Axe Saga Continues to Breed Suffering

I have some advice. Buy a chainsaw and throw out your axes.

I have been trying to get a decent library of axes for some time now. In the old days, you walked into any hardware store, you bought an axe made in America, and you were all set. American axe companies made great axes. The steel was hardened and tempered carefully. The handles were made correctly. You didn’t have to think much. You just bought.

Today, hardware stores don’t sell American axes. There are exceptions, but generally, you’re going to be buying Chinese. The heads will be soft. The handles will be dubious. It’s a bad situation.

If you want a good American axe, you go to Ebay and buy an old axe head for five bucks, because used axe heads are nearly worthless. HAHAHAHAHAHA. You fool! Try it! A good used axe head will cost you at least 30 bucks, and when you receive it, there’s a good chance it will have a fatal flaw you couldn’t see in the pictures.

I bought a new Council Tool axe. This is one of the few American axe companies that remain. They sent it in a flimsy envelope, and the Post Office apparently dragged the edges on concrete. Back it went. I ordered an old Ebay Collins axe head. It turned out to have a mashed eye a handle would not go through.

I finally got a nice Plumb axe head. It looked fine. It still had wood in it, but that was okay. I had a hydraulic press. Today I bought a handle at a hardware store, and I tried to hang the axe. When you put a handle on an axe, you’re hanging it.

I put the axe in a vise and used a 3/8″ drill bit to waste a lot of the wood so the remaining stuff would collapse easily. I put it on the hydraulic press, and the wood wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t support it in a way the looked totally safe, so I didn’t apply full force, but I applied about 10 times what you would think the drilled-out wood could take.

I took a coping saw and sawed the wood between the holes to weaken the wood more. The blade got stuck in the axe. I drilled and did various things, and finally, 80% of the wood slid out. Great. But the remaining 20% was stuck in the axe.

You would think an axe handle would not stick to an axe, but this one did. It was as if the Plumb people had painted the handle and hung the axe while the paint was wet.

I tried various things, and I used a big punch. Finally, the remaining wood came out, and it did so in a perverse way. One second, it was glued in there, seemingly permanently. The next, it just fell out. Okay.

Now I was ready to insert the handle. Well, not really. There was all sorts of rust and crud inside the axe. I had to sand it out by hand.

Remarkably, things didn’t get any less complicated after that.

You would think hanging an axe would be simple, and that lots of people would know how to do it. You would think almost any Youtube video would be a good guide. That’s not how it works. Because Americans don’t use axes much any more, people don’t know how to work on them. They post videos just the same. Doesn’t even slow them down.

They use wedges wrong. They don’t set the axes down far enough on the handles. They force axes onto handles instead of shaping the wood. It’s like Beavis and Butt-head became lumberjacks and bought Gopros.

I found a couple of guys who appeared to know their stuff, and I can tell you what they said.

You don’t force an axe onto a handle and make wood peel up underneath it. That’s the pea-brain method. You shape the handle and try it in the axe repeatedly until you get a good fit. When you finally have it right, you don’t have to pound anything. You put the axe on the handle, and you bop the lower end of the handle on a piece of wood on a concrete floor. The axe will seat itself where it should, which is just above the little protrusion or protrusions on the handle.

I used a belt sander to shape my handle. It was a little slow, but the result was very nice.

When you get your axe onto your handle, you trim the excess wood above the axe, and you insert your wedge. You can coat it with wood glue, or you can soak it in a product called Swel-Lock, which makes wood swell permanently. You force the wedge into the handle as far as you can without splitting anything, and you let everything dry. Then you trim everything and make it look nice.

I did all this stuff, except for inserting the wedge. For some reason, I don’t have wood glue.

Apart from the wedge, I was done, right? Of course not. Don’t even think it.

Handle makers paint handles with varnish This is bad. If you use a varnished axe without gloves (always wear gloves), the varnish will pull at your skin and give you blisters. Even though I use gloves, I used lacquer thinner to remove the varnish from my handle. Then I sanded it and treated it with paste wax.

After I did all these things, I discovered that I had bought the wrong handle. An axe handle should have growth rings that run more or less parallel to the axe. I knew this, but I forgot to check when I was at the store. My handle has growth rings that run across it. This may not cause a problem, but it’s not what I wanted.

My understanding is that the real problem is grain that runs out. That means you have places where a split between two layers of wood can divide the handle into two parts. I don’t know if I have that issue. I am afraid to look.

I blew $17 on a handle, I researched as carefully as I could, and I still ended up with a handle that may be unusable. I’ll give it a try tomorrow and see if it’s safe.

I can see why chainsaws are so popular. They’re all the same. They don’t have grain that wanders around. And if a part goes bad, you take it off and put another one on. You don’t have to use a belt sander or a spokeshave to change a saw bar. Skill is not part of the paradigm.

Tomorrow I’ll buy wood glue, and I’ll check my handle. If it worries me, I’ll buy another one. I’ll get it right some day.

There was one bright spot in my day. I used the belt sander to sharpen the axe, and it took about two minutes. It was a joke. When it was finished, it was sharp enough to be dangerous. I know. I handled it incorrectly and started to peel skin off a finger.

Look how hard it is to prepare and use simple tools. You know–you don’t have to check–almost no one does these things right. No wonder Americans don’t like hand tools. They don’t know what they’re doing. Hand tools are great when you buy good ones and use them correctly, but that’s not obvious when you walk into Lowe’s with a head full of nothing.

On the whole, I’m more grateful than I used to be for my chainsaws. They haven’t failed me yet, and the learning curve is pretty gentle.

Even Weathermen Lie to Support the Left

Today’s global warming news: The Weather Channel’s Mike Seidel was so determined to make us understand how bad hurricanes are, he pretended to have trouble standing up during Hurricane Florence…while unconcerned passersby strolled easily in the background of the same frame.

Why is this a global warming story? Because The Weather Channel is firmly behind the climate change hysteria. They are convinced that gases that make up roughly 1/1000 of our atmosphere are creating a natural catastrophe (which has not materialized), and that human beings caused the problem by burning things.

The Weather Channel just lied to us about the strength of the wind. Why should we expect them to tell us the truth about the climate?

It’s not a small matter. Burning things and creating gases that contain carbon is very important to civilization and progress. Ultimately, the creation of these gases is linked to things like prosperity, food production, and medical care. Discouraging the production of these gases threatens the standard of living of human beings all over the world, and it should not be done unless we are certain we have no choice.

Take a look at this hilarious video. Mike Seidel stands in a windy place, bracing and squirming as though he were having trouble standing. Behind him, people walk completely normally.

Here is The Weather Channel’s disgraceful, dishonest coverup statement:

It’s important to note that the two individuals in the background are walking on concrete, and Mike Seidel is trying to maintain his footing on wet grass, after reporting on-air until 1:00 a.m. ET this morning and is undoubtedly exhausted.

This is what we lawyers call “a lie.” Seidel is not trying to maintain his footing. He’s acting, badly. The video proves TWC employees deceive us on camera. The statement proves the organization lies to cover the deception.

In spite of this, we are required to believe them when they tell us a miniscule increase in carbon dioxide (an unavoidable symptom of progress) will kill us all in the near future.

Fermentation of corn for ethanol production produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide, yet greenies are all for it. I have never seen this issue mentioned on the news. It’s strange how they never talk about it. Have engineers fixed the problem? We don’t even know.

One of the funniest things about the video is that Seidel is leaning the wrong way. To stand up in a high wind, you have to lean into the wind. In the video, the wind is coming from the right. Seidel is leaning to the left! Give it up, man. You are BUSTED.

Excuses are coming from the left. Internet warriors are saying things like, “Mike Seidel is 61.” Apparently, when you hit 61, you become unable to tell which way the wind is blowing.

I wonder how John Kerry manages to windsurf without getting lost.

Here’s a similar video from the past. NBC reporter Michelle Kosinski uses a canoe to show how badly a street has flooded, and during the video, two people walk by…in water about 5 inches deep.

You can tell it’s an old video, because Matt Lauer is one of the anchors.

Kosinski later claimed her team originally tried to shoot in an area where the water was deeper, but they couldn’t get the lighting right, so they moved. First of all, I don’t believe liars. Second, if her story was true, the correct thing to do, as a journalist, was to get out of the canoe and do the story on foot. She tried to deceive viewers, regardless of how she ended up paddling in 5 inches of water.

Dan Rather could weigh in here.

All these videos need are shots of CGI polar bears drowning in seas that only exist inside computers. Why wait for news? If the truth doesn’t cooperate with you and give you the story you want to push, just make it up.

Seidel’s intentional deception is not the big story here. The big story is that his network and others are defending him. That’s the scary part. They’re not upset with him for lying. They’re upset because he got caught. Obviously, most of the time, lying journalists don’t get caught. Seidel’s experience suggests what we already know: leftist journalists treat us like suckers at sideshow games. They don’t care about the truth. They just want to make us believe what they want, so they can herd us like cattle.

Journalists are supposed to inform, not herd. There is no longer any distinction between journalists, publicists, and propagandists. I suppose there never was.

Mike Seidel is a liar, and he should be fired. So should Michelle Kosinski. They should have to go sit in a penalty box with Dan Rather and Brian Williams.

Time to Buy a Kevlar MAGA Hat

God gives me phrases from time to time, and last year, he said this to me: “The hate is already here.” I guess it sounds stupid to say God was right, but boy…was he right!

He was referring to the hatred of the Beast and his children. The Bible tells us the world will be given over to sin before Jesus returns. The spirit of antichrist will assume the function the Holy Spirit was intended to perform: it will fill human beings and bind them together as one.

We are seeing their unifying hatred expressed now. The fundamental purpose is to oppose Jesus, but the spirit of antichrist attacks indirectly as well as directly. We see it going after males, whites, conservatives, heterosexuals, Americans, hunters, people who eat meat, and southerners, even though you can belong to those categories without belonging to God.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children attack every day: Donald Trump, the NRA, the GOP, Fox News, George Zimmerman, every Christian denomination that isn’t Catholic and doesn’t support homosexuality, the Jews, and Israel.

We see the spirit of antichrist supporting sexual deviants, rebellious females and children, the proud, the violent, the trashy, atheists, pagans, Muslims, leftists, enemies of America, and the less-succesful minorities.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children support: the Kardashians, every major rapper, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, the Pope (leftist), the Clintons, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Bernie Sanders, Caitlyn Jenner, George Clooney, Stormy Daniels, CNN, MSNBC, PETA, Greenpeace, David Hogg, and the deceased felon Trayvon Martin.

