Someone Check his ID

I haven’t blogged for a few days. Seems like whatever I had to say was not ripe yet. I will update the world on my progress.

My dad keeps improving. It’s astonishing. All of my life, I had to cope with the knowledge that I could not respect my father as much as I wanted to. I could honor him, but I could never look at him and be satisfied that he was doing what he should. That’s over now. He is a new person.

He is physically weak. He is in a wheelchair. He can’t remember things from one hour to the next. Nonetheless, he is as good a father as a man could ever want, and I am very, very grateful for him.

I tell him what a good father he is, and I mean it.

God used to tell me my dad would be saved, and I was happy about that, but I thought it would be a wrestling match right up to the end. I expected limited satisfaction. I figured he would lie on his deathbed and accept God out of fear, and that when he went, things between us would be unresolved. I expected to have to finish the work of resolution on my own. It hasn’t worked out that way. God has removed bitterness and resentment, and my dad and I are finally in unity.

How many people get this blessing? I know people who have forgiven their parents, and I know people whose relationships with difficult parents have been improved, but I don’t know anyone else who has been truly healed. It shows what is available to us, if we will persist in our relationships with God.

When I show up at the ALF where my dad lives, he is always thrilled to see me. He says one nice thing after another about me. He expresses complete confidence in me. He keeps saying he wants me to have everything he has. We haven’t had a harsh exchange in weeks.

Leaving the ALF used to be difficult because he would tell me how miserable it made him to see me go. Now he says he doesn’t want to keep me if I have things to do. What a difference that makes. He still expresses concern about how he’ll feel when I’m gone, but he isn’t manipulative.

Derek Prince teaches a lot about witchcraft, and he breaks it down into types. Some types involve calling on evil spirits, but one type isn’t overtly supernatural. If you exert excessive pressure on people to do your will, for selfish reasons, it’s a form of witchcraft.

I lived under this type of witchcraft all my life. When I was a kid, my dad ruled the house through fear. Later on, he used money. He broke down our ability to trust ourselves. He made us feel incompetent. He also coerced us to say he was right and we were wrong; maybe that was the worst thing he did.

Guilt trips are witchcraft. My dad used guilt to get obedience a great deal, even when it was clear that he was in the wrong.

My dad doesn’t manipulate me now. He doesn’t belittle me. He doesn’t try to worry me. He doesn’t attack my competence. He doesn’t try to make me feel guilty. He doesn’t try to intimidate me. He doesn’t threaten.

I feel the way I used to feel when he left for business trips. When I was a kid, we counted the days until he left, and while he was gone, we felt like we were on vacation. I feel that way now. My dad is still here, but the black presence that accompanied him is gone.

I don’t like bringing the past up. I used to get relief from it. I needed to vent because I felt pressured to believe lies. Venting helps you resist gaslighting and other forms of manipulation. Now I don’t feel pressured, so talking about the past doesn’t make me feel better. Now it’s an unpleasant duty. My dad is wonderful; I don’t want to say bad things about him.

It’s too bad I’m not married, because there is no one to witness what’s happening with my dad. I wish someone else could see it. I may shoot some more video.

A bad relationship with a parent is a hard thing to overcome. When you mistreat your kids, it’s as if you tie weights to their legs. Life is tough even with parents who bless you, and when you have to fight your parents every day, it’s much tougher. Getting away from a toxic parent is helpful, but you will still carry the parent’s voice inside you, and their curses will still rest on you. The best cure is true reconciliation through submission to God.

I believe many suicides can be traced to selfish parents. When your parents don’t bless you, you will feel that there is an impregnable wall between you and fruitfulness, and even when you’re alone, you will hear your parents’ voices, increasing the weight of your burdens. Young people kill themselves to end the frustration and get away from the voices.

Many of us work to overcome the voices or to drown them out, but I have something better than that. The voices are gone. My dad is a builder, not a destroyer.

My dad keeps talking about God. Sometimes I take notes in my phone. Yesterday, out of the blue, he said, “Peace of mind could be had if only people would listen to the word of God.” I was stunned. Where did that come from? It had to be the Holy Spirit. I haven’t been lecturing him on the word of God.

He’s not doing well physically. The swelling in his ankles keeps increasing, and now they keep him bandaged because fluid weeps out. The decline hasn’t stopped. At the same time, God is tapering off the difficulties that typically surround the death of a parent. He has helped us to be reconciled. He has helped me prepare for cremation and burial. He has helped me avoid probate. On the one hand, I value my time with my dad more than I used to, but on the other, I have much more peace with the prospect of his departure.

It’s painful when someone dies suddenly or without peace. I knew a lady whose husband walked into the kitchen one day and found her body on the floor. One of my high school friends shot himself in the head. At my last church, we used to pray all the time for a man who had breast cancer, and he was held out as a triumphant recipient of divine healing. Then the cancer spread to his brain, and they say he shouted and ranted at the end. It’s unusual for a person’s death to go smoothly, like a wedding planned months in advance. It’s happening to my dad, and none of it is my work.

I’m glad the estate won’t be a problem. I’m going to write my own will so my own estate passes with as little suffering as possible. Sometimes I don’t care what happens to my wealth, but then I think about the waste that would occur if I died intestate. Much of what I have would go to a person who does nothing but consume and destroy. Surely it would be better to direct it to more productive channels.

I would love to make some provisions for my sister, but to include her in a will at all would be to inflict tremendous, lingering suffering on the personal representative and other beneficiaries, so I can’t do it. There is just no way.

I don’t know how much better my testimony could get. If you’re reading this, be encouraged. God is a very good father.

Repetitive Ads You Can’t Skip Rival Waterboarding

I am now weeks into the cable-free lifestyle, so I guess I’ll report.

I do not miss cable (in my case, actually satellite) at all. I have Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Youtube. I watch Youtube for the most part. I watch Hulu maybe 5 days per week. I watch Amazon Prime rarely, but since the video portion of Amazon Prime comes with the free shipping at no extra charge, I plan to keep it.

Here is the breakdown.

Youtube is far and away the best source of video entertainment and education, and the price is right. I can learn about absolutely anything on Youtube. I could become a very credible engineer or mathematician using only Youtube and used textbooks. Youtube is packed with tool videos. If you want to do any type of metalworking or woodworking, Youtube should be your second stop, after joining an online forum. Youtube is also the best source for religious material. No contest.

Hulu is not as good as DirecTV for my purposes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t cost $200 per month. I have no use for nudie channels or network TV. I don’t watch sports. I like Motor Trend, TCM, History, and Discovery, and that’s about it. For a person like me, Hulu fills in all the non-Youtube blanks.

There are problems with Hulu. First, the ads are a horror. They charge you something like $50 per month for the basic service, and then they nail you for a few more dollars to get rid of ads. Then they give you ads anyway.

Hulu is EXTREMELY DISHONEST about ads. When you watch a Hulu show, you can bring up a bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar will contain long unbroken stretches which represent programming. The breaks represent ads. The breaks look very small compared to the unbroken stretches, giving you the idea that ads don’t take up a lot of time. In reality, a typical stretch of programming runs maybe 7 minutes, and ads will often go three minutes. I haven’t timed programs with a stopwatch, but it appears that maybe a third of a typical program’s running time is ads.

You can’t fast-forward past Hulu ads. If Hulu says you have 170 seconds of ads to sit through, you will darned well sit through them. Also, because Hulu isn’t a highly successful company, the ads lack variety. They don’t have a lot of advertisers. This means you will generally see the same ad several times during a show. It’s a form of torture.

Hulu has a DVR feature. You can record shows and watch them later. You only get 50 hours of cloud time, which is not much. If you record a show, you also record the ads. Then when you replay it, you get the recorded ads PLUS the Hulu-inserted ads. You can blow through the recorded ads, but you are still stuck with the inserted ads.

How do I know Hulu needs to fix its ad problem? Simple. When I watch a Hulu show that really tortures me with ads, I switch to Youtube or Amazon in frustration. Hulu is conditioning me to watch other services which beat them on price, so clearly, their methods are not smart.

It seemed like I didn’t get many ads when I first started using Hulu. Maybe they ramp them up once you’re hooked. I think Hulu is a crooked company, so it would not surprise me.

Other companies have better ways of handling ads. Cable and satellite companies let you fast-forward through recorded ads. Youtube generally allows you to opt out of ads after the first 5 seconds, which is brilliant. You may conceivably see an ad you like, and you are free to watch it in its entirety. On the other hand, you don’t have to watch the same ad about living with AIDS 900 times in one week.

Youtube is convinced I have AIDS. I keep seeing the same two AIDS ads.

I think you can pay for ad-free Youtube, but the ads on Youtube are so painless, I see no point in it.

Amazon doesn’t have ads, unless ads for Amazon shows count. Those ads play before your chosen programs, so your programs don’t get interrupted.

Hulu has a forum where you can complain and make suggestions. If they don’t like your posts, they delete them. When you ask why your posts were deleted, they pretend they can’t hear you.

I may dump Hulu. Nearly all of my TV shows are Motor Trend shows, and I can get the Motor Trend channel, ad-free, for $5 per month. I watch a couple of shows from other channels, but there are honest ways to get those programs without Hulu. I still have an Xfinity account, for reasons too boring to go into, and I can use that to get online access to some of the stuff I watch. I like Turner Classic Movies, which Hulu offers. Guess what? TCM movies are available online, free of charge.

Amazon Prime has a lot of mediocre shows I don’t want to watch. It also has The Grand Tour, which is nice, but you can go through a whole season in 4 days, and I’m already done with season three. There are some good “free” things on Amazon Prime, but generally, you have to pay if you want quality.

I like Better Call Saul, which is an AMC product. AMC puts all of the episodes on the Internet. There goes that problem.

I think shedding Hulu is a good idea. I may kill it and see how it goes. I can start again whenever I want. I could put part of the saved money into killing Youtube ads.

Final thing…I may be about to get fixed wireless Internet. I have DSL right now. Wireless speeds are much better. I have been waiting for unlimited wireless data, and it has finally become available. It’s not cheap; I would pay around $100 per month. I think it would be worth it. Life on 1.5 MBps is not normal.

The company that would sell me wireless access would use towers provided by Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. Verizon would be optimal, because they give me 35 MPps on my phone on this property. Problem: Verizon is greedy. They throttle data after a certain point. After three days of TV, I would be cut off. That means I need to find out what the other towers can do for me.

The phone rep for the reseller said I might get 8 MBps. Hey, that’s four times what I get now. Hard to complain.

The more I think about it, the less I feel I can recommend Hulu. Their practices seem shady, and their ad policies sometimes make watching TV very unpleasant.

To sum up, Youtube is great, Amazon is okay, TCM is free, and the Hulu honeymoon is over. DSL is a horror. Fixed wireless is in my future, once I find a good way to get it.

Anything, including most diseases, is better than DirecTV.

Go to the Source

Today I watched a video by a man associated with The Last Reformation. His name is Peter Ahlman, and he’s from Sweden. He was in Israel talking to a Messianic Jew named Ariel Hyde. Hyde has a hard job, which may be a crime in Israel. He tries to get Jews to accept Jesus.

It’s not easy to figure out whether proselytizing is truly a crime in Israel. The official government position is that it’s legal, but if Wikipedia is correct, the government is not quite honest about it. They arrest and detain people deemed to be missionaries, and they forbid them to enter the country. They also force people to pledge not to proselytize. Also, it is illegal to try to convert a minor unless the minor has a parent belonging to the faith in question.

It looks like the issue is not really settled. I don’t know the answer. I suppose the government of Israel is like many secular governments. It probably makes a lot of compromises when dealing with religion, leaving everyone concerned feeling cheated.

Ariel Hyde tells Jews about Isaiah 53, which is a Bible passage that describes the Messiah. I am not saying this is the Jewish position on the matter; it’s what Christians believe. It describes the life of Jesus very accurately. The video describes Isaiah 53 as a “forbidden” passage which Jews have tried to play down. It is not read in synagogues.

Isaiah 53 says the Messiah will be rejected and put to death. It clearly says he will be punished for the sins of others.

Hyde says Jewish scholars used to say Isaiah 53 was about the Messiah, and he mentions Maimonides as an authority who held this belief. Is that true? It appears to be. Maimonides referred to part of Isaiah 53 in connection with the Messiah. On the other hand, in another work, he said that if a candidate was killed, he was not the Messiah promised by the Bible. Isaiah 53 expressly states that the person it describes was “cut off from the land of the living.”

My best guess is that Maimonides simply made a mistake. He had many things to study, and it may well be that he took inconsistent positions because something slipped his mind. Alternatively, maybe his beliefs concerning Isaiah 53 changed. Maybe he believed it was about the Messiah at one time, and then he changed his mind. Maybe that’s not the answer; maybe he thought part of Isaiah 53 was about the Messiah and part was not.

