2300 Words to Help You Pass the Time

I got up late today. A couple of months back, I fired my alarm clock. I hate alarm clocks. It doesn’t matter how nice the wake-up sound is. After a week, it will feel like someone shoving hot needles into your ear. I quit using the alarm, so sometimes I get up later than I want to. Daylight Saving Time just started (or ended; I never can remember how it works), so I suppose that makes my body think it’s early.

I’m a morning person now, which is all the miracle anyone needs in order to believe in God. I used to loathe mornings. My natural tendency was to wake up at noon, and when my clock went off at seven or whatever, I always felt like the world had ended. I couldn’t move. I felt like a magnet was sucking me down into the mattress. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I haven’t had that feeling in years. Mornings are just like any other time of day now. But the alarm sound…that, I still hate.

Today I woke up not long after eight, which is acceptable given my current lifestyle, but when I started to pray and get the day going, I conked out without realizing it, and I woke up at 9:45. Big disruption to my prayer life. I have to sit and pray now instead of doing other things.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I had overslept. I thought I was in my favorite bedroom at my grandfather’s house, and I was trying to see what time it was. I was trying to read the alarm clock, but I couldn’t see clearly. For some reason, I was looking into it from the back. I could see the back of the display, but I couldn’t read anything.

Imagine dreaming you overslept, while you’re oversleeping. But it could be worse. The dream I really hate is the one where I dream I can’t sleep.

My dreams are so realistic, when I look back on them, I have a hard time distinguishing them from reality. Sometimes I think about a place I’ve been, and then I realize that place doesn’t exist. I dreamed I was there, and then the dream was stored in my memory. Sometimes I have to think for a while to determine conclusively whether a place in my memory is real or imaginary.

I have another weird thing that happens when I’m in bed. It generally happens during prayer, because if I’m lying in bed, I’m either praying or sleeping. I’ll fall asleep for an instant, and then I’ll wake up. During that instant, I’ll think about a person I just imagined. I’ll think that nonexistent person is real. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that in the blink of an eye, I’ll create a complete history of that person. I may think of him or her as having a career and relatives and so on, and it will all seem real. When I wake up, I realize it’s imaginary, but I can’t understand how my mind can come up with all that background in a second or less.

Thank God I forget it. I would hate to have a head full of imaginary buddies, like fake names in Google Contacts.

I guess for a brief instant, my mind turns into Twitter. That’s a place inhabited by imaginary individuals. “Right on, Chrissy Teigen. Women should breastfeed EVERYWHERE, stark naked! And I’m not just saying that because your publicist pays me.”

I have issues with my imaginary people. I don’t just create them with no context. Maybe the person will owe me money, and I’m trying to get it back. Maybe I’m supposed to help the person paint his house. There will always be some kind of story that evaporates along with the character.

I wonder if the oversleeping dream came from God. Maybe looking into a clock from the back means I’m wasting time, trying to get too much detail from God about the supernatural and the way the world works. I’m not supposed to know everything. I can’t carry that.

Or maybe it’s just a stupid dream.

Now that I think about it, I believe the dream is about the natural world. I think I focus way too much on understanding and responding to events with my unaided mind. That makes a lot more sense. God would never tell us to stop trying to learn about him.

We can never understand all that much about what happens around us. We have the illusion that we know a lot and see a lot, but each one of us sees the world through a tiny pinhole. Anyone who tells you different is on a pathetic ego trip and will eventually be humbled pretty badly. People like that are destined to have Zaphod Beeblebrox Total Perspective Vortex moments, only without the hack that saved Zaphod.

Douglas Adams died an atheist, and he was younger than I am now. Terrible to think about. At this moment, he is having a Total Perspective Vortex experience that will never end.

It’s sad to see people you can relate to deny God. The director Joss Whedon is another one. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his work, but he uses the borrowed term “Sky Bully” to describe God. Not only does he reject God; he thinks doing so is a crucial part of maturation. Of the nonexistence of God, he said, “That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.”

It’s hard to imagine how anything can be important or necessary in a universe where people simply go out, like the glow from a firefly’s tail (or the run of a canceled TV series). If nothing lasts, nothing has any importance. The greatest evil you can do won’t affect anyone for more than 120 or so years. That’s the upper limit of the human lifespan, and in a universe that lasts forever, it’s mathematically indistinguishable from nothing.

Maybe he means believing God doesn’t exist is important if you want to set yourself free to do all the fun things God is against. That’s probably it. It’s suitably trite, like all atheist platitudes.

It doesn’t take much to impress an atheist. No matter how tired their arguments are, they always think they’re fresh and ingenious.

These days, homosexuality tops the list of fun things God won’t let us embrace. We used to think homosexuality was a problem. Now we think God and Christians who are against homosexuality are the problem. It’s just like the notion that Israel, the only civilized nation in the Middle East, is the problem in that part of the world. Muslims (who torture and execute homosexuals, by the way) will love each other and live in joy once we let them kill the Jews. We know this because Muslims have always been so nice to each other. Yep.

Get rid of one set of combatants, and the war will end. That’s what the people who hate us think. Satan’s children don’t realize there will always be conflict. Kill all the Christians, and Satan’s children will eat each other in our absence. They will find reasons. Look how many atheists they murdered in the USSR and China.

Atheists and other unsaved people are the real fireflies. They may entertain us for while, but very, very soon their names will be blotted out forever, and their infantile works will disappear. They will be removed from our presence, and some say our thoughts, for eternity. There won’t be any gay pride marches or BLM or Antifa riots where we’re going. Everyone will be pro-life. Everyone will be pro-Israel. Everyone will love the God of the Jews.

I can’t imagine a world without conflict. I wish I could conceive of the sensation, so I could enjoy it in advance.

