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.

My Boys Went on Ahead

Today I took a box out of my spare refrigerator, took it to an animal hospital that does cremation, and said goodbye to my little friend Marvin. I did not open the box. I have also thrown out nearly everything that had anything to do with her or my other deceased bird, Maynard. I don’t want that stuff around me. I threw out food. I threw out vet bills. I deleted emails from vets. I didn’t keep their bells or toys. Just photos and videos, as well as a few old feathers.

The hospital says Marvin will be part of a communal cremation, and then the remains will be scattered on a horse farm. I hope that is true. I can’t say it actually matters, because Marvin is not in that body.

I have lost other pets, but losing a parrot is worse. A dog is likely to be with you a dozen years. You expect a dog to die after a short time. Marvin was nearly 29 when he died, and Maynard was 30, and they were fairly young. To say I was used to having them around is an understatement. I expected them to outlive me. I felt as though they would always be there, like the walls or the floor.

My habit is to greet Marvin by exclaiming “MARV!” as I come in the door. I used to greet both birds. Now I walk in the door, and I realize no one is there, and no one will ever be there again. The greeting sticks in my throat. I keep walking.

Last night I got up to use the bathroom. To avoid disturbing the baby, I like to leave the bedroom and walk past the kitchen. I always say something to Marv along the way. Not any more.

We went to a fried chicken joint today. Usually, we ask for containers for scraps for Marvin, which he loved. Not today.

For the first time since early 1991, parrots have absolutely nothing to do with my life. That is so strange. I have old books on parrots. I belong to parrot forums. I’m used to thinking a lot about parrot food, toys, and cage upgrades. Instantly and forever, that ended.

It’s like losing a hand. You feel you can look over and see it whenever you want, but it’s not there, and it will never be there again.

A life without parrots.

I was going to take Marvin’s cage to the dump. I gave away my other cage after Maynard died. I started feeling guilty about throwing out Marvin’s cage, so I put it on Craigslist in the Free Stuff area. I thought there might be some little bird out there whose owner could not afford a decent cage.

I got emails right away. When I asked the senders what kind of birds they had, they had nothing to say. I asked because I didn’t want scammers to take the cage and then try to sell it at thrift shops or on Facebook. Three senders didn’t answer, and one admitted he wanted to flip the cage.

Of course, none of the senders admitted they didn’t have birds up front. The whole business made me feel very bad. I didn’t need to have people try to take advantage of me on this particular day.

Now, for the next two days, I am stuck with a cage I will probably have to take to the dump. I can’t get rid of it until Wednesday. Maybe someone who actually has a bird will get in touch.

As for me, I do not feel good at all.

My faith has been attacked. I stood on the word of God, and then Marvin died. I felt faith when I prayed for her, and it didn’t work. I have been talking to God, asking him to help me know what’s real and what isn’t. My wife and baby son depend on my relationship with God. It has to be sound.

I am more tired of death than ever. I can get new pets and meet new people, but I will still see more deaths, so it’s an imperfect solution.

I would say I want death for myself, to get me out of this world, but that’s not true. I don’t want to die, and I would never, ever harm myself. I just want to leave. I wish Yeshua would come get us. I want to move to a place where things that go well. A place less like Omaha Beach.

Today in one short car trip, I saw sick people and crippled people. I saw poor people who clearly didn’t have it together. I kept thinking about how much suffering there was in the world, how little I could do about it, and how I was going to keep seeing it. I know what I’m in for. I could conceivably live another 30 years, and the world will be as it is now or worse. Will I ever be able to do anything real for people? I keep asking God to use me to heal people. I would love to heal people’s children and even their pets, so they would know this world doesn’t have to win. I sound like Holden Caulfield.

I am blessed, but those around me keep dropping. Being blessed is wonderful, but if you live among people who suffer horrible fates, it’s natural to want to be somewhere else where things are different.

God has said, “A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee; only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Sounds wonderful at first glance, but who wants to see other people destroyed over and over?

If it were not for my wife and son, I would be glad to leave this minute. My family is my only reason for choosing life.

When my dad was alive and I was single, I wanted to see him saved, and I wanted my pets to be taken care of. Other than that, I was happy to leave whenever God called me. Now my dad is dead and in heaven, and my pets are presumably with him. But I am still attached to this miserable planet by my family. I have to watch out for them. I have to prepare them. They are surrounded by enemies, natural and supernatural. They are swimming in a sea of lies. Abandoning them is not something that could ever be on the table.

I hope my friends and relatives do well on Earth, but I would not stay here just for them. Maybe that’s a flaw. I care more about my wife and baby.

