting at Five Guys, and an IED will go off. You’ll be gassing up your car, and an Eagle Scout wearing a Tyler Robinson shirt will shoot you from cover.

People we associate with all the time will become hidden dangers. It’s very difficult to deal with that kind of enemy.

There are potential killers and their helpers all around you. You don’t know they’re against you. You may find out who they are one day.

My buddy Mike posted something nice about Charlie Kirk on Facebook, and one of his “friends” excoriated him and spewed the usual lies about Kirk. Then she went after Kirk’s children. Look:

His daughter is three, and his son is one.

Aren’t women supposed to be child nurturers? Did I imagine that?

There is no military solution to the problem. We can’t put a third or half of our population in prison. We can’t occupy every big city. We can’t bomb them; they live in our houses.

America had a civil war a century and a half ago, and we have pretty much gotten over it, but it was different. Americans weren’t insane. They were divided by their opinions on important issues, but they never felt the people on the other side didn’t deserve to exist.

Leftists believe people like Charlie Kirk and me should not be allowed to exist. We should not have jobs. We should not be allowed to speak. No one should be able to see or hear us.

This is a common thread with Satan’s children. They don’t just want to win. They want their victims to cease to exist, and they want it to look like they never existed. This is why God would not let the Jews cremate their dead, and it’s why the Nazis used cremation to get rid of their bodies.

In the supernatural world, one of the worst types of harm is to have your name and memory blotted out. This is why some religious Jews call Yeshua “YESHU,” which is an initialism for, “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.” The problem for leftists isn’t just that we exist; it’s that we ever existed in the past.

Ryder Corral’s sick actions show that demons still want to erase the memory of those who oppose Satan. Charlie Kirk is dead, and his work will not continue. That should be sufficient to satisfy leftists, but it’s not. The demons are furious that people remember him. The memorial display Corral and his demons attacked is a reminder Satan can’t stand.

The thing that makes you Satan’s child is to have a character similar to Satan’s. Satan wants all the attention, because he’s like a gay man who wants to be the queen bee; the only Cher impersonator at the party. It enrages him that people even know who Yeshua is. His children are enraged that people know who Charlie Kirk was.

A man in Colorado put up a display honoring Kirk. He put a banner on his fence. A cowardly leftist came in the night, burned the banner, and threw a rock through his car’s rear windshield. Anyone who expresses sympathy for Kirk in public will make cowardly enemies.

In 2017, God told me the hatred that would drive leftists and pagans to murder us was already here, and increasingly, we see it manifesting. It’s so strong, it has even united homosexuals with Muslims who murder them. Satan’s children are like billions of rocks in billions of slingshots, pulled back and waiting to be released.

There is nothing we can do to prevent the final conflict or prevent them from taking over. It has been prophesied. We can do little things here and there to protect ourselves, but the earthly war is lost. There is no remedy for the world, but individuals can draw close to God and get protection. They can be isolated from the world and set aside in relatively friendly areas. They can learn to pray and do battle in the supernatural realm.

There is no reason to feel doomed. That’s not for us. It’s for them. Leftists will only with in the natural realm, on a macroscopic scale. We will have complete victory in the supernatural realm, and eventually, we will see a world without leftists, paganism, war, and hatred. A world of peace and love, and not just the false kind we read about in stickers on the backs of hybrid cars.

You know people who, right now, are willing to kill you. I mean people who are friendly now. You’ll find out about them soon enough. You need to separate yourself from them as much as you can. You need to get away from their culture. There is no point in building bridges God is going to burn.

Last night, I told my wife I had seen a lot of disaster movies, but it was really something, finding myself living in one. I said the end of civilization was quite a spectacle. A rare experience, since it only happens once.

Well…twice, if you count the flood.

American Parents Made This Happen

If Charlie Kirk’s barbaric, infantile killing has resulted in any good, it is that American adults are now being forced to look at the Satanic culture of our wrecked educational system.

Teachers and other school employees are making the news all over the country for celebrating Kirk’s death. It’s not a fringe phenomenon. It’s a tidal wave that covers the entire United States.

Even in conservative areas, the people who run our school system are usually leftists who hate Christianity and capitalism, and who bully students into supporting the left’s hatred or at least remaining silent.

The irony of educators publicly supporting a school shooting should be obvious even to leftists, but demons control the perceptions of people who don’t know the Holy Spirt, and they give them disdain for the truth.

God has said, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Satan agrees. That’s why he captured our educational system.

I suppose there will be scattered improvements, but overall, it will get worse. It’s nice to see that some people are outraged, but when the dust settles, leftists will still be in charge of your kids, and they will keep doing what they do. It probably won’t be long before the dominant position in American classrooms as that the firing of teachers who celebrated Kirk’s murder was an outbreak of fascist persecution.

Who is Really Blocking Blessings?

Knowing certain people is like having shingles. You go years without an eruption, and then you feel that familiar sensation again.

Today I heard a police siren outside my house. I looked out, and I saw a cop car at my gate. The officer was waving. I buzzed him in.

He told me nothing was wrong, meaning I was not in trouble, but he named my sister and asked if I were her brother. I reluctantly said I was, and I asked what she had done. He told me she was in a hospital in Kentucky, and a caregiver was trying to get in touch with me. He did not have details.

Thinking she might be dead or dying, which would be something I would need to know about, I took the caregiver’s number. I figured this person was a nurse.

I knew one thing: I was not about to call that number without praying and without asking someone I knew in Kentucky for information. I also did a little research to make sure I would not obligate myself accidentally.

After my wife and I prayed, I called someone and asked what they knew. Nothing, but they offered to call the caregiver for me. I could not believe it. What a gift from heaven.

I didn’t want the caregiver to have my number, I did not want to be manipulated, and I definitely didn’t want to be put on the phone with my sister after a decade. It would be like erasing “3650” and writing “0” on a sign reading “DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT.”

A long time later, I got a call back.

My sister’s life is not in danger at the moment. The caregiver is actually a social worker who helped her move into a subsidized apartment a few years ago.

She is obese. She has diabetes. She had a fall. It was not her first. I knew that. She fell in her kitchen in about 2010 and broke her arm. She also moved in with our elderly aunt and refused to leave, and the only reason my aunt was able to get rid of her is that she fell in a ditch on the way to Whole Foods and broke her leg. While she was in the hospital, my aunt and her daughter moved my sister’s things to the subsidized apartment.

A CAT scan says she has had 4 strokes. Her memory is not good.

She says God is going to heal her.

She says nutty things. She says neighborhood kids come to her apartment, and she feeds them. This is not true.

She is being evicted because she never cleans. This is how she behaved in the only house she ever owned, which she held in joint tenancy with my father after she conned him into paying for most of it. The filth in her house was so bad, you wouldn’t understand if you hadn’t seen it. She didn’t do any maintenance, either, so the house fell apart, and my dad had to buy her out.

The caseworker sent crews to her apartment several times to clean it for her, and she would not come to the door. On one occasion, someone took her trash out, and it amounted to 26 bags.

No surprise. My mother used to pay for apartments for her, and to prevent eviction, she used to go clean them. She would haul out multiple bags full of filthy garbage and dog feces.

When she is thrown out, she will have to wait three years to get another subsidized apartment. If she gets one, she will be evicted from it, too.

Someone has looked the apartment over, and they say the contents are a total loss. There is filth on everything. It’s full of dirty clothes that are beyond saving. Apparently, she has been buying new clothes instead of doing laundry.

She has to go, because one filthy unit will eventually ruin an entire building. Roaches and other pests will use it as a base and maternity ward.

