When People are Down is the Best Time to Kick Them

Today over breakfast, I watched the latest episode of Top Gear. I mean the real Top Gear, not the Australian mess or the twice-euthanized American version.

I must humbly confess; I was dumbstruck by the confirmation of my rightness.

A while back, I wrote that one of the Beeb’s mistakes was hiring Matt LeBlanc. I said it was a mistake because he was so much better than the other hosts. If they had filled his spot with another mediocrity, it would have taken fans longer to realize how awful Chris Evans, Rory Reid, and Chris Harris were. It would have taken them longer to realize Sabine Schmitt (did I spell it right this time?) belongs in a Stig suit, not a star’s dressing room.

WOW, was I right. I was so right it hurts. I may need Oxycontin to dull the pain of rightness overload.

Today the show started out with…someone…talking about…something. I’ve forgotten already. Once again, I was reminded of Top Gear’s most conspicuous new feature…the fast-forward button.

After that, I believe Rory Reid popped up. This is the guy your mom kept begging your sister to date. He is soft and comforting, and he would never cheat on your sister, and they would even share things like bunny slippers and needlepoint equipment. This time, I couldn’t take it. I zipped forward again.

Eventually, LeBlanc appeared on screen. Ahhhhh.

He was reviewing a bizarre retro 911. “Retro 911″…I repeat myself. Anyway, Porsche decided to build a new 911 with no turbo and a real stickshift. It’s not a computerized toaster. It’s not a smartphone on wheels that shoots around the track on its own and then emails you a Snapchat video. It’s a car, and it’s controlled by a part known as a “human being.”

In his reaction to the car, LeBlanc displayed something previously unseen on the new show: passion.

He hopped in the 911 and drove it around the test track. His voice grew soft. His eyes shone. His hands shook. He kept telling the crowd he was in ecstasy. Was it real? Who knows? He’s an actor. William Shatner wasn’t really mad when he fought Ricardo Montalban. But LeBlanc convinced me. At least as well as I was convinced by a bald Jewish sci-fi actor wearing shoe lifts and a girdle.

Car shows shouldn’t be about numbers and electronics. They should be about the pleasure we get from cars. In LeBlanc’s short segment, we got a taste of that.

I can picture LeBlanc lying under his car on a Sunday next to a pile of wrenches and snap-ring pliers, fumbling for a beer can standing just outside the limit of his peripheral vision. Chris Evans? Not so much. I can picture him calling a mechanic to run over and fix the low tire pressure on his frame-off-restored Lamboghini Miura. “It says 24! It’s supposed to say 35! What’s wrong with it?”

Evans is supposed to be a car buff and collector, but it’s not credible.

He did a ridiculous segment on companies that take old English sports cars and rebuild them with modern parts that make them work better. For example, the headlights actually come on. He started with an Aston DB5. Then he did something really dumb: he talked about the Jaguar E Type (pant pant) restoration made by Eagle. We’ve already seen that at least twice. Clarkson (PBUH PBUH) covered it already.

Then he did the unthinkable. He rolled out an MG that cost over a hundred thousand pounds.

Somewhere in his cranium, the wires just aren’t touching.

MG has never made a sports car. They have never made a good looking car. They made ugly-cute convertibles for women, gays, and old men.

NOBODY WANTS TO PAY A HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS FOR A HAIRDRESSER’S CAR.

Think, Evans. Think.

As I was watching the segment and listening to him talk about the car’s 300+ horsepower, I said out loud, “The only part they kept was the one they should have thrown out: the body.”

What the MG restorers did was like transplanting Isaac Newton’s brain into a cancer patient. They got the whole transplant ethos backward. You’re supposed to put good stuff into good stuff. You don’t scour the world looking for new kidneys for Charles Manson.

Evans (Clarkson is equally at fault) demonstrated shocking ignorance of a fact every American knows: any car can be restored and improved, and you don’t have to pay the cost of a house to have it done. Evans and Clarkson seem to think the Eagle people did something no one else can do. Hello? Here in the US, it’s so common we have a word for it: “resto-mod.” And there are hundreds or thousands of shops that can do it for five figures.

I record a show called Fantomworks. It’s about a guy in the DC area who restores cars. Personally, I wouldn’t think of taking a car to him, because he takes old cars that are worth maybe $20,000 in showroom condition and charges people a hundred grand to fix them. But whatever you want done, he can do. An Eagle E Type resto-mod runs around a million dollars. I guarantee you, the Fantomworks boys can do it for less. And there are a dozen shows about other garages that do the same thing.

Open any American hot rod magazine. What do you see? Stunning resto-mods that didn’t cost a million dollars apiece to make.

I paused the program when the ridiculous MG appeared. I want breakfast to stay put. Spending a fortune to fix this thing is like spending a fortune to remaster a William Hung album.

I guess I’ll turn the show back on and see if there’s anything else I can stand to watch. I already blew through the celebrity laps. They’re unbearable. That type of segment is inherently boring, which is why Clarkson kept it short and fast. Evans prolongs it! Insane! He always has two celebrities instead of one, and they’re likely to be boring English celebrities I’ve never heard of. It goes on forever. “What kind of motor did you have when you were 17? Fiat Panda? Jolly good. Let’s look at 15 grainy photos while I say things that aren’t funny.”

I’m fast-forwarding. Oh, no. There’s some sort of “challenge” thing, involving all 53 of the new hosts. No. No. No. I do not want to spend another ten minutes feeling sorry for Rory Reid and Chris Harris.

It has LeBlanc in it, but that’s no help. You can fix an Italian jacket by taking a stain out of it. You can’t fix a stain by adding an Italian jacket to it.

Evans is still wearing those smelly-looking jeans and the ridiculous 1975 punk rocker boots. Where did he get jeans with legs that thin? They look like they’re stuck to his skin. As much as he wears them, they probably are.

One good thing about LeBlanc’s tenure is that it shows that a US version of the show would work just fine. I mean a US version that wasn’t done really badly. A version without Rutledge Wood. A version with a test track, a live audience, celebrities, and writers.

A version with a trio of meat-eating Republicans who aren’t pansies.

It will never happen.

Imagine Top Gear with Donald Trump, Matt LeBlanc, and James Woods. Who cares if Trump doesn’t know cars? He’s the most entertaining conservative alive. He could criticize foreign cars and maybe start his own sports car company to crush Porsche.

Trump: My lap was the fastest.

LeBlanc: Actually, it was the slowest.

Trump: I won!

Woods: Excuse me–Carrot Top’s dad–you lost.

Trump: It was YUUUUUUUGE!

Instead of the Stig, they could have Ted Nugent. The Nuge. “My lap time would have been better, but I had to swerve to run down some hippies.”

Oh, well. Amazon’s show is supposed to air eventually, and maybe in a year it will be in syndication on channels people actually watch.

And the new show isn’t a total loss. I can think of three guys who are really enjoying it.

I am my Own Old Flame

Yesterday, through an odd twist of events, I ended up reading a letter I wrote to my mother when I was in college. When I was SUPPOSED to be in college. My family was a disaster, and I was hanging outside the fabric of society like a bit of loose yarn on a sweater.

The letter really opened my eyes.

Many writers want to throw up when they read things they’ve written in the past. Not me. I’m almost always pleasantly surprised. Even when I read things I said, which I no longer agree with, I generally feel good about the quality of the writing and thought. The old letter was an exception to the rule. It reminded me of something I had forgotten. It reminded me of what I used to be.

One of the greatest things God has shown me is that correction is the best thing there is, apart from salvation.

When you say something negative about a person, it falls into one of two categories: condemnation or correction, i.e. constructive criticism.

Condemnation is for people who will not improve. It’s what the King James Bible calls “judgment.” If you criticize someone, knowing it won’t help him, it’s condemnation. It may be necessary to do this from time to time, usually inwardly, in order to avoid continued involvement with people who can’t be blessed. You shouldn’t do it without a good purpose. You shouldn’t do it for the pleasure of hurting people or getting revenge.

Correction is for people who can change. To correct is to open a door to freedom and victory.

I think about these things every day, and I work to get correction in my daily prayers. One consequence of this is that I am now fairly ruthless with myself. I try to find ways to take responsibility for problems other people and spirits helped cause, as though I were the only one who did wrong. To take responsibility for a thing is to take power over it.

I like to say that all the problems you have after you turn 18 are your own fault. I say this because I used to blame other people, and it made things worse. I gave my parents much of the blame for the way my life turned out, and by refusing to take responsibility, I dug myself deeper into the hole.