I’ve also thought a great deal about what a bad person I’ve been and how I’ve let my loved ones and pets down. I don’t like thinking about it, but correction is like free money. I won’t turn it down. I wish I had done less evil.

I will surely feel better as time passes, but I don’t think the weariness will ever leave me. The future of this world is dim. I don’t expect the constant flow of bad news for humanity to stop or even stop accelerating.

I don’t think I’ll have much reason to mention my birds in the future.

If You Don’t Want Roaches, Take the Trash Out

Derek Prince was an extraordinary preacher. He died in 2003, and I still learn things from him.

Yesterday, I saw one of his videos, and I learned that Yeshua never called Satan “the god of this world.” I didn’t learn that directly from the video. In the video, Prince said Paul (not Yeshua) had called Satan the god of this age, not the god of this world.

People like me believe that God has broken history into distinct ages. I don’t claim to belong to any particular recognized brand of Christianity, but I would say I could be considered a dispensationalist. It appears that the history of humanity, prior to the return of Yeshua, is like a week of thousand-year “days.”

Abraham existed around 4,000 years ago, and it looks like that was the start of the age of the Jews. They were God’s main representatives on Earth. Then came Yeshua, and that began the age of the Gentiles. After this age ends, we get a thousand-year Messianic Age, during which Yeshua is present on the earth in the flesh and rules as king.

God likes the number 7, and it appears to be associated with completeness. Seven days per week. Seven millennia for humanity. Seven Spirits of God. The seventh millennium will be a long sabbath, like the seventh day of every week.

Eight seems to be associated with new beginnings. Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day. God saved 8 people during the flood to repopulate the world.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, the King James Version says:

But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

This is not correct. The Greek calls Satan “the god of this age.”

Yeshua himself called Satan “the prince of this world,” not the god.

There is some debate as to whether “god of this age” refers to Satan or Yeshua, but I think it’s safe to say it has to be Satan, because Yeshua is the God of all ages. It would be odd to call him the god of a particular age.

The Greek version of 2 Corinthians 4:4 makes more sense than the English translation. Satan won’t be in power forever. He’s an upstart, and he has to be slapped down eventually.

I believe the two millennia since the crucifixion have been the Age of the Gentiles. During this time, God revealed himself to billions of Gentiles through Christianity. Most Jews were expelled from Israel, the temple was destroyed, the Jews were dispersed, and mainstream Jews haven’t accomplished much of anything in the way of spreading the knowledge of God since before Yeshua. Meanwhile, the handful of Jews who accepted Yeshua and the baptism with the Holy Spirit evangelized millions, and Gentiles who believed them evangelized the world.

I complain to God a lot about this age. Humanity has become like a rotting trash heap. We give power and praise to astoundingly filthy people. This, in formerly Christian countries. We think abomination is good. All fornication is abomination, not just homosexual acts. Cross-dressing, idolatry and witchcraft are abomination. Pride and swindling are abomination. So is oppressing the poor. We are now solidly in favor of most of these things.

Increasingly, we are convinced we can solve all our own problems. We are like the college kids who keep telling us socialism will work if we just do it right. We never learn. We want all the blessings life has to offer, but we want them on our own terms, not God’s. We want sexual sin and pride. We want idolatry and drugs. We want to make up our own rules.

I believe the principle of rapturing doesn’t just apply to the rapture. It’s really just holiness. “But know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” as Psalm 4 says. When God lifts the people who love him off the earth and leaves the rest behind, he will be pulling that which is holy away from that which belongs to Satan.

When God tells you to give up secular entertainment, rapturing you away from it, he is making you holy. When he helps you to hate pride and love humility, he is making you holy. When he helps you spend hours praying in tongues, he is making you holy. He is preparing you for the big jump.

This process also brings you blessings and protection. It puts you inside God’s hedge with him. The word says, “Whosoever breaks a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.”

There is a wall or hedge around you right now. You’re inside with God and humility or Satan and pride. If you’re with Satan, through rebellion and pride, more bad things will happen to you, and you will miss out on blessings. Things that may seem harmless, like listening to secular music or watching movies, can put you inside the wrong hedge.

I think clinging to worldly culture causes things like cancer, dementia, poverty, miscarriage, birth defects, accidents, attacks from criminals, and just about every other type of misfortune. We tend to think bad things should only happen to those who do things like murder, rape, and theft, but there is no Biblical basis for that idea. I think showing your kids Disney videos or watching filthy Hollywood shows and movies will suffice to attract harm.

When Job wondered why his family had been killed and his body had been disabled by disease, he named all the harmful things he had not done. He included looking at young women. Sounds harmless to us, but Job apparently understood that it was dangerous. Try and sit through a week of TV without seeing a woman dressed like a whore.