Her car has been impounded. Somehow, she has a driver’s license, but it is being taken away. She has 4 hit-and-run charges. There are two active criminal cases on the county website where she lives, but the site won’t tell me what they’re about. Maybe the traffic cases. She does not have car insurance.

The caseworker wants someone to make medical decisions for her. I could do that, right? I could, but I won’t. It would put me in a position where she could sue me or report me to the authorities over imagined malfeasance. Also, and more importantly, I couldn’t stand being subjected to her. I am too old. I have suffered enough.

God has worked things out so I have no abusive or toxic people in my life. If I bring the worst one back in voluntarily, is that gratitude? Should he continue to help me? This is one of the greatest gifts he has given me; one of the greatest gifts anyone could have. I don’t want to spit on it.

She will get medical treatment. I checked, so it’s not as if she will do without treatment if no one steps up to make her decisions. I don’t know why they want a family member involved, except that it may save the government money. I don’t know, but I feel sure there are people who make medical decisions for indigent individuals who don’t have family. I don’t think they just toss them into dumpsters.

It occurred to me that the person I spoke to could make the decisions. I would be happy to consult, as long as I could stay here and never speak to my sister. I would even be glad to pay a monthly fee. The person I spoke to is not a tempting lawsuit target.

I am told something has to be done, because my sister will have nowhere to go in a day or two. Well, I can’t help that. Look at the options.

1. Have her move in with me. My wife would leave and take my son, and I would not blame her. My life would be shortened, and I would wish for death every day. Frankly, I would rather see my sister die than take her in and subject myself, my wife, and my wonderful baby son to her.

2. Pay for an apartment. She would be evicted. I would be liable for the repairs, extensive pest control treatment, days of cleaning, lost rent, and junk removal.

3. Buy a house for her. This has been tried.

4. Put her in a facility. She would be evicted. See 2. Even if she did not destroy the place, she would be so obnoxious, they would have to get rid of her in order to maintain order. This isn’t a possibility; it’s a certainty. It has happened already.

5. Homeless shelter. That’s where she’s going to go, if they will take her. They will probably throw her out before long, but at least I won’t have to pay for new drywall and plumbing.

Prison or a mental asylum would be the best thing for her, because they could keep her clean, give her medical care, and feed her, and she wouldn’t be able to defy them. No one else can do it.

The person I spoke to asked if I wanted to do anything to save the car. No. I do not. She can’t drive it anyway, so it has to go. Maybe a relative of ours would agree to sell it for her. I can only think of one who would dare try.

The caseworker likes my sister. She thinks she’s funny. She didn’t have to raise her or be her sibling, however. She was not there to see her torment her mother over and over. She was not there when she was torturing her little brother in the crib. She was not there when she tried to victimize her elderly father or when she abused her frail, elderly aunt and refused to leave her home.

She wasn’t there when she got thrown out of Teen Challenge, of all places. When you hit bottom and find yourself in Teen Challenge, and you abuse the employees and residents until they give you one day to leave, you should know you are very, very special.

I can’t help her. Maybe I can work it out so someone assumes responsibility for her medical decisions, but even that is risky. She will never get better. She will keep doing what she does until she dies. No one can help, but people can become enablers.

The caseworker is a woman. She is probably an emotional person; the field attracts that type. I doubt she has thought the situation through, as I just did. She may marvel to see the family of a helpless person abandon her. She may be under a common Christian delusion, which is that God never gives up on anyone, so we shouldn’t either.

God gives up on people. He gave up on the entire world in Noah’s time. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah. He will give up on the world again, precipitating the rapture and tribulation. He gave up on the Amalekites and the residents of various Canaanite cities. Yeshua gave up on cities that would not receive him. He told his disciples to do the same.

There is one person who could help my sister, and it’s not Yeshua. It’s my sister. Yeshua has done everything he could. My sister refuses to help herself by doing simple things like cooperating with her caseworker. She refuses to confess and repent. The horse is at the water trough, but it will not drink.

There is a small possibility that I might involve myself peripherally in getting someone to handle the medical decisions, but I don’t think I will. I think God told me I should not even think about my sister, and I don’t believe he wants me tossing others into her snake pit. Fixing her medical care won’t change much, anyway.

She will lose the car. She will go to a shelter, if they will have her. She will not get another apartment. I suppose she will live in a tent. There are tent camps in her area. The county and city clear them out, but they return.

Until today, I never thought much about the final residences of incorrigible people who don’t qualify for prison or permanent commission to institutions. I see how it works now. We are told encampments exist because of bad old capitalism or because we don’t offer enough care. Not true. People who live in tents are there because they don’t give us options. They won’t work with us, so we can’t help them. And leftists blame society, not the guilty.

Sure, there are some tent residents who can’t be blamed because of mental illness, but on the other hand, you can make yourself mentally ill by being an unrepentant jerk all your life. Not every mental case is a blameless person who suddenly went schizophrenic without warning. There are plenty of crazy homeless people who caused their own mental issues.

My sister appears to be somewhat crazy now, but that was not always the case. She made herself crazy through decades of evil decisions she made in cold blood while in her right mind.

She is as self-righteous as anyone on Earth. She is always right. She is always the victim. Everyone owes her an apology. Other people cause all of her problems. She could be saved if she would admit guilt, repent, and have her many demons cast out. Pride, a love of lying, and hostility are the hedges that confine her with her demons.

So that’s it. I’ll pray with my wife, and we will probably leave it at that.

One Less Thing to Worry About

I enjoy watching Mark Hemans on Youtube. He is a former missionary, and now he flies all over the world healing people. He learned from Bill Subritzky, a wealthy New Zealand developer who learned from T.B. Joshua.

He accepts donations, but he never asks for a dime. He never preaches the prosperity gospel. He hasn’t made any nutty prophesies about presidential election. The healings that take place at his meetings look legitimate to me. People bring doctors’ notes and so on.

Today I saw a video in which he prayed for healing for people with bone problems and so on. For a couple of weeks or so, I’ve had pain in my wrist on one side When I put my hand down to rest my weight on it, it hurt. I figured it would go away. I hoped I wouldn’t have to see a doctor.

I think of physicians as witch doctors. I don’t mean it in a hostile way. They are extremely weak and ignorant compared to God, the original healer. They fail all the time. They charge too much. Treatment often involves inconvenience, pain, and humiliation for patients. There are many, many things they can’t treat at all. There are many conditions they can’t explain. They actually have a word for “We don’t know what’s going on.” That word is “ideopathic.” It sounds a lot better than confessing complete ignorance.

Of course, I use doctors, because sometimes my own efforts at getting healed don’t work. I assume I’m doing things wrong. I have found doctors to be useful for simple things like vaccinations, warts, and setting broken bones. If I needed surgery urgently, and I couldn’t get healed, I would have the surgery.

I have had more than one miraculous healing, so I try to go to God first when I have a problem. Sometimes I forget.

Today I prayed along with Mark Hemans, for myself and other people. When I got done, the problem with my wrist was gone. I could feel a tiny remnant of the pain, but I was definitely healed.

When God does something for you, you should tell people, so here I am.

A few weeks back, I did my rear brakes, so I had to sit on a very low stool. While I was working, I stood up and did something to my left knee. I wondered if I had torn an important ligament. That’s a problem doctors can only fix with surgery. It’s a big deal.

My knee gave me sharp pains when I bent it too much. Putting on pants was very risky. When I lifted my left leg too high, pain shot through my knee and shin.

I was able to walk normally. I only felt pain when I bent the knee too much.

