You Will Dwell in a Land of Walmarts and Chick-fil-A’s

Life here continues to amaze.

My wife and I have been painting the inside of our house. Today we did some other things. We ordered bedroom furniture and had a fantastic Italian meal at a local restaurant run and staffed by Mexicans.

As we were walking into the furniture store to place our order, I told my wife furniture stores would look a whole lot different if there were no women. Mattresses, recliners and maybe some breakfast tables. That’s all we need.

We went with Amish furniture. This is a type of furniture which is popular these days. It looks very good without actually being made of quality wood. They use alder, a second-tier wood, and put wonderful finishes on it. Are the builders really Amish? Well, they clearly use a lot of power tools, so no.

I mean, they could be Amish. They could be like the Orthodox Jews who spend most of their time trying to figure out how to disobey God. “You can’t turn the heat on on the Sabbath!” “Okay, we’ll hire gentiles to do it!” “We can’t carry stuff on the Sabbath outside our homes!” “Okay, we’ll put a tiny wire around our area and pretend it’s an enclosure, which we’ll pretend is a home!”

Oh, boy. Why can’t they figure out a way to justify bacon?

Maybe the Amish have figured out how to run power tools while pretending they’re not running power tools.

Anyway, we are getting Amish furniture. Good wood is too expensive. I’m not blowing $10,000 on a bedroom.

We looked for used stuff, but there are some problems with that. My wife insists on a king size bed, and they were not popular back when ordinary people owned real furniture. Also, when things turn up, they tend to be huge and ostentatious. Like Oskar Schindler’s stolen bed in the movie.

It’s sad, because you can get quality used furniture for much less than you would pay for new “Amish” furniture.

I don’t know why we can’t get good wood. Russia and China are giant reservoirs of hardwoods. I think. Maybe it’s just Russia.

Our bed will be made of dozens of tiny alder planks glued up into panels. The big trees are gone.

Without getting into TMI material, I will say we need a big bed because a certain person thrashes around all night and throws elbows.

We need a couple of couches. Looks like we’ll be paying at least $5K for those. I want reclining couches. I’ve thought it over. We will never have a hoity-toity Architectural Digest home because I refuse to be afraid of my own furnishings. I refuse to have furniture I’m afraid to sit on all day, with or without pizza and beverages. And we expect to have kids. I’m not stupid enough to put a kid on a $7000 couch.

Reclining couches are not all that chic, and they will clash with the traditional style of the house. Tough. We’re getting them.

I found out most reclining chairs and couches are built to fail in 5 years. The industry couch-stuffing standard is something called 1.8-pound foam. If you want a couch to last, you need 2.5-pound foam. We can pay $2500 for couches the manufacturer fully expects to be junk in 2029, or we can pay considerably more for couches that will make it to 2034.

If you buy a La-Z-Boy reclining couch, you have two options. The reasonably-priced one La-Z-Boy knows will collapse in a hurry, or the one that costs $500 more and lasts twice as long. La-Z-Boy isn’t very honest about it, but they do let people know they can “upgrade” their couches.

Their policy is a problem, because retailers other than La-Z-Boy appear to be unwilling to add the optional padding. Other retailers sell La-Z-Boy cheaper than La-Z-Boy, so if you want the padding, you probably have to go to a La-Z-Boy showroom and pay full retail, on top of shelling out for the foam they should give you by default.

Is La-Z-Boy a good brand? Not really, but there really aren’t many good brands. Companies that were great 5 years ago now sell Chinese junk. Oddly, there is now a Chinese company that sells excellent recliners. It’s called Hydeline. American companies ruined their reputations by selling Chinese garbage, and the Chinese themselves fixed the problem. Really nice.

Hooker. Bradington Young. Go ahead and tell me about the great company that made your recliner, thinking I don’t know about it. I’ve looked them all up. The wonderful chair you bought in 2015 is probably not available now. Best you can do is a copy full of flimsy foam.

I don’t really like Hydeline couches. They don’t look great, and they don’t come in fabric. I may give up and go with La-Z-Boy.

Fabric is actually better than leather. It costs less. It breathes. It’s more comfortable. It’s less likely to be destroyed by spills.