It does appear clear that he thought part of it was a Messianic prophecy.

If the figure in Isaiah 53 isn’t the Messiah, who could it be? Who else was put to death for our sins? Nobody. No human being.

It has to be about SOMEONE.

As for the censorship issue, I don’t think you can call a passage “forbidden” when it’s still included in Torah scrolls and printed versions of Isaiah. Religious Jews say less than 5% of the prophets’ writings are read in synagogues, and they claim Isaiah 53 has never been included. They say they can debunk sources that claim otherwise.

It was interesting to watch Hyde talk to Jews. He spoke to several in the video, and at least three were religious. Two wore yarmulkes, and one appeared to be some type of Orthodox Jew. He wore a black suit and a black hat, and he had a full beard. None of the people Hyde spoke to seemed familiar with Isaiah 53. When he showed it to them, they expressed surprise. That’s very strange. I can understand why random Israelis would be ignorant; most Jews are atheists. I would expect religious Jews to know more than that.

Given the high level of scholarship among religious Jews–some of them, at least–the natural assumption is that a typical religious Jew will be familiar with the entire Old Testament, just as many, many Christians are. Perhaps this is not the case. Maybe their devotion to the Talmud and other extrascriptural works is so great, scripture takes a backseat.

There are Christian sects which tend to produce Biblically ignorant people. Catholics are amazing in this regard. It seems like very few of them read the Bible. To become a Catholic, you have to study a work called the catechism, and you have to show that you are familiar with certain points. It seems that the catechism has become a sort of Christian Talmud. The implication appears to be that if you read what certain men have written about God, you don’t need to know what God himself says through the Bible.

Catholics are so notorious for their laxity, our language contains the familiar phrase “practicing Catholic.” We needed a way to set serious Catholics apart from the majority. Catholics themselves use the term “hatch, match, and dispatch Catholics.” It refers to people who only show up in church to be christened, married, and buried.

I am not a Catholic, so I can’t say for a fact that Catholics prefer rituals and extrascriptural works to the Bible, but I have seen a number of Catholics say this is the way things are.

The Catholic church used to have a rule making it illegal for laymen to own Bibles, so I guess no one should be surprised if an anti-scriptural, pro-scholarship bias still impacts their methods.

I don’t understand why anyone who wants to know God would permit himself to be ignorant of scripture. Short of God himself, it’s the most authoritative source we have. The farther you get from God, the more corrupt sources become. Knowledge gives way to gossip, fables, and propaganda. You can end up with very bad doctrine. The Catholic Church used to be the biggest terrorist organization on earth, while purporting to represent the Prince of Peace. They burned many, many people alive in the name of a gentle man who gave his life to save his persecutors. It shows how dangerous it is to rely on human beings for teaching.

It’s no wonder Catholics worship Mary as a goddess. There is no limit to how wrong you can be when you listen to the wrong teacher.

The Bible makes it clear that Jesus had younger brothers, so the notion that Mary died a virgin is untenable. Jesus himself slapped down a person who tried to exalt Mary. He did it publicly and instantly, knowing what was going to happen in future centuries. You can’t be familiar with the Bible and not know these things. The Bible even criticizes the error of forbidding people to marry.

As for the Jews in the video, I can’t understand how they would be familiar with Isaiah 53. Regardless of how they interpret it, how can they hold themselves out as observant and not know the Old Testament? If you’re going to wear special clothes, go to yeshivas, and live by very difficult rules, supposedly because God is the center of your life, how can you fail to read the Bible regularly? It makes sense for reformed Jews, who, I think, mainly go to the synagogue to practice yoga, but how can the Orthodox end up like this?

Mysterious.

This kind of thing is easier to understand in Christians and Muslims. Christians are not known for their scholarship, and Muslims are on a considerably lower tier. They have a very high illiteracy rate. A big percentage of fanatical Muslims have no idea what they believe, because they don’t study. Many have not read the Koran. Jews, on the other hand, have the single most impressive record of scholarship and learning of all peoples. No one else comes close. They should know the Old Testament better than anyone.

I’m a bad Bible scholar, but I have read it and read it. I have memorized a bunch of psalms. I can recite many verses. I understand the meaning of thousands more, even if I can’t recite them correctly. I’m not unusual among charismatics in America. How did we end up with this advantage, and why would those who oppose us let it happen?

I read both testaments of the Bible. This is normal for people who share my beliefs. None of the Bible has been superceded or repealed, and all of it supports the divinity of Jesus. Pick a book, and you can find him there, starting with the first words of Genesis, which use a plural word to describe God. I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t read the Bible.

The rejection of the suffering Messiah of Isaiah 53 seems strange to me. It’s a classic picture, even outside of Judaism and Christianity. Human beings love to kill people who tell the truth. It’s a recurring theme in history. The Greeks killed Socrates. Greek literature is full of prophets who were contemned. Cain killed Able. Jacob’s sons sold Joseph into slavery. The Hebrews rejected Moses and worshiped a golden calf. David’s family rejected him. Religious Jews killed and abused prophet after prophet, their modern counterparts admit it, and yet somehow, they can’t believe they would oppose the greatest prophet of all.

It’s not bizarre to kill a Messiah. What’s out of character for humanity is accepting one.

Even if you assume Jesus isn’t the Messiah, wouldn’t you expect the Messiah to face terrible opposition? If I rejected Jesus, I would still expect the Messiah to be treated the way he treated his messengers. After all, the message is the same.

The notion of an iron-fisted Messiah who appears and forces everyone to kneel and obey is incompatible with the Bible. Free will is clearly a top priority with God. Our loving God throws people into burning torment every day because he considers it better than making them slaves or robots. If a Messiah came and forced everyone to obey right off the bat, he wouldn’t change many people. Most of us would hate him and wait for an opportunity to dethrone him. A real Messiah would want to change our hearts. Jesus gave us 2000 years of patience so we could come to him on our own and be transformed supernaturally.

God wants our hearts, not merely dutiful adherence to rules. In Psalm 32, he says, “Do not be like the horse or like the mule, Which have no understanding, Which must be harnessed with bit and bridle, Else they will not come near you.”

Here is what Psalm 40 says:

Sacrifice and offering You did not desire;
My ears You have opened.
Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require.
Then I said, “Behold, I come;
In the scroll of the book it is written of me.
I delight to do Your will, O my God,
And Your law is within my heart.”

Any strong person can have slaves. Parenting is harder and takes patience.

I should never be surprised when people turn out to be less impressive than I thought. I don’t know when I’ll finally absorb this lesson.

Free Will Limits Potential to be Blessed

My testimony continues to develop, not always in ways that flatter me.

It has been impossible for me to steady myself and take firm positions during my dad’s illness and transformation. I take certain positions, and then circumstances change, and I realize I have to adapt.

He became a new person this year. He went from calling the Bible a book of fairy tales to urging me enthusiastically to pray with him. He lost his anger. He quit saying things that created anxiety for me. He stopped accusing me and criticizing me. He started blessing me verbally and exclaiming that he loved me. I have marveled at the transformation.

Several years ago, God told me he had cut my dad off. He had also told me my dad would be saved, so when he said he was cut off, I knew he didn’t mean my dad was going to hell. God had decided to cut off some of his mercy here on earth.

The Bible says God’s mercy endures forever, but people misunderstand. His mercy endures forever in heaven, for those who are saved. Here on earth, his patience is limited, regardless of what ignorant people say in order to justify continuing to sin. A God with infinite patience would not have flooded the world or created hell. God shows us great forbearance, but even he requires closure and justice. He’s not going to remain in labor forever just so we can do as we please.

After God told me he had cut my dad off, my dad sank into dementia. I took care of him at home for several years, and during that time, he retained his bitterness, anger, sense of entitlement, and so on. He continued to reject God. After he went to assisted living, the transformation took place.

I pray for people every day. I have a list. My dad has not been on the list for a very long time. I would guess he came off the list something like 5 years ago. I prayed for certain things for people I knew to be Christians, and I included their families. I prayed for my dad separately, because I felt he needed something different.

When I first started to think my dad had memory issues, I began praying regularly for God to take them away, but nothing happened. My dad didn’t develop what I would call full-blown dementia until around 2015, but he was forgetting things a few years before that. After I took my dad off my list, I stopped praying for God to fix his memory. I continued to pray for God to save him, however.

In recent years, I have not prayed for God to take the dementia away. When God told me he had cut my dad off, I knew praying for a cure was pointless, and I also felt that it was enmity toward God. I got used to this stance.

The problem with my position was this: it was a little too convenient for my flesh. I am not the kind of person who would push a parent down the stairs in order to get an inheritance or relief from abuse, but I am a human being, and even though my dad’s problems were disturbing to me, I felt a selfish motivation to refrain from attacking them supernaturally. What if he recovered fully, resented everything I had done since taking over for him, resumed insulting God, and made my life miserable for 5 more years? The prospect was not pleasant.

After my dad changed for the better, I asked myself if it made sense to limit my prayers for him. He was not the same person who had rejected God in the past. He was my new brother. Shouldn’t I pray for him, just as I prayed for other people?

I didn’t feel right about things. I felt like I was committing the sin of Onan, who refused to sow seed in his brother’s widow because he wanted his brother’s inheritance.

Day before yesterday, I decided to pray for him to be healed of dementia and his physical problems. I did it sincerely. I felt God wanted me to do it, if not for my dad, for the health of my own soul. Afterward, I felt peace come to me.

Yesterday, when I went to see my dad, his mind was clearer. He was also angry. When I arrived at the ALF, he was arguing with his roommate. They were having a disagreement about the window blinds. My dad called him a filthy name.

I took my dad to the place where we usually talk, and when God came up, my dad said the Bible was a story book. He said he had only prayed with me in order to make me happy.

What he said wasn’t true. My dad would not pray just to make me happy. That’s not him. He believed. He was sincerely concerned about his future when we prayed.

I had prayed for my dad to be healed, and the very thing I had feared had happened, overnight. He had started to reject God. He was regressing.

While I sat with my dad, I went back over my testimony with him. I reminded him of various things we had discussed. I didn’t push him, but I did preach a little. He started to revert to believing, as though his sudden backsliding had never happened. I asked God, silently, what I should do. Then I got an idea.

I asked my dad if he would agree that arranging for one’s welfare in the afterlife was the most important thing a person could do. He agreed strongly. I asked him if I could pray that God would help him do whatever was necessary to assure his future. I said he could agree with me in prayer. He consented with enthusiasm.

Aloud, I prayed that God would help him to do whatever had to be done, giving up whatever was necessary, in order to make it to heaven. I asked God to take away anything that had to be taken away. My dad agreed, and that was that. Afterward, God’s peace came back to me.

Here’s what I think. I believe God does not want to take away my dad’s dementia, because my dad is proud. If he is completely healed, he will deny God, and the result will be catastrophic. My dad is going to stay demented, and he will not live long. On the other hand, I should not have refrained from prayer out of carnal motives. I needed to drop the barrier and do the right thing, even though God didn’t intend to give me what I asked for.

My dad has made the right choice, so God will help him to get to heaven. I have done the right thing. Things will go well now.

In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar went mad. God had given him the greatest kingdom on earth, and he had refused to acknowledge God, so his mind was taken away from him. He crawled around like an animal and ate grass for seven years. In the end, Nebuchadnezzar was restored, and he glorified God. My dad is apparently more stubborn than Nebuchadnezzar. I think he is getting the same basic treatment, however.

God wants perfect health and sanity for all of us. He wants us to be financially sound. He wants life to go well for us. Nonetheless, there are people who can’t receive certain blessings without turning against God. If I had received the success I wanted early in life, I would not know God now.

My dad is better off as he is than he would be as a sane, healthy man who rejected salvation. That’s just how it is. The problem isn’t God’s will. My dad’s will is the issue. If he gets certain blessings, he will choose damnation again.

My new dad is a wonderful person (apart from last night’s aberration). I love going to see him. I love praying with him. I love doing things for him. I don’t want him to go. At the same time, I believe that his will has put firm limitations on what God can do for him. Also, no matter how much I love my dad, I know it’s not God’s will that I be burdened with his willful problem child much longer.

My dad is experiencing the gentlest takeoff his own will permits. God is helping me get his estate ready. He is ending the father-son conflicts that poisoned my life. He has put my dad in an excellent facility where he will get good care until he goes. I can’t ask for anything more.

I don’t plan to ask God to heal him any more. Of course, that may change. This is a turbulent time for us. I never know what’s going to happen next.

I am content. I do not intend to run to God and beg when my dad’s end draws near. There are worse things than dementia and death, and God has been extremely patient and generous. It’s very hard to see health problems growing on my dad like moss, but I am not God, and I have limited power and responsibility. I can’t make everything perfect for a man who won’t cooperate.