I had my wife pray for me, lay her hands on my leg, and apply oil.

My knee started getting better right away, and in a week or so, I couldn’t feel any pain at all. It was like I was never hurt.

By this time, I had developed a fear of putting my pants on, so I had to retrain myself to raise my leg without thinking about it.

During this time, I thought about a fact of which I have often lost sight: miracles don’t have to be instantaneous. In fact, the Bible doesn’t say Yeshua always healed people instantly. It just says he healed them. The Bible says that if we lay hands on the sick, they shall recover, but it doesn’t say it will happen in a second.

Yeshua tried to heal a blind man three times. The improvement got better every time. It didn’t happen all at once, the first time he tried.

There is nothing like divine healing. So much better than sitting in a doctor’s office, being billed huge amounts they don’t tell you about up front and getting bad results. It’s better than sucking down expensive prescription drugs with side effects and hoping they don’t ruin your health.

My little parrot Marvin died last month, and we prayed for her. We could not get a healing for her. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I should have fasted more.

It made me think about what I would like to do for God. For years, I’ve been praying for him to use me to heal people, but losing Marvin made me think more in terms of healing the small and helpless. Babies, children, and even pets. It is painful to lose anyone you care about, but it’s much worse when it’s someone small and helpless who depends on you for everything. When a child, baby, or pet dies on your watch, it’s your failure.

Our son has no real health problems. He had a crooked toe when he was born, but it’s nearly normal now. Taking him to doctors for little things makes me feel for the millions of people who have to watch their babies suffer and die every year. I don’t know how they keep on living.

In any case, I have testified. I hope I get to be involved in ending other people’s suffering eventually.

MORE

I don’t like giving negative testimony, but lying testimony is much worse, so here goes.

After my wrist was healed, it felt fine for a long time, but maybe eight or ten hours, the pain came back. It has gone away a few times since then, but it keeps returning.

It Means You’re Doing Well

Not long ago, I was praying and prophesying, and I got this sentence: “The world hates me.”

I already knew that. The world hates everyone who might possibly be favored by God. The world hates people who really are close to God, and it hates people it thinks could be close to God now or in the future. It hates people preemptively, just in case they get close to God.

You can see this in action in the press coverage of Israel, a perennial victim of actual, openly confessed, state-sponsored, Muslim-sponsored genocide. The press tells us Israel is committing genocide when, in reality, the Jews are simply responding to a state of siege that has existed ever since Jacob’s time.

Jewish religious authorities missed the Messiah and think they please God when they make turning people away from him their life’s work, so you might say they’re not close to God, but he has not forgotten them. He has said a woman can forget a baby she breastfed, but he can’t forget Zion:

But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.

If God has not forgotten you, Satan and his children will remember you, too.

When God reminded me that the world hates me, it was helpful, because every so often, while I’m getting along with Satan’s children, one of them lets me know they can turn on me at any time.

I belong to a forum, and people were discussing Popular Mechanics. This used to be a wonderful magazine full of information about tool projects and methods. People were criticizing Pop Mech because, well, it stinks. It’s a horrible, boring magazine of little use to anyone.

As a former subscriber, I mentioned a couple of things I didn’t like about it.

Pop Mech has a relationship with Glenn Reynolds. This makes no sense at all. He has never shown any signs of knowing anything about tools or technology. He teaches law and posts links to things other people wrote on his blog. Far as I know, that’s about it. You might as well hire Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow to tell people about tools.

They should have been able to find someone, in the entire United States, who was familiar with tools and could also write.

Who will he write for next? The Lancet?

I didn’t like the articles I saw, either. In the old days, they might tell you how to run a water pipe under a concrete walk or build a meter for testing resistance. When my magazines started rolling in, they were full of useless junk.

First, the articles about tools were lame. “Find Out Which Inadequate Chinese Sustainable Organic Plastic-Handled Toolkit is Best to Keep in Your Frunk.” Stuff like that. And they published articles about “great tools” that were pretty clearly paid placement.

Second, the projects were awful. Simple plans for ugly furniture made of plywood, for example. It was like they had realized American men had stopped producing testosterone decades ago and were no longer capable of operating real tools with any degree of skill, so they pandered to men they assumed were afraid to use tools for fear of scratching their nail polish.

Maybe they dumbed down the projects in a futile effort to fan the flames of women’s nonexistent interest in tools. Women are different from men. They will always be in the minority in STEM fields and anything involving tools. There will probably always be 8 employed male engineers for every female, mainly because women are not interested in engineering. These truths don’t penetrate the skulls of people who are determined to convince the world nurture is everything.

Third, there was a lot of political fluff that was clearly intended to be social engineering. “Meet 10 CEO’s Under 30 who Made it in Spite of Being Gay/Asian/Black/Female/Crippled/Whatever.” Articles like that are a waste of paper. Put them in Mother Jones or something. Nobody opens Popular Mechanics hoping to find out a lesbian illegal alien is running a successful CNC shop that makes can openers from recycled cans.

Girls can use tools, too! Talk about the soft sexism of low expectations. Wow; a woman operated a drill press. Next, they’ll be walking on their hind feet and using iPads to ask for banana slices.

The magazine was boring and of no use whatsoever, so I did not renew my subscription.

Here is a link to the kind of article I never saw when I subscribed: How to do a Complete Brake System Checkout.

Does Glenn Reynolds do his own brakes? Doubtful. I do. Google “Glenn Reynolds” and “wrench” or “tools” and see what comes up. Nothing.

Doing your own brakes is near the very bottom of the list of things you should be able to do if you want to be tool-literate. It’s down there with changing your oil and cleaning a dryer vent. It’s something millions of American men do all the time. Saying I do my own brakes is not much of a boast.

So anyway, I voiced the above concerns on the forum, and my post was deleted. I was accused of “thinly-veiled racism” and “personal attacks.”

This is where we are now. Complaining about worthless and off-topic material in a magazine that spent roughly a century telling people about tools and things that could be done with them is racism and personal attacks.

They didn’t say who I attacked. I think they just threw that in because their feelings were hurt.

I doubt they were talking about Reynolds, because all I said was that he didn’t know anything about tools. Which is true. Ordinarily, when you get in trouble for making personal attacks on a forum, it has something to do with other forum members, but I didn’t say anything critical about members.

Apparently, using the terms “minorities” and “illegal alien” is racism per se now. But what I said was true, of course. Pop Mech praised minority members and women for being successful in spite of being minority members and women. I don’t know if any of the people I saw the magazine promote were illegals. I just threw that in because it was the kind of thing I thought the editors would do. Poetic license.

By the way, “thinly-veiled racism” usually isn’t racism. The hackneyed phrase “thinly-veiled” is a verbal booster seat. It was created so leftists could accuse people of racism when they weren’t. It’s an evil tool designed to put innocent people on the defensive.

The person who deleted my comment was wrong and unfair, and maybe not very bright, but it’s not my place to tell people how to run their Internet forums. They are allowed to be wrong, unfair, and self-righteous, all day, every day.

So what is the connection between God and being slandered on a forum about tools?

The connection is that I have been treated unfairly all my life, in every area of life. Things I earned were given to others. Positions. Titles. Jobs. Money. I have been slandered so much, I can’t begin to recall the instances. When the world hates you because you might be important to God, it doesn’t treat you well in matters not involving religion and then jump in to attack when religion is relevant; it abuses you all the time.

It’s important to realize this, because otherwise you come to trust the world. You think, “If I do what everyone else does, I’ll get what everyone else gets.” It doesn’t work that way.