Job wasn’t ignorant. He lived for hundreds of years. He knew things we don’t know. If staring at young women was dangerous, what about all the other things we consider normal?

At my last two churches, they played secular music to convince the kids Yeshua and church were cool. I wonder how much damage they did. I remember seeing the old fool Steve Munsey dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the stage at Trinity Church in Miami. That song is about a woman who had sex with a man in order to get him to marry her. It’s about abomination. Nobody in the Trinity hierarchy heard from the Holy Spirit, so they saw nothing wrong with Munsey’s antics.

This is normal in 2025.

I have found that the more God renews my heart and helps me feel love and empathy, the more I hate this age. I hate the suffering and failure. It makes me wonder how God, who is love itself, can stand it.

We harden ourselves and make ourselves get used to the suffering of those around us. I don’t think God wanted us to do that, but it’s a normal survival skill. We laugh at things that would have brought our grandparents to tears. I’m a huge offender. I made a deliberate effort to cultivate that type of sense of humor. I didn’t think it mattered to God.

I often pray for God to show my family evil. For example, I ask him to show us the worthless people around us, and I ask him to rid us of them permanently. It seems like he has come through. Lately, I have been asking him to show us the Spirit-led people around us, so all the exposure to the others won’t destroy our morale.

People in formerly-Christian nations are pursuing curses now, like never before. We get more and more loathsome. I find it oppressive now. I keep asking God to come now and rule.

John, who was closer to Yeshua than anyone, said this at the end of the Bible: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

He was talking about the end of this age, which the Revelation describes. It’s about the decline of man, the rapture, the tribulation, the millennium, the battle at the end, and the New Jerusalem. He was telling us Yeshua had said surely, he was coming quickly. Just like me, John said, “So be it. Even so [quickly], come Lord Jesus.” John was sick of this place, too.

I have about had it with this place. I want the rapture to happen now. Today. This minute. Barring that, I have to stay as close to God as possible, because that is the only way to have the blessings, protection, and strength to tolerate this place. It’s like living in a big building with adults who run around smearing poop on the walls and furniture. Enough.

Marvin has had some ups and downs with his medical situation. He got worse a day or two ago, so I had to drive him to a hospital in Orlando. His condition has been a very unpleasant ordeal for me. It has gone on for two weeks.

I prayed on the road in both directions. I was thinking about how miserable this world is and how I still had to stay here for a while. I was trying to have faith for Marvin’s recovery.

I got stuck in a traffic jam on I-75, and I found myself behind a semi. In the dirt on the back of the trailer, someone had written, “Bee [sic] the good. You are ENOUGH! Don’t quit. Pray for my Aunts Susan + Shelly. It’s gonna be okay Love God.”

Cars and trucks were shifting positions, but this truck kept ending up directly in front of me. I had to sit behind it.

It made me think of Belshazzar’s feast. Belshazzar and his pagan buddies were in Babylon, getting drunk using the sacred vessels of God’s temple, and a finger appeared and wrote, “You have been weighed and found lacking.” As my wife put it the other day, “not enough.”

The writing on the truck used the same word. “You are enough.” I took it to mean that though I was not very good, I was doing well enough to get God’s help and make it in the rapture.

I found that and the assurance that things were going to be okay very comforting. I prayed for Aunt Shelly and Aunt Susan, and my wife and I prayed for them again last night.

What Belshazzar went through was like the rapture and tribulation. God’s protection left him suddenly, and he was destroyed.

Today Marv is doing better. I got a call this morning. He’s on a better antibiotic, and he has capable people looking after him. I am planning to move him to UF as soon as he seems strong.

I don’t know when the rapture will come, but the way the walls are closing in, it can’t come fast enough to suit me.

If You Care, be the Bad Guy

My friend Marvin the parrot got sick because I made the mistake of using bifenthrin spray on a loveseat that had carpet beetles in it. We bought the loveseat from a place called Koontz Furniture and Design. My wife liked a bigger couch that matched it, and they showed us the loveseat, which was a like-new return.

They said they had taken it back after 6 months. I asked why. They said the customer didn’t like it. I thought that was odd, but their explanation was that the boss was a really nice guy who wanted people to be happy. I was suspicious, but then people here are very nice.

The loveseat was discounted heavily, and it looked unused, so we bought it. Weeks or months later, we started seeing little black balls on the floor around it. I thought maybe a roach was wandering around in the living room, and the balls were roach poops.

I knew nothing about carpet beetles. Eventually, I dug up the truth on the Internet. Carpet beetles are tiny, round, black bugs about the size of roach poops.