Things are going extremely well, given what God has to work with.

Plus Life on One Wheel

I had another interesting dream last night.

A while back, I dreamed about a woman I know. She showed up at my house. She was adrift in life. She had nowhere to go. I gave her a place to sleep and looked after her. Instead of accepting food, she fed herself on leftovers she carried. She did not seem to realize we were supposed to be together as man and wife. Last night, I dreamed about her again.

Before she began to figure in the dream, I found myself riding around on a unicycle with a wheel maybe 5 feet in diameter. It was very unsteady. I was trying to use a GPS while I rode. I had to ride over to a telephone pole and hold on while I tried to look up my destination. A younger man near me was riding a shorter unicycle. We almost collided. Maybe he’s someone I mentor. I hope his unicycle never gets as tall and awkward as mine was.

Eventually, I found myself at a university for people in show business. It was as if Disney had built a university. I knew the woman was there somewhere, but I didn’t see her. She was getting a busload of students together. Her intention was to take them somewhere and teach them something. She felt that doing this would please God, but it was actually a carnal idea. A lot of the things we do to please God are based on bad ideas that come from the flesh. We overwork ourselves, and God doesn’t help, and then we get frustrated and discouraged.

While I was looking for her, I felt a strong, warm wind blowing toward me from the front. It felt nice; it seemed to embrace me. I lifted my hands up so I could catch the wind, and I left the ground. I moved forward even though the wind blew the opposite way.

People marveled at me while I flew. I suppose I got around 25 feet off the ground. I found myself approaching a water oak tree, and I grabbed the leaves and branches to hold me in place.

I didn’t catch up with the woman, but she wasn’t far off.

My interpretation was that the woman was single because she was chasing her tail, pursuing carnal ideas in order to please God. Instead of allowing God to put her in front of a Spirit-led husband who could help her, she was doing things on her own. She had been hurt by men, and her answer was to reject them and buy into feminism, which has a tendency to produce bitter spinsters who end up buying DNA from strangers. I was riding around on a unicycle because my second wheel was off somewhere organizing a pointless field trip. The college kids the woman was chasing weren’t much younger than she was, so she didn’t really have a lot to teach them.

You don’t have to travel to meet God. Wherever you are, he is present and waiting. You don’t have to go see him in a group. He is a father, and fathers communicate with their children one-on-one.

GPS represents the Holy Spirit. He guides us and keeps putting us back on course. I was trying to get guidance, but I was busy struggling with the ridiculous unicycle because my second wheel wasn’t there to help me look after earthly problems that kept me off balance.

The wind was the love of God, complete with the peace it brings. Love casts out fear, according to the word. The wind lifted me above the ground. Fear is a thing of the earth, and we are supposed to keep our eyes on God in order to rise above it.

I’m not sure what the oak was. In the Bible, trees are people, and leaves are their works. The first psalm says a righteous man is like a tree planted by the rivers of water; his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he does shall prosper. It may be that the tree–a “water” oak–represented righteous people who will serve to steady me and help me in the future. If so, we will be brought together by love, which is a lot better than duty.

While I was feeling the wind, I was not myself. I was a Jewish man in his 60’s. I was wearing a sportcoat. In the Bible, Jews seem to represent people who rebel in their youth and repent when they’re old. I could see how that would fit.

Business clothes (a sportcoat and slacks) would represent authority and purpose. I was not wearing a tie, so perhaps the clothes represented authority without legalism or excessive formality. I had a reason to be at the university. I was going to speak and tell people helpful things to get them back on track. I was going to troubleshoot. I was very assured, without being proud or angry.

I was not a university employee. I was a guest. That was nice. As employers, universities are insane pits of unbearable leftist coercion.

Why would the university be dedicated to show business? Maybe because so much of modern American charismatic Christianity is superficial. It’s a big show. The bigger the show you put on, the easier it is to convince yourself you’re serving God while you deliberately withhold your best. You can feel pretty good about yourself while holding onto things like pride and unforgiveness.

For some reason, my law school was on the campus. Superficial charismatic preachers are very legalistic, so maybe that’s the explanation. They push tithing, unscriptural cash offerings, and observance of the Jewish feasts. They leave people in ignorance when it comes to confessing, defeating iniquity, casting out demons, and being led by the Spirit. In the dream, I saw the law school as a place I had left behind. I was no longer a student or subject to its authority.

I can’t say whether the woman represented herself or even a wife. A woman can represent a church. A church wouldn’t function as my helper or second wheel, however. She’s very attractive, so that’s encouraging. I have always dreaded marrying someone unappealing simply because I felt obligated. When you buy a mule, you don’t worry about chemistry. Being with a woman you aren’t attracted to is very different. A woman is not just a helper. Let’s face it; if I only wanted help, I’d look to men. Much less troublesome, and they have tools and big muscles.

Generally, when people call for help in this life, they call for men, not women. I never thought about that until just now.

I can think of many times when I’ve seen men enter people’s lives and solve major problems. I can’t think of any examples of women doing that.

The woman in the dream is someone who seems like a highly unlikely match, so it may be that she represents someone else.

I was very happy to feel the wind. When Jesus visits you and then leaves, the things you will miss most are the peace and love that radiate from him. I believe I’m supposed to feel those things all the time. The strongholds I’ve built in myself block them, and it takes time to open things up.

The most exciting thing about the dream was the prospect of having God’s love flow through me. That would be nice to have on a permanent basis. Lots of men have wives, but how many men have God’s love pouring through them?

Was the dream from God? I make no promises. I hope it was, because living in God’s love would be fantastic.

I Got the Horse Right Here…

I’m not sure how to grade today’s visit with my dad. On the up side, he was fascinated by the things I told him about God and the supernatural. On the down side, he seems to think he’s living at a horse track.

I got to the ALF and caught up with him, and he told me he had had a crazy day. He said he had had a delusion. He used the word “delusion.”

He said he had had a conversation with a few people about horse racing. He said he had had a hard time making them understand the meaning of the word “parimutuel.” Then he started talking about his time working as a ticket clerk at Keeneland. He worked there part-time when he was in law school. He remembered the names of other law students who worked there. He thought it was strange that he remembered them.

From there, he somehow got off on the topic of Flagler, one of Miami’s dog tracks. I’m not sure, but I think the track’s owner, a man named Izzy Hecht, had been part of the imaginary conversation. I looked Hecht up. He died in 1977.

My dad may have represented the dog track at one time. He had a tremendous number of clients.

My friend Mike called during our talk. My dad usually has a hard time remembering Mike, but this time, he knew who he was, and he remembered his father, who was the attorney for all the horse tracks in Florida. My dad thought it was amazing that Mike had called while we were discussing the horse track delusion, but then Mike and I talk often.

We started talking about God, and I told my dad a lot of things. I told him how the fallen angels had descended on Mount Hermon and bound each other with mutual curses before taking human wives and having half-breed children. I told him we were surrounded by spirits that wanted to rule us, and that this was the reason we needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I told him that in the Bible, hair represented glory. I said that when Samson was shorn, it symbolized the loss of the glory of God.

He was very interested. It has always bothered me that my dad could not share my interest in Christianity and the supernatural. I doubt we’ll ever recapture much of what was lost, but today, it was nice that we talked about these things a little.

One of the problems with going to the ALF every day is that the other patients recognize me and sometimes want to talk to me. As I was walking in today, a lady in a wheelchair looked up at me with a very serious expression and said, “You’re a very good-looking man!” My dad says this all the time. Maybe she overheard him. I thanked her.

I’m very attractive. To people I do not want to attract. I’m used to it. When I was young, I got lots of attention from the mothers of girls who wanted nothing to do with me.

Another lady had a man with her, and she asked me for help with him because he refused to go home. Of course, they can’t leave. Dementia patients have quirks and back stories. I did not know hers. I got a staffer to talk to her.

I also heard from Frank. He’s a nice old man who is very serious. He stands and talks as though he’s trying to explain something very important, and all the sentences make sense, but when you add them up, you get nothing. “They had the big glasses there. Like a big bowl, about this big. The guys on my crew, I have complete faith in. Anyway, this is the problem. All of the doors are locked.” Frank came up to me several times and started expressing his concerns, and I had to extricate myself without offending him.

It would be very relaxing to listen to Frank before bed. If you could get him to talk for half an hour and record it, you would have a useful thing to replay on nights when sleep won’t come. He’s very polite, and he has a pleasant, comforting voice, but nothing he says goes anywhere.

If you’ve dealt with mentally ill people, you may know what it’s like to talk to irrational people who sound completely logical for the first 30 seconds. They can really suck you in. Now that I think about it, Lyndon Larouche was like that. “How do you know George Bush and Lawrence Eagleburger are astrally projected spies from a planet in the Crab Nebula?” “Oh, there’s plenty of documentation on that, up at the compound. Unfortunately, it can’t be unsealed until the judge rules in the Ferguson matter. Meetings have been held. Contacts have been made. Arrangements scuttled. Of course, we can’t ignore the agitprop from the Somali contingent. We can’t even discuss the matter until that has been debunked. Colonel Lamberson has kept me quite up to date on that operation. I guess there’s no need to even mention Bermuda.” Nutty as a fruitcake, but he had the ability to make people take him seriously for surprisingly long stretches.

Things went well, but when I got ready to leave, my dad could not remember the ALF. He acted like he had never seen his room before. He said I couldn’t leave him there. He said, “This is a gambling joint.”

I spent maybe 10 minutes reassuring him. A staffer tried to put him together with Frank–an inspired tactic–but it didn’t work.

While I was talking to him, I had to make myself give the problem the importance it deserved. It’s a little funny when a demented person has a crazy idea, but to my dad, the situation wasn’t amusing. He really thought I was leaving him in a gambling establishment he had never seen before. I tried to imagine how he felt as I talked to him. It was frustrating. I could not make him remember the ALF or feel comfortable about it. I could only try to help him resign himself to sleeping in a strange place without me. I kept reminding him that I would be back the next day.

The experience serves to remind me of one of the big problems with mental illness. You can’t explain things to people who suffer from it. You can explain injuries and diseases to patients, but when a patient’s problem is mental, the doorway through which explanation enters is closed.

If you manage to explain something to such a person, your explanation may evaporate from his mind in a day or 10 minutes.

I tried to say comforting things instead of things that made sense. I kept telling him his bills were paid and that he had nothing to worry about. Things like that. I tried to use a tone of voice that made it sound like I was completely sure he would be all right.

I know he’ll be fine eventually, but I wonder what he’s going through in the meantime. Is he over there now, exploring a strange new world with trepidation and dread? I hope not. The staff is very nice, and I know they’ll work with him. Maybe the delusion has already passed.

I can’t do anything to help. Not in the natural. I can’t stay there all night, every night, holding his hand. I’m doing the best I can. There are things I can’t fix. There are problems people have to face by themselves or with God alone.

This is why I pray with him.

Things could be worse. America is full of demented people who never get visits.

I don’t know how much longer we have. They called today and said his ankle was weeping. The swelling from heart failure caused it. Is it an important sign? Can you live with swollen, weeping ankles for a decade? I don’t know.

I always feel like God is telling me he will be gone by April 1. I’m so glad I get to have pleasant conversations with him while I wait.

If You Think You’ve Seen it Before, You Probably Have

I have been listening to Derek Prince every day for some time. I put my faith in no man, and every man makes mistakes, but I’ve picked up a lot of useful information from Prince’s videos.

Prince used to live in Fort Lauderdale, forty minutes away from me. I was listening to frauds and fabulists at that time. I was trying to find the truth, but the custodians of the truth turned out to be ignorant and, often, dishonest. It’s a shame I didn’t know about Prince.

When you want to find an honest, knowledgeable preacher, it’s like wandering the desert looking for one particular grain of sand, but it seems like there’s a Benny Hinn or a T.D. Jakes on every street corner.

Prince did a series of sermons on the end of the age. Interesting stuff. It’s impossible to be certain about prophecy, but it looks like prophecy says Jesus will find a very strong church when he returns. If that’s true, a lot of reformation is in store.

The church is falling apart right now. We have homosexual clergy (admitted homosexuals, not the closeted ones we’re so used to), homosexual marriages, churches that teach yoga and meditation, and churches that tell us the Bible isn’t true. If the church is disintegrating, how can Jesus come back for a pure bride?

The answer is this: the church isn’t his bride. That’s not accurate, really. I mean the big, global body we think of as the church. It’s not really the church at all. The real church is a small remnant hidden within the big false church. While the false church whores itself out and sends people to hell, the real church can be built up and prepared for Jesus.

Most people and spirits are afterbirth. That’s a harsh statement, but it’s true. When a baby is born, a lot of useless flesh comes out with it, and that flesh is discarded. In this world, people destined for salvation have always been in the minority, and like afterbirth, the rest are not going to survive. We should be accustomed to the understanding that most people will be destroyed, even if we don’t like it.