Look at Israel. The only civilized nation in the Middle East. A nation what works very, very hard to protect enemy noncombatants. A nation that is among the first to offer aid when bitter enemies have earthquakes and so on. But Satan’s children are busy every day, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and praising its abusers as martyrs and victims.

Look at the way Christians are portrayed on TV and in the movies. They come in two varieties. The first type is a man who seems kind of gay and gains admiration for standing up to people who criticize sin. The other is a vicious, abusive, controlling ogre–often racist–who needs to be exposed and taken down.

How often have you seen real Christians portrayed favorably on screen? Nearly never. Satan owns Hollywood, and real Christians are a threat to his empire.

If Satan thinks you look like someone God might be planning to save and put to work, you are going to be abused. Satan will send people to destroy you. Backstabbing coworkers. Bosses who promote everyone but you. Whorish women. Friends who work to make you fail. Abusive parents and teachers. Prosecutors. The police. Random criminals. Homeless demoniacs.

People who belong to fraternities and secret organizations will blackball your business. Exciting business opportunities that look like they will be your big breaks will disappear after you put in a lot of time and work.

If you expect it, you can avoid that feeling you get when your trust is betrayed. That sensation of having your legs sliced off at the knees or taking a cannonball to the stomach. You can also avoid big losses. Satan likes getting people to invest heavily in schemes that look good but disintegrate like mirages when they think they’re getting close.

If you know the world hates you, you can take such good things as the world offers you, without great risk. You can accept the little bribes and baits without sticking your neck out and going all in.

Satan wants you to keep jumping back on the treadmill. He wants you to think persistence is the key. It’s not. You’ll never be his favorite. You’ll never get the blue ribbon or the gold medal. Your tech startup will never make you a billionaire. Other people will get things you think you deserve. If you know you were not created to be honored and promoted by the world, you will learn to be happy with very good things God provides instead of the outrageous gifts Satan gives the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Barack Obamas, and Jay Z’s.

Eventually you will learn that the things you thought you wanted were not as good as the things you got.

In 2003, God gave me this: “Our preachers are antichrists.” I learned that by trying to serve preachers, but God reminded me after I quit.

When I belonged to churches, I was frustrated, because I wanted to do so much for people, but worthless preachers and hypocritical, conceited volunteers always shot me down and kept me on the bottom.

Sometimes I wished I could talk to people from the stage, so I could tell them what God had shown me. Things that had been extremely helpful.

At my last church, they let me speak for a few minutes. This was a place where a false prophet could hold the mike and yell all day with the pastor’s encouragement. When they handed me the mike, a horrible stench hit me. They never cleaned it! Perhaps a decade of dried and fresh spit belonging to dozens of people was in the sponge cover. The smell was like the worst bad breath you’ve ever smelled, because that’s what it was: a huge colony of pulsing, multiplying bad breath germs.

Being me, I said something like, “Wow, this thing really stinks!” I probably said they needed to clean it. They wanted me to hold it close to my mouth, but I wouldn’t do it. It was disgusting and probably dangerous. I’m sure I offended people, but they had it coming.

It’s astonishing to me that no one else ever said anything about the smell of a microphone. In my entire life, I have never seen anyone else mention it. Maybe it’s hard to criticize something you love and crave.

I know everyone who used that church’s mikes smelled that stench.

To me, this is a picture of getting something you think is good and then realizing it’s not.

I have been on stage a few times in my life, playing music, speaking, and acting. I don’t like it much. I’m not afraid of it. I have no fear at all of speaking; I don’t understand people who are scared of it. I just don’t like being on a stage. Talking to, or making music with, a few people you know is different. Being on a stage is a job. And if there are lights, you can barely see the people you’re talking to. It’s like you’re performing for the lights.

Making music on a stage is not much fun. The sound is too loud. There are cords everywhere.

I think that when I smelled that microphone, God was telling me I was more blessed than the people who had to hold mikes to their mouths for hours in order to make a living. I could talk to individuals without dealing with microphones, lights, and so on. I could choose the people I talked to instead of spraying throngs of hypocrites with information they had no interest in.

John the Baptist didn’t get a microphone. His father was a temple priest, so he was entitled to be a priest, too, but he ended up in the wilderness eating bugs and talking to people who were willing to walk out and listen to him. On the other hand, the honored religious officials who murdered Yeshua worked in the temple and had riches and glory.

What I have found is that God will look after me financially and otherwise, regardless of the demon-inspired hatred human beings feel for me. I didn’t get many of the prizes and honors I earned in life, but I live in a nice house in a wonderful county. I have no debts. I don’t work. My wife stays here and takes care of our baby, and if you tried to give her a career, she might punch you in the face. I have been able to make a bunch of overseas trips since 2020. My wife and I aren’t afraid to eat in restaurants from time to time.

I consider that abundance. I can feel that I’m well off even if I know someone else has thousands of times as much as I have, or that I don’t have as much as I could have had if I had done things differently.

I didn’t have to wreck my life or sell my soul to get here. God looked after me.

I have very few friends, but then most people who have a lot of friends actually have NO friends. I doubt Oprah has a single friend; she will never know unless she loses her fortune. I have a small number of quality friends. That’s very good. When I was a kid, my mother told me most people are lucky to have one real friend.

I don’t have a jet collection. I don’t have a Bentley or a Bugatti. I don’t own a villa on Laga di Como. Beautiful girls don’t run in and out of my home; they don’t have sex with me so I’ll cast them in movies. I’m not in charge of any armies. I don’t own a crown. I don’t have the stuff Satan gives his temporary favorites. But I wouldn’t know what to do with his gifts if I had them. They would be big, smelly microphones to me.

Get used to being cheated, but on the other hand, get used to being blessed behind the scenes and having a better life than any of the people who hate you. That’s what it all boils down to.

“Nostalgia”: From the Greek for “the Pain of Returning Home”

I felt very down for a while today.

I was goofing around on the web, and I came across a video about physical education in the 1950’s. It began as an old educational video, but the man who runs the channel broke in a couple of times and told of his experiences in gym class. He thought it was too brutal.

Someone in the comments wrote about gym classes being dominated by bullies.

That made me think about a guy I have written about before. I have written posts about him, but they don’t appear on the site. As I recall, I took some down shortly after publishing them. I’m not sure. I may have discarded all of them before publishing.

I had this feeling that I shouldn’t expose people’s pasts if I didn’t want mine exposed. The Golden Rule. Everyone has things to be ashamed of.

I started Googling the man in question. His name was Gary Gussman. He was the phys. ed. teacher at Miami Shores Elementary, where I spent several grades.

I was trying to find an old photo of him, because I had the idea that he might have been one of the men who used steroids before they became popular and well known. My memory told me that in the old photo, he looked weak. When he was my phys. ed. teacher, he was more muscular, or so I recall him. I also recall him having more masculine features. Steroids do that to a man’s face.

While I was looking, I came across a social media group for people who grew up in Miami Shores. He had been mentioned.

Some people praised him, saying he had done them a lot of good. Others said he was abusive and hit the kids. One guy–someone in my class–said he “slapped the ___ out of” him several times. Others said he liked to hit kids with his elbow, perhaps so he could later say he hadn’t punched or slapped anyone. “I bumped into him.”

I never saw him hit the kid he slapped, and I don’t recall him hitting anyone with his elbow. I saw him do other things.

I was not happy with the people who praised Gussman. He was a criminal. Corporal punishment was, and is, still legal in Florida, but Miami Shores Elementary didn’t use it, and slapping and elbowing kids would not have been legal anyway. Gussman was just an angry coward who liked hurting small children who could not fight back.