Obviously, then, I am extremely reluctant to blame other people now. But when I looked at that letter, I remembered how my upbringing crippled me. Looking back on it, I understood that whatever I am now, it’s a wonder I’m not in an institution, or dead. My sister ended up in a homeless shelter. That could have been me.

I was raised in an atmosphere of abuse. In my case, the abuse was generally verbal, coupled with neglect. I was insulted and barked at all the time. I was made to understand that I was wrong about everything, and that if I spoke or asked questions, I was likely to be driven off with my heart pounding, looking–literally–for a place to hide until the storm passed. When others were abused, I would sit behind my bedroom door in the middle of the night, waiting for the sounds of abuse to stop.

When I was a teenager, I had no confidence whatsoever. I barely had any involvement with girls; I ruined my opportunities with my lack of certainty. It was hard for me to stand up for myself. When someone mistreated me, I suddenly felt the same way I had felt at home during outbreaks of abuse. Instead of trying to set things straight, I wanted to say or do whatever it took to make it stop. I had been conditioned to feel that any effort to defend myself would make things much worse. I had been taught that I could not do anything to help myself.

I had no goals, except to escape. I used to go for long drives and wish I had somewhere to go, so I would not have to come back. I only worked hard enough to avoid getting F’s. I never thought in terms of accomplishment. I thought in terms of avoiding suffering, and even temporary relief was worth pursuing, regardless of the cost.

I knew things were screwed up. I tried to fix it. I looked for secular heroes. I ran to all sorts of unlikely messiahs. One was Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy. I thought he was brilliant, but he was really just a dirty old man who hated his parents. His answer to life’s problems was to discard his parents and feed his giant ego and goatlike lust, without thinking about other the way he hurt other people.

I read books by people who believed self-esteem was the path to nirvana. It was very appealing. I had no self-esteem at all, unless negative self-esteem counts. I internalized the abuse I had received from others. When they weren’t around, internally, I insulted myself throughout the day, repeating the things they would have said. Believing in myself and praising myself gave me relief from that; it took away the pain, the way morphine takes away the pain of a broken bone. It was the wrong way to go. I didn’t know that.

I applied to a grand total of three colleges. Columbia accepted me. Yale sent my application back because it was late. Dartmouth waitlisted me. I went to Columbia. As a college student, I was totally ineffective. No one had taught me how to organize my life and get things done. All I wanted was to get drunk and make trouble. Animal House was my source of guidance. I tried to relive it.

I couldn’t deal with the challenges of college life. My freshman advisor quit during the first semester, and my English class moved to a new building. I didn’t do what was necessary to get a new advisor, and I missed class for six weeks because I didn’t want to deal with the administration. I hated talking to people in authority. They intimidated me, and I knew that if they asked me questions, I would have to tell them things that would get me in more trouble. Also, to be honest, the administration at Columbia was fairly useless. They didn’t do much to help people in trouble.

I fell under a lot of bad influences. Bad influences were pretty much the only kind Columbia had to offer. I thought I was going to be a writer, so I wrote a lot, and I took classes in writing and literature. Columbia was still wilting under the demonic spell of fools like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, like a high school girl in the back seat of a car with a third-string college quarterback. The atmosphere was godless, debauched, and pessimistic. I drank it in.

I read Henry Miller. I thought he was wonderful. He was a wicked old crank and probably a sociopath, but he seemed to be getting over on the system.

More and more, self-esteem and self-determination seemed to be the answers. I made a conscious, proactive, overt effort to become proud, to the point where I gave myself a nickname that started with “Arrogant.” I wanted to be so self-assured, no one could shake me. I was building my own little internal Tower of Babel.

I saw these things yesterday in the letter I wrote. I saw the effects they had on me. I was dramatic and emotional, like one of the English Romantic poets. I kept praising my own talent. I was trying to make myself believe I could do something. My parents had no faith in me at all. They didn’t think I could accomplish anything. My answer was to go way overboard, trying to supply what I couldn’t get from them.

I was nearly insane. My handwriting looked like the scrawl of a potential serial killer. I was clinging to anything that would keep me from sliding into complete despair. It made me almost deranged. Almost delusional. I needed help, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. My desire for help and my suffering didn’t matter. No one gave me what I needed, and when I tried to give it to myself, I became more warped.

I had forgotten about this. It’s hard to relate to. My mind is completely different now. I have more peace. I’m not afraid of people. I don’t go to bed at night and hold onto myself and shift in bed, wondering what will become of me. God has worked a tremendous amount of healing and restoration in me, so it’s a shock to remember how I used to feel.

Now I’m thinking about this, trying to draw the right conclusions. I have to take responsibility for what I am; I can’t pin it on others. At the same time, I look back and realize I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t turn myself into a good student or a competent person. I was the only person I had to rely on, and I was running on fumes. I had almost nothing to give myself.

You can’t breastfeed yourself; you run into the same principles that govern thermodynamics. You have to have input from outside.

I’m still responsible for what happened. I chose not to pray when I was young. I looked in the wrong direction. There is no getting around that. I didn’t want to serve God. Maybe I would have wanted to serve him, had I not been immersed in slander about him. Those who slandered him to me are accountable, but I am still responsible. I knew he was God.

Looking at that letter makes me think about the way I view people who don’t believe in God. They are as lost and wrong as I was. Their blindness and deafness are extremely profound. What hope is there for any of them unless God does them a giant favor, steps in, and gives them supernatural faith and remorse? None, I suppose.

My misery was a blessing. Had I been successful, I would have thought everything was fine, and I would still be on rails, sliding toward damnation. A lot of famous, greatly admired people have awakened suddenly in hell, wondering where their limos and personal assistants went.

I have to be aware of the wrong others have done to me, and I have to acknowledge it. The truth is important, regardless of its nature. You’re not supposed to forget the bad things people have done or pretend they didn’t happen. You’re not supposed to lie about them to make them look better. At the same time, I can’t hold onto anger or blame others for my problems. If I do that, they defeat me twice.

If you want your kids to do well, there are two important things you have to do. You have to teach them to know the Holy Spirit, and you have to support them emotionally. These things are more important than food, education, clothing, and shelter, because meeting internal needs results in the meeting of external needs. There are many kids on this planet whose material needs are met, who would be better off if their parents died. That sounds terrible, but it’s unquestionably true. Many parents wreck their children, to the extent that almost any adopted parents would be better.

I still take responsibility for what I did with my lfe, but I don’t feel as bad about it as I did last week. I see now that I’m very blessed to be doing as well as I am. My sister didn’t get what I got, and my mother died young after a miserable life. My dad doesn’t know God. I’m doing better than all of them.

Don’t fool with prosperity preachers, positive-thinking preachers, or the old-line clergymen who teach you garbage about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. You need the charity of God, provided through the Holy Spirit. You need handouts, not paychecks or bribes. Improvement of the self is job one, after receiving salvation. If you know that, you will avoid a lot of blind alleys. You will eventually come out on top.

Progress Isn’t Always Pretty

A friend of mine is taking serious steps to get aligned with God, and he has all sorts of problems. People let him down constantly. Things go wrong for him. He got in trouble with the law, in a moment of completely inexplicable irresponsibility. He has all sorts of financial issues because of his credit history, and because his legal problems–combined with Miami’s Spanish-first policy–make it hard for him to get employers interested.

If you think bilingualism is a great idea, wait until you try to get a job in Miami. It’s no wonder Cubans think it’s heaven. They get first dibs on every job because of their remarkable and unique refusal to learn the language of the country that saved them. Strange way to thank us.

He still makes a lot of mistakes, but I keep working with him, because I know he’s not joking about fixing his life. Also, I know I’m going through the same thing, even if my experience is not nearly as difficult as his.

The other day while I was in prayer, I got a picture in my mind. I don’t mean a magical vision; just something that occurred to me. I thought of a dirty, blind canal full of dead fish, floating turtle grass, and junk.

When you aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, you’re off course. You’re like a boat that has turned up a blind canal. A canal that goes nowhere will fill up with crap over time, and at the end of it, there is nothing but a concrete wall.

If you cruise up a blind canal, you will have to go by all sorts of obstacles. The debris in the canal will be in your way the whole time. When you wise up and turn around, things don’t improve right away. In order to get out, you’ll have to go through the same mess you passed on the way in.