The Beast’s crowd hasn’t been beefing all that much with the pope, and that makes sense, because he is one of them. He is very weak on criticizing sexual perversion, he swallows everything leftists say about the environment, he adores celebrities, and he has no supernatural power whatsoever. He teaches Christians to be weak and carnal, so he’s more of a Beast asset than enemy.

It’s too bad Christians don’t label the opposition. Too many of us are caught up in political conflict. We label the MSM and the SJW’s, but we don’t have a name for the body of people who are controlled by the spirit of antichrist. My own name for them is “ACC.” The Antichrist Community.

We overuse the word “community” now. Everything has a community. The LGBTQetc. community. The black community. The People Named Fred Community. People who are completely unaware of each other’s existence or their bond have communities.

The world will be ruled by a human being the Bible calls the Antichrist, but in order for him to get anywhere, people will have to be susceptible to control by deceptive antichrist spirits. The body of Christ needs the Holy Spirit to unite and empower them, and the ACC needs spirits of antichrist for the same purposes.

The hate is already here, and it’s strong enough to drive things like massacres. We already see it at work in physical attacks on people the ACC doesn’t like. GOP offices are vandalized and burned. An ACC member shot up a baseball diamond while GOP members were playing. A man shot up a Trump property. Another man attacked Trump and had to be restrained. There have been numerous beatings of Trump supporters by ACC members. There are neighborhoods where a red hat will virtually guarantee that you will be attacked. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the other tech powers are doing their best to silence non-ACC people.

There is no corresponding hate apparatus on the other side. There are a few nuts who go off the rails, but you can go nearly anywhere in America wearing a T-shirt that says, “Black Lives Matter,” or even, “Satan is God,” without any fear of harm. There is no huge tech effort to silence Keith Olbermann, Spike Lee, or Michael Moore. It doesn’t matter how much Lee or Moore lie in movies and interviews. They are safe.

It’s going to be a real spectacle when the ACC slips its restraints. Right now, you can’t march on a Christian’s home, drag the family out, and kill them on the street, but there are plenty of people who are itching to do that. When the atmosphere changes sufficiently, we will see things like that. Take away the threat of arrest, and the ACC will express itself fully, as it did in Cambodia, Austria, and Germany. We think people behave because they’re not really that crazy. That’s wrong. They’re just unwilling to do time. There are millions of people in America who would kill God’s children today if they knew they would get away with it.

Would you hesitate to wear a shirt with Trayvon Martin’s picture on it in Utah or Wyoming? Of course not. You might get some nasty looks, but you would be safe. Would you wear a MAGA hat in Baltimore or Compton? There is no way you could get away with it. Sooner or later, you would be harmed. In places where human beings have already been trained to ignore the law and give in to their impulses, the batteries are already happening.

I don’t understand why the ACC associates white Caucasians with God. Jesus was a Semite whose ancestors were from Iraq and Egypt, so he probably had fairly dark skin for a Caucasian. Maybe the association comes from the fact that white people spread Christianity throughout the world.

Maybe 10 years ago, God showed me that we build our own enemies. Our enemies are like hurricanes forming way across the ocean where we can’t see them. We refuse to pray. We sin freely. We deny God. Many of us take up false gods. When we do these things, our enemies are conceived and fed. Eventually, they appear and overcome us. Then we ask stupid questions, like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

God’s children used to be dominant in America. For all our failings, we were still doing well enough to receive God’s favor. He limited the power of the ACC. Then we turned away. Now we’re so corrupt we stink, and ACC factions that ran from us decades ago sit in positions of power. They play the tune, and we dance, and many of us are dumb enough to think voting for Republicans will fix things. Political problems are just expressions of problems in the supernatural. As long as we are against God, he will limit the good things he does for us, and he will let our enemies torment and humiliate us.

It’s upsetting to live in a country where the paradigm is one of endless retreat. I moved away from Miami, to a place where Christians are safer. I didn’t conquer Miami for Jesus. That was not possible, because people there want sin and have no interest in God. Eventually, the county where I live now will be as filthy as Key West or Seattle.

Maybe I’ll be able to move again, but the water keeps rising, and the islands will keep getting smaller and farther apart. Eventually, there will be no place on Earth where we can stand without suffering more than God will permit, and we’ll have to leave.

I wonder if I’ll be able to see what goes on here on Earth after the ACC declares total victory. I almost hate to miss the show. When history is made, for good or bad, it’s natural to want to watch. I suppose the suffering would be a little too much to stand, though.

Help is Coming

I had the weirdest dream last night. This morning, really.

I ordered a second refrigerator for this house. That’s not part of the dream; it happened. My dad does disgusting things around food, and I could not take it any more, so I ordered a fridge from Home Depot’s website. They were having a sale.

The delivery people called and told me they would arrive today some time between 7:30 and 11:30 a.m. You read that correctly. To arrive at 7:30, they would have to call me by no later than 7:15, and that means I would have to be up, around, bathed, and clothed by 7:00 in order to leave a margin of error. No prayer. No breakfast. No attending to my other responsibilities. They refused to work with me.

I was not happy. You don’t force customers to roll out of bed to accommodate your schedule. No one does that. You give them options.

Last night, I dreamed that the delivery people called. I was in an apartment that belonged to me. I realized I had to rush to my father’s house to meet them, so I took off running. Oddly, it was attached to my apartment. I ran through a door, and I was in the house.

I heard a Hispanic guy talking loudly in my garage. Many delivery people here are Hispanic, so that made sense. I ran to the garage, and they already had the door open. A guy with a crazy robotic exoskeleton the color of a school bus or construction machine had the fridge in the machine’s arms, and he was charging up the garage steps. He was really moving. All I could do was get out of the way. There was some kind of railing, and I had to grab it with both hands and somersault over it. That was easy for me. In my dream, I was in shape!

It didn’t seem strange to me that he was encased in a hydraulic suit. We have self-driving cars and delivery drones now, so I figured it was another sudden advancement I hadn’t kept up with.

A few minutes later, I was awake, talking to a Hispanic delivery guy who was on his way to my house.

I asked God if the dream meant anything, and here is what I got: he’s going to send strong spirits to get things done for me, and they will act quickly and without a lot of warning. It has something to do with provision, which explains the refrigerator.

I’ll take all the help I can get. Being an heir is a lot better than working hard.

I felt I should blog the dream. If I’m wrong, I’ll look stupid, but if not, God will get the glory.

I’ve already moved things to the new fridge. I’m going to put a lock on it if necessary. I’m really going to enjoy opening a refrigerator and not seeing greasy fingerprints on everything, along with dried-out food in packages that have been left open.

In other news, the Dade clerk’s website posted an update today. It says my former pastor will be pleading guilty on September 25. I’m still amazed at how things turned out for him.

When Your Mind Goes AWOL, Your Body Will Still Have a Home

I looked at a third assisted living/memory care facility today. I don’t have anything negative to say about it, so I won’t try to prevent people from figuring out which one it was. The company that runs it is called Elan, and it’s part of The Villages.

The Villages is like Westworld for old people. It’s a big retirement complex south of Ocala. I have not been into the Magic Kingdom, or whatever the main complex is called. All I saw was an assisted living place which is associated with it.

The places I visited yesterday were one-story buildings, and they were not particularly elegant. The windows didn’t let a lot of light in, and a lot of the carpeting was entering the home stretch of its existence. The Elan facility was different. It’s several stories high. The construction appears to be fairly new. There is a lot of tile on the floors. There are a lot of big windows, and everything is very clean.

I didn’t smell anything while I was there. That sets this place apart from the others. I didn’t know it was possible to have an old folks home without potty smells, but these people have pulled it off.

Like many other facilities, this one had areas for people with memory issues and people who were simply old. I looked at both. The memory care side didn’t look too bad. They had a big room with a kitchen and a lot of tables, and people were hanging out there playing games. A staffer was doing dishes. There were slices of cake on dishes, waiting for anyone who wanted one.

The rooms were a little depressing, but that’s not because there was anything wrong with them. They’re depressing because once the door to one’s room shuts, the patient knows how alone he is and what his situation is. When the door closes, you’re in what is clearly an impersonal environment designed by the same kind of people who design Holiday Inn rooms. Your wife didn’t pick the counter in the kitchen area. You didn’t choose the paint or the carpeting. You’re not independent any more, so strangers who are very busy have to put your living space together, and you get what everyone else gets. If you walk into the next room over by mistake, you’ll feel right at home, because it will look just like yours.

There isn’t much that can be done to make these places feel more like homes. The company hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s the nature of the business. People who can’t take care of themselves don’t sit down with architects and designers and take charge of their environments.

It must be like a hotel stay that never ends.

He would have to change doctors again if he moved to this place. They drive people to appointments, but they don’t drive far enough to take him to the doctors he’s seeing now. That’s not a big deal. He’s not attached to them, and it doesn’t take a genius to handle my dad’s boring health problems. You give him the same 8 pills every day and wait for new issues to develop.

If he moved in today, he would be looking at around $60,000 per year. The VA would pay about $22,000. My dad didn’t buy insurance to pay for long-term care. Instead, he opted to live forever without health problems. I’m glad the VA money is available. I didn’t know about it until this week.

Shelling out $38K per year is not the end of the world, but the lady who explained the costs to me failed to mention the obvious concern: whatever they charge him the day he walks in will be the lowest rate of his entire stay. It can only go up after that, because he is going to deteriorate, and he will probably deteriorate significantly this year. The more help he needs, the more they charge. If I understand things correctly, the maximum will be in the high 40’s.

The place I visited today is the best option I’ve seen.

I’m not sure what to do. I can get someone to come here for 20 hours a week, considerably cheaper. He would not have to leave me or his home. I don’t know how much she could do to take burdens off of me, though.

Is the benefit of being around other old people worth the trouble of moving? He probably won’t make friends in any real sense, because he’ll forget new people from day to day.

I don’t know what life is like for people in memory care. They walk out of their rooms every day and see the same folks, but do they know who they are? Do they have to introduce themselves to each other over and over?