I tried imidacloprid on the loveseat and couch, and things got a lot better, but the loveseat appeared to continue to produce some bugs. This is why I tried bifenthrin, a “safe” chemical that leaves a dry residue that kills for months. I have used it in the house for years with no apparent problems.

A lot of spray got into the air, and Marv got sick the same day. Seizures and weakness. Short of watching your baby son die in your arms, nothing could be worse. But God was gracious, as always, and Marv did not die.

He spent two nights at the small animal hospital at the university, and he improved a great deal, so we brought him home.

Then I very stupidly let my wife push me into painting the kitchen. Most of the interior of the house looks fantastic, but the kitchen and two stairwells need paint.

I have told my wife not to nag me. Nagging is evil, and doctors believe it actually shortens husbands’ lives by ruining their cardiovascular health. My wife’s response was to cite the story Yeshua told about the widow who kept bothering the wicked judge until he granted her wish.

That’s not a good analogy. The judge was not her husband, so he was not the king and priest of her house, to whom God expected her to submit. Also, the judge was not subject to nagging all day, like a husband. Finally, she had been wronged, and she was asking for justice. My wife was not wronged.

I told her to knock it off, but I decided to start on the kitchen all the same. The pressure had an effect.

The day after I started painting the kitchen, Marv took sick again. The obvious reason: paint fumes. Birds have very sensitive lungs, which is why canaries used to be used to let miners know about gas accumulations. Marvin was getting better, but his lungs were still unusually sensitive, and he is a bird.

I felt like an idiot, because that’s what I was. I should never have let my wife goad me into doing something dumb. If I had not let her rush me, I would have thought more carefully, and common sense would have told me not to paint the kitchen until Marv was fully well.

Here’s something you really need to know about God: he can’t be rushed, and he does not want his children to be rushed. When someone rushes you, it’s nearly always for an evil reason. If you’re in a burning building and someone tells you to get out fast, that’s fine, but what if you’re at a car dealership and the salesman tells you a deal is only good for 24 hours? Walk. He’s not looking after you. He’s trying to get you to make a decision that will harm you.

A long time ago, I heard God say this while I was with him: “I will not be rushed.” I said it in the first person, but it referred to both of us. He will not be rushed, and he wants me to refuse to be rushed, too. I should have thought about this when my wife was in error, pushing me to do something dumb.

I sprayed the couch because of her impatience. She was pressing me to call Koontz and demand they take the loveseat back. When I finally called them, they said the sale was as-is, but they offered to send a bug guy.

What happened to the nice guy who took furniture back just because customers didn’t like it? He must have retired. Or maybe they took the couch back because the customer found bugs in it, they sprayed it until they didn’t see any bugs, and then they dumped it on me.

Oh, well. A $9,000 mistake and a lesson learned.

I sprayed the couch myself because I was concerned the bug guy might use something that would harm Marvin or my son, and I picked the wrong spray.

If you’re a husband, and you don’t want curses to fall on your house, you have to learn two things. You have to learn that you’re the leader, not a partner. You also have to learn to be willing to be unpopular in your own house. When your wife or child goes against God, you have to stick with God. This is one of your main purposes. It sounds odd, but battling your own wife and children for their own good is one of your primary functions. You should expect it and try to be grateful for it.

I put Marv in our son’s nursery, closed off the air conditioning vent, opened the windows, put towels under the doors, and gave him food and water by hand. My son rarely sees the nursery, so it didn’t matter to him. Of course, I humbled myself before God and used all my supernatural tools and weapons. After two nights of misery (for me), Marvin has perked up and started eating and playing in his water. It looks like he’s okay. I will be babying him for at least a month.

I told my wife to go ahead and put the kitchen back in order, because there was no way I was going to resume painting it until it was safe. I didn’t ask her if this was okay with her. I said this was how it was going to be, end of story, and she was fine with it. She feels very guilty.

Women resist leadership, but they like decisiveness. A woman who will fight a polite suggestion will be completely content to comply with a stern command. The same thing goes for men when they deal with their superiors. No one trusts a leader who cajoles and waffles. It encourages argument and plants doubt.

The truth is that I let my wife down by trying to please her, just as Adam, Abraham, and Moses let their wives down. I let her down, and I definitely let Marvin down. I know God forgives me, but I will never forget what I put Marvin through with my 20th-century feminist brainwashing. The things I saw and heard will live with me for the rest of my life, as they should. I deserve that.

It is inevitable that wives will rebel, but it wasn’t necessary for me to fail to lead properly, so who is more to blame?

I intend to be more forceful from now on. My family is depending on me, and so is Marvin.