Gussman was small. I would guess he was 5’4″ tall. He was muscular and athletic, but he was tiny. I have always suspected that he was angry about his size, and that this was why he hurt children. I think he wanted to be a college or pro athlete, and he felt fate had cheated him. He was a little large for a jockey. He once complained about his size to us. I don’t know if he ever tried boxing, which has weight classes for small men. Anyway, he ended up teaching phys. ed. to children, and he seemed to have a scorching case of short man syndrome.

His real name was George Herman Gussman, and he was born in 1927, so it looks like he was named after Babe Ruth, who was 6’2″ tall and also Babe Ruth. I wonder if Gussman had a pushy dad who was disappointed in his son for failing to grow tall and become a professional athlete. Gussman’s son became a pro of sorts.

He didn’t like fat kids. Big surprise for a old-fashioned P.E. coach. He also didn’t like smart kids. He didn’t pick on me, apart from generally being obnoxious, but he picked on people I knew.

Tony Bryant, now deceased, was a mama’s boy to the core. His dad was dead, and his mother spoiled him relentlessly. He was soft. He was a nerd. Star Trek was his life. He was also obnoxious, but not in a bullying way. His IQ was over 150.

One day Gussman picked Tony to lead the class in calisthenics, and he wasn’t happy with Tony’s performance. I guess Gussman had access to our files, even though he wasn’t a real teacher, because he knew Tony was smart. He stopped the performance and ridiculed Tony while the rest of us waited for it to be over. He said, “You have intelligence, but you don’t have intellect.”

I don’t know what that means, and neither did Gussman. He wanted to sound smart, so he used a word he did not understand. He resented the smart boy, so he said something he thought made himself look smart, but it only emphasized the difference between his IQ and Tony’s.

There was a kid named Ronnie Coyle in my class. Unremarkable kid. Not a jerk. Not a clown. Not dumb. Not a genius. A regular guy. One day, Gussman had some of the boys line up for some reason, and while he was talking to us, he went off on Ronnie, picked him up by his shirt collar, and threw him on the ground.

Ronnie was terrified. He didn’t know what might happen next.

Gussman was frothing about something that had happened. From his raving, I gathered that Ronnie’s mother had complained about Gussman abusing Ronnie. Gussman was absolutely enraged. He wanted to kill Ronnie. He eventually ran out of gas and came to his senses, and class, if you can call P.E. that, resumed.

Throwing kids on the ground and threatening them is not legitimate corporal punishment, and Gussman wasn’t punishing Ronnie for misbehaving. He was punishing him for exposing Gussman’s misbehavior.

Gussman belonged in the penitentiary as a habitual batterer and verbal abuser of children in his care. He should have been in Raiford, unable to run away from bigger inmates (about 95% of the population) who would have treated him the way he treated kids, for the same reason: he wouldn’t have been able to stop them.

It has occurred to me that he may have hated kids because kids were cruel to him when he was a small, weak boy.

Gussman continued teaching at the school, if you can call it teaching.

P.E. isn’t really a class, since there are no real lessons. “Throw the ball through the hoop.” “Run from here to there as fast as you can.” “Climb the rope and then come down.” Nonetheless, Gussman failed at it. He didn’t teach people much of anything.

I was one of those kids who could not figure out how to climb the rope. I tried, but I got nowhere. Now, I could teach a kid to climb a rope. It takes one sentence. Gussman could not manage it. He sent me up the rope, I couldn’t figure it out, and he told me to move on.

It bothered me to see a few people complimenting Gussman. One even said he had gone to visit him in Punta Gorda after he retired. What on earth for? Why would you visit a child abuser? I suppose this person must have been a very good athlete. Maybe Gussman coached him elsewhere, in a league, and helped him develop. And he wouldn’t have been around when Gussman was taking his height issues out on Ronnie.

I found the photo of Gussman, and I will post the relevant part. As you can see, he looks almost frail, and not particularly masculine. In later pictures, he looks different.

Steroids were available in the Fifties and Sixties. I don’t know if he used them or not. Maybe he just started hitting the gym hard. They would go a long way toward explaining his cowardly rages.

The lady to the left is Miss Pedigo. She is not a favorite of mine. She knew exactly what Gussman was doing to the kids. She was the girls’ coach, and she was beside him every day as second banana. She let it happen. I never saw her express any kind of disapproval.

Miss Pedigo was very crabby. Always angry. I can’t recall seeing her smile, except for this photo, and when you pose for group photos, they order you to smile. She looks as though it makes her face hurt. Like she has never done it before.

I don’t know what things are like now, but when I was a kid, a lot of girls’ coaches were butch and gruff. She fit the stereotype. I remember her scolding people, but I can’t recall any pleasant interactions.

This photo was probably taken 10 years before I showed up, and she was still Miss during my time.

On a lighter note, the lady on the far right is Mrs. Ryan, the music teacher. She used to be in charge of plays. Oddly enough, one particular student always seemed to get cast in lead roles. His name was…Randy Ryan. I still remember his memorable portrayal of the boy Indian chief, Little Peacemaker.

I doubt he went into showbiz and made his mother’s dreams come true.

Should people like Gussman be exposed? I think so. Exposure is appropriate when there is deception as well as bad behavior. If you shoplift when you’re 17 and then repent, there is no point in exposing you, but if you pick on kids for decades while holding yourself out as a model educator, and liars defend you, you should be exposed.

It’s amazing that a guy like this was ever paid to be around kids. Today he would have a mugshot.

While I’m on the subject, I had another prize teacher when I was in junior high. His name was Jack Bubrick. Predictably, he was a P.E. teacher.

Mr. Bubrick had a classic buzz cut, and he was always so tanned, he looked like a brick. Maybe he was tanned and sunburned at the same time.

He was an exercise nut. I would guess he was 55 when I showed up, and he had big biceps and rolled his shirt sleeves up so people could see them. I remember seeing him do situps on an incline bench with his arms crossed.

Bubrick was an angry, angry guy.

I was in his algebra class. One day, he said we were going to have a quiz. I didn’t have everything on my desk on time. I reached underneath for a pencil.

Bubrick flipped his lid. It was a startling spectacle. He told me not to reach under my desk. He said, “I’ll break your arm.” He said he meant it. He said, “I don’t care who your father is.” He repeated his threat. I didn’t understand the father reference at the time.

He raved a while longer while the students, like Gussman’s students, froze and waited for it to be over. Then we had our quiz.

Of course, he had committed a serious crime: assault. But he didn’t get in trouble, and I guess he taught until he died or went to a facility.

I don’t know why he had it in for me. I never saw him go insane with any other student.

He even bet against me when I competed in the Miami Herald spelling bee. I won the school bee, and an administrator named Alice Liberto had the common sense to enter me in the Herald’s contest. I won that handily. Days later, Bubrick saw me by the P.E. building, and he told me I had cost him five bucks. He lost to Mr. Girard, another coach who had always been kind to me.

It was kind of bold for Mr. Girard to bet on me against dozens of kids from all over South Florida, now that I think about it.

Anyway, he committed assault in front of a room full of kids, and there were no consequences.

I had several bully teachers during my childhood, but Gussman and Bubrick stood out in that they were physically dangerous. I only saw Bubrick lose his mind once, so Gussman is in a class by himself.

There was Mrs. Patricia Morceau, the 4th-grade math teacher who used to go berserk, scream at kids, and then say, “Go ahead. cry.” She did that to poor little Jill Waldman, who kept a messy desk. Mrs. Morceau pulled out a rotten orange and showed it to the class, and she got her wish. Jill started sobbing.