My friend and I–you are probably in the same situation–putted our way up our blind canals for a long time. Then we reluctantly, grudgingly turned around, and we expected everything to be fine. Of course, that isn’t what happened. The junk was still there, and now we are cruising through it.

Today I thought of this, in connection with the work I’m doing, putting my dad’s financial transactions in Quickbooks. I don’t mean to whine (this time), but it’s the opposite of fun. I had to study accounting briefly, which is just about the most boring thing a human being can do, and then I had to learn how to use the program. I also had to get special materials to make it work with rental properties. Now I sit for hours every day, entering checks and bills.

It’s a drag, but it was predictable. For years, I tried to get my dad to keep track of things week by week instead of all at once, during a yearly two-month period of hell. He would not listen. By the time I got ahold of things, over a year’s worth of transactions had to be dealt with.

The work I’m doing is not fun, but the main reason it’s not fun is because my dad sowed for it over a period of decades. If he had been doing what he should, I would be entering current transactions, which would be relatively quick. Because he didn’t, I’ve been entering things going back to December of 2014. The work of entering transactions has been multiplied by about 18.

In a couple of weeks, I won’t hate Quickbooks any more. I’ll love it. I’ll tell people how wonderful it is. I’ll be living in the world of a responsible person doing maintenance, not that of a goofball doing tons of remedial work.

I brought it all on myself. I’m not saying other people didn’t screw up. I’m saying I let a lot of things pile up over the years, and now I’m paying for it. I don’t know if I could have made my dad use accounting software, but I am confident that one way or another, God would have arranged things so this experience would have been much better.

The Quickbooks thing is but one example of old, creaky problems I’m having to fix now.

God aligns things. He straightens our paths. The promises of the Bible are true, but they’re only true for people who truly give themselves to him, and when you change your ways, things don’t necessarily change instantaneously.

God doesn’t just do repairs; he also puts thorns in our paths to show us we’re screwing up. Or he merely lets others put thorns in our paths.

When I was living in Israel, I saw a very strange thing: impenetrable walls of thistles. You would really have to see these things for yourself in order to believe it. They looked like something out of a movie. The plants they grew on were very tall; they must have been seven or eight feet in height. They grew right against each other, so you couldn’t walk between them. They were covered with razor-sharp thorns. There is no way a human being could get through them. I couldn’t even see through them.

I think about that sometimes. Israel was arranged by God to illustrate Biblical principles. I think those creepy thistles were there to show the Jews what life was like without his help.

In some ways, we expect too little from God, and in other ways we expect too much. We don’t think he’ll fix our lives, so we stick with our own stupid plans. Once we turn around, we expect him to make everything wonderful overnight.

The things at which you fail are signposts, telling you you’re going the wrong way. It’s that simple. If you want to get past them, you have to stop leading yourself. When you accept God’s leadership, you will start to defeat your obstacles, but you shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t clear up all at once.

I eagerly await the day when I can honestly say I like Quickbooks. I may throw a party. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be deductible.

Get Your Holy Ghost Water Wings

Motivational speakers make a living retelling lies. One famous lie is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I love that one. No, that’s not insanity. That’s persistence. Insanity is thinking you’re a chicken or running down the street naked, rubbing your own excrement into your hair. Thinking the CIA put listening devices in your fillings is insanity. Doing the same thing over and over is pretty much normal; we all accept the fact that doing things right often produces bad results, so we don’t give up.

Isn’t telling the same lies to different crowds (who don’t improve) insane, according to the motivational-speaker definition?

Another big lie is the frog story. You put a frog in a pan of cold water, and you turn on the heat. The water heats so slowly, the frog doesn’t realize it. Eventually it boils to death. Yeah, okay. Try that and see what happens. Even a frog knows when it’s being scalded.

Nonetheless, the frog lie illustrates a valid point: human beings don’t notice slow change. Somebody has to slap us to get us to see it.

Case in point: Internet filth.

There was a time when you couldn’t say “condom” in front of your grandmother at the dinner table. That all changed with the venereal disease explosion in the 1980’s. Driven by gay promiscuity, AIDS seemed to threaten to kill all of us, and suddenly, we were shamed for being unwilling to talk about condoms at every conceivable opportunity.

That was gross, but the Internet made things a lot worse. Today, unfortunate phrases like “nip slip” and “upskirt” appear not just on porn sites, but on the evening news, and while I wouldn’t swear to it, the President has probably used the word “d*****bag” at least once in the State of the Union Address.

The water is hot. The frogs haven’t noticed.

I’m surfing the web in order to procrastinate. I guess I’ve put in half an hour. So far, without going to a porn site, I have seen two naked people and one woman wearing a bikini that reveals a big percentage of her pubic region. One of the naked people was a woman straddling a man. I’m not even trying, and this stuff is coming at me.

I wish we could go back to 1975 and transport people into 2016 for brief visits, so we could show them TV and the Internet and see what they thought. They would probably go back and start smoking and overeating, hoping to die before they got here. We are surrounded by lust and perversion, along with every kind of uncleanness. Gay marriage. Transsexuals in the military. The idiotic pro-public-nudity movement. We live in a time when people who say homosexuality is wrong are treated like child molesters.

If the change had occured in a day, we would be shocked beyond words, but it took 40 years, so most of us don’t even know it happened.

The big problem with this is that it wrecks our relationships with the Holy Spirit, who is our only source of help. There is a limit to how intimately he will associate with a filthy person who doesn’t listen. The devil knows that, and he’s terrified of God, so he spreads filth everywhere.

When I was in high school, I read a funny book called Superfolks. It was about a Superman-like hero who had gone soft. He was from the planet Cronk, and he was allergic to matter from his planet, appropriately called “Cronkite.” His arch enemy neutralized him by putting Cronkite in everything. Over time, the hero turned into a mushy couch potato who posed no threat at all.

Satan must have read that book.

Most people don’t think about the assault we’re experiencing. They think it’s fine, because they have no idea who the Holy Spirit is, what he can do for them, and how much they need him. They don’t think about minimizing the filth in their lives, because they don’t know it repels God. They welcome filth. If the average male sees something dirty pop up on his TV or monitor, he’s happy about it, and he stares intently. The people who produce this junk promote it with no sense of shame at all. They’re very proud of it. And I’m talking about people like network TV executives, not Larry Flynt.

Once you start trying to clean up, you realize how bad the problem is. Even if you don’t deliberately seek out sexual stimulation, it pounces on you from unexpected directions. You can’t go to the beach. You can’t turn the TV on. You can’t walk through a mall. Thanks to the breastfeeding fanatics, you can’t even sit in a restaurant.

You don’t realize how broken something is until you try to fix it.

Liberals and other God-haters keep saying we should be more concerned about violence and cruelty than sexual sin, but that’s stupid. The sexual urge is very, very strong, especially in men. It is extremely persistent. The urge to be violent or cruel is not like that. It’s not universal, it’s weak, and in most people, it only flares up briefly, on isolated occasions. Most of us try to resist it, because we think it’s bad. It offers the enemy less power over us than sex.

Look at it this way: how many people do you know whose lives were screwed up through sex, and how many do you know who ruined their lives with violence or cruelty? The list of violent people will be way, way shorter. Sex is simply not as dangerous, on an individual level, as violence. The devil knows that, and it’s why he works harder to promote sexual sin.

Many, many famous people have been destroyed by sexual sin, whether their own or that of others. Let’s see. Marvin Gorman. Jimmy Swaggart. Charlie Sheen. Bill Clinton. Denny Hastert. Anthony Weiner. Larry Craig. David Vitter. General Petraeus. Ted Haggard. Jim Bakker. Eliot Spitzer. Rock Hudson. Liberace. Prince. Michael Jackson. Anthony Perkins. Freddie Mercury. Amanda Blake (yes, Miss Kitty), Rudolf Nureyev, Brad Davis, Peter Allen, Paganini, Karen Blixen, Al Capone, Oscar Wilde, Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, Kimberly Bergalis…how many names do you want?

There are billions of people with sexual addictions. There aren’t many people who are addicted to violence. If the condition exists at all, it’s sufficiently rare to be considered a mental illness. We think intense lust is normal. And guess what? Many famous prolific murderers, if not all, are actually sex offenders. They murder in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Think I’m making that up? Have you heard of Ted Bundy? Jeffrey Dahmer? John Wayne Gacy? Gary Heidnik? Wayne Williams? Richard Speck?