It’s not that hard for Christians to accept the damnation of unbelievers. We tend to be self-righteous, and often we actually look forward to seeing others condemned. What’s harder is admitting that religious people are going to go to hell in droves. Most of us don’t believe it, but we ignore history. Most Jews (according to Jewish history) denied God and did not make it out of Egypt, even after the daily miracles God performed for them. Most religious Jews in the time of Jesus rejected salvation. It should not be hard for us to believe that most Christians don’t belong to God or that most will go to hell.

We are not better than the Jews. We think we are, but we make all the same mistakes. I grant you, it appears that our problems are less severe. God himself–an authority who cannot be questioned–calls the Jews a stiff-necked people, and he predicted that the Gentiles would be more accepting, but we still blow it all the time.

Religious people who keep others out of the kingdom have always been a problem. Jesus told his fellow Pharisees (the unbelieving ones) this: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”

The men he was talking to honored the prophets their fathers had killed, yet they were about to kill the greatest prophet. They were just like us! Jesus criticized them for saying, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.” We think we’re better than the people who came before us, but we also hate people who tell us the truth about God. I never got in trouble with a pastor because of sin, and my pastors were very easy on sinners; I was always mistreated because I told the truth. That’s normal.

Most of us are doing our best to avoid changing while convincing ourselves we’re saved. We love the whitewash.

I was thinking about the cleansing of the church today, and it occurred to me that it was probably a necessary prelude to the wave of imprisonment and execution we’re going to experience. There aren’t that many powerful Christians now, but as the remnant gets stronger, we will be a bigger threat to the Beast, and he will want to react. Always look for symmetry in the supernatural.

Prophecy tells us the Beast is going to win. That’s very clear. We will have to leave the earth because most people will prefer killing us to serving God. A democratic vote against God (presaged by the weird anti-God voice votes at a recent Democratic convention) will seal our fate here on earth. Satan can’t win on earth if the church gets so powerful it upends his kingdom. If the church really shapes up, it will have to be removed from the earth in order for prophecy to be fulfilled.

When I look at it this way, I see that the decay of Christianity, the strengthening of the real church, the Beast’s victory on earth, and the rapture can be reconciled.

While I was listening to Prince talk about the end of the age, I thought about the bad clergymen who help keep people away from God. They’re like hockey goalies. Many enemies of God hang out in brothels, bars, abortion clinics, and universities, but the goalies stay close to the door to the kingdom. It’s a choke point the faithful have to use, so it’s efficient for Satan to position people there to pick seekers off.

Jesus called the goalies of his time “whitewashed tombs,” and he said they were full of dead men’s bones. He meant they were full of demons. In the Bible, bones are spirits. Demons are the spirits of dead human beings and demi-humans fathered by rebellious spirits. Jesus was speaking almost literally. The men he accused were full of religious demons instead of the unique Spirit that saves: the Spirit of Holiness.

In Hebrew, the Holy Spirit is actually called “the Spirit of Holiness,” which makes sense, because when he lives in you, he tends to make you more holy.

Whitewashing makes a thing appear clean and sound without changing its nature. It’s thinner than paper. The men Jesus accused wore fancy getups and made a big show of serving God, but inside, they were full of iniquity.

I’ll tell you about a revelation God gave me.

Islam is an evil religion spawned by a spirit that hates God. It’s a big problem. After Islam was established, Muslims came to rule a large part of the world, including Jerusalem. A Muslim ruler named Suleiman took advantage of his power to try to prevent the Jewish Messiah from coming.

Prophecy said the Messiah would enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate (also called the Golden Gate), which was an opening in Jerusalem’s wall. It used to be the gate people used to get to the temple. Right now, this gate is sealed with stone. Suleiman had it sealed (two other Muslim rulers had sealed it before him), and guess what he put outside it? Tombs full of dead men’s bones.

Prophecy said Elijah would announce the coming of the Messiah. He would precede him. Elijah was a descendent of Aaron, making him a member of the priestly tribe. Jewish priests have to be careful about their dealings with dead bodies (some believe this is why the priests on the way to Jerusalem refused to help the injured man in the story of the Good Samaritan). Suleiman and his minions hoped Elijah would not be able to pass through a Muslim cemetery and enter the Eastern Gate. No Elijah, no Messiah.

Jerusalem represents the kingdom of heaven in the Bible. The Messiah is God’s firstfruit. He has to enter the kingdom first. Jesus entered the Eastern Gate on a donkey, fulfilling prophecy. Suleiman didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah, however, so he built his cemetery.

Can this be coincidence? In a world ruled by the vagaries of quantum mechanics, it’s hard to rule anything out, but look what Suleiman did. He repeated Satan’s pattern. He tried to block the entrance to heaven, using tombs containing dead men’s bones. Without realizing it, Suleiman gave us a picture of the Pharisees who opposed Jesus and the modern Christians who fight the Holy Spirit.

Prophecy doesn’t say Jesus will return through the gate. It says his coming will be seen in the heavens, from one end of the earth to the other. Suleiman closed the barn door after the colt got in.

Donkeys represent the flesh. We’re supposed to ride the flesh and steer it, but generally, it works the other way around. Jesus rode a donkey to show that a man living in a flesh body could rule the flesh and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Incidentally, Jesus said he would return after “the gospel of the kingdom” (not the gospel of “raise your hand and you will go to heaven”) was preached to all people. Guess which religion is most effective at keeping people from hearing the gospel? Islam. Look it up. It’s still blocking gates.

We need to get on top of self-righteousness. We drive people away with it. Oddly, we also lure people with licentiousness, which is the wrong bait. Error is an easy thing to commit. No matter the direction in which you miss, every miss counts. The laws of probability favor error.

Think of homosexuality, which is a huge problem for the church. The world beats us with it every day, very successfully. We criticize homosexuals because they insist we accept their sin and call it righteous. At the same time, we insist that God accept other sins. Churches are full of heterosexuals who fornicate and have no plans to quit. Living in sin is very common among Christians. How is forcing fornication on God any better than forcing homosexuality on him? We also accept sins like gluttony, materialism, anger, lying, laziness, and gossip.

We have to condemn homosexuality, but we also have to confront and condemn our own sins.

I have a Christian friend who lives with a boyfriend and has two children by him. She has a stash of Harry Potter material which she refuses to give up. You can’t do things like that and do well in the kingdom. I don’t want to offend her, so I don’t harangue her, but I am very concerned.

I watched a video featuring a person who claimed to have been sent to hell in a near-death experience. She said she asked God why she was damned, and the response was that she lived with her boyfriend. It made me think of my friend. I don’t know whether the story in the video was true, but I do know that salvation can be lost through deliberate rebellion. The Bible says so.

There are Christians who defend smoking weed, which clearly fits the Biblical definition of witchcraft. Christians practice yoga, which is part of a Satanic religion. Many, many Christians practice astrology, which is also a Satanic religion. We go to fortune tellers. We keep good luck charms and idols. We do all these things and expect God to accept them, while we go after other people whose sins seem more obvious.

We have to warn people about sin, but we also have to confront our own sins. I think we look pretty stupid to God when we defend astrology and condemn sodomy. How can you leave a yoga session, wearing a necklace with an astrological symbol on it, while living with a girlfriend and several illegitimate babies, and then pray for a homosexual to be delivered, as though you have something he doesn’t? You’re playing for one team and praying to the other team’s coach.

Pride is a huge Christian sin. Most of us think it’s a great thing. We say, “Don’t you have any pride?” Every good Christian is a charity case, just like a wino begging on a sidewalk in urine-soaked pants. None of us should have pride about anything. We should realize that every one of us is like a grown man who lives by taking money from his mother’s purse. Every good thing we get is charity, paid for by the torture of an innocent man. The phrase “self-made” should make us gag.

You may think you earn things through hard work. The world is full of people who work hard and play it smart but don’t succeed. How can you answer them?

If you have more than one god, you don’t have Jesus. It’s that simple. It always has been. You can worship as many “gods” as you like without offending Satan, but as soon as you pick up your second “god,” you give up Jesus.

Sometimes I feel like Jesus is coming back very soon, but other times, I think of the sad state of even charismatic Christians, and I feel like he must be a thousand years off.

God’s Presence is my Quantum of Solace

If you use the email address on my blog to get in touch with me, you may be disappointed. For some reason, it likes to put people in the junk folder, and it marks messages read, so I have no idea they’re in there. Last night I happened to check the folder, and I found a message from a college buddy. I think we last communicated in the 90’s, but I’m not sure.

We were classmates at Columbia College, back before the internal combustion engine, cell phones under 20 pounds, and lolcats. He’s a successful radiologist, which is a little funny, because he used to despair of getting into medical school. He came up with some kind of improvement in the bone marrow transplant procedure, and he was then accepted by Columbia’s medical school. I believe his invention was a very big deal, because he used to appear in TV interviews. If I recall correctly, he went to Australia to talk about it.

I don’t know why anyone worries about getting into medical school. I have high school classmates I wouldn’t trust to take a splinter out of a rat’s butt, yet who are now successful physicians. One is the son of a former mayor. I remember him as kind of a goof. Nice guy, but not someone you would bet on if he appeared on Jeopardy.

One day while I was walking around drunk during a free period, I saw him leaning against a classroom door. I had no idea what was going on. I figured he was playing a joke on a girl. He told me to hold the door for him, so I did. After he ran off, I let go, and Mr. Bond burst into the hallway. Mr. Bond was a teacher, which is why I call him “Mr.” He wasn’t all that interested in my explanation, so I soon found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office. I guess the headmaster didn’t respect Mr. Bond any more than my classmate did, because we never got past the waiting room. Mr. Bond gave me a lecture, and off I went.

Later on, he caught me in a school parking lot, riding drunk on the trunk of a friend’s car. That, I want to stress, was not my fault. Being drunk was my fault, but my friend decided to hit the gas on his own. I had no control over that.

I feel like I got framed both times. I couldn’t tell who was behind the door. It certainly felt like a girl.

My college friend is considerably smarter than the mayor’s son. Generally, doctors aren’t all that smart, so my friend should have realized he was better than the competition.

My friend gets most of the credit for getting me interested in science and math. I had entered college as a verbal person.

When I took the SAT’s, the chairman of Columbia’s English department sent me a letter, asking me to apply. I can’t understand that at all. Yes, I had a high verbal score, but how does that translate to an aptitude for studying literature? A high verbal aptitude makes you really good at crossword puzzles. It doesn’t mean you automatically want to become a leading authority on Chaucer.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that extreme verbal aptitude is useless. Maybe it’s good for cryptography? I don’t know. Nobody pays anyone to do crossword puzzles, and most English professors are middle-of-the-road intellects. You don’t need to be smart to teach people about J.D. Salinger. I don’t think brains would even be helpful.

At some point, I got the idea that I would rather be a doctor than a useless English major, and my friend…I will call him “Stan,” since I need a pseudonym…was the perfect resource. His dad was a podiatrist, and he was taking really neat classes. He told me about vertebrate anatomy, and we both signed up. Each of us got a dead cat and a dogfish, and we worked side by side at a dissection table. Stan’s dad generously supplied real scalpels so we didn’t have to use the junk most students used.

Sadly, I had no study habits, and I was clinically depressed because my disintegrating family drove me nuts. I was a real mess. I ended up bailing out and taking the class a second time. I bailed on a number of classes. I didn’t finish the class the second time around, and then I dropped out of college.

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t end up in medical school. Doctors tend to be unhappy, like lawyers, and they used to suffer a lot on the way up. I don’t know if I could have survived the long shifts and systematic abuse that characterized the system back then.

I couldn’t survive the pre-med experience, so I think it’s silly to even suggest that I could have made it through a residency.

Law school was a joke. Drink all you want, hang out with your friends, and then work hard for one week at the end of every semester. I quit taking notes during my third year. It was a good fit for me.

When you get out of law school, you don’t work 36-hour shifts. You go to work at 9, and you leave by 6. On the weekends, you stay home. If you work harder than that, you’re working for the wrong firm. Truthfully, I think the hardest workers are people who should not have gone to law school. If you’re not talented enough to get a good job, you would be better off doing something else.

Stan also helped me get hooked on tools. In his room in our suite, he had a special drawer with lots of fascinating items in it. Stuff from Brookstone and so on. Weird little hand tools I had not realized I needed. He may deserve a lot of the credit or blame for the fact that I own several tons of tools. He would probably like the little tool station I’ve set up in my man room.

I had a sort of family of 5 friends. Four of us shared a suite. Stan was the resident leftist, although he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t chain himself to anything or take part in marches. He was just farther to the left than the group average. He used to have long political discussions with my friend (and fellow blogger) Aaron, who was also part of the group. We used to call Aaron “Point” and Stan “Counterpoint.” Or maybe it was the other way around.