The more I get into this, the more I realize that most causes of death cause less suffering than dementia. My mother died 8 months after her cancer diagnosis. She knew who we were, she was able to read and talk and use the phone, and she made some preparations. I talked her out of disinheriting my sister, unfortunately, but she did do a few things. Anyway, 8 months into it, she passed, and then we moved on and got over it. We didn’t have to put her in a facility. We didn’t have to explain what we were doing for her over and over. She never got paranoid. She didn’t get agitated at night or in the morning. She understood what was happening. That’s better than 4 or 5 years of taking the same ground repeatedly.

I was not close to my dad’s late sister, so I never knew she was ill until she died, but I know a little bit about what happened to her. Her dementia progressed very quickly and then killed her. She stopped speaking English. She spoke gibberish, and she was convinced she was speaking normally. She talked to the family members who were looking after her, and I suppose she could not comprehend their confusion. I’m glad my mother didn’t go like that.

We didn’t visit my aunt while she was ill. My dad didn’t suggest it, and I would have been very uncomfortable going alone. My relatives would have been shocked to see me. Says a lot about how close we are.

When dad’s mother died, I skipped the funeral. Two of my first cousins died young. I didn’t go to their funerals, either. I didn’t know them, because my aunts and my grandmother had very little to do with us. I can only guess that my aunts were very glad when my dad left home, because after that, they made almost no effort to stay in touch. They told my mother he was impossible to get along with.

I don’t know what I would do if I had vascular dementia. I have a strong prayer life, I’m not obese, I don’t drink heavily, and God heals me of things, so I don’t expect to go that way, but what if I did? Would I tell my doctors to stop treating me so my dementia would get worse and I would die sooner? If I did that, the problems I was hoping to escape would intensify quicker. I wouldn’t be able to avoid them. I would only be able to make it all happen faster. That would be unpleasant to face.

I would have to create some kind of directive to prevent people from keeping me alive too long. That much is certain.

Cancer is better. Heart attacks and fatal strokes are better. Car accidents are better. The body should die before the mind, and money shouldn’t be wasted on empty machinery that refuses to quit running. I don’t have any kids, but I know people I would like to leave money to. I would rather see it go to them than a company that runs a home.

Some of the people I have seen in memory care seemed happy. I don’t think my dad could be happy. He can’t accept his status now, so I don’t expect him to adjust well when he is surrounded by invalids and realizes he is one of them.

I’m done looking at these places for a while. Now I’m going to look into nursing attendants. Maybe my dad’s condition will change before I make a decision, and that will force me to choose an option.

Don’t lose your mind if you can help it. You are better off falling off a cliff.

I Sleep all Night and I Blog all Day

I’m kind of drained after visiting assisted living operations today, so I will write some more.

I conquered two of my tool-acquisition problems this week. I think. I won’t know until the tools arrive. I ordered a Pexto brace with a Samson chuck, and I got a good deal on a used Collins axe head.

If you don’t know what a brace is, it’s because you’re a little green sprout who hasn’t been on Earth long enough to know anything. A brace is a drill you operate by hand, without batteries or any other helpful technology. Usually, you don’t hear “brace” by itself. You hear “brace and bit,” but since I didn’t buy a drill bit, what I have on the way is a brace.

It turns out braces are useful for certain things. When you want a lot of control and you don’t want to worry about electricity, a brace can be convenient. They are very handy for countersinking and deburring in metal.

Braces have chucks, and some chucks are better than others. Two types people like a lot are Lion and Samson chucks. These are versatile ball bearing chucks. Lions were made by the Millers Falls company, and Samson chucks were made by Pexto (a contraction of “Peck, Stow & Wilcox”).

Ordinarily, braces take drill bits with weird, 4-sided shanks. I have not tried a Samson chuck, but supposedly, they will work with round drills. I hope so, because otherwise I will have to buy adaptors. Which do exist. You can find adaptors for sockets, hex-shanked tools, and…other stuff I don’t remember.

Braces come with reversible ratchets, so they turn in two directions.

I look forward to checking my brace out. I found one that looked reasonably pretty and didn’t seem too beat-up.

The axe head was an unexpected find. As I said in an earlier entry, modern axes are very badly made, and people are selling rusty old American axe heads on Ebay for high prices. A lot of Ebay axe heads have been sharpened so many times there isn’t much of them left, and many, for reasons I can’t fathom, appear to have been stored with one side underwater. There are a lot of Ebay axe heads that look fine on one side and have a second side which is a vast expanse of craters.

Some sellers wire-brush axe heads until they look nice, but they’re still junky. Also, many axe heads have sledge marks on them. Apparently, old timers used sledges to knock them out of logs. I hate tool abuse. I’m not going to trust an axe which has substantial deformations on it.

There is another problem with Ebay axe heads. Some are burned up. Ignorant sellers will sometimes burn an axe head to get handle fragments out of it. Hardened and tempered steel loses its conditioning when it’s heated too much. A roasted axe head which looks nice due to wire-brushing may be too soft to use.

The axe head I found is a Collins. This is a company that made highly regarded axes. I sent the seller a message and asked how the wood was removed, and she said it was removed with wedges. I think she means drifts. You use a drift to knock the wood out of an axe head. Anyway, it’s not fire. The axe head appears to have very little wear, and no one has beaten on it with a sledge, so I think I’m finally getting a decent tool.

I have to buy a handle now. I plan to try the local stores, but I may end up buying an American handle online.

Axe handles are commonly made from hickory, which is a hard and very springy wood. You can’t just take a hickory four-by-four and cut a handle out of it without further examination. You have to make sure the striations in the wood run more or less parallel to the axe head’s length. You also have to look for cracks or whatever. I have read that there are some pretty crappy axe handles out there. I hope local stores will fix me up, but if not, I can get an American-made handle for $15 or less online.

Once I have the head and handle, I have to “hang” the axe head. This is tool talk for attaching it to the handle. Supposedly, hanging a head incorrectly causes problems when you use the axe, and this is where the expression “getting the hang of it” comes from. This may be Internet BS, so caveat emptor, or if not “emptor”, whatever the Latin word for reader is.

I found a neat resource for axe scholars. Some dude who probably doesn’t date much works as an axe expert up in Montana, and he wrote a long treatise on axes. He tells people how to hang them and so on. I will provide a link to his PDF, in case you want it. And I know you do.

https://www.pcta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/an_ax_to_grind.pdf

Tools are never simple. I guarantee you, even a putty knife has complexities you would not suspect. I don’t even have to check. I’m sure of it. You can spend a whole day reading about hammers and be amazed when you’re finished. It doesn’t surprise me that axes have substantial lore.

I bought a double-bitted axe head. Some people say they swing better. We will find out, I guess. I learned that double-bitted axes aren’t symmetrical. Not always, anyway. One bit is thicker than the other. The thick one is for splitting, and the thin one is for chopping. How about that? I told you tools aren’t simple.

I’ll have to sharpen the axe. Some people get their axes shaving sharp. I think that’s stupid, because after three whacks, an axe will lose the fineness of its edge. That is my guess, anyway. That will mean that you wasted maybe 2/3 of the time you spent sharpening it. It’s easy to get a blade fairly sharp. Making it super-sharp takes a lot more time.

I suspect that once you get your axe sharp enough to slice bologna, it’s more than sharp enough to cut wood well. Maybe I’m wrong.

We live in a funny country now. We have bad Chinese tools and clueless hipster tool buyers who have no idea why good tools matter. I can’t understand why people continue to buy tools now that they’re bad. Using a good tool is a pretty pleasant experience. Using a bad tool is usually very unpleasant, and often, the tools we buy are so bad they aren’t useful at all; it’s impossible to make them work no matter what you do. Companies manufacture tools that don’t work, and we still buy them and try to use them. Strange.

I may continue to be clueless and unskilled after I get my axe hung, but at least I will have a good tool. And I’m not wearing skinny jeans. Two things to be grateful for.

I guess I’ll get a beverage and a parrot and watch a Fred Astaire movie on Turner Classic Movies. Tomorrow, more assisted living.

I’ve Seen Living, and This isn’t It

Today has not been the jolliest of days.

I toured two assisted living facilities earlier. This is my first foray into the world of parent storage. It’s hard to think of it as anything other than storage. Once you move to one of these places, you cease to accomplish anything of worth on the planet. You sit in God’s waiting room, killing time until his receptionist calls your name.

This was my first visit to this kind of business since maybe 1990, when my dad and I visited his mother. I don’t call her my grandmother because she had no interest in my sister or me. Her facility was a small hospital. They didn’t try to make it look like anything else. My grandmother lived in a hospital room, not an apartment. Some patients there were mentally okay, and some just made grunting sounds and wandered around. The air smelled like urine, feces, and ineffective cleaning chemicals that failed to mask odors.

I’ve written about this place before. While we were there, my dad whispered that if he ever ended up in such a place, I should kill him.

The people were very nice at both places I visited today. This is northern Florida, so one would expect them to be nice. I have no doubt that my dad would be treated with kindness, consideration, and patience at either one.

The first place was relatively upscale. They had private rooms which were really suites. They showed me one. My dad would have a small living room, a kitchen area, and a separate bedroom. He could have his own refrigerator. The living room would have a TV, and he could have another one installed in his bedroom.

The halls in this place are maybe a hundred feet long. At mealtimes, the residents make their way to a dining room which is probably 60 feet square. Attendants sit along one wall, like ball boys at a tennis match, waiting to jump out and help anyone who falls over or chokes.

There were a lot of women at the tables. Men do themselves a favor by dying younger than women. It seemed to me that most of the people were a little more frail than my dad, but maybe I’m just used to thinking of him as strong and vital.

While we were walking around, a man left the dining room with a walker. He moved very slowly. He was wearing funny socks with little rubber things knitted into them for grip. No shoes. An attendant carrying a walker chased him down. She had another walker in her hand. His. He had taken someone else’s.

They had a room with chairs and a DVD player. They also had an activity room with a piano, lots of books, and plenty of games.

They didn’t have much in the way of outdoor facilities. They allow residents to walk beside the road in front of the place. Not sure how good an idea that is.

The lighting was a little gloomy, and the paint was somewhat yellowish. The air wasn’t all that fresh, but the aromas of things like diapers and disinfectants were muted.

If you store your dad at a place like this, you can visit whenever you want. You can check him out and take him to lunch. You can bring him home on weekends. You can use it as a firewall to keep your dad away from you while you try to get things done, but you don’t have to leave him there all the time.