She told me to go ahead and cry once. I forget the reason. I never cried for bullies. I was only a little kid, but she made me angry. I didn’t feel like crying at all.

There was Ada Chaki, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher, who got mad at me because I knew how to spell “aspirin.” She was trying to write it on the board, she could not figure it out, and kids started guessing. She settled for “asprin,” and I piped up and tried to help. Boy, did she lay into me. No warning.

I thought she was going to be happy I helped. I did not understand human nature well at the time.

Some teachers think it’s a good thing when kids are good spellers.

We had a field trip. We went to Key Biscayne and waded in the ocean. She told us to be absolutely sure we brought a change of clothes so we could clean up before we got on the bus to go back. She made it clear this was very important.

I brought a change of clothes. I went to the mens’ room and changed. When I got to the bus, everyone was waiting on me. No one else got to change; they had changed their plan without telling me. Miss Chaki laid into me and made fun of me again for making everyone wait. I really disliked her.

She must have had serious problems. She died at 29, and the obituary has no explanation, so it would not surprise me if she was so miserable, she took her own life.

There was Jaye Schechter, my sixth-grade history teacher. I did a very bad job on a long-term project because my parents never made any effort to show me how to organize and complete a project, and she felt it was appropriate to give an insulting speech in front of the class while showing off my project. I was in a gifted program that took me out of Shores Elementary twice a week and put me in another school, and I guess that made her mad, because she used to say she didn’t understand why I was in the gifted program. She wanted me to think I was stupid. Really, I think she was looking for a way to convince herself I wasn’t smarter than she was. Which I was.

She took me out of class and led me into the hallway, and then she called another teacher, Miss Tosch, away from her class, so they could hector me and ridicule my work. I had to sit in Miss Tosch’s class while everyone else in my history class had a party with cake and punch.

It was a little weird that they thought just giving me a D wasn’t enough. She never contacted my parents to see what could be done to help me, because she didn’t care about me.

They were so critical and nasty, you would have thought I had been caught egging their cars. To be allowed to teach, they had to study teaching in college, so I have to wonder what they were taught there, if it included tormenting problem students and failing to follow up with their parents or do anything constructive.

My family was extremely dysfunctional, and it was my parents’ fault that I couldn’t do a long-term project, but it didn’t occur to these women to try to find out what my problem was.

I can’t leave out Mrs. Ritchie, my first sixth-grade homeroom teacher at Shores Elementary. She was a drunk. She had various bits of teaching paraphernalia in our classroom, stored in boxes with names like Heublein on them. I think she was buying booze by the case.

She was vile to everyone. One girl couldn’t take it, so she hit her in the stomach. My stomach used to get so upset, I had to use the bathroom.

I got my mother to talk to the principal, Miss Izzo, about her, and guess what Miss Izzo told us. She said she had put me in Mrs. Ritchie’s class because I was smart and mature, and she thought I could stand the abuse better than other students.

I always criticize tort lawyers, but my family should have hired one.

I was not mature. I was not ready to stand up to a vicious old crone who was hungover every day. Why do teachers assume smart kids are mature? You can be smarter than an adult and still be less mature.

Miss Izzo told us they knew Ritchie was a drunk, and they knew she abused students, but because of tenure, they could not fire her unless she did something egregious. Specifically, she said they could do it if she came to class drunk, but Ritchie was careful not to do that.

The sad thing is that people claimed Ritchie had been a good teacher in the past. She was elderly and bitter when my turn came.

They moved me to Miss Chaki’s room. That worked out poorly due to Miss Chaki’s hatred of smart kids, and she probably wasn’t happy that I had complained about another teacher. I still had to take math with Mrs. Ritchie, who stood over me and yelled at me for leaving her homeroom.

I didn’t have a problem with tough teachers. I preferred them. I was very happy when I entered junior high and started getting more male teachers. They motivated people better than women, and they got more respect, so things went more smoothly. My problem was with bullies.

It was after I read about Gussman that I started to feel down. It wasn’t because of him. It was because I saw other posts from people who loved growing up in Miami Shores. I saw last names I recognized; probably siblings of people I knew. They talked about the country club. Teachers they liked, including some no one should have liked. They said there was no crime. They made it sound like Mayberry.

This disturbed me because I don’t feel that way about Miami Shores.

When I think of Miami Shores, I think of the police coming to our house at night and my dad standing in the front doorway in his underwear, taunting them because he knows they can’t arrest him unless he comes outside. I think of my sister tormenting my mother. I think of the night an ambulance showed up at my friend Mike’s house and took his brother away dead from a heroin overdose.

I think of sitting or lying in my bedroom, sometimes on the floor by the door, wishing my dad would go to bed and stop abusing my mother. I remember hearing slaps. I think of being afraid of the dark even though I was almost ready for junior high. I remember being afraid of my father. I remember underachieving in school, doing just enough to avoid disaster.

I remember getting my first car and going for long drives at night, just so I would not be in the house. I wished I could keep driving and not go home, but I had no place to run to.

I remember getting drunk during the school day and sitting through the last 4 periods hammered.

I remember my father telling my mother, “You’re not going to gut me,” when she finally decided to divorce him. He didn’t want her to get a dime. He said he would put her in the car, drive it into the bay, and kill her and himself. I remember the day my mother got fed up, and I had to take a pistol out of her hand while my dad stared at her in fear from their bed.

Were other families just better than ours? Was Miami Shores really a great place to live?

I am sure many families were less dysfunctional, but most people I knew were screwed up. Mike’s family, for sure. Next door, there was an Irish woman whose husband died from melanoma. She coddled and smothered her son, and he turned to heroin. His upbringing crippled him, and he felt a lot of hostility. He used to practice martial arts moves on his mother, and she was too ashamed to tell anyone. We used to hear banging noises from their house. It was the mother, slamming the refrigerator doors over and over to vent her anger.

She used to pour vodka into a tall water glass and turn it up. Their house was so dirty, you could smell it as soon as you got within 20 feet of the door.

My best friend Clayton killed his sister’s rabbit with ice water. He wanted to see its pink eyes turn blue. Then he hacked its foot off with a shovel for luck. His older brother was a big scary drug user. He became a Jesus freak, and he visited sometimes, but he was still scary. His parents didn’t want him around. Clayton stole things from me, and because I didn’t steal, I thought he was telling the truth when he said his parents had given him things that were just like the ones that had been stolen from me.

His mother was manic-depressive, as I recall.

Across the street, we had a gay couple. One night, one of them tied the other one up and castrated him. His body was found later on. I believe he was strangled. Romantic quarrel, people thought.

A block away, there were the Barakets. The father was a criminal. He had stolen a lot of money. One day the police found his dead body in a little park next to the bay, on a bench. He had cheated justice. His son was gay and obsessed with acting. He made his mother the widow build a stage in his garage so he could sing and dance for the neighborhood kids. She was very nice. Soft-spoken and well-dressed. He talked to her like she was a naughty child.

Down farther, by the park, there was my one-time friend Mark. We went to elementary school and high school together. He was arrogant and insulting, so I cut him loose in the 10th grade. He lived to see our 10th-year reunion, and then he jumped off a bridge in San Diego, supposedly because he could not cope with his homosexuality.

We had mafia families a couple of blocks north. Not known for happy lives.

Maybe some people had happy lives there, but I think a lot of the positive things I saw on social media were just social media fraud. “Bob just got a big promotion, and the twins are planning to go to Stanford!” Meanwhile, Mom is cheating on Bob with her tennis pro, and the kids are more likely to end up at community college.