When Stan got in touch with me, he did it through this blog, so I knew he had seen some of my writing. I wondered how a person like me could fit into his world. I’m a far-right religious nut.

Stan surprised me. He apparently has a carry permit, and he’s a fanatical bird hunter. He says he’s upset because Californian invaders are ruining Colorado, the state where he lives. My take on this is that he’s a closeted conservative. Maybe he’ll have a Dennis Miller moment and come out one of these days.

It was nice to learn he wasn’t a transsexual vegan in a micro house with hemp walls.

I think Stan and Aaron had more influence on me than my other college friends. Stan helped me rediscover my STEM roots, and Aaron got me into blogging. He also got me interested in Israel, which is why I spent four life-changing months on a kibbutz.

I don’t communicate with a couple of the guys these days. One, a Jew who went through college with a very low opinion of Arabs, became a hard core anti-Israel activist, and he seems to be an extreme leftist. Another simply wore me down. I eventually realized I was not satisfied with the way he treated me or his influence on me, and there were some things about his character that made me uncomfortable, so I let him go.

I haven’t heard from the fifth guy in some time. He was always different. I always knew he was gay, but when we were in college, he was trying to make heterosexuality work. Years later, I found out his mother had died, and I called to express my sympathy. I heard another man’s voice on his answering machine, saying “we” were not home. I knew what had happened. I had always expected him to come out once his mother was gone.

I eventually wrote him. I told him I was a Christian, and that I couldn’t exactly congratulate him. I said I still considered him a friend, and I probably said I hoped he understood. He did not. He thought I was rejecting him or putting him down. I don’t recall, exactly. Anyway, we didn’t communicate for a while after that.

We eventually reestablished contact, and we got along fine once we cleared things up. I don’t know what he’s up to now, though. I pray for him sometimes. No matter how much you care about someone in that lifestyle, as a Christian, there is a limit to how close you can get. I’m very open about my concerns about the way homosexuality and sexual confusion are being used to as tools of persecution, and I would guess that my positions would not go over well with him.

Friends are friends, but God is God. When there is a conflict, you don’t have to weigh things and make a decision. There is only one choice.

The anti-Israel guy called me after I sent the letter to my gay friend, and while ostensibly trying to catch up with me and rekindle our friendship, he told me my letter was “evil.” That killed the relationship for me. It wasn’t his disagreement that bothered me. It was the arrogance and rudeness, combined with his incomprehensible belief that the matter was any of his business. It was startling to be confronted with such nonchalant condescension and close-mindedness.

Also, it showed how much he had changed. In college, he had been interested in learning more about his Jewish faith, and when he told me my letter was evil, I knew he had given up on the God of Leviticus. It seemed to me that he had allowed politics to become an excuse for venting rage that came from other sources.

That’s how political rage and other types of activist rage usually work. You can’t resolve things with your parents, so you join Greenpeace and go around ramming whaling ships. Activism is a wonderful, classic cover for cruelty and inability to forgive. If you dream of sending people mail bombs, but you’re having a hard time justifying it, come up with a cause, and you’ll be putting tacks and dynamite in boxes in no time.

Columbia was a terrible choice for me. The people were nuts. I have blamed myself more than anyone for my problems there, but the truth is that the atmosphere was sick.

I guess things would have been different if my parents had been helpful. Many people take their kids to colleges to look them over. Most educated people discuss college and career choices with their kids. They look to see what their kids are good at when they’re young, and they spend money on their interests and help them progress. My parents didn’t do any of those things. When I filled out college applications, I only did it because I knew I needed to have something to do the following year. I only got two applications in on time: Columbia and Dartmouth. Dartmouth waitlisted me, so I went to Columbia.

I didn’t do well with girls at Columbia. I used to think that was because I was a maladjusted kid, and there is a lot of truth to that, but I have looked up some of the women I knew, and they’re a mess. I wasn’t wrong about them. Some ended up in extreme-leftist academia or activism. None I checked up on had husbands. They were poisonous. Imagine being married to someone like that and being “corrected” 24 hours a day.

I remember a beautiful young engineer named June. She used to come to my dorm and hang out in the TV lounge on my floor. She talked about rape a lot. She would pop off with gems like, “Rape isn’t a crime of sex! It’s a crime of violence!” Out of nowhere.

Okay, fine, but what does that have to do with General Hospital? Am I supposed to ask you out now, or should I just jump out the window? Very strange. And she wasn’t odd by Columbia/Barnard standards. She was well within a standard deviation of normal.

Then there was Angela. I think she was an engineer. She was a gorgeous (by Columbia standards) Italian girl. She used to hang out with my friend Sam and his pack. She seemed like an airhead when I first met her. I remember watching her stand and grin while Sam slapped her buttocks to make them jiggle. He marveled at the motion. A year or two later, she was a feminist avenger with no sense of humor at all. It was as though an emasculating spirit had entered her body and taken control.

The previous version of Angela had been disappointing because she seemed unaware that she was selling herself cheap. The newer version was a pure horror.

I recall talking to her about a couple of people we knew. I had been speaking to them while they tried to cram for exams. I told Angela the woman’s “pre-med boyfriend” wanted to study. She said, “I find it interesting that you call him ‘pre-med’ but you don’t say what she was studying.” Ouch. Where did that come from? There go all my reasons for ever talking to you again.

She ended up working for one of the networks, helping make soap operas. She made a lot of money, but I don’t think she advanced the cause of feminism. I haven’t change the world, but I’m glad I don’t have to say I spent my life making soap operas.

Anyway, most of the women were highly maladjusted and completely unacceptable, and their nature said a lot about the institution itself.

As for the academics, there was no way I could have made it in the liberal arts, even if I had studied. To make it among liberal intellectuals (a tragic misnomer), you have to join the club, and I would not have done that. I would have been blackballed right and left for years before figuring out what was wrong.

The chairman of the English department should have added this sentence to his letter: “If you’re not a leftist nut, you are still welcome to study here, but you should forget about the possibility of making a living in academia or the arts afterward.”

Who wants to teach English or literature anyway? Could anything be more boring?

If I had had a sharp person to mentor me (instead of no one at all), I would have gone into a STEM field from day one. I would still have been in a hostile environment, but I could have gotten my degree and gotten out.

My parents didn’t introduce me to God. They didn’t prepare a path for me with prayer. I was not sharp enough to get connected on my own. Things went pretty well for me, considering. I didn’t end up dead or in prison.

I should have taken up STEM pursuits in high school and forgotten all about things like writing. Then I could have gone to a relatively normal technical college and minimized the friction with the more corrosive elements of the left.

When I look back on the opportunity I had, I can’t believe I dropped the ball. Columbia, for all its problems, was the equal of Harvard or Stanford. I could have been a mechanical engineer, an EE, or a physicist. I could have done medicine, had I chosen and prepared correctly. I had a horrible attitude, and I was not prepared at all. I wish I hadn’t gone to Columbia, but once I was there, blew a gigantic opportunity. What percentage of American 18-year-olds get four years at a top-10 university, with no student loans?

I busted my butt when I went back to school for physics. I was a different person. It’s too bad it happened so late, at the wrong school. I’m glad I got my degree, and I will always be grateful to the University of Miami for giving me a chance, but it would have been great to study at Caltech or MIT instead. Or Georgia Tech. A somewhat normal place.

Interesting stuff, at least to me.

It was good to hear from Stan, and it’s great to know he did well in life. He really got me thinking, too. Maybe now I’ll have more useful input the next time a young person who is not a leftist asks me for advice.

Visitors Remind me What Farms are For

This weekend I had a pleasant experience. Friends from my Miami days called and came by for a visit, bringing their 5 kids. My friend Amanda also came by, along with two of her sons. I think everyone had a good time. You can judge by the photo.

I think the one in the middle of the seat is my goddaughter, Gabriella. Can’t tell for sure.

The man driving the cart is Alonzo. I met him in about 2007, at Trinity Church. We were armorbearers. We both got disgusted with the leadership’s bad behavior. Alonzo moved to another church. I ended up at the same church, as readers of this blog know. Then the pastors at the second church imploded. They did what they pleased, answering to no one, and they rejected not only good advice, but the people who provided it. The husband is in prison now, and the wife is dead.

Alonzo and his wife Teri moved to Orlando. They had a hard time prospering in Miami, which is a Latin-dominated town. Cubans have serious problems with racism, and no one confronts them, because it’s only fashionable to confront white racism. Alonzo applied for 27 jobs in Miami and didn’t land a single one, but when he applied for three jobs in Orlando, he got three offers. They have never looked back. Like me, Alonzo hates Miami so much it makes him miserable when he has to go back for visits.

They live in Sanford now, which is not all that far from me. It’s near Orlando. As happy as they are to be away from Miami, they are thinking of moving to the Macon area. Disney World pretty much ruined Orlando, so it gets more like Miami all the time.

I may go to Tennessee. They may go to Macon. It may be that Florida is turning out to be a dubious area for Christians. Maybe God is moving people north.

Alonzo and Teri should hire themselves out as parent counselors. Their kids are about as close to perfect as kids get. They have great personalities, they don’t break things (much) when they show up. They treat adults with respect. They don’t whine.

Their oldest is 16, and she already has a college scholarship.

While they were here, I got a surprise call from my friend Tina. She’s a young woman who attended the second church I mentioned above. She got a scholarship from the University of Miami, so she had to leave her sister and brother-in-law in Coral Springs to go to school. They asked me if I could provide transportation to church, so I drove her for a couple of years.

Tina’s mother disappeared from her life, and she was raised by her sister. She competed in beauty pageants to support herself, and she got more than one scholarship. Once she made it to college, she worked very hard, doing very well in calculus and computer classes. She has a job know, but she’s also in grad school. She plans to develop software applications. I don’t know where she’s headed in life, but she is going to come out on top.

She’s still competing. She’s currently a “Miss” on the state level.

We used to talk while I drove her, and I gave her such advice as I could. She was very serious about Christianity. I don’t think college corrupted her. I mentioned the problems at New Dawn, and she started talking about the lack of accountability in the leadership. She was right on the money. How many kids fresh out of college even know what accountability is?

I thought she had forgotten all about me, but Teri posted a photo on Facebook, and Tina saw it, and she decided to call. She had lost my contact information.

I made a mess of my life when I was young. I can’t fix that, but it’s wonderful to see younger people I have had the opportunity to talk to. My revenge on the devil and the flesh is to help other people avoid what I went through.

I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now. I hope I’ll still be able to have a positive influence on someone here and there.

I spend a lot of time alone these days. It was nice to have people show up and remind me that I’ve made some investments. Investing in material wealth is a good idea, but the investments you make in people are more rewarding.

That poor cart. I don’t know how it survived the ride.

It’s Amazing What we Take for Granted

Today’s exciting event: installing a new toilet seat.

The neatest toilet seat I ever saw was in France. I was on a train. It was 1984. The restroom in my car had a seat with a spring in it. The spring kept the seat in the up position unless someone was sitting on it.

That was brilliant. No one likes to touch a public toilet seat, so men usually leave them down, and bad things happen. I am told that women like to hover over them, which also causes marksmanship errors. When the seat has a spring in it, both problems are eliminated.

Women probably hated the seat, but then women have a real entitlement issue in this regard. If one woman shares a house with 10 males, she will insist that everyone leave the seat down so she can sit down without looking. It’s a bad policy, but it seems to be universal. Anyway, I thought the seat was wonderful. I know what it’s like to share a bathroom with a man who doesn’t raise the seat.

The second-neatest toilet seat I ever saw was on a Japanese Toto brand toilet. The Japanese make the best toilets in the world. It’s actually a little sick, if you ask me. They go way overboard. They have seats that wash and dry you and do God knows what else. Anyway, the Toto seat did not bang into position when it was released. It fell slowly. The hinges were built so they applied friction on the way down. Genius.

I had to put a special seat and bars in my dad’s bathroom a few months ago. It was very recent. I signed him up for hospice service late in 2018, and they made suggestions. Now that he’s gone, the special equipment makes no sense, and it was hard to clean around. I replaced the seat with a slow-close job from Amazon. Apparently, the Japanese no longer have a monopoly. The manufacturer is not Toto. It’s Bath Royale.

I feel like there should be competing manufacturers named Journey, Foreigner, and Cheap Trick.

I give the Bath Royale people credit. They came up with a doozy. When you install the seat, it essentially aligns itself. When you want to clean, you push a button, and the seat pops right off.

It’s important for me to get the bathroom in order so I can fully accept what’s happening to my dad. If I left the handicap accessories there “just in case,” I would be fooling myself, and I would feel stuck emotionally, unable to inhabit my new role in life.