Serial killers keep souvenirs from their crimes so they can look at them later while they pleasure themselves. It’s like pornography to them. One investigator got a murderer to talk by putting one of his souvenirs where he could see it. He became sexually aroused by the memory of raping and murdering a little boy, and he dropped his guard. The son of my dad’s former law partner was raped, murdered, and dismembered by a sex-driven killer.

God-haters tell us sexual sins are victimless. Tell that to the children of a divorced couple. Tell it to hemophiliacs who have AIDS. Tell it to people who were born with syphilis. Tell it to a first wife. Good luck with that.

I know I’m not going to change anything by writing this. That’s not my motivation. I’m just commenting on something I find remarkable. I feel like I’m looking out the rear window of the Enola Gay, remarking on the explosion.

God gave me a sudden supernatural increase in my own self-control. I could never have managed that on my own. I used to think sexual sin was just fine, or that I had an expense account in heaven, so I could do what I wanted as long as I asked for forgiveness. I worked sexual iniquity deeply into my being, over decades. I could not have gotten rid of it on my own. The Holy Spirit lifted me to a better level, without my help. All I did was ask and wait. Without his help, I would still be walking in the same circle. If he stops helping, I’ll go right back.

Most other people aren’t going to receive his help, because they aren’t even asking. They think nothing is wrong; people will actually pay for phony pills to increase their sex drive. They will never have good relationships with the Holy Spirit, so they will be weak and defeated until they die. They will think defeat is victory.

Remember the book and movie, Hannibal? Dr. Lecter decided he didn’t like a pedophile, because as a murderer, torturer, and cannibal, he was morally superior. He gave the pedophile drugs, which the pedophile liked, and then he told the pedophile to cut his own face off and feed it to his dogs. The whole time, the pedophile was enjoying himself. Lecter was supposed to be helping the court analyze the man, but here Lecter was, being the best pal ever, helping him fool the silly old judge. Then the pedophile woke up with no face and a broken neck. Oops.

That’s what life without correction is like. The devil convinces us to destroy ourselves, and the whole time, we think we’re winning and that our fangs are dripping tiger blood.

It’s great to beat your enemy when he fights back, but it’s a thousand times sweeter to get him to destroy himself while you watch. Satan loves deceit, because it turns us into our own murderers. And it certainly saves work.

I wish I had something useful to say, but I don’t think that’s the case, so I’ll just settle for interesting.

Or “I’m Awl Ears”

A while back, I wrote about habits and the way they run our lives. I am getting new revelation on the subject, and it’s coming through an unfortunate source.

When I was young, I figured I was safe from dementia. My great-grandfather lived to be 100, with full control of his mind. My grandfather was a little forgetful, but he was able to practice law at 85. He had sisters who grazed or passed the century mark without losing it. I assumed genetics were on my side.

In 2014, my father’s older sister died. She was obese. She was demented. In her case, doctors believed strokes caused the problem, but she was an angry, irritable, bossy person, and she was probably never less than a hundred pounds overweight, so her habits probably caused her downfall. Also, she was a Mormon, so she didn’t have any useful knowledge to help her beat her problems.

When she died, it became obvious that my genes were not as good as I had thought.

Now my dad is having problems, and I have to look after him. I am learning things.

He decided to make a five-figure investment in his real estate. It looked like a good idea to me, but I didn’t push it. I had looked into it, but I was not planning to follow up. He made the decision.

I made the arrangements, and then I told my dad we had to meet with the salesman to firm things up and provide a deposit. Before the salesman arrived, my dad started asking why we wanted to do it. He had forgotten, and I had to go back over the story.

Here’s the interesting thing: he forgot the decision to buy, because that was a factual matter. He remembered that he didn’t like to spend money, because that was a habit. Dementia destroys your ability to recall facts, but habits aren’t facts, so they persist.

I have a young friend who gives hospice care to old people, most of whom are demented. I talk to her and get her advice, and she confirms my observations. She says dementia never changes people’s habits. You can forget a fact, but you can’t forget a character trait.

What does that mean, on a practical level?

The other day, I wrote a blog post, and I said good habits were like slaves that work for nothing. They do what you want done, 24 hours a day, with little input from you. Last night, God showed me the other edge of the sword: bad habits are slave drivers. They goad you all day, every day, even when you resist.

This is obvious when you see it stated concisely, but I didn’t think of it that way before. I didn’t think of the terms “slave” and “slave driver” in close juxtaposition.

For a long time, I’ve been telling people they need to clean up their personalities while they’re young, because when they get old and lose their minds, all the bad things will persist, and they will be socially isolated because people will not be able to stand them. It’s not great advice, because people who are irritating and unpleasant are not the kind of people who take advice. But it’s true. It would be good advice, if the people who needed it were able to act on it.

If you’re arrogant, and you think you’re always right, you will still be that way when you’re wearing diapers and being fed with a spoon. Same thing goes for lust, greed, and whatever other habitual flaws you have.

My mother’s mother became demented at the very end of her life. She had always liked telling people what to do. One day she made the following announcement: “I want to be the boss.” Just like that. It’s funny, but it’s also instructive. When you get old and demented, it’s like your clothes fall off, and all the stuff you used to hide pops out.

Here I am in middle age, with slave drivers I chose to empower. At first I didn’t know the Holy Spirit. After that, I knew him, but I chose to do my own thing. The other spirits…lust, greed, pride, dishonesty, anger, whatever…those, I listened to. The Holy Spirit’s liberating influence was stifled, and the filthy, stupid influence of the others was magnified. It was like an eclipse, where the moon, which is lifeless, comes between you and the sun.

The Old Testament provided for slavery. If you wanted another person to take care of you, you stood by the door of the house, and that person took an awl and shoved it through your ear, into the doorpost. After that, you had to serve him. For slaves who were Hebrews, the length of the service was limited, but I don’t want to get into that.

Doorways symbolize the gates of perception. They symbolize our senses, which are doorways to our hearts and minds. When we let foreign spirits in, we let them penetrate our ears at the doorways to our inner parts. The symbolism is obvious.

Once a spirit gets in, it builds a stronghold of habit, and it’s hard to evict, because your own flesh and mind work to keep it in place.

If I can’t get God’s help and receive deliverance, and I later lose my mind, all the gross parts of my personality will be in control and on display, and I will be totally powerless.

Supposedly, the body of George Custer was mutilated with an awl. A person claiming to be a witness said a squaw shoved an awl deep into both of his ears, into his brain, because he was a man who would not listen. Interesting.

We don’t understand how bad our situation is, or how filthy and how close to hell this world is. We don’t see anything wrong, so we think defeat is victory, and we don’t try to do anything about it. Sooner or later, anyone who doesn’t get free will see the spirits he served while he lived. My feeling is that it’s better to boot them out while I’m still breathing.

Pray in the Spirit to get revelation and faith. Never make an excuse to God. Never try to defend yourself. Always ask what you’re doing wrong, and how you can fix it. If you keep doing these things, the clouds will start to part. If not, try to enjoy being the tail and not the head.

The Pun Mine is Deep Indeed

I watched a little bit of Top Gear with breakfast today. What a horror.

Chris Evans showed up, wearing the same seemingly smelly outfit he has worn on every episode, topped off with a plaid hunter’s cap that would make Elmer Fudd turn up his nose. He screamed his way through a review of a British lightweight roadster, and after two or three minutes, I had to fast forward. Up side: if he threw up, I didn’t have to see it.

Matt LeBlanc followed up, reviewing a gorgeous blue Rolls-Royce convertible. What a contrast. He was relaxed, as though buzzed on warm bitter. He was witty. His comic delivery was magnificent.

It made me realize there are two things wrong with Top Gear. First, they hired Matt LeBlanc. Second, the talent is the talent.

Hiring Matt LeBlanc was a bad idea, because he’s so good, he throws the badness of the rest of the crew into very sharp relief. They stink on ice. They are unredeemable. But for the presence of LeBlanc, their lack of ability might cause me less suffering.

The young guys are a big danger to the show, because neither one does a good job, yet they look better than Evans, so the suits are pretty likely to bump Evans off and promote one or both of them. It would be a classic tone-deaf corporate move.

Chris Harris, the angry-looking bald guy, has almost no personality. He hollers a fair amount, although less than Chris Evans, but he never says anything funny or interesting. Top Gear is a comedy show; an unfunny host can’t be made to function within that frame. He needs to go.

Rory Reid, the nonthreatening black guy, has the soft, reassuring presence of a chubby maiden aunt with whiskers. He is just as not funny as Harris, and his personality has no edges. Watching him is like being a girl in a movie theater sitting next to a guy who will always, always be in the friend zone. It’s like a sympathy date.