I suppose the danger is that you’ll check him out so often, the home will fail to serve its purpose. I started thinking about how I could take him out for lunch and bring him home for visits, and then I realized I wouldn’t benefit much from moving him in if I overdid those things.

The second place was less expensive. The rooms were just rooms. No suites. They opened onto little living room areas with kitchens. There were no stoves or conventional ovens, for obvious reasons, but they had microwave ovens and refrigerators.

They had a little courtyard where people could garden or sit in the sun. They had some barbecue grills. One still had stickers on it, but another had been used. They didn’t have any place for people to walk. My dad takes long walks every day. He would have to walk in circles in the courtyard.

The second place had two levels, a la Dante. One was for people who weren’t too far gone mentally. The other was for people who were completely out of it. The lady who gave me the tour said my dad would be given an assessment to determine where he belonged. He is clearly in better shape than the residents of the second place, but six months from now, he may fit right in, or he may be so far gone he’ll be in a hospice.

The second place had two smell levels to go along with the care levels. The area for people who could dress and feed themselves only smelled a little bit. The other area smelled like what it was. The more feeble people get, the dirtier they are, even when attendants are scurrying around behind them wiping things up.

I “met” three ladies who live in the memory care area. One seemed very happy. She was smiling and engaging the attendants, enjoying the attention. She was in a wheelchair. She was wearing black pants that had white discolorations in the crotch area. I knew what that was. Prolonged contact with urine bleaches fabrics.

I’m not accusing anyone of failing to look after this lady. For all I know, fabrics get bleached like that after attendants remove them promptly and put them in hampers.

There was another woman who seemed very young to be there. I would guess she was around 65. She looked like she must have been beautiful in her youth. Her jaw was set, and she sat staring at the TV with a grim expression. Her hair was mostly white, with some brown areas. Most women that age dye their hair, so it was a little strange to see one whose vanity was being ignored. It was a quiet admission of surrender. Her hair color wasn’t important any more.

I asked the lady giving me the tour things about getting my dad installed there. I wanted to know how long it took and so on. I told her he was determined never to be put in a home. She started telling me how people adjust. Some of them ream their kids out every time they visit, calling them traitors and so on. Then when the kids go, they forget all about it, literally, and go back to palling around with their new friends.

It made me think of my first day of school. No kid wants to start school, but once you’re there, you don’t mind it. If you’re lucky. My first “school” was more like a pre-K day camp, so I enjoyed it.

I feel like I’m considering sending a kid to camp. At first, you look forward to having some time to yourself, but then you think about the days when you’ll be alone at home, wondering what he’s up to.

My dad is making some effort to avoid causing me problems, but he still does a lot of things to make moving him to assisted living easier to face. He does unbelievably filthy things in the bathroom and kitchen. Sometimes he is abusive. He offends my friends, not with his disability, but with insulting or gross remarks.

I am somewhat grateful for his bad behavior. It must be very, very hard to put a considerate, cooperative parent in a facility. It will be harder than I expected when my dad’s time comes, regardless of how difficult he makes life here at home.

I don’t think he’ll be happy in a home. Not while he still has some of his marbles. He’s very smart, apart from the dementia. He will understand exactly what’s happening. He will know what it means. He will feel the sting of the loss of status and power. It will be harder to maintain the shield of denial.

I’m wondering about home care. I was advised to get him evaluated for home hospice care. Today I learned that Korean War veterans are eligible for $1800 per month in assistance. That would pay for a lot of personal attention. Maybe it would be better to have someone come here for a few hours a day to look after him. It’s hard to say. In a home, he would have people his own age to socialize with, and they would have activities, but it would still be a home. Here, he would be able to stay in his house and be around me, but he could forget about karaoke and all that other nonsense.

There is no good answer. I need to stop looking for one and settle on the best bad outcome. He’s going to suffer. He’ll suffer the indignity of regimented life in a thinly disguised asylum, or he’ll suffer boredom and increased isolation here.

When my mother got cancer, no one expected or looked for a perfect solution that would avoid all pain and grief. We just looked for the best deal we could get, which turned out to be 8 months of unpleasant, expensive, utterly pointless treatment followed by death.

Dementia is like cancer. When you get it, you will suffer, no matter what anyone does to help you. The suffering probably varies in direct proportion to the size of your ego.

When you become demented, the best thing anyone can do for you, apart from helping you receive salvation, is to give you up to laziness and the diet and activities of your choice. Trying to fix you is cruel. It prolongs a bad experience for no constructive purpose. My dad’s doctors should take him off his blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood clot medications. I should let him drink 5 shots of hard liquor a night, the way he used to before I got his doctor to stop him.

His new cardiologist is talking about the possibility of more “aggressive” treatment. Cynical me, I see that as an effort to milk more money out of Medicare. My dad is like a toothpaste tube full of tax and insurance money, and medical professionals want to squeeze every drop out before giving up on the tube.

He doesn’t know his address or phone number, and he wears a diaper. He can’t get better. He will continue getting worse, and then he will die. If treatment accomplishes anything at all, which is not likely, it will only be the prolongation of his struggle and humiliation. It may keep his heart beating longer, but his dementia won’t even be slowed down. It is 100% incurable and impossible to retard.

When we go to the grocery store, my dad stops in the bakery and ice cream areas. I let him buy what he wants. If he forgets to get ice cream and baked goods, I remind him, because he bugs me about it if we run out. He probably eats a gallon and a half of ice cream every week, and he likes pies and cookies. That’s fine. It’s not making anything worse. The problem is the ice cream he ate when he was in his fifties and sixties. That’s the ice cream that made him demented, and he can’t uneat it now.

If I tried to stop him, I would have to hear about it every day. When he starts demanding ice cream, I take him to get it.

He reminds me of my aunt. One day her neck started to itch, and she went to her primary care physician. She had a skin rash, and it turned out to be caused by small cell lung cancer. After she was diagnosed, she continued to smoke. It didn’t make things any worse. She was killed by the half-million cigarettes she smoked before she got sick.

My grandfather had a heart attack at the age of 85. He was strong and healthy at the time. He was still practicing law and enjoying life. He got angry at a hired man who disobeyed him, and he got out of his car and chased some cattle on foot. Later on, he had chest pains, and they took him to the hospital in Lexington. A few days later, he was dead. He was lucky, and so was my grandmother, who would have had to look after him. Look what they missed. Even my mother was lucky, compared to my dad. And what if she had been cured of cancer? She would be 83 now, struggling with the job I’m trying to do.

Tomorrow I visit another home, and then I’m done with that for the week. I’ll be looking into hiring an attendant, and I’ll eventually ask his doctor about home hospice care. Tonight I may tell my dad where I went today. I’m not sure. He has to know sooner or later.

I don’t know what can be done when a patient refuses to move into a facility. Do they Baker Act them and hogtie them? The people I talked to today didn’t seem ready for angry patients who are determined to escape.

The sooner we start talking about it, the sooner he will accept it. I think.

I strongly advise people to take care of their brains. Lay off the booze, don’t smoke, and avoid obesity. If you start to slip, draw up legal documents indicating you don’t want your shell to be propped up forever with blood thinners and beta blockers. Otherwise, get ready to see your family suffer needlessly and your estate drained. Even with Medicare, you may shell out $75,000 per year. How long can you keep that up?

This stuff is real. We hide it behind hedges and fences and drawn blinds, but it’s coming for us. Might as do what you can to prepare. It’s better than letting your selfishness cause your family to be blindsided.

Health Food Breakthrough

I don’t really cook any more. I lost my interest, and I was tired of cooking for people who showed up late, left early, and didn’t shop, help cook, or clean. I still have to cook for myself, though, so once in a while, I turn on the stove.

I make what must be the worst pancakes on earth. Or at least I used to. It was frustrating, because my waffles were perfect. I make them with bacon grease instead of butter. My pancakes came out heavy and rubbery. They would keep a man going all day because it took so long for the stomach to break them down.

Yesterday I tried again. I looked up a New York Times recipe and went to work. Result: rubber pancakes. I know why it happened. I used the wrong spoon to measure the baking powder.

Today I used the correct spoon, and I made some adjustments of my own. I have a tentative recipe to post. The pancakes were light and tasty.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour (not self-rising)
1 cup milk
1 tbsp melted butter
1 egg
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar

I warmed the milk up to room temperature before using it.

You separate the egg and beat the white until it’s stiff. After that, put the mixer away. You don’t want it near the batter. Mixers seem to make pancakes gluey. Maybe that’s my imagination, though.

Mix the remaining ingredients with a spoon, but hold back 1/4 cup of milk. Fold in the egg white. Stir in enough of the remaining milk to make the batter flow the way it should.

When you fry your pancakes, put a little butter on top of each one as it hits the plate. To be really decadent, sprinkle it with salt.

I heat my syrup in the microwave, and I add butter to it. Cold syrup and hard butter ruin pancakes.

That’s about it. It takes a little longer than using a box. I can’t say it’s worth it because I don’t have a box to compare it to.

I think they would taste better with a whole teaspoon of salt in the batter, but I was too chicken to try it today.

I use a Griswold cast iron griddle for pancakes. It’s wonderful. They brown very quickly, and they never stick. Best thing I’ve ever seen for pancakes. Much better than a skillet. With a skillet, the walls get in the way when you try to flip your pancakes.

I use grade B syrup because it has more flavor than grade A. I buy a brand called Anderson’s, from Amazon. I keep maple syrup in the fridge or freezer to prevent mold.

I need to learn to make blueberry pancakes. I’m not sure you can throw blueberries into batter without additional steps. They might be too sour and raw. The syrup is easy. You heat blueberries with a little sugar and water. You can add starch to bulk it up, and you might consider a small amount of lemon juice. Make sure the syrup boils. Starch has to boil.

Buckwheat pancakes would be great. I’m sure I can find buckwheat flour on the Internet. I think buckwheat pancakes are the best pancakes possible.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pancakes. I am open to suggestions.

Cold Weather Shrinks Footballs but not Egos

Somebody mentioned Bill Nye in a comment, and that set me off! In a discussion of Israel, Bill Nye has said places like France and Germany (bad choice) were “home” for Jews. He also calls himself the Science Guy, but for some reason, he has never made a point of letting people know he is not a trained scientist. He has a BS (not a Ph.D) in mechanical engineering, which is science-aided but not science. Finally, he has a reputation for rude diva behavior. These factors, combined with his bowtie, resulted in him being added to my list.