In the far past, leather was for peasants and fabric was for patricians. If you bought an expensive limousine, the driver sat on leather, out in the weather, and you sat inside on fabric. Look it up. Things have changed, and modern people have no idea they’re paying extra for servant trappings.

I’d like to have a leather chair and two fabric couches. Maybe we’ll find what we want.

I love our mattress. It’s a Novaform I got at Costco for my dad. When he died, I cleaned it to surgical standards, and now we use it. I want another foam mattress. They are fantastic. I would never have another pre-2000-technology mattress.

Foam mattresses don’t need box springs. I’m not actually sure why any mattress needs one, but anyway, I want a mattress that sits right on a wooden platform. Foam gives perfect support. It’s cool, which is nice in Florida. It comes with a cover you can take off and submerge in cleaning solution if something bad happens. And it’s cheap.

My mattress cost $500, and it’s still not too far from that. It has a 20-year warranty. I want one as much like it as possible.

At one time, I somehow ended up sleeping on a conventional Sealy mattress my mother had paid over $2000 for. I threw it out. It was like a concrete sidewalk. Never again. If I can get something better for about $500, and it will last 20 years, I’m all over it. If it doesn’t work out, and I can’t return it, I can buy a different $500 mattress the following year and not worry about it.

I like a nice mushy mattress. I don’t know how people sleep on hard ones. What I really like is a somewhat firm mattress with a layer of mushy stuff on top.

Today we went to Sam’s Club to look at their signature foam mattress. I figured we could lie on one so my wife could put it up against her princess genes to prevent her from finding problems with it after purchase. No such luck. Sam’s Club sells mattresses they won’t let you try. But they guarantee them. They must have a huge markup, like conventional mattresses. If they’re willing to pay you to take a nearly-new mattress to the dump and pay you for it, instead of letting you try it in the store, they can’t have paid more than 50 bucks for it.

We left without a mattress. We also went to TJ Maxx so my wife could look at 4,000 pairs of cheap shoes.

So that’s what we did today.

We drove home in the twilight on I-75. It was beautiful out. The temperature was 68 degrees. The sky was kind of a dark lavender above, with darker purple near the horizon. The trailers on the big trucks seemed to shine like silver tea services. The taillights gleamed like backlit rubies. Very odd. I commented on this to my wife, and she agreed.

I told her I had the feeling this area was like a farm where God raised people like livestock. Everything was provided for us. Life was easy. Lots of stores. Not much traffic. Enough good restaurants for a reasonable person. Great people.

She agreed. We are very sheltered.

We talked about our marriage. People told us things would get worse when we were together day after day, but the opposite happened. We had a little friction on a couple of our trips, but here, things go smoother and smoother with the passage of time. We enjoy each other more. We’re not just mates. We’re buddies.

We went home, and I looked at X and saw lunatics making death threats toward conservatives. I saw men trying to breastfeed. It was like spying on a planet where a virus had made everyone insane. I felt like Gulliver checking out the Yahoos.

People are hopeless and angry now. Their lives are falling apart. They’re waiting for civil war. Some look forward to it. They go home and watch violent movies and listen to ghetto whores singing about their vaginas. They go to work and get pushed around by perverts who insist they lie about their genders or get written up.

It’s different with us.

Prayer in tongues is what makes the difference. The more you do it, the more you will be aligned with God and others who pray in tongues. I wake up at night and hear my wife praying and singing in the master closet. I wake up in the morning and pray in tongues silently while she sleeps next to me. It works. God has graciously given us the ability to make ourselves do it.

I believe God moves people away from Yahoos as they draw closer to him. I believe he pushes people into lower circumstances as they move away. I think prisons are full of people who are far from God. They are moving toward hell, and prisons are about as close to hell as you can get while you’re alive.

I think God moves Spirit-filled, cooperative people to places like the county where I live. Maybe there is a nicer county we’ll be moved to if we keep cooperating. Eventually, we will be raptured to an even better place, or we will die and go to heaven. That’s how it looks to me.

I don’t believe people who are really close to God and highly informed live in defeat. The Bible says such people are blessed and victorious. How can you be victorious if you live in defeat?

I hear singing right now.

I’m not claiming we’re good people. There are no good people. We are rewarded for listening and cooperating, not for perfection.

Time to have a beer and see what the wife is up to. I hope God sees fit to keep us separated from the insanity.