Get my Pod Ready

I talk to my parrot Marvin a lot, which only means I’m reciprocating. The other day, I found myself walking around the kitchen saying, “It’s really happening. The world is really ending.” He didn’t have much to say about it. He talks mostly about peanuts. But it was comforting to have a listener.

Marv’s new favorite thing to say is, “peanuts and bird.” I think the meaning is obvious. It’s like saying, “Pawn to queen five,” sort of. It’s a delivery request.

Can a pawn move to queen five? I don’t know. I don’t play chess.

I was talking to my wife this morning, and she was enjoying her new home in Zambia. Seems like she never gets out of the tub. I thought about the mild stress I had felt about setting her up over there. I want to be generous, but I don’t want to endanger our futures by overspending. The stress has melted away. I thought about that.

These days, I feel as though the funds I have were Monopoly money. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I spend, because we won’t be here long.

Remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Arthur Dent’s village was about to demolish his house, and he was very upset. His friend Ford Prefect took him to a pub while the bulldozer was sitting in his yard, waiting to start, and he ordered pints and peanuts for Arthur and himself. He told the bartender to serve them quickly because the world was going to end. At first, the bartender didn’t pay much attention, but he realized something was wrong when Ford left him two extravagant tips. Pounds were about to lose all their value, so why not spend them?

Douglas Adams is the best humorist I know of. A modern Voltaire. It’s a shame he was a proselytizing, belligerent atheist. I will never meet him. He dropped dead while still holding onto his pathological beliefs. When we are judged and the question of salvation is resolved, we won’t get any credit for good intentions or good works. Nice people who wrote funny books and rejected Jesus will go to hell.

Voltaire was an atheist, too. It’s one of the things that make people view him as progressive. He was an atheist before atheism was cool.

In Paris, there is a collection of tombs for famous people. It’s a sort of secular pantheon, and aptly, it’s in a building called the Pantheon. Victor Hugo is there. So is Marie Curie. They moved dead celebrities in, and Voltaire is one of them.

The Pantheon was originally a church, but it was commandeered for secular use. Fitting.

The Pantheon’s mausoleum is for people who are revered for their allegedly positive contributions to Western civilization. Voltaire’s encased body is there, still receiving the adulation of intellectuals. Where is Voltaire himself, though? Probably not receiving adulation. Very much the opposite. He is probably crying in hell, where his pride likely failed to follow him when he died two and a half centuries ago. Everyone is humiliated in hell, no matter how cocky they were up here. There are probably some people who keep spitting at God even from the pit, but my guess is that the majority spend their time crying, screaming, and begging with no dignity at all.

In November, they’re putting a plaque for Josephine Baker in the Pantheon. What are the odds she made it to heaven? She did a lot of things to help France during World War Two, and she was a civil rights activist. She also adopted poor children. It all sounds nice, but she was a famous stripper who was promiscuous with both sexes, and she didn’t do her good deeds in the name of God.

I guess she was the black Marlene Dietrich.

Atheists and even many Christians think God takes you to heaven for being good, but it’s completely untrue. You can do no end of nice things, but if you reject Jesus, you go to hell anyway. People who live altruistic lives while rejecting Jesus are like ectopic pregnancies. They are headed for problems. The entrance to heaven is like the birth canal, and there are no spiritual caesarians.

Guess I’m digressing. Or am I? The underlying theme hasn’t changed. The things we think are important here generally are not, and that becomes increasingly obvious as we get closer to our departures.

Yesterday, motivated by the shortages most people haven’t noticed yet, I went to Wal-Mart and Publix. I spent about $175 on things like beans, flour, protein bars, and canned meat. I replenished the disaster rations I’ve been carelessly eating.

Costo says paper towels are going to disappear again, but there are plenty here. I picked up 24 rolls. I noticed that Wal-mart’s selection of dried beans was pretty bad, and the big bags of rice I wanted to buy were not there. The rice in the main area was wiped out. They still had some big bags in the Hispanic region, but I passed them by. Products aimed at Hispanics tend to be low-quality.