Bill Nye weighed in during the Deflategate scandal. The New England Sport-Ruining Cheaters…I mean “Patriots”…were accused of using partially deflated balls to make the game easier for them. Defenders (the kind of people who beat other people up in stadiums for wearing the wrong color socks) chimed in and said the pressure problem was caused by the temperature difference between the field and wherever the balls were inflated. Gases contract when cooled.

Bill Belichick, the Snoke of the NFL, came up with a truly weird theory. He said something about players rubbing the balls a lot, causing them to heat up and expand. I haven’t played football since phys. ed. class in high school, but I think I know enough to state, with confidence, that rubbing the footballs vigorously is not a normal part of the game.

Nye gave a ridiculous interview, and he brought a prop, which was an air pump with a needle. He said that in order to change the inflation pressure of a football, one would need “one of these.”

Let’s talk about the ideal gas law. In fairness to Nye, for all I know, this may not be a topic covered in a basic ME program. It is, however, a topic covered in HIGH SCHOOL CHEMISTRY.

Bill defends his science credentials by saying he took 6 semesters of calculus (physicists take 8 or more, but never mind). The ideal gas law doesn’t involve calculus. You should be able to master it when you’re in the fifth grade.

Here’s what it looks like: pV=nRT, or as I called it when I was trying to memorize it, “PIVNERT.” The small P is pressure. The V is volume. The n is the number of moles (kilomoles, whatever) of gas. R is the ideal gas constant, which is something that works with plain old air, even though it may not smell ideal to you. T is temperature, measured from absolute zero.

The pressure inside a football varies with temperature, Bill. That’s science, by the way.

I sat down today, and in a few minutes, I came up with a figure. I am not totally sure about the units, so I may be wrong, but it looks like the pressure inside a football ought to change by about half a pound per square inch per ten degrees Fahrenheit.

I think I’m right, because I see people who claim to know what they’re doing, citing pretty similar figures. If I were wrong, I would probably be off by one or more decimal places, because the dimensional errors would come in multiples of 10. I don’t think a ball’s pressure will change by 0.2 or a whopping 20 pounds over 40 degrees.

I guessed that a ball contains about 2 liters of air, and I figured that’s about a tenth of a mole of air, because of the Gay-Lussac law. Air doesn’t really have moles, but you can pretend it does, and it works.

Hmm. Turns out it’s Avogadro’s law. Whatever. Some foreigner or other.

Some of the figures don’t matter when you’re figuring pressure changes, because they cancel. It’s not a hard problem.

I’m too lazy to make absolutely sure I’m right, but I’m working harder than Bill Nye.

Football is a cold weather sport, which is one of the many good reasons for not watching it. Baseball players go home at the first sign of a cloud. Football players stay on the field when it’s zero degrees. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hail, locusts…you play, and if you die, you walk it off.

Let’s say a ball is pumped up in a 70-degree locker room or Chamber of Referee Mysticism or whatever. Then you put it on a field where the temperature is 30 degrees. That’s about two pounds of pressure lost, once the ball gets cold. Don’t know how long that takes, but air doesn’t hold a lot of heat, so it shouldn’t take long to cool a football.

NFL balls are supposed to be pumped up to 13 psi, but because no one wants to be a royal pain, it’s actually 13 +/- 0.5. The NFL found that Patriot cheater balls were something like 1.5-2 pounds low. That seems to fit in pretty well with science, but I still think they cheated because they’re the Patriots.

Anyway, I don’t get Bill Nye’s claim. If you’re going to call yourself the Science Guy and probably apply for a trademark, and you have time to dig up a football pump before an interview, you have time to look up the science. Takes maybe three minutes, if you’re slow. Maybe Nye had no idea what the ideal gas law was. Maybe he managed to get a degree without learning it, or maybe he forgot because he’s old.

I would certainly expect an ME to learn about ideal gases.

There is a Youtube video of an MIT professor giving what is presumably an authoritative lecture on Deflategate. Unlike Bill Nye, he is a Ph.D. mechanical engineer, and since he teaches at MIT, he may very well be a true Science Guy. Whatever he is, he should be able to handle pV=nRT. I didn’t watch the video however, because it was like 15 minutes long.

My guess: Bill Nye didn’t “like” the MIT video and send links to all his friends.

Okay, I’ll cheat (like the Patriots). I looked at the money parts of the MIT video. The prof’s findings match mine to within something like 10%, and unlike the prof, I didn’t even measure anything. I just winged it. Hello, it’s not hard. A football is about the size of a two-liter soda, so I said two liters of air. That’s about 10% of 22.4 liters (volume of a mole of ideal gas at STP, which is not all that far off from 70 degrees F), so 10% of a mole. It worked.

Real scientists don’t measure unless they have to. A good scientist can guess at a lot of things and be within 10% of the truth. I’m a bad scientist, and I can do it. A good scientist knows when a guess is good enough. Look up, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago”?

People who get overly excited about precise figures and taking advantage of all 14 digits displayed on their calculators don’t know anything about science (or significant figures). Sometimes you need great precision, and sometimes it just gets in the way, and a real scientist knows the difference.

Anyone can be wrong about science, but the ideal gas law is 10th-grade stuff. Very obvious. If Nye can’t figure football pressure out, how can he be taken seriously when he claims he knows about the climate?

The Patriots still cheated. That much is obvious.

Engineering!

My dad’s new primary care practitioner is a busy bee or possibly an eager beaver. He got us lined up with a couple of specialists, and now we have two therapists and one nurse coming to the house every week. I don’t know how much this will benefit my dad, who never remembers anything the therapists teach him, but I believe it will improve my math, engineering, and physics skills, because when I take him to see doctors, I study and do problems while we wait.

A long time ago, I developed a policy which I don’t follow nearly often enough: “Never wait.” Of course, it doesn’t really mean, “Never wait.” It means, “Never JUST wait.” When you’re stuck waiting on someone or something, come up with something useful to do to fill the time.

Waiting-room magazines are horrid, especially in offices where liberals or women choose them. Women’s magazines are sick, shallow, and depraved. It’s strange how no one talks about this. Men have great magazines about things like guns, hunting, mechanical things, and so on. Women’s magazines are about MEN MEN MEN MEN MEN. More specifically, they are about how to out-compete sluts by being a bigger and less sincere slut. If you don’t believe me, read Cosmopolitan some day.

Men chase women, but we don’t sit around reading magazines telling us how to torture and abuse and twist ourselves into woman magnets. Men’s magazines don’t tell us how to starve ourselves, dress like prostitutes, drive women crazy in bed, fool women into marrying us, or get over painful breakups so we don’t turn into stalkers who call their boyfriends’ offices 500 times a day.

Men don’t have long, painful breakups. The first thing a man notices when he dumps a woman is the sudden sensation of freedom, and it tempers the feeling of loss. “I can drive as fast as I want! I can wear the shoes she hates! I don’t have to pretend I like to dance! I’ll never have to watch another movie about cancer! MY GUNS ARE GOING BACK ON THE LIVING ROOM WALL!”

I’m not about to poison my mind with old copies of O or Vogue. I have to have something else to do.

I’ve been working through the Schaum outline on differential equations, but I decided to set it aside because the problems aren’t really suitable for waiting rooms. Some of them require integral tables, and while a Schaum outline is a thin, handy book, adding an integral table to it turns it into a cumbersome package.

My new thing is the Schaum outline on solids. This is an engineering topic involving the way solid stuff behaves when you subject it to forces. I think. The names of engineering courses are confusing. The title of the outline is Strength of Materials.

I really like this stuff so far. It gives me confidence that mechanical engineering isn’t very hard. I know engineers will yell when they read that, and maybe I’m wrong, but so far, it looks a lot less challenging than physics.

I looked at lists of things ME’s study, and it was not like what I studied. I started with courses a lot like the ones ME’s start with, and then things got worse and worse. The material got more and more difficult and esoteric. It looks like undergrad ME’s don’t continue pushing themselves the way physicists do. They go into courses about applying simple first-year physics. Which gear to pick when you design a machine. How much concrete you need to build a strong garage floor.

Maybe it’s like law. Law never gets any harder than it is during the first semester. You spend one year acquiring skills and general knowledge, and after that, you apply the skills to new material.

I’m sure there are ways to make mechanical engineering very hard. I suspect it’s like math. Getting a math major is about one-thousandth as hard as getting a physics major (says a physics major with all but one math major course), but you don’t have to limit yourself to the relatively easy math courses. You can make math as hard as you want if you pick the right things to study, and I’m sure mechanical engineering must work the same way.

There is no easy way through a physics program.

Thing is, I am not interested in the hard engineering topics, if they exist. I just want to feel more competent about building things and so on. Physicists can’t build anything.

I scored a brand-new, highly regarded solids textbook for 21 bucks on Amazon. That was sweet. I used to think a $60 text was expensive, but I see a lot of three-figure prices these days. I don’t know how anyone can pay for college. The Schaum outline was 7 bucks, new. Lectures are free on Youtube. I figure I could become a de facto ME for $200. No one would ever want to hire me based on home study, but I would always know which gear to pick.

I wouldn’t want to work as an ME. My understanding is that they learn all sorts of cool stuff, and then they get stuck in horrible jobs where they measure things all day. I think the only fun they ever have is building things in their garages.

I’ve seen horrifying Youtube videos by disappointed engineers. They think they’re going to build autonomous robots and Ferrari engines. Then they show up for work, and someone hands them a box of parts and some micrometers.

I wish I knew what my Uncle Johnny did for NASA. He was in liquid propulsion back when we had a space program. No idea what liquid propulsion is. I don’t know what he did or whether he enjoyed his career. I know he liked using his skills at home.

He knew a lot of things but he wasn’t really that great with practical applications. I remember he fixed a refrigerator on my dad’s boat. It would tilt when the boat listed too far. He made a crappy little plate and screwed it to the fridge and a cabinet, I think. I hate the term “redneck,” but that’s how it looked. I expected a miracle, because I was so impressed with his credentials, but a guy who fixes lawnmowers every day could have done better. After four years of study, you should be able to stabilize a fridge in a way which is completely seamless.

He’s from Alabama. Do I ask too much?