I have an abusive elderly aunt, and she loves to brag about her family on the web. She and her husband can’t stand each other. Her son can’t stand her or her husband. Her daughter took her mother on a trip to her mother’s vacation home and told her she would not take both her mother and her husband. Her son is a drunk and a liar, and he is too lazy to look after the house his mother gave her.

I looked up her husband on the web, and criminals with his last name kept popping up. It looks like his son is in the joint for selling fentanyl and tampering with evidence. I’m not positive it’s his son, but he is the right age, he comes from the right small town, and he looks just like my uncle. My aunt’s son’s wife prosecuted him, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think my aunt married into a family of thugs. When her husband married her, he was living in a trailer and driving a beat-up jalopy truck.

“Everything is great. Envy us!” Like people don’t know anything except what you post on Facebook.

People lie. Also, some people are truthful, but they have very low standards. And memory is the servant of denial. People remember good times that weren’t.

My family could have done much, much better even by wordly standards, without knowing God, if my dad had handled things differently. He is still a mystery to me. The demented, frail Dad I knew before he died was wonderful, and I cherish every minute we spent together. The ogre I spent my childhood with was a different creature.

I don’t know if we could have had pleasant, fulfilling lives. Maybe. We should have been given the chance.

God Tells Everyone the Same Things

Last night before my wife and I prayed for other people, I asked her how she was feeling about the way things were going in the world. She said she felt detached.

That’s exactly how I feel.

Her sense is that this world is not a place where we can be accepted and build a future.

You turn on the TV or the PC and look at the world, and what do you see? Homosexuals, including cross-dressers, protesting in favor of Hamas, which has been known to throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Millionaire sluts rapping about their genitalia, saying things so crude, even a sailor would be grossed out. Satanists and witches praying aloud before government meetings. Transvestites reading stories to kids in libraries and schools funded by taxes. Many non-Muslim members of the United Nations accusing Israel of genocide for defending itself against…genocide. Public protests, some violent, against businesses that are Jewish but not affiliated with Israel.

Lesbians in colorful sashes, pretending to be priests, running large organizations that pretend to be Christian churches. Demoniacs vandalizing electric cars because Elon Musk helped a Republican get elected. Violence against Republicans that has become routine. Transvestites performing a big percentage of mass shootings for reasons they seem to be unable to articulate. Ads for Jaguar cars featuring sexual deviants but no cars and no normal men.

My wife watches a family on Youtube. Supposedly, this is a Christian family. She tells me they used to pray and talk about God on their channel.

Yesterday, I saw a video in which they dropped their daughter off at Berkeley, which stands out among schools dominated by left-wing insanity. They were thrilled for her. They toured her dorm floor. They went into the bathroom. It’s unisex. They thought it was funny that their daughter would be using the toilet and showers with young men.

If this is what Christians are like now, no wonder unbelievers are delusional.

I can’t send my son to Berkeley or any other far-left academic nuthouse. Any mainstream university, in other words. Imagine what they would put him through. Lectures about whiteness and patriarchy. Lectures about transphobia. If he stood up for his beliefs, he would be the most persecuted student on campus. He could never fit in or be treated fairly. He would be a target, and he would get low grades from vindictive instructors. He would be excluded from opportunities. He would receive negative recommendations. He would probably be thrown out of classrooms.

We had lunch at Costco yesterday. Costco is pretty woke. They gave us weird cup lids intended to discourage straw use, and they provided paper straws that leak and get soggy. To protect the sea turtles from plastic. In a country that dumps zero garbage at sea.

Before we visited Costco, we took my baby son to the dermatologist. They gave me a tablet so I could tell them his history. They wanted to know his gender identity. This is the second provider that has done this to us. A pediatric facility asked what my son’s preferred pronouns were.

“Detached” is the right word. We are now like disaster tourists. We are here. We observe. We can’t join, though, and we don’t want to stay. It’s like having a day pass at a mental asylum.

Both of us are aware there is no future for our family here within the system. We will live out our lives as outsiders.

This isn’t the old America. I watched World War Two veterans talking about their experiences the other day, and by modern standards, some of them sounded like religious fanatics. Mainstream guys. One said an angel had appeared to him to tell him he wasn’t going to be hurt. That kind of talk used to be considered normal.

The other day, I saw someone on the web suggesting that really smart people should be working to solve hard problems for society. Cancer and so on. As though able people owed society something. Not true.

I thought of what Yeshua said: “The poor, you will always have with you.” More broadly, he meant that the world’s problems were not going to be solved.

Mankind is cursed. It’s in rebellion. Things aren’t going to go as they should during this age, because we consistently reject the only source of real, enduring blessings. We will never have clean, cheap, inexhaustible energy. We will always have disease. We will always have violence and poverty. We will never stop doing the things that cause our misfortunes, so there is a limit to what we should do to fix the world. It’s a treadmill.

Secular solutions have some importance, but our main obligation in life is to expand the kingdom of heaven. Look after your own soul. Do what you can to help others become like Yeshua. Give to people who need help. Deliver people from demons and work miracles if God permits. You’re not really obligated to work 16 hours a day in a lab, trying to synthesize a chemical that obliterates every kind of tumor or cures AIDS.

Mary was right, and Martha was wrong.

It’s more important to help one person go on to eternal salvation than it is to fight global problems which are not going away. Salvation is permanent and priceless. Fighting worldly problems is Whack-a-Mole.

It’s hard for people who are close to God to position themselves so they have the power to do what unbelievers think is good. If you’re a genius Christian, and you try to do groundbreaking cancer research, Satan will probably see to it you end up assisting incompetent DEI hires or teaching biology to bored high school students. Satan’s kids blackball Christians.

It’s even hard to make headway in churches. I tried to work as an armorbearer. I created fantastic food for a church kitchen. I tried to get into prison ministry. I helped drive poor people to church. I shared revelation with people. My pastors and many of the other volunteers treated me like a troublemaker. They crippled and shut down programs. They promoted sychophants and nincompoops and made sure I was always an outsider.

I can’t complain. John the Baptist was a priest by inheritance, and instead of taking a position of honor in the temple, he had to live in the desert and eat bugs. Religious people beat Yeshua and had him murdered, and they murdered the prophets as well as many Jews who believed in Yeshua. A secular Jew whose father built the temple murdered John.

If you belong to God, you can’t join the herd. If you’re part of the herd, and you think you belong to God, you are deluding yourself. It’s normal for Christians to serve Satan and the flesh while claiming they’re sold out to God. Look at Chris Pratt. I could make a long list.

We always want to have our cake and eat it, too, and we are better at lying to ourselves than lying to other people.

My wife and I feel as though the end is just about here, so it doesn’t matter much what we do. America has fallen away for good. But does that mean the rapture is close? The area that is now Turkey used to be the boiler room of Earth’s Christian activity, but it went Muslim, and the world didn’t end. Europe took over the lead role in spreading the gospel, and then it turned on God, and the world didn’t end. Should America be different?

I think it is, because there is no other part of the world that can take our place. When Turkey fizzled, Europe took over. When Europe fizzled, America took over. All the other countries and continents have already been evangelized heavily, and they are not making progress. We’re not going to see China or Africa or India take America’s place.

When Europe faded, the US was ready to step in. Nobody is ready to step in now that the US is spiritually almost dead.

Chris Pratt is an interesting case. Unbelievers in Hollywood love him. He’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t make waves. That last part is important. Satan’s kids often take up for Christians who don’t make waves. If you actually accomplish anything, they go after you.