I got some New York strips at acceptable prices. These days, $10 per pound is a good deal. It used to be the everyday price. I paid $9 and $10, at different stores.

I don’t like strips all that much, but they’re way better than nothing, and deals on choice rib eyes are rare.

I have a ton of oatmeal. When the rapture comes, it will not find me constipated. The oatmeal will counteract the rice, pasta, white bread, and Velveeta.

If they don’t take away our electricity, I will be fine for a few months of famine. Without electricity, I won’t have water or any way to cook food. I wish I lived in beautiful Tennessee, on a farm with springs, a gas well, and soil that grows things other than water oaks and weeds.

Are my acorns edible? I should check. They don’t sound appetizing. I think there is something you can do with them to render them useful, but I don’t know what it is. I have mountains of them.

WebMD says you can eat acorns if you pulverize them, soak them, and keep discarding the water until it’s colorless. Yay. Whee. Rapture me, please.

If famine outlasts my supplies, I would just as soon die as subsist on squirrels and crows. I think those would be my only fall-back staples once Sonny’s BBQ closes. Even Euell Gibbons would have a hard time finding wild food on my property.

Rhodah is nervous about Tennessee. She is afraid of racism. You can’t let other people tell you where to live, though, and my guess is that there are plenty of places in rural Tennessee where they are more concerned about people’s religious and political beliefs than they are about race. I would think there would be room for two charismatic Christian conservatives who showed up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Is it okay for a Christian to use lethal force in self-defense? It’s a question I revisit from time to time.

I had this thought the other day: Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, but he didn’t say to stand still and let people stab us with swords. A slap on the cheek is not that big a deal, but other types of battery are. Even dangerous people who know a lot about fighting routinely counsel us to avoid fights and run away, but they don’t usually tell us to lie down and die.

There is a former Navy SEAL named Jocko Willink, and he looks exactly like his name sounds. His head, all by itself, looks like it could defeat a battalion. He is a scary-looking dude. The other day, I saw a little bit of a video in which he provided people with advice. He said that if someone punched him, his first choice would be to run away.

I kind of wonder if he was telling the truth, given the ease with which he could subdue most people, but I am relaying his advice accurately. He said fighting leads to a lot of problems, which is true. He and Jesus are in agreement when it comes to minor batteries. Would he let someone shoot him or his wife, though? Bet not.

I would appreciate it if someone who reads my blog would find Jocko Willink and punch him in the face, just to see how honest he is. I would do it myself, but my sinuses are bothering me, and you know how that is.

Jesus told the disciples to buy and carry swords. What for? He discouraged Peter from using a sword to save him from the murderous priests who had him tortured to death, but he let him whack one of their servants first. This happened on a special occasion. The priests had come, and it was important for Jesus to die. Would he have stopped Peter a week earlier, when a premature murder would have prevented the crucifixion?

The death of Jesus was necessary. My death by murder isn’t, as far as I can see. My blood has no value. It can’t save anyone. No one who eats my body can claim to have taken communion. Would Jesus have told Peter not to defend me?

Was it necessary for Paul to take beatings and stonings? Maybe Jesus would have preferred to see him use a sword to save himself. I wonder.

The apostles made a lot of mistakes. No one likes to talk about that. They had public arguments, so obviously, they weren’t right all the time.

Wow. Superman is a sodomite. I just found out after writing the last paragraph. DC Comics has a new Superman–the primary messiah substitute in American comics–who does it with dudes. Sorry about the abrupt transition.

Wow. Wow. What’s next? Deepfake John Wayne gay porn? James Bond has been fairly gay since Casino Royale, so there is no point in wondering about him. Maybe they’ll create a deepfake Eastwood character called Dainty Harry.

Yesterday, I started thinking about the long history of seemingly gay Bond villains. It startled me.