Maybe I overestimate engineers. Maybe they can’t do do anything, either. Perhaps they’re like physicists. Maybe only the exceptional ones are able to build things.

Maybe Johnny measured things all day for NASA.

“How long is that bolt, Johnny?”

“Fifteen millimeters, plus or minus one tenth.”

“Great work.”

“When do I get my pension?”

“Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That’s good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.”

I feel like no one who doesn’t have a milling machine and a lathe is serious about mechanical things. You need those tools, a drill press, a belt grinder, and a metal-cutting band saw if you want to do anything with metal. If you’re poor and extremely determined, you can do a lot with files, but I digress.

MIG welder. You need a MIG welder, too.

I guess I’ll do some problems. If I fail, I’ll realize I’m too old and stupid to learn anything new. My biggest problem will be learning engineerspeak. Physicists gave them every basic tool they have, but they had to change the name of everything. Out of spite. This is my theory.

Moment is just torque. Stress is just pressure. Come on, guys. We invented this stuff.

If all goes well, some time next year I’ll be able to pick the correct gears out of lists. That will be exciting.

If I succeed at this, I will be insufferable to engineers. More than I already am. “I learned your stuff in a year. Why do you exist, again?”

If I fail, I’ll just quietly not write about it.

Watch this space.

Exiles From Ruptured Church Sift Through the Ashes

Today two friends from my old church, North Miami’s New Dawn Ministries, came by to visit. They’re a married couple. I will call them Pepe and Lourdes. Pepe is the uncle of the pastor’s wife.

If you read my blog regularly, you know the pastor was charged with several counts of child molestation. He started molesting his sister’s daughter when she was 5 or 6, and it continued until she was in her teens. He confessed in front of the church. It’s not like his guilt is in doubt.

I am told it happened like this: a friend of the victim told the pastor’s sister, and she went after the pastor. She told him she would keep it quiet if he resigned and stopped preaching. He continued preaching, so she called the police. She hit Facebook and exposed everything, and she accused the pastor’s wife of turning a blind eye.

Today I learned something new: the pastor is still preaching. My friends say he even preached in jail. Is that commendable? You tell me. A truly repentant rapist could tell other prisoners about his filthy deeds, and he could talk about how he failed God and how God was helping him go forward. Is that what’s happening? Doubtful. Based on the pastor’s past behavior, it would surprise me.

Anyone can repent. Anyone can change. People have to be permitted to change. They have to be forgiven. None of this means we have to take them back or restore them to their former positions.

He killed his church, so if he is preaching outside of jail, some idiot who runs a church must be allowing him to speak. I hope he’s not receiving offerings. God will only stand for so much.

I learned something else, about a branch the church tried to open while I was a member. The branch was in Winter Haven. People from the church supported the place with offerings. New Dawn Winter Haven closed, and no one informed the members in Miami. The pastors kept the branch’s Facebook page open. I wondered why they didn’t inform us and take the page down. I think I know the answer. Today my friends said they continued accepting offerings after the branch closed. A cynical person would say they kept quiet about the branch’s collapse so they could continue taking money from donors.

Pepe was eating with the pastors, and a relative who didn’t know the church’s failure was a secret mentioned what had happened. The pastor’s wife’s eyes opened wide. She knew they had been busted. Pepe had been supporting the dead church. He asked where his donations had been going.

Sounds a lot like wire fraud, but it looks like it was par for the course. It was not the first allegation of financial corruption.

I don’t know what to make of my former pastors. People who deal with addicts say they reform only when they hit rock bottom. My pastors don’t seem to be that teachable. Rock bottom is when you’re sitting in jail charged with numerous counts of molestation. If you’re still trying to hold services after that, there is probably no hope for you.

The pastor’s wife is dying from a brain tumor. Their petty criminal son is keeping Twitter hot with crazy posts insulting God in profane terms. Looks like he is still not very close to the moment of repentance he needs. The whole family is crumbling.

If I had to guess, I would say the pastor is preaching in order to make money. He had a government job as an inspector, but he quit to preach full-time. That job is gone forever, so he has to preach or start mowing yards. Maybe he is preaching because he doesn’t want a minimum-wage job that requires exertion. He’s a very lazy man, and his pride makes him a poor fit for a zero-turn mower.

On September 12, he is expected to take a plea. Pepe says he was looking at 25 years. He was eligible for more time than that, but maybe the prosecutors told him to expect 25. The clerk’s website mentions a plea, so maybe he’ll do better. If he’s certain he’s going to prison, he has no motivation to develop a new career right now. He could still pick up some offerings while he awaits sentencing, however.

He’s not going to get probation. He can forget that. He’s going away. You can’t confess to raping a 6-year-old or even a 14-year-old and get probation.

Maybe when he preached in jail, he was sounding other prisoners out to find out if preaching can protect him from beatings. Maybe he hopes prison inmates will overlook the nature of his crimes if he preaches convincingly and develops a following.

His continued preaching is a mystery to me. I don’t know what the explanation is. I very much doubt he has turned a corner, so I’m looking for other motives.

Pepe and Lourdes got pushed out of the church. It didn’t matter that they were the pastor’s wife’s uncle and aunt. We had several positions in the church. Armorbearer, deacon, and minister were positions. Pepe was a minister. This was as high up as one could get without running the place.

Pepe got upset because the pastor’s wife booted people off the prayer team. We had a team that prayed together over the phone. A lady named Daisy had a mentally impaired daughter named Bianca, and they were on the team. They left the church, and the pastor’s wife said they had to leave the team. A friend of mine in another city also got kicked off. She got the boot because she was my friend. That’s my impression, anyway. Pepe was not happy, and he said so. The pastors drove him out.

Pepe is retired. He worked for the government, fixing diesel equipment. He somehow ended up with a double pension at a relatively early age. He left Miami last year and moved to Kissimmee. He loves it up here. He and I were extracted from the snakepit of Dade County, and our lives are very pleasant now. The pastors are still down there, and you can see how things worked out for them.

It’s almost as if being persecuted by these people is an indication that your life will go well.

Maybe it is.

I’m not better off than the pastor because I’m a good person. I am far from good. My hope is that God is helping me because I keep confessing and repenting. Today Pepe said the pastor once told him he thought the grace the church was experiencing was so great, there was no need to confess. It appears that he was wrong about that.

Human beings impress me, for good or bad. Some people do unselfish things I can’t imagine doing. Some people behave so stupidly, I can’t comprehend it.

In a few days, the pastor will either plead guilty or go to trial. If he pleads, his sentence will be on the clerk’s site shortly thereafter.

I never thought I would see something like this happen to him. It has to be the power of pride.

Levi’s Joins the Fight Against Civil Rights

I have two points to make:

1. The Levi’s people are pushing gun control and even pressing employees to take part, so they are now on my list.

2. The CEO of Levi’s, one Chip Bergh, never washes his pants and thinks he’s doing a good thing, so he probably smells like a bum in August.

3. Levi’s jeans aren’t very good.

Okay, three points.

Today I read that Levi’s is getting on board with Michael Bloomberg’s anti-civil-rights campaign. They are going to push for “sensible” laws, i.e. the eventual confiscation of all firearms. I’m not sure how many pairs of Levi’s I’ve seen at gun ranges. A lot, for sure. I wonder if Mr. Bergh is aware that many people who stand up for their civil rights do it in Levi’s.

While I was reading about Levi’s doing its best to kill sales, I came across a disgusting article. Mr. Bergh says it’s wrong to wash jeans. EVER. If you must do something about the filth, you’re supposed to do it as rarely as possible. Says the fragrant Mr. Bergh, “A good pair of denim doesn’t really need to be washed in the washing machine except for very infrequently or rarely.”

In a way, he’s right. The jeans don’t need to be washed. They don’t need anything. The people who wear them need them to be washed.

Let’s get real. Jeans cover the pelvis. This is where genitalia and anuses are found. In an ideal world, the contents of these body parts would never, ever come in contact with one’s pants. This is not an ideal world, however. Things go wrong. Our digestions have bad days, resulting in fecal issues. Urine goes where it shouldn’t. Unfortunate things that emerge from our genitals go where we don’t want them to. Things like this happen to everyone, including people who lie about it. Over time, anyone’s pants will eventually develop smells and even stains.

Then there is sweat. It contains oil, salt, and bacteria. It lifts dead skin off and onto our clothes. You can’t just leave it there.

Wearing filthy clothes will eventually cause people to avoid you and maybe even fire you, and it also leads to things like boils and skin infections. I don’t know, but I would guess that lice prefer dirty clothes, too, and lice are not things of the past.

The fact that Bergh thinks filth is okay tells you his values are not in line with those of relatively sane people, i.e. conservatives and Christians. He is way off in that “calling evil good and good evil” area. He works for a major corporation in San Francisco, so no big shock.

Imagine standing next to a man who has defecated maybe 600 times and urinated a couple of thousand times without washing his pants. No, don’t.

If it’s not obvious to you what’s wrong with Bergh’s plan, there is no point in talking to you. Either it’s obvious, or you are under a delusion.

He’s wrong. That’s what I’m getting at.

He’s also wrong when he uses the term “good denim” to refer to Levi’s.

Levi’s uses crappy fabric. Not all cotton is the same. Some cotton has long fibers. Some has short fibers. Long fibers are stronger and nicer. I’m sure there must be other characteristics that set good cotton apart from bad.

Cheap cotton falls apart faster. The way Levi’s do. If you wear a pair of Levi’s long enough for them to fade from WASHING (Mr. Bergh), they will start to tear at the crotch. The buttonholes on the fly will start to fail. The belt loops will tear the pants. You may get other rips even if you don’t make them deliberately. This happens because Levi’s fabric is not “good denim.”

I have Carhartt jeans. I started buying them last year, when I realized dressing like a Miami boat bum was not going to work on a farm. I have some pairs that are around a year old, and I have some pairs I got last month. I wear them every single day. I wash them after almost every use. I use them for farm work and hunting. It’s hard to tell the new ones from the old ones. That’s “good denim.”

Carhartts also fit better than Levi’s. They sit at the waist, not down at the hipster level where they cut you in half every time you bend. Levi’s sit right where a beer gut makes its first fold. This is why so many men with beer guts are able to wear size 30 Levi’s, and it’s why they look so bad doing it. Levi’s make your legs look short, and they slice into you every time you move. Carhartts make your legs look longer, the way pants are supposed to.