As for the show’s second problem, I guess I need to clarify. When I say, “The talent is the talent,” I mean all the talent that matters is on screen. The writers and producers didn’t make the show work. Clarkson, Hammond, and May did. That’s why they succeed on other shows, even when they’re apart.

Many shows are not like that. Take Breaking Bad, for example. When the show ended, people scrambled to hire Bryan Cranston, thinking he would pack theaters the same way he packed living rooms. It didn’t happen. Why? Because he wasn’t the engine pulling the train. Vince Gilligan (the creator) and the writers did that. Vince Gilligan could create a great show using crash test dummies. It really doesn’t matter who the actors are. They’re just sock puppets.

Joss Whedon is like Vince Gilligan. He created some shows that were very good, and when you watch them, you think the actors are fantastic. They’re not. Joss Whedon and his writers are fantastic. Usually (ahem Ultron). Firefly is my favorite show of all time, but I don’t flip channels looking for Jewel Staite and Nathan Fillion, because they didn’t create the magic.

The Beeb needs to fire everyone except LeBlanc and Eddie Jordan and start over. But they won’t. They’ll fire Evans eventually, probably after another awful year, and they’ll promote the boring kids, who will fail worse than he did. LeBlanc will disappear unless–maybe even if–they open the British treasury to him. Although with Britain’s welfare system, it’s probably full of old biscuit tins and IOU’s.

Like ours.

Except not biscuit tins. Maybe Cheetos bags and Air Jordan boxes.

Does this mean the Clarkson triumvirate won? I don’t think so. Not exactly.

The triplets moved on to Amazon Prime, which nobody watches. Okay, yes, they’ll get paid a lot, and they’ll have a huge budget, but what difference does it make if no one sees it?

Jeff Bezos thinks he can make people watch Amazon the way they watch cable. He’s probably right. In 2025. He’s like Elon Musk; he has a great idea that doesn’t work yet. I think Clarkson, Hammond and Mays will sacrifice two years out of the primes of their careers in the name of electronic progress.

Will Bezos syndicate the show so people can actually see it? I think so, although he’s nuts, so he might not. He may have the Apple psychosis. He may want to keep everything in the family, to the point where he makes his company a marginal player perpetually on life support. If he does syndicate, it will be at least spring of 2017 before we get our fix. By the time a sizeable demographic gets to see fresh shows with the troika again, the boys may be doing their mobility scooter episode all over, for totally different reasons.

The US version of the show has been canceled again (thank you, inept History Channel execs and Rutledge Wood), so at least we don’t have to worry about being plagued with that. I hope this time they pounded a stake into it and buried it under garlic. Last time, the execution didn’t take.

Fairly credible news stories now say LeBlanc (and everyone else in the organization) can’t bear Chris Evans, and that LeBlanc will leave if Evans stays. I guess there is hope, but there are a lot of ways for the Beeb to make things worse, and there aren’t many ways to make it right. When you rely on blind luck instead of competence, you are chance’s plaything, and the odds in this game are not good.

I still say they should hire Jason Statham and pay him anything he wants, plus all the rain and bad British food he can handle.

That’s today’s gripe. Now I must go and do something useful. Briefly.

My Joint Ventures are Faring Poorly

Unbelievably, I had to re-re-redo the PVC pipes on my pool pump. I’m starting to think PVC is cursed.

I fixed it last month, and then I waited for the pump shed to dry out. I figured I could continue cleaning and improving once the water was gone. I went out there a couple of days ago to check on things, and the floor was still wet.

Worse, the accumulation of dirt and leaves covering the floor was still wet.

Here in South Florida, all pool guys are English-deaf. You can’t tell them anything. And if you do, it doesn’t matter, because they won’t do it, or they will be replaced in three weeks by new people who didn’t get el memo. I figured the persistent water problem was caused by the pool guy’s continuing failure to tighten the pump lid down, and by my continuing failure to check it whenever he left the property.

Yesterday I took a closer look, and water was dripping from my new pipe system. Incredible.

The crud on the floor was there because all landscape guys in this area are English-deaf. They are also unable to use rakes. They use leaf blowers for everything. You can’t tell them not to use leaf blowers, and the blowers blow dirt and leaves into every opening available. Over the years, it adds up.

I got a shovel, a hoe, and a shop-vac, and I removed a tremendous amount of dirt and plant matter. I actually saw the concrete floor; it’s not just a myth. It’s really there.

Before I got into this mess, I hated slip joints. A slip joint is a place where a pipe slides into a fitting. It has no threads. You have to cement it together, and after that, you can’t take it apart. I hated them because I thought they were a copout, and because they turn repairable systems into replaceable systems. If you have one bad fitting in a big conglomeration of parts that are cemented together, there is a good chance you’ll have to throw everything out and start over. I liked threaded joints, which can be taken apart.

I now think slip joints rock, and I hate threaded joints.

When I examined my pipes, I found that the cemented joints were fine, and at least two threaded joints were leaking, giving me a threaded-joint failure rate of about 67%.

I had to get out the sawzall (which I don’t capitalize because it’s not a Milwaukee) and cut the pipes off the pump.

I got on the web and looked around, trying to find out what I should do. Are threaded joints just plain bad? Were my joints too tight? Were they too loose? Should I have used tape instead of dope?

Here is what I found out: dope is better than tape (yay), and doped joints have to be tightened as hard as humanly possible.

My leaking joints were very tight, but they leaked anyway. I didn’t tighten them as much as I could have, because I was afraid the fittings would split. Now my feeling is, tighten away, and if the fittings split, get new fittings. Buy extra fittings before you build your joints just in case.

This time, I took the offending structure out of the pump shed and put it in my bench vise. I tightened the joints way, way, way down, and I reinstalled everything. I had to replace one threaded joint, so I used a 24″ pipe wrench to tighten it. I used a ton of dope. I was not going to tolerate a too-dry fit that prevented the male end from bottoming, and I was not going to put up with water leaks caused by gaps in the dope.

Is this the correct way to do it? I do not know. I know that the common sense way didn’t work, so now I’m using the brute-force moron approach, and so far, I have no leaks.

I used a huge amount of cement on the new slip joints. Cement melts PVC, so presumably, if you use a lot, you end up with lots of fused plastic to prevent leaks. That is my hope.

I guarantee you, there is no one within 30 miles who would have come here and done this job correctly in exchange for money. This county is the doofus capital of the universe. Even though I’ve done it wrong twice, I still feel like I’m way ahead of the game. I only spent like a hundred bucks, and I didn’t have to yell at anyone or threaten to sue.

It’s a shame I can’t fix roofs. Don’t even get me started on that nightmare.

Here is my advice: if you have to do PVC plumbing, only use threaded fittings when you have a compelling reason. Tighten the crap out of everything, use dope instead of tape, and use lots of cement on slip joints. Buy a sawzall, too. It will cut any PVC joint ever made in under ten seconds.

Make sure you tighten your threaded joints as early as possible in the process to get them into their final form. See to it that you leave slip joints for last, because they can be wiggled and adjusted before you add the glue, helping you to get things aligned. If you move a threaded joint, you risk creating a leak.

Now watch the pipes start leaking, proving everything I just wrote is wrong.

I hate swimming pools. Biggest con since time shares.

I am Too Busy Doing Nothing to Deal With You

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday. I’m middle-aged, and it’s still my favorite day of the week. On Saturdays, I REFUSE to do anything productive. The rest of the week, I merely FAIL.

It’s not the same.

Yesterday I blogged so I could put off working on bills and taxes. Today I’m blogging so I can put off reading Aeschylus. You have to be a sick, sad individual to procrastinate with regard to recreation. You can’t stoop much lower than that.

I have been trying to get my dad’s finances up to date. I have come to accept the fact that it’s not going to happen overnight. I could work at it for twelve hours a day and lose my mind. Instead I put in three or four hours and remain partially sane. If he has to pay a couple of late fees, he will live.

When your affairs get screwed up, you can’t turn them around instantly. It’s like turning an oil tanker. After you turn the wheel, you keep going in the same direction for a while. Some things will actually get worse while you’re improving the big picture. It’s better to accept it than to ruin your sleep and digestion.

The process of untangling the mess is improving me, personally.

Because I merely occurred instead of being raised responsibly, I have bad habits a well-reared six-year-old would not have, and I lack good habits. For one thing, I never know when to start things or when I’m done. I come from a family of disorganized people. They just do things when they have to. Very little planning. And the dumbest one probably has an IQ of 120. There is no excuse.