Pratt makes movies that endorse fornication. The characters aren’t Christians. God isn’t involved in the scripts.

Come on.

He’s a nice guy. A goodfella. A good old boy. Tamed and declawed.

I feel like the world is stuck, like a car that has run out of pavement and gotten stuck in mud. We seem to have reached the end of a journey. None of it seems to matter.

I don’t feel like attending to home repairs, yard work, or my other responsibilities. I don’t feel like planning. I don’t feel like watching our spending.

If the county had forced me to sell my house so it could be demolished, and I were outside waiting for someone to pick my family up and drive us to a new home, I wouldn’t run back inside and start painting the kitchen.

Maybe things will change, the rapture won’t come during my lifetime, and I’ll feel differently about the future. I hope not, though. It would be wonderful to be raptured and forget about this place.

I want to thank everyone who has expressed condolences in my comments, regarding my recent loss. It was very thoughtful.

I have been comforted by reminders that the living suffer more than the dead, except of course for the damned. For example, although I tend to remember my dad as a scary tyrant or the weak, prayer-loving old man he became, in reality, he is more like a god than a person now. He is younger than I am. That’s really something. He doesn’t wear glasses. His hair isn’t gray. He never gets sick. He never feels pain or sorrow. The greatest evil spirits there are can’t touch him or go anywhere near him.

Christian funerals used to be celebrations. Over time, pagan converts corrupted the church like Californians moving to Texas, and Christians started wearing black and focusing on the pain. I have to keep this in mind. I saw a recent video featuring Lester Sumrall, and he described moping over the deceased as feeling sorry for oneself. That sobered me up.

The condition of my heart will keep getting better, my blessed life will continue, and it won’t be long before I will be with God and all the dead people and creatures I have cared about, but for those who would not accept salvation. This life is but a vapor, as the word says. I am closer to heaven than high school, which seems very recent in my mind.

I will try not to be self-indulgent and make things worse than they are while my heart heals.

Time to Inventory the Chemicals

My son keeps surprising me.

Last week, if memory serves, I started whistling to him. They say you need to stimulate babies’ brains, so I make an effort, as does his mother.

A couple of days ago, she told me he was whistling. I didn’t pay much attention. I had a lot on my mind. Today I saw him do it. He looked me right in the face and whistled on purpose.

It wasn’t great whistling, but it was whistling, and it was deliberate.

This morning, my wife called me to come to the bedroom. I went to the door and asked her what she wanted. She told me to look down. My son was on the floor by the doorway. I hadn’t even seen him; I could have stepped on him. I expected him to be on the other side of the room with his mother.

He had crawled about 15 feet from my wife’s recliner. He drops out of her lap on purpose, onto his feet. He can’t stay on his feet, and his crawling form is not very good, but he took off anyway.

A short time ago, she called me again and had me look at what she referred to as “the scene of the crime.” He was on the floor on his back, in front of our dresser, with a knob lying next to him. He had somehow unscrewed a knob from a drawer. Now we have to take measures to keep him from eating drawer knobs.

I put him on the bed and sat him up. He can sit up just fine now. I put the TV remote about a foot and a half away from him. He flopped on his belly, grabbed the remote, rolled back into a sitting position, and started trying to eat it. As of around three weeks or a month back, he hated being on his stomach. Now he doesn’t care.

He has an exercise mat he lies on. At the foot end, there is a plastic keyboard with 5 or 6 keys that look like piano keys. They make sounds and play annoying songs. Until recently, he had banged on the keys randomly, without seeming to realize what they did. Now he is kicking them on purpose in order to hear the sounds. He kicks them randomly, too, though.

He tried to imitate a word yesterday. We took him to Costco last week, and he sat in the cart like a toddler. He has a high chair, and he sits in it for long periods.

He had a checkup today. The nurse said he was way ahead on everything. We don’t know much about these things. We haven’t raised any other kids. We have to look them up.

She was impressed with things he had been doing for months. She thought he had just started doing them. She said he had great core strength. I could have told her that. He has been like a two-by-six since he was maybe two months old.

He may turn out to be extremely intelligent. If so, he is going to need some guidance. He will need help dealing with other kids, because he will find taking to normal children frustrating. He will eventually need to know some kids who are like him. He will have to be taught humility and gratitude so he doesn’t get on the other kids’ nerves and spend most of his childhood stuffed in lockers. He will need to know that brains are nothing to be proud of, and that they don’t make him better than anyone else.

It’s good that he’s so strong. Being a smart kid is no fun if you’re weak.

You shouldn’t be proud of anything, and that goes double for things that were handed to you without regard to effort or merit.

It would be great if he were very smart, but the important things are humility and a good relationship with the Holy Spirit.

His first word must be right around the corner. That will be legitimately spooky.

The Long View Must Prevail

A thoughtful reader asked whether it was possible I was depressed. The answer is yes, and I appreciate the question, which helped me consider the issue.

I was completely miserable during the last two days. My friend Marvin was dead, my faith was under attack, and a loving member of my household, with whom I had interacted nearly every day for 29 years, was gone, leaving a gaping hole, like a crater where the living room once was.

Something I had dreaded and dreamed about for years, which I had fought as hard as I could, had happened. My emotions were drowning me.

It made me think about Job. All the children he had hugged and loved as babies, and for whom he made daily sacrifices, had died in a moment, and his body had broken out in boils. He said, “the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” Although his misfortune was much greater than mine, I think I understand the nature of what he felt. I don’t think he was talking about the boils. He wanted to save his children.

I am not habitually depressed, though. That hasn’t happened to me since the ordeal I went through as a graduate student, when I was away from God and pumped full of ADD drugs, socially isolated and watching my dream slip away from me despite my best efforts. That was almost 30 years ago.

I have sometimes said I was depressed by proxy, however.

I have a great life. My relationship with God lifts me up above the turmoil, worry, and failure that are inundating most people. I know I’m saved. God answers my prayers over and over. I have a wonderful wife and son. My health is good. I don’t have to work. I live in an area full of warm, kind Christian people.

On the other hand, I see the world collapsing around me. Satan won the popularity contest, and even in formerly-Christian countries, people are turning to Satan in droves. Here in America, our culture is hateful and nauseating compared to the culture of 2000, and the farther back you go for comparison, the worse 2025 looks. In videos about the 1940’s, people who were considered normal then seem like those who are considered religious freaks today.

I can’t help people. Not many, anyway. No matter how good things get for me, I can’t get other people to listen to my testimony and give the Holy Spirit a try. I have to sit back and watch them destroy themselves needlessly. I know it won’t change to the point where the tide goes the other way.

I coined the term “depression by proxy” to describe this situation. Depressed people have no hope for themselves. I have no hope for the world.

God clearly agrees with me about the world. He told us the tribulation was coming. He didn’t say it might come. It will happen.

I would be much happier if I were not surrounded by people who are doomed, but I am not depressed. Not ordinarily. I was depressed this week, and I was depressed when my other bird died, but these were brief intervals. I haven’t gotten depressed when human beings died.

One mark of depression is predicting your own future irrationally. I have been doing this to some extent. I predicted that I would be stuck here for the rest of my life, watching other people crash and burn, and I thought it would be very hard to bear. Now I am leveling off. I realize my prediction about other people was correct, but I also know God will not allow me to be miserable on a chronic basis. Depression is the opposite of joy, and the Holy Spirit provides joy. It is named as one of the fruit of the Spirit. I feel it today. It displaces grief.

I don’t feel great, but today is much better than yesterday, and things will get better as God supplies me.