Here’s what you can put in a pair of Carhartt jeans: a Glock, a big knife, a big cell phone, a bunch of car keys, a wallet, a bandana, some cash, and whatever fits in the remaining secret pocket. You can also put something in the hammer loop. You can put more stuff in two Carhartt pockets than all the pockets in a pair of Levi’s. You can’t even fit one Glock in there.

Carhartt jeans have triple seams. Levi’s jeans…not.

Carhartts run about $40. For that you get a pair of jeans which is stronger, longer-lasting, better-looking, more comfortable, much more useful, and less of a threat to the Bill of Rights. I don’t know what Levi’s (which are made in China in spite of their liberal pretensions) cost, but it’s more than $40.

The choice is obvious. If you’re a 9-year-old girl who wants to look like Rihanna, and your sexually ambiguous parents don’t care if your overpriced jeans fall apart in 6 months, you want Levi’s. If you’re a grown American who cares about civil rights and wants superior pants at a good price, you want Carhartt.

I can’t say I’m going to boycott Levi’s because I don’t wear them. I found something much better a long time ago, so Levi’s are no longer a factor in my life. I just thought I’d let Levi’s wearers know what they’re missing. Levi’s are the Budweiser of jeans. Great advertising, at least in the past, but no substance.

People say great things about Wrangler and Lee, which are also cheaper than Levi’s. Something to think about.

Demons

I just read something interesting. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, claims a demon drove him to torture and murder people for sexual gratification.

A 2005 interview aired last night. I didn’t see it. I read about it today. I don’t see much of the material online. I do have a quotation.

I personally think, and I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me. At some point in time, it entered me when I was young, and it basically controlled me.

What is it that bothers me about this quotation? Two things.

First, this man’s life, and the lives of his victims, may have been destroyed unnecessarily by ignorance about demons.

Second, he says the notion of having a demon inside him is “not very Christian.”

This man was a churchgoer. He presumably sat through a lot of sermons. Why didn’t he know how common demons are or how to get rid of them? His religion let him down, just as it lets everyone else down. The people in charge of doctrine teach powerless garbage they steal from secular and pagan sources, and they fail to tell us how to lead victorious lives.

Jesus cast demons out of people, and so did his disciples. His followers are supposed to do it today. Many do. Yet there are preachers all over the world who seem to think demons are rare or even imaginary, or that they can’t afflict Christians.

It’s as if we have roach problems, and when we hire exterminators, they tell us roaches are imaginary, or they come to our houses and spray distilled water or even pancake syrup on the baseboards.

Demons love church; they filled Italy’s churches with nude sculptures and paintings. They love infesting Christians. They love warping our desires and harming our bodies. They enjoy killing us with diseases. They rule over us, like the gentiles who occupied Jerusalem and Israel. We’re supposed to be the head and not the tail, but we are servants in our own flesh houses. We can’t even rule our minds and bodies.

Some people are skeptical of claims like the one BTK made. They see them as efforts to evade blame. Does that make sense in the context of the story of a man serving multiple life sentences? He says he’s a serial killer. He confessed. He has no hope of ever seeing the light of day again. What does he have to gain by saying a demon was involved?

I don’t know what his intentions were, but I’m sure he wasn’t expecting people to think more highly of him because of demonic influence.

It’s interesting that sex drives so many serial killers, and it is perhaps more interesting that most people don’t know it.

To a normal person, tying someone else up and killing them would not be sexually rewarding. The thought of it would tend to kill arousal and make sex impossible. To Dennis Rader, it was the height of sexual expression and pleasure.

When people talk about Ted Bundy, they rarely mention his practice of burying dead girls in secret places so he could go back and have sex with their decaying corpses. We talk about him as though anger were his big problem. It’s not that simple. He had a powerful sexual fetish involving dead bodies.

Jeffrey Dahmer was driven by sex. He was a homosexual, and he wanted mindless sex slaves. He experimented on his victims, trying to turn them into obedient servants. He injected things like hydrochloric acid into his victims’ brains, hoping it would destroy enough tissue to make them obedient.

Some child murderers get tremendous sexual pleasure from torturing children sexually. There was one who nicknamed himself “Pliers” because of his fetish. He used pliers on the private parts of teenage girls. He was proud of it.

Satan’s children seem to think it’s very important to play down the link between sexual perversion and violent crime. I suppose that’s because Satan doesn’t want to stink up his bait. He uses sex to lure people into demonic oppression. He doesn’t want people who indulge fetishes, including homosexuality, to connect their practices with things like rape, murder, torture, addiction, or disease. He hides behind a flag decorated with a rainbow, not a dead child.

BTK left DNA evidence at the scenes of his crimes, and I don’t mean blood or hair follicles. You can guess what it was. He was so aroused, he did what aroused men do, right there at the murder scenes with freshly killed bodies.

The Bible says Jesus’s followers will cast out demons, but very few of us are doing it. It should be a staple on the menu at every church. Strange. How did we get here? We worship an exorcist, but most of us can’t do what he told us to do.

I believe BTK. His claim makes perfect sense to me. I doubt it exonerates him, although it is possible for a demon to override human will. It’s definitely a contributing factor.

Jump Before Your High Horse Gets too Tall

I had a fun visit from my friend Amanda and her kids today. When that was finished, I thought I would sit down and study mechanical engineering for pleasure. I was mistaken. I ended up watching a movie called Mrs. Skeffington.

Spoilers lie ahead.

The movie is good but not great. The star is Bette Davis. The movie starts in 1914. Unbelievably, Davis plays a gorgeous girl from a rich family. Bette Davis was not gorgeous, so some suspension of disbelief is required. The makeup people did a bang-up job with her, but she was still a B- on her very best day, even through a lens smeared with vaseline.

There is a reason why homosexuals like her more than straight men.

Bette’s brother loses the family fortune, and then he goes to work for a brokerage. He steals money by submitting false orders.

Claude Rains plays Job Skeffington, a rich Jewish man who runs the brokerage. He comes to see Bette and her brother, and he ends up telling Bette what happened. Bette tells him the family can’t cover the debt because their fortune is gone. Rains agrees to let things ride for a while.

Davis chases Rains and gets him to marry her, in order to get the debt canceled. He moves into her family’s mansion, saving it from creditors. Bette likes him, but she doesn’t love him. She has a bunch of desperate suitors who continue to pursue her after she marries, and she doesn’t discourage them. She loves the attention. Men are crazy about her. Wherever she goes, they trample each other trying to get to her.

Davis and Rains have a baby. Their marriage gets worse. The irresponsible brother dies in World War I, and Davis becomes bitter because she is stuck in a marriage she only created in order to save him.

Davis steps out on Rains with other men. Eventually, she finds out he has been cheating on her with his secretaries, and she divorces him. He gives her a huge fortune, purely because he’s a kind person. She practically forces him to take the daughter and raise her. Rains and the daughter take off for Europe, and Davis avoids her for years.

The Nazis overrun Europe. The daughter flees to America. Rains stays behind and gets put in a concentration camp.

Davis goes sailing with a man in his late 20’s. She is about 50, but she looks 30, so he is in hot pursuit. She catches a chill out on the water and contracts diphtheria. When she gets over it, she has the wrinkles of a 70-year-old, and a lot of her hair has vanished for good.

While she recovers, she sees Rains sitting in the room with her. Bothered by the hallucinations, she goes to a rude therapist. He tells her she needs to take her husband back. He says her suitors never really cared for her. She gets mad and says she can still get attention from men. He dares her to prove it. She throws a party and invites her old beaus.

At the party, people are horrified by her appearance. The wives of her former suitors are overjoyed. She tries to seduce one of the men, and as tactfully as he can, he makes it clear he has no interest at all.

One of her suitors is broke. He shows up after the party and pretends to be in love with her. She pretends to be broke, too, and he takes off. This is when she realizes things are not going well.

The daughter tells Davis she is marrying the young man who took her mother sailing. Ouch.

Davis ends up alone, miserable, and ashamed to take her ugly face outside.

In the end, Rains returns from Europe. He has been in a concentration camp, and somehow he ended up broke and blind. He still loves Davis. She takes him back.

Shorter version: beautiful woman uses looks to control men; then she becomes ugly very quickly and has to adjust to the loss of her powers.

Why did I watch this movie? God shows me things for reasons.

I feel it was about my dad. He used to be a powerful figure in a number of lives. His family and his employees had to toe the line. People who didn’t really like him all that much treated him well because they had to or because they wanted something from him. Now he has no power over people, and no one is kissing up to him any more. He has to ask for things instead of giving orders. If he’s not nice to people, they don’t have to be nice to him or even suffer his presence.

I only have two friends I see regularly. One has a strong maternal side, so she doesn’t mind dealing with him. Not that much, anyway. She doesn’t pretend his behavior is acceptable, but she tolerates it out of kindness. The other friend is a man who, obviously, lacks a maternal side. He is nice to my dad, but that’s largely a courtesy to me. He comes to visit, and he realizes that in order to spend time with me, he has to endure a certain amount of rude behavior from my dad. He humors him and invests some time talking to him, but he only does it to keep things going smoothly. We look for excuses to do things without my dad.

In the past, he spent more time with my dad, because they had common interests and enjoyed talking about them. Things have changed. My dad’s behavior is worse, and the conversation isn’t good.

There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to get away from my dad. My friends are my friends, not his, and they come to see me, not him. They’re not obligated to let him mistreat them or impose on them. Also, if he is indulged, he will dominate the conversation to the point where I am cut out of it completely. He would see nothing wrong with having a long conversation with my friends, in which I did not get to talk to them once. He has done it in the past. It was bad when he had all his marbles, but when it’s a dementia conversation, it’s even worse.

He doesn’t have a single friend, unless you count another dementia sufferer he hasn’t spoken to in months. He uses me to get contact with other people. It’s as if I’m growing apples and picking them for myself, and he is taking them off my plate and eating them in front of me.

He didn’t grow any apples for himself. His friendships were phony. His friends were people he did business with.

Mrs. Skeffington could not wrap her head around the obvious. She looked somewhat grotesque after her illness, and there was nothing wrong with her vision or her mirrors. She could see herself clearly. Nonetheless, she pretended she was still a beauty who could gather crowds of adoring men simply by showing up. She had to have her denial shoved in her face before she admitted what was already clear to everyone else.