It came as a big shock to me that it was possible to break tasks into chunks and quit before I was finished. This is the kind of thing Jewish and Asian parents teach their kids in the womb, so they go on to blow the curves on tests and own really nice houses. My ancestors–at least the immediate ones–didn’t pass this information on, probably because they didn’t know it.

I wonder if one of the purposes of the Sabbath was to teach the Jews time management. Imagine what it was like to live before the Sabbath, in a world where every day was exactly like the one before. There were no weekends. There were no days off, unless you died. It must have been hard to organize time.

Once Saturday is cordoned off for God, you must inevitably start thinking in terms of a weekly cycle. You have to prepare for the Sabbath, which takes time. Some parts of the preparation will surely take more than one day. Tasks will have to be broken up. Meanwhile, your Dagon-worshiping neighbors will be wandering aimlessly in an unstructured existence, on a time line that stretches out before them like the unreachable horizon.

First thing you know, you have a desk calendar and a to-do list, and you own all the real estate for a mile in every direction. And your neighbors are sharecropping and waiting for a chance to behead you.

My guess, anyway.

Good habits are like slaves that work 24 hours a day, without being prompted. A good habit is like a passive investment. It works even when you’re resting.

I really need some of those.

I was diagnosed with ADD a long time ago, and they put me on powerful drugs that made me considerably crazier than I had been when I was untreated. ADD is real; no question about it. But I always felt that a good upbringing would have canceled most of the ill effects.

Oh, well. You have to think about what you have left and what you can still gather, not what you have wasted.

A lot of what the Holy Spirit does for people falls into the realm of habit. Spirits drive habits. Any Christian who has been a heroin addict could tell you that. God will take bad habits out, and he will put good habits in. Only if you give yourself to him. Otherwise, you limit his help.

I have finally figured out that you need to prioritize tasks. Then you need to create a list. After that, you need to go down the list and deal with tasks in order. And you need to break each task up into bits, so you don’t work on one thing for ten days straight while letting everything else slide.

You have to have finish lines. You can’t have a goal like, “Get condo fee mess straightened out.” You have to come up with something that has a definite end, like, “Call condo association and leave a message, threatening to sue.” When you do this, you know what you’re supposed to do, and you know when you’re finished for the day.

When I was a kid (and when I was in college the first time around), I did my long-term projects the nights before they were due. My parents knew I was in the living room at 5 a.m., time and time again, cobbling things together and getting B’s or worse, but somehow they didn’t see it as a huge problem they should fix. They were able to criticize, but they did not provide solutions, and neither did I.

Even as late as law school, I didn’t know how to structure time. I told my girlfriend, “You can work all semester and get a B+, or you can work hard for three days and get a B.” That was actually true, but it wasn’t a brilliant strategy. I graduated cum laude, and the people with good habits got summa. They’re generally unhappy people, but they handled responsibility well.

When I became a lawyer, all that changed, at least with respect to work. When you work on a case, the court sets deadlines, and your first big job is to pore over the rules and write a schedule for yourself. Once that’s done, you’re on rails. I almost never had a problem. I was the person who kept other people on track. Somehow this didn’t bleed over into my personal life. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because my personal life didn’t include a bar association and a judge, waiting to take my license and put me in jail.

The more I help my dad organize, the more organized I become. I like it.

My dad had a partner who could not organize anything. He was very, very smart. He was a wonderful resource when you needed help on a case. But he didn’t record his hours. He didn’t answer the phone or return calls. He was hard to locate. When the partners complained, he said his value as a resource justified his pay. Then they reminded him that if he didn’t record his hours, the clients could not be billed.

He was always a nervous wreck. He had high blood pressure. He always had some kind of unnecessary crisis going on. Once, he left his car in the airport’s short-term lot, and the cost of redeeming it got so high, he decided to abandon it. And they wouldn’t take it.

The managing partner, who was ambitious in a not-nice way, got rid of him eventually. No one could mount a convincing defense.

When you’re a kid, they don’t tell you this: peace comes from order. If your life is disorderly, you will never have peace. When I was a kid, they taught us that peace came from being a rebel, doing drugs, and following your heart, which is about as smart as following a goose. That stuff is the road to ulcers and strokes, not to mention poverty.

When you start to get organized, things clear up as though by magic. You find yourself noticing that old, familiar problems aren’t there any more. Maybe excess fat disappears. Maybe your digestion improves. Suddenly, you can walk across your living room without tripping. You’re not afraid when the phone rings, because you know your bills are paid. You decide to drive to the store, and you actually know where the keys are.

I am definitely procrastinating right now, but because my life is more organized than it used to be, I don’t have to work as much, so procrastination is less damaging. Strange, how that works.

I guess now I need to work on organizing my free time. That sounds perverse, but it’s not. Even elective activities require a steady, consistent approach. You can’t even get good at playing Frisbee if you don’t practice. Here’s something weird: the time you determine to spend NOT doing anything is almost as sacred as the time you spend doing. It has to be nearly as important.

I wish I could go back in time to when I was a kid and track myself down and kick myself in the butt every day. “Hi. It’s me. Did you brush your teeth this morning? No?” KICK. “Have you prayed in tongues? No?” KICK. “Do you have a list of things to do? No?” KICK. The British say the boy is the father of the man. I kind of wish the man could be the father of the boy.

I can’t fix the years that are behind me, but some people who read this blog are younger than I am, so I know someone out there will, or at least can, benefit from my experience. The rest get to repeat it, as Santayana more or less said. Come over and join me on the Group W bench.

I better get Aeschylus out and put in 30 minutes. After Aeschylus, Thucydides will be like a day at the spa.

The Maze of the Minotaur was Child’s Play Compared to Aeschylus

I feel like climbing a big mountain and shouting from the top. I am so happy about my homemade shower spray. My bathroom practically cleans itself. Now if I could just do something about the 9,000 hairs my body ejects onto the floor each day. Where do they come from? How is it that I still have hair left?

I literally see hairs on the floor as I’m putting the vacuum cleaner away.

It must be pretty obvious that I’m blogging in order to procrastinate, although I really am happy about the shower. The tub and shower take up 80% of bathroom cleaning time. The toilet takes five minutes, and four of those minutes are just waiting for the chemicals to work. The floor takes three minutes. The sink is quick. If you can defeat the tub and shower, the rest is cake.

It’s good that I published the above information for all the world. Blogs are so important.

In other news, The Oresteia is killing me.

I believe the book (the parts Aeschylus wrote) ends at somewhere around the 170-page mark. I am at about 120, I think. I can get through 20 pages per day without spontaneously dying. According to the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus, college students get two days to read the whole mess.

It makes me wonder: was I right to refuse to do my assigned reading when I was in college? Is it reasonable to expect a human being to do this much work for one course (especially a course about something that isn’t important)?

I have done what writers are supposed to do. I have started my essay by starting conflict and provoking thought, so I can go on to resolve things. All good writers are basically trolls.

Actually, it is fair to make people read this in two days. First of all, no college student reads it the way I’m reading it. I read one page, and then I turn to Professor Logan’s incredibly badly written, turgid, pedantic commentary. Then I go back to Aeschylus. I look stuff up on the web. I check pronunciations, which I forget by the next day. I don’t have a lecturer to explain things to me, so I refer to poor old Logan. This adds time, but I’m also avoiding spending time in class.

Of course, I also avoided spending time in class when I was in college, by choosing not to go, so I leave it to you to add things up and decide what’s right.

If I were still in college, I would read the book in two sittings (assuming I read it at all), and then I would get drunk. I would not look anything up. I would only learn what the instructor wanted me to repeat on the exam. Things would go much faster.

Logan’s commentary is really disconcerting. It reinforces all my negative feelings about liberal arts courses and intellectuals.

The man apparently knows Aeschylus-era Greek really well. Points for that. And he knows a lot about Greek literature. That’s where my admiration ends.

His writing is so stuffy and pretentious, I have a hard time understanding it, even though it’s in English. And I’m not stupid. I got a perfect score on the verbal portion of the GRE, which is probably more than Professor Logan can say.

Here’s something most people don’t understand about intellectuals: they are not particularly smart. The word “intellectual” doesn’t really mean “intelligent person,” although we have twisted it to mean that. It really means “member of a relatively small group of highly insecure academics and artists who read the same books and use the same jargon.” It describes accomplishment, interest, and affiliation, not aptitude.