Living in Marion County is a little bit like moving to heaven. In Miami, everyone hates each other. Rudeness is normal. Cubans hate blacks. Blacks hate Cubans. White people are unwelcome, and we know it, so we sell our houses and leave.

Up here, people are so nice I still can’t get used to it. Doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is.

Heaven will be nicer yet.

I feel like I’m ascending. This, oddly, is a very Jewish idea. The real name of the Jordan River (“Yarden”) means “descend” in Hebrew, and Jews who leave Israel are “yardim,” or, “those who descend.” When you move to Israel, you make “aliyah,” which means you go up. When I applied to be a kibbutz volunteer, I went through an annoying agency called Kibbutz Aliyah.

Jerusalem is pretty high up, and the Bible describes Jews who went to Jerusalem to worship in God’s presence as “going up.”

Ocala is a monstrous step up from Miami. It’s like moving from the gutters of Calcutta to Beverly Hills, in spiritual terms. Miami is a rotting hole of carnality and ignorance. Ocala is wonderful, but I feel I have another upward step to take before I leave the earth. I seriously believe I’ll be in Tennessee soon. I hope so, because hunting has made me miss Appalachia like crazy.

Last night I went to Gander Outdoors (a sporting goods store) to buy more tools for hunting, and when I got to the register, the lady who rang me up joked with me like I was her cousin. I am not an extroverted person. In Miami, I have to repeat myself all the time because no one understands English, and I’m used to people being cold or hostile. I don’t automatically kid around with strangers. It’s strange to have cashiers and waitresses show me warmth and familiarity.

There is a way southerners talk to each other, and if you’re not a southerner, I can’t explain it, but it’s very welcoming and inclusive. Here, I can fall into it. In Miami, I might as well be talking to porcupines with inflamed hemorrhoids.

Puercoespins con hemorrhoides grandes.

I still have so much healing to do! It’s very hard to let people be nice to me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to live in Miami. I was blind to what people were doing to me. I tried to make it work. I was descending, the whole time!

Funny thing; I’m from Eastern Kentucky, which is part of a southern state, and I can tell you, people there are not that nice. There is a streak of Celtic blackheartedness in them. Many people in the mountain areas ridicule their kids and spouses. They spit out little barbs all the time. They can’t say nice things to people. They have to find roundabout ways to do it. Up there, a person will say something nasty to you, facetiously, hoping you will see through it and understand they mean something nice. They’re afraid to say things like, “You look very pretty today,” or, “I’m very proud of you.” I have had this problem myself. These days, I feel very liberated when I say something nice to someone without putting a little hook in it.

There is a lot of Celtic blood in the mountains, and Celts are mean. Their tongues are like whips. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Everyone knows the Scots are mean, but the Irish are mean, too. They may hide it better, but there is a lot of hardness in them. They didn’t become the biggest terrorists in Europe because they’re warm and forgiving.

In this country, the Irish have great PR. You watch movies, and you see gentle, half-drunk people who smoke clay pipes and say poetic things. Totally unrealistic. The Irish are angry as hell!

Call me prejudiced. I don’t care. I’m old, and I’m going to die soon. I can say whatever I want. Go ahead and ban me from Aer Lingus. That will teach me.

Miami poisoned me, but when my family moved there, we brought ethnic poison of our own. I never thought about that until now. At least I don’t think so.

Mountain people in Kentucky and other states have problems, but people are nicer in other areas of the South.

I continue watching healing videos on Youtube. They make me wonder what purpose I serve here on earth. I see Christians going out and healing total strangers. What do I do? I blog and manage real estate. I have a strong prayer life, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s nice to see Christians getting out there and demonstrating God’s love.

I’ve been watching a guy named Tom Fischer. Through his videos, I found someone else. A young man named Troy. He only has a few videos. He heals people, too.

When he talks to people, his face shines. It makes you sense God’s love. That’s impressive. I’ll embed a video.

I can’t do this kind of thing. I have not been called or empowered to do it. Evangelists are salesmen, and as I often say, I couldn’t sell poop to flies. If you know a Christian you want to turn away from God, give me a call, and I’ll talk to him. He’ll be worshiping the devil in a week.

There are things you just shouldn’t try to do until God gives you power.

That’s what anointing is all about. “Anointing,” figuratively, means “authority.” A person with an anointing has a commission–an assignment–from God, and God will help him get it done. If you have an anointing, God will part the Red Sea for you. If not, you may lose your church and be imprisoned for something like fraud or pedophilia.

Tom Fischer goes up to Jews in yarmulkes and gets them to let him heal them in the name of Jesus. If you don’t know Jews, you don’t understand how crazy that is. It’s like selling pork in Mecca. But God helps him get away with it.

I can relate to the prophets, because no one listens to me. If I said something obvious which was so brilliant it could end all of the world’s problems in 5 minutes, people would chase me with pitchforks. My old pastors think I’m an idiot. My relatives think I’m an idiot. Many people I’ve gone to church with think I’m an idiot, and I’m talking about people who, in some cases, are nearly illiterate. People who can barely read and who know how educated I am feel completely entitled to lecture me. It’s something to see.

My dad started telling people I was smart…after he lost his mind. I have no words to discuss that! When I was winning the Miami spelling bee, getting crazy test scores, and doing graduate work in physics, I was still an idiot. But now I’m smart. If he goes into a coma, I’ll be a genius.

He says I’m smart, but he doesn’t think I’m bright enough to decide what to throw out. He takes things out of the garbage. When I really want to be sure I’m rid of something, I have to destroy it before I throw it out. Sometimes I’ll pour dishwashing liquid all over it. He says I’m smart, but people’s actions show what they really think.

Never pay any attention to what people say. Always look at their actions.

Don’t count on me being right about the people in the videos I watch. For all I know, they could be axe murderers. I only know what I see.