I suppose there is some possibility that his health might take a turn that would make it desirable to bring him home for his last few days, but I’m not going to leave things as they are just because of that. If it happens, I can restore the equipment in a day.

I use the master shower now, just to make myself move forward. I ripped out the flow restrictor, but it didn’t improve things enough, so I got a better shower handle from an upstairs bath and moved it to the master. I ordered a new handle which is supposed to be very good.

I don’t care about water flow. I have two wells and dozens of acres. My toilets and showers are going to have no impact on the local water supply no matter what I do.

It’s bad enough that my hipster washing machine doesn’t get clothes clean. I’m not putting up with substandard showers.

The people who like “high-efficiency” machines (deluded hippies at Consumer Reports) claim they get clothes cleaner. That’s far from true. It may be that they remove stains better, but that’s not the same thing as getting clothes clean. If you take a pair of poopy drawers and put them in a machine, and it smears the poo around really well and then leaves the diluted poo in the fabric, the stains will be gone, but the poo and bacteria will remain. If you wash a pair in an old-fashioned machine that uses a ton of water, you may end up with a tiny amount of poo pigment in a stain, but the generous rinsing will assure that there is virtually no poo anywhere else in the garment. Which pair would you rather wear?

Greenie washing machines don’t even get big loads wet all the way through. Try one and see. Put 6 bath sheets in the washer and turn it on. Chances are, the load will be dry in the middle when you’re done. If you’re washing things that are really offensive, it’s very bad when they don’t get wet. You’re just sending filth on a carnival ride, and then you’re putting it in your dryer, so it can coat the inside.

I found out how to defeat the problem with greenie washers. You use the “bulky” cycle. It’s typical leftist hypocrisy. You make a “green” product which doesn’t work, and then you add a feature that defeats the purpose yet makes the product function. It’s like low-flow toilets. You buy a toilet which uses half as much water, and then when you use it, you flush twice.

When you use the bulky cycle, the machine gives up and uses more water. Then it punishes you by refusing to spin it well, so you have to leave it in the dryer twice as long. Which consumes…more energy.

Greenies never seem to get anything right, yet their smugness and self-righteousness continue unabated.

I replaced 11 compact fluorescent bulbs in my ceiling recently. These are the curly bulbs Al Gore forced on us prematurely. They’re full of mercury, and they take around two minutes to start working. You go in a dark room, turn on the lights, stumble around in the dark, walk out, and turn off the lights. They’re worthless. My ceilings are at least 10 feet high, and my CFL’s were starting to crap out, so I had to get a big ladder and drag it from room to room. I only needed two new bulbs, but I was not about to get that ladder out 9 more times, so I threw all the others out, too. I replaced all the bulbs with LED’s. The LED bulb is the product Al Gore should have been patient enough to wait for.

The CFL’s have to be disposed of carefully because of the mercury. That means you have to make sure they’re hidden deep in a bag when you put them out with the regular trash. Virtually everyone puts them in the regular trash, so there is no point in making a drive to the special place where they take in scary garbage. If most people were disposing of CFL’s properly, I would, too, but since they’re not, my rigid observance of the law would accomplish nothing except to inconvenience me.

In the distant past, we waited for technology to improve before we abandoned tried and true ways of doing things. Not any more. We gave up incandescent bulbs and killed thousands of American jobs before we had a decent alternative, just so hippies could feel superior. LED’s were coming with or without input from greenies; the free market loves superior technology.

Imagine what it would have been like had we banned horses in 1895. Horses were considered unsanitary, and cars were the new green option. If greenies had been around back then, Americans would have been forced to buy a lot of really terrible cars or just walk.

To leftists, government coercion is always the first resort. They never wait for people to do the intelligent thing on their own.

I get cranky when I have problems caused by bad green technology. I acknowledge that. It’s exasperating, having a $1000 washer which is vastly inferior to a $400 washer made 20 years ago. It’s even more exasperating, knowing there are no good new washers. There is nothing I can do to get around the problem of the bulky cycle and moldy clothes, until engineers find a way to create an effective washing machine hippies can’t ban.

Anyway, the toilet seat is installed, and my high-flow shower handle is coming. It’s only a matter of time before I use that bathroom for everything. Eventually, I’ll use the bedroom as well.

I better get on the road. My dad will be finishing his dinner in about 35 minutes, and I haven’t seen him yet today. It’s best to see him an hour before a meal, so he will have something to do when I leave, or immediately after he eats, so he won’t be hungry and I won’t have to sit in the dining room while he finishes. It seems like they’re always eating. They have three meals a day, and bedtime comes early.

Sudden Weight Loss Helps me Prepare

Yesterday, I fired up my action camera and filmed my dad during our daily visit. I’m glad I did, because I don’t know how many more conversations I’ll have with him.

My family is dysfunctional, so we have very few photos, movies, and videos compared to normal American families. I believe the last time my dad appeared in a home video was in about 1991. He was steering his yacht, and his sister was filming. He gave her the finger.

His sister’s family was also dysfunctional, but they were high-functioning, so none of them are felons or drug addicts, and they all married. My aunt beat her stepdaughter regularly, but she shot a lot of family photos and videos.

My camera is a 4K model. I don’t see the point. If I shot a 30-minute video in 4K, I would have to buy a new hard drive just to hold it. I filmed my dad in 1080p, and it was still way more detailed than it needed to be. You don’t really want to capture everything when you film old people. I think I’m going to shoot in 480p from now on. It’s more than adequate.

I asked him a few things about his family. I will never get to know these people the way I should have when I was young, and I have no one to pass the information on to, but I figured I might as well learn a few things while there was still time. Because dementia erases older memories last, he can still recall a lot about his relatives.

I wanted to prove my dad had changed. That’s the main reason why I filmed him. No one who knows him will believe the things I say about him unless they see video. He kept telling me how great I was and so forth, and he talked about Christianity and heaven. He is a new person. I had to document it.

Today, two interesting things happened. First, his cremation urn arrived via UPS. Second, I found out he had lost 28 pounds.

I ordered the urn from Amazon a couple of days ago. I did not want to find myself struggling to tie up loose ends after his death. I knew it would be smart to have it on hand in advance. Imagine having someone cremated and having to wait several days for the urn.

The Amazon ad calls it an urn, but it’s really a box. It’s nearly cubic, and the sides are cherry veneer. It looks perfect. I’m surprised to see how nice it is, given the low cost. It certainly looks better than the one my aunt got in 2014. It looked exactly like a beer cooler. That’s kind of appropriate, since my uncle used to make her get up to get him beer. She tore her finger open on a rocking boat in a heavy sea, and while we were headed for shore to get it stitched up, he told her to get him a Coors Light.

The urn makes me a little uncomfortable. I’ll have to decide where to store it. I don’t want to see it every day.

Now for the weight loss. My dad has been losing weight slowly for the past several years. Between our move in 2017 and December of 2018, he went from a pretty consistent 217 to 210. To most people, that wouldn’t mean much, but he was more sedentary than ever, and he ate a lot of ice cream, so he should have gained weight.

Today he weighed 182 pounds. Prior to this, I had never known him to be under 185. Back in the Seventies, he went on a diet and got down to 185. I remember, because it was a big deal to him.

Oddly, until he was weighed today, I didn’t realize he had lost weight. He still looks fairly heavy. He still has a spare tire. I don’t know what’s happening. I think he dropped a lot of muscle.

The cardiologist told me the weight loss could be an end-of-life phenomenon resulting from multiple illnesses, which she called “co-morbidities.” He has congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation as well as dementia.

I did some Googling, and I came up with this term: “cachexia.” It means unintentional weight loss coupled with disease, more or less. It can be caused by a lack of appetite, but it also describes a condition in which you eat normally and still waste. It means your body doesn’t process food correctly any more; it stops rebuilding itself.

My dad’s appetite is fine. It’s not what it was 10 years ago (excessive), but he eats whatever they put on his plate. That means something else is happening.

It’s not cancer. When cancer patients lose weight, it’s because they can’t stand to eat.

The Internet says there is a cachexia variant called “cardiac cachexia.” People with congestive heart failure get it. Heart failure causes fluid to accumulate in the body, and this prevents nutrients from being absorbed. The fluid can cause swelling which masks the wasting.

Maybe that’s what’s happening.

This part of my dad’s life has been very turbulent for me. Things are changing quickly all the time. It’s not possible to assume a stance and hold it.

God has changed my dad’s personality tremendously over a period of a couple of weeks. My dad is giving me things I have been wishing for all my life. How can I want this new person to leave? On the other hand, my grief renews itself many times every day. I get reminders all the time, telling me he’s nearly gone. I take down the little notes I put up to help him remember things. I find and clean up little messes he made, for the very last time. I throw out things I know he’ll never use again.

Today I ordered a normal toilet seat for the master bath, to replace the elevated seat I installed a few weeks ago. I refuse to call it “my father’s bathroom.” I can’t allow myself to hold on like that.

I love my father, and I don’t want him to go, especially when we’re praying together and we’ve been delivered from frustration and anger, but I can’t live in this state for the rest of my life.

If my dad is in the final weeks, it’s all right. It’s not a crisis to be confronted and defeated. I feel like I should find him new doctors and come up with a strategy to make him gain weight and regain clarity, but then after my mother died, I kept feeling we should go get the body, revive her, and try something new. I didn’t seriously believe we should do that, but I had the feeling. It kept coming back for months after she was gone. I have an irrational resistance to giving up, and I know it’s irrational. There is nothing anyone can do.

It’s astounding to get so much help from God during this time. This could have gone much worse. I thought my dad would straight-arm God until the last minute, and I expected to suffer the whole time. I thought he would wait until he was breathing his last to repent. It has been nothing like that. We get together and talk about our love for each other, and we pray as a family. When my dad goes, I won’t have any lingering resentment to subdue. I will be as satisfied as a man with a father like mine can be.

My dad could have continued casting his burdens on me instead of God, but that has not happened. He has become gracious. How many adults can say that about their difficult parents? What a gift I’ve been given.

After he goes, I’ll have video to prove my story is true. Oral testimony is fine, but video is much more powerful.

I hope the end isn’t needlessly protracted. I don’t want to sit by his bed for three weeks, waiting for the familiar sound that says it’s over. He would be better off going in his sleep. I don’t have to be there to see it. I’ll catch up with him later.

My mother must be even happier than I am about his salvation. He’s leaving me in a cursed world, but she’s about to meet him again in heaven, and boy, is he improved.

I wish I could explain these things to him now, so he could have some understanding of what’s going on. It doesn’t matter, though. When I catch up with him, we will know everything we need to know, without saying a word.

Testimony of Restoration

My dad the former atheist is now so enthusiastic about God, you could almost call him a Jesus freak.

I can’t get over the way God came through. For years he had been telling me my dad was going to be saved, but when I finally saw it, I was still amazed.

Every day, I go to the ALF with my Bluetooth speaker, and we spend an hour or so talking. Most of the time, we just go in circles. Occasionally, we stumble on a topic that leads to something resembling a conversation. He is aware that he repeats himself. I tell him not to worry about it. It’s a privilege to be in his company these days. I don’t care if our conversations aren’t structured.

I don’t know why it took him so long to realize he had dementia. I assume spirits blinded him to it. He used to say he was fine. Now he asks why he can’t remember certain things. For example, we’ll talk about someone, and he’ll say, “Why can’t I remember how she looks?”

He keeps telling me how wonderful I am. Yesterday he said he wanted to pour out everything he had for me. Because you don’t know him, you will never understand how strange it is for me to hear that. He was never a person who spoke that way. He was very selfish. He had a sense of complete entitlement. It was hard for him to say nice things to people, even when he felt like doing so.

I remind him that God is his real help and that I’m not that wonderful. Glory is a dangerous thing.

I believe God is blessing me through him. Parents are supposed to speak blessings over their children, in God’s name. Obviously, I never had that when I was young. Suddenly, my dad seems determined to make up for it. He probably blesses me 50 times during every session.

It’s a good thing I understand how blessings work, so I know what’s happening. I know it’s important, so I take it seriously and benefit from it.

Many, many people are cursed by their parents. I could sit here and make a list of friends whose parents have systematically poisoned them. Generally, people can’t fix this problem. We tolerate it and compensate for it as well as we can, and when our parents die, we feel relief, not just grief. I know that having my dad turn around and bless me before dying is a rare gift. Many people would give a great deal to have the same experience, but few will ever get it.

Last night while we talked, I thought about how good it was to have him bless me at last. I started to think about my age, though, and I thought about how much had been wasted. If I had to sum up my thoughts, I would write something like, “Sure, he’s blessing me now, but I’m so old I’m practically dead. What about all the decades of my life that have already been destroyed?”