Dick Cavett is an intellectual. Albert Einstein probably was not. You can have an IQ of 110 and be a perfectly sound intellectual. Universities are full of tenured people who are not smart.

Professor Logan is definitely an intellectual, because he winds his convoluted words tighter than the wire on a motor armature, and to understand one of his sentences, you have to unwind it slowly. That’s not good writing. It’s clever, but it’s not good. The purpose of explanatory prose is to make things easier to understand, not harder.

When you go to college, they beat you over the head with simplicity and concision. “Keep it brief. Use small words.” But they can’t seem to take that advice, themselves.

The commentary itself demonstrates one of my many quibbles with intellectuals. They think way too highly of what they do. It’s full of comments that are completely unnecessary. Logan skips over things that are utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader, and then he puts in fluff, like, “It is the hour also means ‘it is the crucial (or opportune) moment.’”

Okay, great. Thanks. I would never have figured that out.

If he took out the junk that adds nothing, shortened and straightened the knotted-up language, and made a better effort to explain things that actually need explaining, his book would be a whole lot better.

It does have one great virtue, however. It’s free. Or at least it’s included in my Scrib’d subscription.

As for the plays themselves…not good. I understand their historical importance, but you would have to be insane to read them for pleasure or attend a performance.

One of the things I don’t like about the plays is their thick coating of excessive emotion. To describe them accurately, we would need to coin new words for the territory beyond “melodramatic” and “maudlin.” The prose isn’t purple; it’s ultraviolet. I guess it’s not prose, since the plays are musicals. Anyway, you get the point. It’s like something a 21st-century stalker would write. Way over the top.

Here’s another problem: there is no action. Agamemnon comes home. He takes a bath. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus stab him to death. Orestes comes home (apparently years later, with no indication that there was a gap), and he yaps for a while and then kills Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. No car chases. No sub-plots. No Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No Touchstone. Just whining and stabbing.

Couple these issues with the fact that all the female roles are played by men, and you have a recipe for a bad evening.

I did learn a few things; had I not, I would feel pretty bummed about what I am putting myself through.

Christians have a concept called “generational curses.” The idea is that demons and fallen angels keep track of families, and they find ways to stick to us and cause us to repeat negative behaviors. This is what the trilogy is all about. Agamemnon’s ancestors committed disgusting murders. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter just so he can get a good wind to go on a completely unnecessary raid. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus kill Agamemnon and mutilate his body. Orestes kills Clytaemnestra (his mother) and Aegisthus, fully expecting supernatural consequences to fall on him and his seed.

Throughout the plays, the characters refer to spirits that drive violent revenge. Words translated “curse” or “fate” can actually refer to these spirits. At one point, the word “daimon” (our English “demon”) is translated “fate.”

The New Testament was written in Greek. The Greek word used for “demon” was “daimonion,” which is a form of “daimon.”

It’s all very interesting, because I know that evil spirits control people who aren’t led by the Holy Spirit. A Christian who is submitted to the Holy Spirit is “Spirit-led”; he is influenced greatly, but he isn’t a slave. A person who isn’t submitted to the Holy Spirit is enslaved by spirits that destroy his free will. He can’t change much, even if he wants to.

When I was in school, they taught me that “tragedy” doesn’t mean “misfortune” or “sad story.” They taught me that it described a tale of self-destruction. A tragic character knows, or should know, that his own behavior is ruining him, but he persists. He can’t stop. The story of the House of Atreus (The Oresteia) is a tragedy, and the characters know their plight is spirit-driven.

Life still works this way. We don’t like to admit it. Nonbelievers scoff at the idea that spirits exist, and Christians think they’re too good to be infested. But if you don’t get clear of the beings that control you, you will never really serve God or walk in victory.

In the law, there is a concept called “adverse possession.” The brief version is this: if someone who hates you camps out on your property for seven years, they own it. You have a responsibility to oust them. If you don’t do it, the next time you show up, they can have you arrested for trespassing.

That’s what life is like for most of us. We are inhabited by spirits, and we don’t throw them out. We love them and serve them. We love the things they give us: lust, greed, violence, pride…whatever. We decide our demonic drives are good, so we let the demons stay. Then we lose the ability to get rid of them, and they can do whatever they want inside of us. This includes things like disease and mental illness. We want the things we think are good, but we don’t realize there is a price.

The ancient Greeks were ignorant. They didn’t know God. They worshiped demons and fallen angels. But they knew spirits were real. They had a basic understanding of how spirits shape lives. The fact that they would equate “fate” and “demon” says it all. If you have demons, they determine your fate.

Pretty wild.

I can just imagine what would have happened had I raised my hand in Lit. Hum. class and brought this up. The same academic who loved teaching about Manichaeans and Zorastrians probably would have turned purple and exploded. I may be wrong; maybe he would have found the beliefs of modern charismatic Christians interesting, from an academic standpoint. But I very much doubt it.

The characters in Greek literature are shallow, violent jerks of limited intelligence. Academics don’t seem to have problems with that, just as most don’t seem to have a problem with murderous, cruel Islam. They do get upset with Jesus, though. When they’re not claiming he was a gay vegetarian socialist who loved gun control.

I think Thucydides is next on the list, and after Aeschylus, I can’t wait. Anything is better than what I’m dealing with now.

You can’t understand Aeschylus. You can’t really understand the Greek, even if you become fluent. You can’t understand pre-technological people. You can’t understand the people who lived during the same decades as Aeschylus, because one century is not like another, even in the ancient world. You can’t understand topical references. You can’t reconstruct the music.

It must be frustrating to be a classics scholar and realize you will never get any closer to your subject than you were the day you got your Bachelor of Arts. It must be a bummer to be in a field that is impervious to progress.

Reading Logan’s book is like reading the Talmud. The Jews who wrote the Talmud didn’t know God personally, so they guessed a lot, and they contradicted each other. The scholars who study Aeschylus can never have a deep understanding of his work, so they do what the Jewish scholars did. In the end, there is no substitute for intimate firsthand knowledge.

Interesting.

At least I’ll be able to say I read this stuff. That counts for something.

Humans Bury Them; Satan Cremates Them

First, some housekeeping. Or at least some trivia to warm up.

Do you have a Windows 10 computer? Do you have an SSD (solid state hard drive)? Is your system still taking a long time to boot up? If so, kill Cortana. You may have killed this wretched, intrusive, domineering fishwife before, but she has a tendency to come back to life, like a tumor driven into remission.

You will want a program called Unlocker. Go get it. Install it. Then navigate to Cortana’s filthy hidden burrow, position her carefully, and give her a curb stomp. I’ll paste directions I found elsewhere:

Navigate to the following folder: “C:/Windows/SystemApps/Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy”
Right click “SearchUI.exe” and select “Unlocker”
Under the action menu, select “Rename”
Give it a new name such as “Disabled.SearchUI.exe”
Click OK.

Recently, I’ve been tormenting myself with the Oresteia of Aeschylus. I recommend renaming Cortana “Clytaemnestra.exe.”

Cortana will come back one day, and when she does, just stomp her again.

I guess I’m out of touch, but I do not want a computerized nanny. I don’t want to be able to talk to my PC, because that means it listens to me. I don’t want to be able to communicate with hand signals, because that means it watches me. I don’t want it to hear my questions and give me totally inappropriate and useless answers. I have Google and ten fingers (the table saw has been treating me well).

I don’t want my computer to take forty minutes to boot so it can bring me the latest sports scores every time I turn it on. I hate professional sports. I don’t want to see headlines. I don’t want to see great new stuff that just popped up on Amazon or Ebay. LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE AND SERVE ME. That’s what I want.

I think the nerds who run the world are involved in a race nobody wanted them to run in the first place. They’re trying to recreate Tony Stark’s Jarvis on everyone’s desk or in the pocket of their fashionable but not stylish Banana Republic hipster shirts.

I guess if you were accepted by Cal Tech at the age of five and you’ve never had a date, you may think having a computer take care of you is cool. Just like having our wonderful government take care of you is cool, because hey, no government has ever gone overboard and done things like genocide or thought control.

The fact that you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should; just because you can write a presumptuous, paternalistic program doesn’t mean you should. I’m a big boy; I can pull up my own pants and wipe my own nose. I don’t need a computer to do absolutely everything for me.

I have a bloatware Siri copy on my Android phone. I never use it. I need to root the phone and get rid of it, along with Google- (did I mistype that?) and Google Hangouts.