1. Dr. No. No. Although he was a single man who lived on an island with other men, so I could be wrong.

2. From Russia with Love. Robert Shaw’s Donald Grant was a bemuscled gym rat with bleached blond hair and a full-body winter tan, he appeared to be oiled in at least one scene, and he certainly liked tussling with other men. Not sure, though.

3. Goldfinger. Single man who favored shorts back when they raised eyebrows. Could be.

4. Thunderball. Emilio Largo lived on an island with men who spent a lot of time swimming together, he wore a shorty wetsuit, and he always had an incredible tan and perfectly coiffed salt and pepper hair. A possible.

5. You Only Live Twice. Blofeld…gay, gay, gay, gay GAY. A prim old man who sat around stroking a cat. Come on. He could have been Elton John’s dad.

6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I don’t know. No one saw this movie.

7. Diamonds are Forever. Jimmy Dean was definitely straight, but Blofeld was still the uncle who always shows up for Thanksgiving dinner unaccompanied, drinks too much, and cries because everyone else gets pecan pie before he does.

8. Live and Let Die. Kananga seemed butch, but Geoffrey Holder made up for it in spades. He was the first Rupaul.

9. The Man With the Golden Gun. Christopher Lee was effeminate and dressed way too well to be straight. And he cried because an elephant died.

10. The Spy Who Loved Me. Don’t remember. I couldn’t stand Roger Moore, who was, himself, a bit buoyant in his Ballys.

11. Moonraker. Michael Lonsdale’s Drax did not exactly ooze testosterone. I would not want him to be my son’s scoutmaster.

12. For Your Eyes Only. Honestly, I don’t remember this one, except that Bond had to fend off an amorous minor who was determined to get him to commit a felony with her.

13. Octopussy. The villain was Louis Jourdan. Draw your own conclusions.

14. A View to a Kill. Christopher Walken’s Zorin will remind you that Walken got his start as a dancer.

15. The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton made us all miss George Lazenby. No idea what happened in this movie.

16. Goldeneye. Didn’t see it.

17. Tomorrow Never Dies. Didn’t see it, but Jonathan Pryce generally comes off as masculine in his other roles, in spite of being nearly English.

18. The World is not Enough. Robert Carlyle’s Renard had that “They always picked me last in gym class” feel, but he also had a crush on Sophie Marceau.

19. Die Another Day. Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves and Pierce Brosnan seemed positively infatuated with each other. Their sweaty fencing match was like two storks doing a courtship dance.

The Craig films, or at least some of them, were fit to sit on the same DVD shelf as Gore Vidal’s sometimes-troubling Ben Hur. The gross Mads Mikkelsen rope scene, gay Q, Bond failing to close the deal with the tantalizing Moneypenny, Bond and Javier Bardem flirting, the return of tiny, Italian-slippered Blofeld, an aging Craig fighting Freddie Mercury…I’d have to say there were undercurrents.

Maybe they’ll rewrite our history books and put George Washington in bed with Thomas Jefferson. In the future, we’ll go past saying everyone is gay and every really admirable historical figure was gay. We’ll say everyone has always been gay. Children will wonder how we kept the race going.

We’ll have to transpose “surrogate” into hieroglyphics and cuneiform in carve it on obelisks and tablets. We can make some fake Dead Sea Scrolls, but to keep up with the times, we can see to it they’re discovered in Provincetown.

Superman is a homosexual. It was inevitable, but still. It’s terrible, but it’s impossible not to laugh a little. Who’s next? Winnie the Pooh? Tom Sawyer? Mickey Mouse? The Grinch? Well, Jim Carrey already went there.

If there is one thing that would make Lex Luthor go straight, this has to be it.

Everything around me is exploding in slow motion. It’s like the verse from the Revelation in which the stars fall from the sky.

I should buy a few more groceries and some batteries, and then maybe I’ll burn, “Come get me, Jesus,” into my lawn and sit outside hopefully in an Adirondack chair.

What fresh insanity will tomorrow bring? The question is chilling. I lack the imagination to guess.