I repented. God doesn’t change the past, and he doesn’t owe us anything anyway. Most of the problems I have had were self-inflicted, even if other people were against me. Anything good I receive is undeserved. What I am getting now is the best possible result given the way I lived my life.

My emotional state and my circumstances keep improving, and I believe my dad’s new personality is a big part of it.

I believe having a Christian home has changed my life a great deal. I get up early now and fire up the TV. I spend a long time praying in tongues in the living room, not upstairs in a remote family room. I sing hymns. I study the Bible. I watch people like Derek Prince. I believe that when your home is a church, as it should be, blessings follow, and that belief is consistent with my experience.

I also pray in the evenings. That’s very important. The second prayer session of the day is always much more powerful than the first. I have missed many evening prayer sessions, but now it’s much easier to sit down and do it, because there is no one here to interfere.

Yesterday I did something I had been dreaming of doing. I called the people at DirecTV and told them we were through. DirecTV is a nightmare, and my bill for bad TV, a bad phone, and slow Internet service was about $260 per month. I cut it down to slow Internet service. Maybe I should get rid of that and go with fixed wireless.

One of the reasons I’m glad DirecTV is gone is that it was full of porn. I don’t just mean the relatively weak porn we receive through networks like HBO. There were channels on the guide screen that featured titles like “Bad Dads Punish Naughty Meter Maids.” I’m making that title up, so don’t go looking for it. I did not like having those options appear on my TV, even though I did not use them. I suppose I can find dirty material on Hulu and Amazon Prime, but if so, I have not seen it yet, and I don’t plan to look.

Bringing wicked things into your home causes bad things to happen to the people who live there. It gives demons the right to move in with you. Try to cast them out, and God will side with them against you.

When I make changes like this, I feel like I’m standing on a pier, watching my dad’s boat pull out, but these things have to be done.

I also ordered a box for his ashes. I was thinking about it, and I realized I did not want to be stuck here waiting for an urn if he died unexpectedly. It will be disturbing to have it in the house, but it’s a necessity, so I’m taking care of it.

The box cost $48. His will suggests a simple wooden box, so that’s what I ordered. I don’t have the typical desire to spend big money on funerals, so I’m fine with his choice. My mother is not in the $7000 coffin we bought for her. My dad will never be in a box. Blowing money on funerals is something we do in order to feel good about ourselves. The dead could not care less, and neither could God.

Now I know I won’t be scrambling around looking for an urn. As Forrest Gump said, “One less thing to worry about.”

My dad has always been terrified of death, but that seems to be a thing of the past. Yesterday he asked me what I would do when he was gone. His middle-aged self would not have wanted to discuss that. He appears to know the end is coming soon, and he doesn’t worry about it. He keeps saying how wonderful it is to know he’ll be with my mother and me in heaven.

He worries about things happening to me, however. He does not want to face life without me.

His physical condition does not seem good. He seems yellowish and maybe a bit shrunken. On the other hand, he looks very peaceful. He hasn’t taken to the wheelchair the hospice people suggested. He can still walk with me to the place where we talk.

Whenever I bring up God, I can’t help bracing myself. I worry that he’s about to respond the way he used to, telling me Christianity is all fairy tales. It never happens. He is always receptive and in agreement.

The ALF has a courtyard, which is a sort of garden. It’s not much of a garden. It’s a rectangle of grass with shrubs and a few trees. It’s very peaceful, because almost no one uses it. We sit in rocking chairs in the shade.

This morning I thought about that. In Genesis, Adam spent the evenings in a garden, talking to his father. Then things went haywire. In my case, things started out badly, but now my dad and I sit and talk in a garden.

Like the Bible says, the end of a thing is better than the beginning.

I told my dad something I never thought I would tell him. I said he was a good father. That’s true. I didn’t say, “You WERE a good father.” That would be a lie. I was talking about his current status. Regardless of what he used to be, he’s a good father now. He prays with me. He encourages me. He wants to help me.

I have to stop thinking of him as a bad father. When people change for the better, you don’t get the benefit unless you start to see them for the improved beings they are. He’s a good father. What he used to be no longer means anything.

Christianity is all about redemption and change. It’s not just about forgiveness and putting up with people. When we change, we expect God to treat us like righteous people instead of dwelling on our former natures. I can’t expect that from him if I’m not willing to give others the same benefit.

I’m thinking of shooting video of my dad. He won’t be able to communicate forever. I want his testimony to be preserved, and I want people to be able to see what he was like before he died. Hearing about it is not the same as seeing it.

Our situation is far better than I had expected. I figured my dad would have a crisis which would put him on his deathbed, and he would repent right before he died. I expected him to be proud and difficult until that moment, and I expected the strain on me to continue until he passed. I never dreamed his whole personality would change, and that I would have time to benefit from it.

I take pictures of him. I don’t plan on posting them here. I think that’s an invasion of his privacy. I just want a record. I want to be able to look at the pictures later and remember the changed man he became. If I marry, or by some miracle I have kids, I want to be able to tell my wife and kids about him and prove what I say.

I wish I could be writing these things in 1980. That’s on us. There is no point in looking backward.

Christianity works. God really will help you. You just have to do things his way. You should be looking for knowledge all the time. The sooner you get started, the less you will have to regret.

God Never Asks us to do the Impossible

I love the way God tells all of his children the same things.

At some point after the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the church started splitting into denominations. Christians began disagreeing about doctrine. It proved we had already failed God. Jesus chose to be crucified so we could receive the Holy Spirit and learn directly from him, and we blew it. We went back to learning from men and evil spirits, and they sowed confusion.

The New Testament clearly teaches that we are supposed to learn from the Holy Spirit, not men. God uses people to steer us to him, and they help us with advice until we get up and running, but we were never supposed to rely on men heavily for doctrine. Men make mistakes, and mistakes accumulate over time. You start out with Abraham or Jesus, and years later, you end up enslaved by Satanic gossip like the Talmud or the catechism.

If we all learned from the Holy Spirit, we would never disagree for long. He would tell all of us the same things, and he would resolve any disputes. Instead, we go around saying we respect each other’s opinions. We have reached a state where we think tolerating other opinions is somehow equivalent to believing all opinions are valid. Of course, that’s stupidity. When two disagree, only one can be right.

God told me this: “Only the uninformed have opinions.”

God doesn’t have opinions. He has the truth, and the rest of us have opinions.

When you start praying in tongues for long periods every day, the Holy Spirit will teach you things, and you’ll find you disagree with your pastors from time to time. This is what happened to me. I was proven right every time, so I know it works. It didn’t happen because I was smart or righteous; it happened because God’s word flowed through me. God could have done it to a chicken or even a rock, so anyone who thinks they can’t have the same experience because I’m special is just making an excuse.

Back when my pastors at Trinity Church and then New Dawn Ministries were telling me all God wanted were my money and free labor, God told me something different. He told me I was full of demons and iniquities. He said I had to be cleansed so the Holy Spirit could rule. He told me to love correction and to get the demons cast out of me. The pastors labeled me an enemy and rejected me. Trinity continued to stumble along in failure, and New Dawn went bust. I kept getting new help from God.

Today I watched a Derek Prince video. It was probably filmed in the mid-1990’s, which was before I turned back to God. Derek Prince confirmed things God had told me independently.

It was actually a little funny. I’ll explain why.

The subject of his sermon was spiritual warfare on earth, and it was about demons. I can sum up his message. Demons are spirits (“persons without bodies,” according to Prince) that want to live in bodies. They want to indulge their cravings and promote poisonous ideas through us. Through sin, we invite them in, and then we have to cast them out. In order to cast them out, we need to turn against them, confess, and renounce and hate what they try to make us do.

Here’s why it was funny. He was teaching in John Hagee’s church, and Hagee was sitting near him while he taught, helpless to interrupt. While Hagee sat there before his church, Prince gave a long teaching about gluttony.

If you know who John Hagee is, you know he’s gluttonous. He probably weighs 300 pounds. He is also proud and angry, so he has a number of things he needs to work on. Prince essentially informed his whole church that he was serving demons. In fact, he said spirits of self-indulgence were the biggest demonic problem in the United States.

The Bible says people who are lovers of pleasure can’t enter the kingdom of God. This is one reason why I am no longer an enthusiastic cook.

I hope I don’t sound self-righteous when I criticize Hagee, but I have to deliver the truth. I am qualified to talk about other people’s pride, anger, and gluttony because I have openly discussed and confronted these problems in myself. I continue to confront them. Jesus told us to take the logs out of our own eyes SO WE COULD THEN TAKE THE DUST MOTES OUT OF OUR BROTHERS’ EYES. He didn’t say, “Take the log out of your own eye and then be silent when someone else has a dust mote. Just let him go blind.” Read it for yourself.

I am not perfected. I have plenty to work on. I’m just saying I am not a person who criticizes gluttony and pride while ignoring them in myself. I use God’s tools to defeat them every day.

Some people defend the obese and say you don’t have to be gluttonous to be one of them. That’s simply not true. If you have a one-in-a-billion genetic disorder that makes you gain weight on 1500 calories per day, you get a pass, but YOU DON’T HAVE THAT DISORDER, now do you? No. Why talk about it? According to God, excuses are lies, and liars don’t inherit the kingdom of heaven.

One of the clues that demons are at work is an inability to control a behavior. If you want to weigh 300 pounds, perhaps because you’re a professional sumo wrestler, and you can stop stuffing yourself whenever you want, you may not have a demon. If you hate yourself for overeating and wish you could stop, and you hate being unattractive, unhealthy, uncomfortable, and annoying because of your weight, but you can’t do anything to change, you probably have a demon, and you are definitely a glutton.

If you’re significantly heavier than you want to be, and your desired weight is reasonable, you are a glutton. If you truly had self-control, you would not be defeated, would you? Of course not. Not unless you desire to be defeated.

As Derek Prince said in his sermon, the Bible tells us the man who will not confess his sin will not prosper. If you can’t confess because of your pride, get used to your situation, because it will never change. You can try bariatric surgery, but it only works for about a year.

Prince mentioned the spirit of self-pity, which is something God told me about independently a while back. I learned I was gluttonous because I fed myself out of self-pity. I would say, “Today was a hard day, so I’m having ice cream.” The Bible says the Holy Spirit is our comforter, but I relied on food instead. Also, self-pity partners with self-condemnation, because both involve telling yourself you can never do any better.

I have been delivered from gluttony in the past, but it started to creep back to me, and self-pity and self-condemnation were the doors it used.

Right now, I’m 14 pounds above my desired weight. I am not happy about it. I do not accept it, and I do not defend it. These days, I take supernatural steps to defeat self-pity, along with gluttony, and I also try to think about what I eat. Having self-control only works when you remember to use it. Sometimes I’ll consider eating or drinking something, and then I’ll think, “I won’t lose weight if I do that.” Then I’ll pass it up. I’ll use God’s tools, and I won’t have cravings. If I forget, though, I’m likely to go ahead and overdo it a little. Modern America shoves things in front of you all the time, and if you lack presence of mind, you may eat before you think.

I don’t know if I seem harsh. How zealous you are depends on how much help you want. If you’re content to rot and live in weakness, you won’t confess much. If you want to improve a great deal, you will confess a great deal, and you will be unsparing when you talk about similar problems in other people, because you will also want the best for them.

I really want to improve, so I dig pretty deep. That offends people who prefer the sleep of denial. I can understand that, because I have loved that sleep myself.

Prince said someone had told him that if he ever needed to find out about the best restaurants in a city, he should ask a preacher. Wow! He didn’t even look back at Hagee. He made the crowd uncomfortable. They knew exactly who he was talking about.

You can imagine the problems that could exist in a church pastored by an obese man. Most of the fat people in the congregation would come in, take one look at him, and breathe a sigh of relief. They’d think, “He weighs twice what I do, so I must be okay.” It’s not okay. If you’re obese, you are probably ruled by a demon, and I guarantee you, it’s working on things other than making you fat. It has other projects which are even worse. It has demon friends, too, and God only knows that they’re doing to you.

While I’m discussing Hagee’s faults, I might as well talk about Prince. Today I realized he talked very little about his own failings. That’s a mistake. When you teach correction without discussing your own sins and recovery, you end up in pride, and God fights the proud.

I know he wasn’t afraid of discussing people’s sins per se, because he was perfectly willing to talk about the problems other people had. He was just harder on other people than he was on himself.

Prince said something else that bothered the crowd. He discussed coffee and said it was a drug. He said people should give it up for a day and see if they could stand it. If not, they were addicts.

Ouch.

Maybe 9 years ago, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” I then lost my ability to tolerate caffeine. I have to be very careful about drinking coffee, tea, and caffeine sodas like Coke. I have to limit the amount of chocolate I eat, because it contains stimulants.