My dad’s biggest problem these days is dementia. His second-biggest problem is his refusal to admit he has it. He is not so demented that he can’t see what’s happening. He knows he can’t drive. He knows he can’t practice law. He knows he can’t take care of himself. Obviously, he understands these things. Still, a few times a month, he insists on telling me there is nothing wrong with him.

Because he refused to admit he had a problem back when things weren’t so bad, he didn’t prepare at all. He thought he would die at 100, still at the top of his game. He didn’t tell me anything about looking after his investments. He didn’t plan his estate to any great extent. He didn’t give away cash every year to beat the IRS.

He never made any plans to wrap up his law practice. He simply stopped getting business. People he had represented for decades hired other lawyers.

His investments got messed up. He couldn’t keep records well. He got in trouble because he refused to pay a just debt. I had to step in and figure it all out, instead being brought in 10 years ago and being allowed to modernize everything.

After the transition was made, he insisted on interfering from time to time, and he was always wrong because he was no longer fit to run things. He finally reached the point where he could not interfere much, and it made things go much more smoothly. I no longer had to argue with him in addition to doing his work for him.

He made no plans at all for his eventual deterioration. He refused to make a living will. He didn’t educate himself about assisted living and so on. He never thought about leaving Miami in order to avoid dying surrounded by old Cubans who could not converse with him.

He tells himself he’s a great guy who was a fantastic husband and father. He tells himself his family consisted of three total screwups and one saint. He says he’s a good person who hasn’t done anything wrong. Who says things like that? Virtually everyone is willing to own a certain number of misdeeds and admit regret, even if they aren’t completely honest.

I believe God wanted me to see the movie so he could tell me this: “Your dad put himself where he is today. He did this to himself. Whatever happens to him now is completely his fault. It was to be expected. And he is still making his problems worse.”

Sometimes you have to watch people sink. It happens to us all, many times in life. We have to stand by and observe while self-destructive people crash and burn in slow motion. I marvel when I think how hard I worked to try to get my sister to let me help her.

The fact that someone else is failing and suffering badly doesn’t mean you are supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t mean you failed. God does everything that can be done to help people, and he still watches them burn in hell. You’re not more capable than God.

We try to help people, and often, it works. But there are many people who can’t be blessed because the blessings can’t get through the thick armor of pride. You can’t always help.

I can do a lot to make my dad’s life better, but there will be a great deal of suffering I can’t touch with my best efforts, and I have to feel in my heart that this is not my fault.

When I was teaching physics at the University of Texas, my head T.A. told me about the written exam. We let students work together on lab reports, but they had to take the written test alone. He said we were uncoupling the cars in order to see who was pulling the train. God is uncoupling the cars. My ability to help my dad is decreasing week by week, and soon it will disappear. Then he will be alone with God, and I will be sitting on the sidelines.

We all end up alone with God eventually. The earlier you meet with him, the better off you will be.

There is nothing wrong, abnormal, unexpected, or unjust about my dad’s situation. It’s a small taste of the justice we deserve for abandoning God. We all deserve hell. My dad isn’t in hell. He’s getting a mild preview in order to motivate him to come clean.

These unsubtle lessons keep coming. I have one father who didn’t prepare himself or me, but I have another one who is preparing me very thoroughly.

I don’t recommend the movie. It’s okay if you’re tired and you just want a reason to eat popcorn, but that’s about it.

New Correction From God

This week my copy of The Death of Santini arrived.

If you read this blog, you know I have been reading about the dysfunctional family of the author Pat Conroy. The movie The Great Santini was based on Conroy’s dad, but the real-life Santini was much worse than the Robert Duvall version. He was a habitual wife-beater, and he beat his children with his fists. He even beat strangers who tried to stop the beatings.

I bought Conroy’s autobiographical book My Losing Season because I found out it contained material about his dad. I felt like I had to read it.

Something supernatural is going on. Conroy is not a skilled writer, and he can be annoying, but I still feel compelled to read his books.

Today something odd happened. I went to Youtube to watch a couple of Christian videos, and as might be expected, I drifted off into garbage video. I watched some Jack Reacher clips. For some reason, I clicked on a video from a show called True Detective. I have never seen the show. The caption said the video was about a character named Ray Velcoro, beating up a bully’s dad. That appealed to me. Morbid curiosity.

The video is easy to summarize. Velcoro’s young son is a fat victim. He had some expensive basketball shoes. Another boy stole them and cut them up. Velcoro berated, insulted, and threatened his son (like Pat Conroy’s dad) until he gave him a name. Velcoro went to the boy’s house, got his dad to bring him out for a lecture, and beat his dad senseless in front of him.

The bully’s name was Aspen Conroy.

That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be. Pat Conroy is a well-known writer who appeals to soft left-wing males, and soft left-wing males are the kind of people who get hired to write TV shows.

The writers chose that name for a reason, and I came across the video for a reason.

My dad was a bully. My sister was a bully, too. She always found people to torture, wherever she went. She probably has some victims right now. She always liked picking on homosexuals. She and her friend used to torment an effeminate young man when we lived in Miami Shores. I thought his name was Sally because that was what they always called him.

She also tried to feminize straight men who attracted her abuse. Like a bull lesbian, she likes men to be small and weak. Maybe that’s a response to her aggressive, assertive, intimidating father.

My dad was a bully, and now that I’m in charge, the bully aspects of his nature cause problems. He curses me when I tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. He tries to make me think I’m crazy when I disagree with him. He holds me responsible for things like his boredom, his incurable back pain, everything that goes wrong with the house…you name it. I am the genie who has a duty to appear on command, wave a wand, and make all discomfort and resistance vanish instantly.

He also has some extremely filthy habits which derive from a lifetime of treating other people like porta-potties.

To me, the big problem with my dad isn’t the way he treats me. It’s the way I respond. I get angry with him. I’m not saying I scream at him or physically abuse him. I just get angry. I behave like someone who isn’t angry, but I still feel it, and I have to fight it using supernatural means. I don’t want to be a place where anger sits and festers. What happens in the world outside of me is beyond my control, and I have low expectations, but I don’t want the filth inside me.

I believe God is telling me it’s wrong to hate bullies.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I hate bullies.” We say it without guilt, as if hating bullies makes a person righteous.

Bullies are horrendous. They taunt. They rape. They invade our boundaries and put their hands on others. They look for the things that disturb us most, and those are the things they do. The humiliation of others brings them joy. They do things like shoving people’s heads in toilets and holding people down and spitting in their mouths.

A bully doesn’t just hurt you while he’s with you. He leaves pain inside you and makes you hate yourself for losing. Nonetheless, we’re not entitled to hate them. If you accept hate, you damage yourself and grieve the Holy Spirit, so it’s another victory for the bullies. It’s the biggest victory a bully can get.

Cursed people who serve demons are always looking for dance partners. They latch onto others, and if they succeed, demons join with the others, and sick relationships are established. This is why beating a woman is one of the best ways to keep her from leaving you. The demons want to keep dance partners together.

I have to get over the idea that it’s okay to hate a bully. Self-righteousness is poisonous. Besides, I have bullied people. Not a lot, but I have done it. Something came over me, and I yielded. I did what I hate. Who am I to feel like I’m in a superior class?

Two things are true, and at first glance, they may seem inconsistent. First, we are not to develop relationships with bullies. It’s correct to cut them loose instantly and to refuse to take them back when they whimper and beg for forgiveness. Forgiveness and taking people back are different things. As for taking up with a bully, it’s like dating a pimp; you’ll get what you asked for, and God won’t listen when you ask for deliverance. Second thing: we are not supposed to hate bullies. You can cut a mentally diseased person out of your life without hatred.

Unless I am literally forced to accept relationships I don’t want, my dad will be the very last abusive person in my life. I wasn’t to blame for being born in a house with two bullies, but I am responsible for the problems caused by new bullies I choose to tolerate.

I have to keep a watchful eye on my social circle, but I can’t harbor active malice toward those who mistreat me. It’s like a break in the skin where demons can enter.

If you’re not submitted to God, he will put people who hate you over you. The Bible says so. It leads to bad marriages, horrible jobs, tyranny, and toxic friendships. God will make you the tail and not the head. I put contemptible people in positions of power over me, and I didn’t know I was doing it. The reason I didn’t know is that I wasn’t close to God. He would have advised me, had I been spending time with him.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be my dad or my sister.

My sister is vicious and mentally ill. No one can stand her. She has no law license, and there is no way she’ll ever meet the requirements to get her license restored, because she would have to admit what she has done, apologize to the bar, and complete a rehab program. She used her looks to control men when she was young, but now she is old and physically repulsive. She was disinherited 14 years ago. Her cancer is in remission, but cancer comes back.

My sister thinks she’s a holy woman. She thinks God and the world have cheated her. Everyone who knows her thinks she deserves worse and is glad to be free of her. Her relatives dread contact with her, as do many of her former business contacts.

My dad’s life has no meaning. He wakes up in a smelly bedroom, bathes in a filthy bathroom, puts on the same basic outfit every day, and then thinks about nothing except his own comfort and pleasure until he falls asleep. He can’t do anything to entertain himself. He can’t have a real conversation. He doesn’t have a single friend, and he can’t make new ones. He doesn’t have the comfort of prayer.

I think the only reason he has for living is fear of death. He can’t be thinking about heaven. He may die this year, but he refuses to think about the afterlife. He is dying from a terminal disease, and he insists he’s in great health and ought to live to be a hundred.

I can’t help thinking of David Carradine, a screwup and human cipher who met his end in a closet in Thailand, naked, obsessing on his own base pleasure.

My dad and my sister have no one they can talk to about their thoughts and feelings, and if they did, they wouldn’t do it. They think they’ve done everything right, so there is nothing to talk about. I’ve never heard my dad say anything introspective. I don’t think he permits that kind of thought.

Whatever. Regardless of what happens to the people around me because of their bad choices, I don’t want their poison to contaminate me.

Pat Conroy’s parents had 7 children, and 5 attempted suicide. One succeeded. His dad, the bully, wasn’t suicidal. What he did to his family must not have bothered him much. He died from cancer. He must have succeeded in pushing his poison into his kids permanently.

I will continue listening to God and trying to get correction, and as for my dad, I look forward to the day he accepts salvation. There is nothing else of value he is capable of accomplishing in this life.