God got on me about gluttony, and he got on me about the drug abuse of heavy caffeine consumption. Years later, I found out he had told Derek Prince the same things. If I had stuck with God 29 years ago, when I began to drift off, maybe I would have seen Prince speak, and I would have learned what I needed to know sooner. Prince used to live about 30 miles from me.

Maybe God himself would have told me sooner.

Prince showed me something else. He showed that a very popular (and familiar) scripture had been mistranslated. Here is the KJV: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and a sound mind.” Guess what it really says? “Love, power, and SELF-CONTROL.” Look up the Greek. It’s true.

Self-control and a sound mind are very different things.

The flesh is a stupid bag of unrefrigerated meat, and it has no more class than a goat or a hog. There is no limit to the filthiness of its desires. You can see this in the weird fetishes that flourish today among homosexuals. Once they give in to homosexuality, they open the door to things like sadism and playing with feces. These things are not rare, even though leftists like to cover them up. They are mainstream activities among homosexuals. When the flesh takes over, you might as well be a highly aroused cannibalistic rodent that rolls in its own manure all day.

The flesh is supposed to serve each of us as a beast of burden, like a horse. We are supposed to command it, and God is supposed to command us. Instead, the flesh commands us, and demons command the flesh. They must love watching us do the nutty things they come up with. They must laugh themselves sore when they see aroused people eating excrement or fornicating with animals.

Fornicating with animals is not a rare thing, especially (for some reason) among Latins. In some Latin American countries, sex with pigs and donkeys is considered normal. It’s big in Cuba; Cubans don’t like to talk about it, but it’s true. People will do amazing things once depravity sets in.

I recently saw an episode of The Grand Tour, the de facto continuation of the BBC’s Top Gear. The team was in Colombia, photographing animals for laughs, and they inadvertently got video of a normal-looking young man engaging with a donkey outdoors, in broad daylight. They asked the locals about it, and they weren’t ashamed of him at all. They said animals served as their first girlfriends. It was accepted in their culture.

People need to know what happens around them.

Either you control your flesh, or it controls you. There is no middle ground. If your flesh controls you, Satan controls you. The flesh can’t be independent.

Christians don’t think about these things. They’re too busy obeying rules, trying to get God to give them money, or trying to get quick forgiveness so they can run home and resume sinning.

Satan controls the flesh through demons, and demons often come in through things we think are innocent, such as astrology, yoga, fortune-telling, games of chance, gluttony, shacking up, gossip, body modification, and feminism. Avoiding sin and casting out demons are supposed to be cornerstones of the Christian walk, but how many of us are working at these things? If someone shows up at your church during a service and asks to have demons cast out, what will the pastor do? Most will have such a person escorted out so they can be informed that demons aren’t real.

We don’t pray in tongues, so we don’t have any idea what we’re supposed to believe. We are too busy fighting over bogus doctrines made up by ignorant men who dress like Liberace. If we were hearing from the Holy Spirit, we would understand the need to be cleansed and to empower the Holy Spirit to rule us unopposed.

It’s wonderful to get confirmation. The more correction I get, the better my life will be. It would have been better to receive it sooner, but I made my choice, so I have to live with it.

If you’re wondering how to exercise self-control, I can give you a helpful tip. First, you need to be baptized in water, properly. You can watch videos from The Last Reformation to find out how, and you can have another Christian do it. You don’t need a priest. Also, you should be praying in tongues every day. If you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit but can’t speak in tongues, you may have an unconfessed iniquity that allows spirits to block it, so ask God to help you confess and repent.

Once you get in touch with the Holy Spirit and receive faith, whenever you find yourself falling prey to a sinful urge, you can say, “I forbid my flesh, mind and spirit to think about [whatever it is] in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord. I am a son (or daughter) of God, and this is how things are supposed to work. May Jesus be glorified.” If you have faith, it will work.

There was a famous person (maybe Bertrand Russell) who used to play a game with his sister. They played the game when they were kids. It was simple. You see how long you can avoid thinking of a big white bear. I guess they didn’t have a lot of toys. It’s very hard to do for more than a second or two, because we do not naturally have that kind of self-control. If you use the authority of Jesus, however, you really can stop thinking about women’s bodies, things you wish you owned, anger, tempting food, or other things that are problematic. It works all the time. It’s amazing, because it’s completely impossible to do it on your own.

In 2 Timothy 1:7, we are told that God gives us a Spirit of love, power, and self-control. Now you know what it means. Run with it, and you can start conquering lust, gluttony, pride, anger, covetousness, and other things that rule you today. God doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. It works. You just have to know how to do it.

Would it work for things like homosexuality and drug addiction? I don’t know, but if I had those problems, I would be trying it right now. I know I can’t fix iniquities with my own unaided mind.

God really is up there (and inside the Spirit-filled), and he is eager to tell us what we need to know. He is eager to give us power and deliverance. You just have to do things his way, instead of relying on people whose theological notions are really crippling gossip that flowed from Satan.

I hope this helps you even more than it has helped me. If you try it and get results, I would like to hear about it.

Police Name Al Jolson as Person of Interest

Who is surprised by this story? I’ve been expecting it for several days: Empire cast member “attackers” say he paid them to stage hate crime.

If you don’t know what happened, I’ll summarize. A gay black actor named Jussie Smollett called the cops and said he had been attacked by two white men yelling something about “MAGA.” He said they had placed a noose around his neck and thrown something which may have been bleach on him. When the cops showed up, he was still wearing the noose, because this is what you do when someone puts a repugnant, demeaning symbol around your neck.

He claimed he was attacked at 2 a.m. while buying a Subway sandwich on a night when the temperature was 20 below zero. Completely typical errand. Exactly the kind of weather that draws racists out for fresh air and mischief.

I read this story and knew immediately that there would be a follow-up revealing that the attack had been staged. Now two brothers from Nigeria have told police Smollett gave them money to put a noose on him and whitesplain gay slurs at him. You can see them in a photo, below.

Whitesplain…isn’t that a town in New York? In the name of Nathan Phillips, I demand that it be renamed Nativeamericansplain.

I assume posting the picture is fair use, since marveling at someone’s weirdness is legitimate journalistic practice. They totally look like they know what they’re doing.

“We are professional agitprop performance artists. Do not try this at home.”

Here is my tip for black SJW’s who want to slander white conservatives with false accusations: lay off the nooses. Real white racists don’t use nooses now. The noose preoccupation is a black thing. When you see a noose, you can pretty well count on the story turning out to be a hoax.

Real white racists don’t put nooses on people unless they intend to hang them, and hanging is long out of style. If they decide to target you, they will simply beat you up, run over you with their monster trucks, or shoot you. If you really want to frame Trump supporters, the best way is to shoot yourself with an AR-15 from 20 yards away while threatening to impose higher tariffs on Chinese goods.

Smollett makes me wonder if there is any need for white racists to exist. He and his black accomplices seem to be doing the work of white racists very well on their own. In fact, they shamed white racists by committing a hate crime white racists hadn’t even thought of yet.

Maybe white racists who read the story will feel unwanted, and they’ll be motivated to take up other hobbies.

Maybe Smollett could open a business committing hate crimes for pay. They could have a phone app, like Uber; in fact, it’s too bad that name is taken.

Say a white supremacist who is too lazy or afraid to drive to a black neighborhood wants to commit a hate crime. He could use the app to hire Smollett and his friends to do it for him, and he could even pay for it with Paypal. What a time saver. And it would be green, since it would save the racist the trouble of driving.

Green white hate crime by proxy. I can’t believe I published this idea without patenting it first. Someone else will be all over this, and I won’t get a dime. A coin which has a white man’s face on it, by the way. Down with white coin privilege.

George Washington had slaves, and he’s on the quarter. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and he’s on the penny. Am I getting too woke for you honkies?

Oh, yes. I can say the H-word. I own my whiteness. I used to lease, but I decided to own so I could deduct the depreciation.

What point is there in behaving well when your enemies will accuse you of crimes anyway? Okay, I suppose the point is to avoid being an evil loser, but still. One of the fundamental principles of human interaction is that you have to reward people for good behavior, and a corollary is that you don’t punish them for bad things they haven’t done. Smollett isn’t fighting racist crime. He’s encouraging it by punishing an entire class of people who haven’t done anything to him. When you frame people, you reduce their motivation for refraining from doing the types of things of which you have accused them.

There was definitely a racist crime committed on the fateful night of the Subway noose. It was committed by Jussie Smollett and two Nigerians. Will leftists be angry at him? Probably not. They will probably continue to insist he’s telling the truth, because MAGA.

“We also do Milli Vanilli covers at bar mitzvahs.”

The whole affair is ridiculous, but it serves to remind Christians that persecution is increasing in America. “MAGA” is associated with white people, conservatism, and Christianity, in a loose and probably irrational way. Somewhere deep in his soul, Smollett probably felt he was striking a blow at the white Christian machine, which stirs rage within the leftist soul but doesn’t actually exist.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re guilty. We are approved targets because of who we are, not what we do.

I had a killer caption for this photo, but I forgot it.

Maybe Smollett’s friends are guilty of cultural appropriation. I’m not sure. If you pretend to be a white racist while black, is it a form of blackface? Also, is there a Rachel Dolezal joke in here which I’m too tired to discern? Hey…Rachel…”racial”…WOKE!

What if Smollett had paid Racial Dolezal to attack him, and the public fell for it, but he did it before she got exposed as a Caucasian? Would it have become a legitimate hate crime after the reveal? I’m not sure. And could she have been charged with blackface retroactively?

I know what we need. We need a white man who made a career of pretending to be black to answer the question. I assume Shaun King will pipe up. If not him, then maybe Pat Boone.

Or Bryant Gumbel.

Pat Boone

It’s late. This world is too crazy for me.

“We’ll Put the Bendpak Over by the Breakfast Nook”

I am having a man moment. I am asking myself if there is any reason why I should not move my TIG welder to the living room.

I got a TIG early in 2017, and then we moved north. I was terrible at TIGing when we left. I didn’t get a lot of time to practice. My welder has been in my workshop ever since. It has been idle.

I planned to get 240V service installed, and I figured I would TIG once I got it hooked up. The electrician I contacted for an estimate flaked out repeatedly, so nothing has been done.

The other day, I was surfing and learning about TIG, and I realized my welder doesn’t require 240V service.

One of the welder’s selling points is its ability to work on 120V power. I discounted that, because I assumed it would only weld very thin metal. I looked into it, and I was wrong. I can weld 1/8″ metal, which is what I was welding back in 2017. Now that I think about it, welding very thin metal would be a good strategy, because it would be easier to prepare for welding, it would be cheaper, and it would require more skill. If I can weld thin metal, I can weld thick metal. If I learn on thick metal, I will still struggle with thin metal until I get used to it.

I thought about this, and then I made the next jump of logic. If I can weld on 120 in the workshop, I can also do it in the living room. With air conditioning and a big TV. Close to the fridge.

I have some concerns about damaging the hardwood floors, but TIG is not very messy. MIG throws crap around, but TIG is neater. I have never had molten metal leave a workpiece.

This could work. I’d have to move the birds to another room when I welded, in order to protect their eyes, but I could make it happen.

You know what? I’m a single man. I could move LOTS of my tools into the main living area. Maybe my ideas about getting real furniture were stupid. I have no woman to stomp around, giving me a hard time. What am I waiting for?

In other news, my dad and I shared a great experience today. The Veterans of Foreign Wars like to go around pinning medals on veterans in assisted living, and my dad’s hospice works with them. Today three people showed up at my dad’s ALF and held a pinning ceremony. They played the national anthem and God Bless America. We recited the pledge of allegiance. They gave him a certificate and a stand with three flags (American, Florida, Army).

The guy who ran things is a marine. He served in the 1960’s. His wife came too, but she forgot some things, so we had to wait while she went to get them. That gave us time to talk. My dad had a surprising conversation during that time. He and the marine had been to a lot of the same places, and because my dad’s military experience took place so long ago, he still remembered a lot of it well enough to be able to discuss it. They talked about Nevada and San Francisco. My dad was in the army band, and he served in San Francisco with Tony Bennett and Chet Baker.

It was shocking to see my dad speak so lucidly. He wasn’t completely on top of things, but he didn’t sound completely demented, the way he usually does. I didn’t know what to make of it.

My dad is not the same man he was a year ago. He got very emotional during the ceremony. He kept saying he didn’t deserve it. He talked about how moved he was. He kept telling us how much he loved America. I wondered what our visitors would have thought, had they known him when he was young. God has done wonders in my dad over the last couple of months. I hardly know him.

They’re going to have a bigger ceremony with more honorees soon, and my dad will get to enjoy being honored all over again.

The marine told us this county has the nation’s biggest military population, apart from counties that contain military installations. So apparently, Marion County is one of the world’s great military powers. We should invade somebody.

I have to think about the welder idea. It would be pretty hilarious, TIG welding in front of the TV.