I rejected Google+, so now I can’t get comment feedback on Youtube. Probably for the best, considering my tendency to get on people’s nerves.

Some of our modern electronic minder programs are useful, for certain people. I got my dad an Android phone because I needed to be able to find him at any time, using his GPS signal. That’s nice. The phone has a program that will help emergency responders if something happens to him. Wonderful. But as far as I know, I’m not suffering from dementia yet, so I would like to dodder along unassisted until the shapes on the wallpaper start talking to me.

Naturally, my dad’s phone only works with Android Device Manager about a third of the time, and every time he puts it in the holster, the flashlight comes on and kills the battery. But I give the nerds credit for trying. I’m sure it will be 100% successful at gathering information that could potentially be used against him.

I still can’t believe Google tracks our movements by default. If you haven’t checked out your giant Google GPS map yet, you really need to. I looked at mine. It showed trips I had made years before. I’m sure Obama would never use that to put me in prison or anything.

What else was I going to write about? Oh, yeah.

Yesterday I continued working my way through a book called Death Dealer. The author (or at least the person who wrote most of it) is Rudolf Hoess (not Rudolf Hess), a man who served as Kommandant of Auschwitz. He describes himself as the greatest mass murderer in history.

I find reading about the Holocaust instructive, because God uses it to show me Satan’s patterns of behavior. Hoess’s book has shown me a lot. For one thing, it has shown me the great similarities between Nazi genocide and the child-sacrifice (better known as “abortion”) movement.

I’ve always compared abortion to peeing in the pool. If you stand on the side of the pool and pee into it from above, people are outraged. If you jump in, you can pee all you want, and no one cares, even if they know it’s happening.

Everyone who uses a public pool knows it’s full of pee. People jump in at noon and get out at two, and they never go to the toilet. People don’t mind, because we are used to shutting down disturbing thoughts about things we can’t, or don’t want, to change.

Abortion works the same way. If unwanted babies had to be torn apart publicly, we would be lynching abortionists, the way we used to. No question about it. Satan got around this issue by arranging for executions inside the uterus, inside medical exam rooms, where the carnage goes unseen. We rip babies’ bellies open and twist their limbs off without even the courtesy of an anaesthetic, and we tell the mothers they’re losing “clumps of cells.” They decide to believe it, and instead of going home with immediate, crushing guilt, they go home with hidden guilt that grows inside them and reemerges later.

The Germans and Austrians (and many other anti-Semites around the world) treated genocide the way we treat abortion.

The Nazis committed a lot of murders publicly, but they eventually adopted a practice of hiding the killing. They started out with rifles, but they later opted for cyanide gas. Why?

In his book, Hoess reveals that violent, open killings were very hard on the SS!

Hoess says that when SS members were required to line people up and shoot them, they became depressed. They hated the Jews, but they were not completely blind. They had to get large groups of strangers to dig pits, strip naked, and stand beside the pits while they were shot and shoved inside. Among these groups, there were many children, women, and old people. For some reason, murdering the weak bothers people more than murdering the strong. Anyway, SS men became drunks, and a number committed suicide.

Zyklon B, a cyanide preparation originally created to kill bugs and rats, changed all that.

When the gas chambers were built, the whole process became relatively free of stress. The Jews were ushered into the stripping rooms and told they were going to be showered and then relocated. Other Jews, the Sonderkommandos, were forced to do most of the work of herding them, lying to them, carrying off their possessions, and burning the bodies.

It was very much like abortion.

Today, if you want to kill your unborn baby, you drive to the abattoir in the privacy of your own car. You go into a privately owned building (or a public hospital with security), where employees work to suppress your guilt and fear, just as the Sonderkommandos lied to the Jews. You and your family never see the baby you kill. Some of the employees see, because they have to count the parts and make sure every finger and toe has been removed from you, but you don’t have to deal with it.

You’re just like Adolf Eichmann, who issued extermination orders and then sat in his office and let people like Hoess carry the water.

Here’s a remarkable parallel: Hitler burned dead Jews, in a Satanic effort to violate Jewish law and remove not just the Jews, but all evidence of their existence, from the earth. We burn aborted babies.

After the war, we found out that almost no Germans or Austrians knew about the slaughter. Neither did the Poles who collaborated. Almost no one knew! But that’s not surprising, because there were no former Nazis. After the way\r, we learned that everyone who had been in Germany and Austria had hated Hitler and his ideas. I wonder where the Nazis went. Maybe they’re still there, hiding in basements.

Obviously, people knew, and most Germans and Austrians adored Hitler and supported him with all their hearts. They were thrilled to see the Jews go, and they helped Hitler get rid of them. They smelled the burning flesh and rotting meat. They saw the ashes. They saw the full train cars going one way and the empty cars coming back. They heard from witnesses who worked in the camps. But they didn’t have to see the killing, and they got all the stuff the dead Jews left behind, so they were okay with it.

Hoess’s book is remarkable. From the tone, you would think he was describing his stint as a Wal-Mart manager. Eichmann and his other superiors didn’t understand his problems. His underlings didn’t obey orders. Bad things happened, and he couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t get enough food or water. There weren’t enough guards. The pastries in the conference room were never fresh. It’s all very cold and matter-of-fact, and he’s talking about a place where babies were fried alive in the hot fat of burning Jews.

Kermit Gosnell could not be any less empathetic.

Hoess never repented of anti-Semitism. In his book, he complains about anti-Semitic propaganda that pandered to the lowest instincts of the Germans…because it undermined “scientific” anti-Semitism. He continued to call the Jews Germany’s greatest enemies. He firmly believed that if even a stump of the tree were left, it would grow back and annihilate the Germans and Austrians.

He remained faithful to National Socialism. He thought it was the answer to his people’s problems.

He sounded a lot like people who defend abortion. They talk about the unborn as though they were landmines that need to be dug up; as though they were plague-carrying lice. You don’t get emotional about landmines. You say, “There are lots of old landmines in this region of the map, and here is the most efficient way to get rid of them.”

Abortion-lovers say, “They will grow up to be unwanted (i.e. black). They will grow up to be criminals (i.e. black). They will grow up to be poor (i.e. black) and have to go on welfare. They will be unhappy. They will cost us a lot of money. The most efficient way to prevent them from causing problems is to ‘terminate’ them before they fully arrive.”

Abortion is all about getting rid of black people. Don’t fool yourself.

If you want to get people to participate in something horrible, first you hide the horror from them. You make it look clean and peaceful. Later, you convince them that it’s holy. You make them think anyone who opposes it is filthy and evil.

If the Nazis had won, we would now be arresting and killing anyone who tried to keep a Jew alive. Such people would be enemies of the state. They would be reviled. Similarly, we now treat abortion opponents, who are simply objecting to the murder of babies, the way baby-murderers used to be treated.

Evil is good, and good is evil. That’s how the depraved think; this kind of thinking defines depravity. It’s the reason God destroyed the world, and it’s the reason he’s going to destroy it again. Depravity is worse than mere sin, because it makes you incapable of being corrected. It’s the reason hell exists. Our loving God, who is always right, throws depraved people into it every day, because he can’t fix them, and they are a danger to the rest of us.

American Christians are strange. Many think abortion is wonderful. Many of those same people read about the ancient Jews sacrificing their children to Moloch, and they feel superior. We’ve murdered dozens of millions of babies in the name of convenience. The ancient Jews never began to approach that kind of body count. Who will be judged more harshly?

At least the Jews had the courage and honesty to deliver their babies and kill them openly.

The story of God versus Satan is the story of a race war. No one seems to understand it. Genocide is an integral part of it. God’s people are one race, and Satan’s people are the other.

Christians will be wiped out eventually, and very few Jews will be left on earth. The devil will win the earth, and then God will come and take it back. It’s like the Nazi notion of liebensraum (“room to live”), which was used to justify conquest and genocide. One big difference is that in the war between Christians and the lost, the victors will be the ones who die. Strange.

Christians who believe in organizing and taking over are crazy. It will never work. God’s kingdom is not of this world. He will not help you. Your enemies will have his permission to defeat you. If you want to own guns for self-defense, great, but you will never be able to conquer America for God with them. You will just give the lost ammunition for propaganda.

It’s good to know what you have permission to do and what is forbidden. It helps you avoid wasting time and working toward defeat.

Try to get in touch with the Holy Spirit and get his guidance. Without it, you will just have to learn from hard knocks, and some of those knocks are very, very hard.

Mars Attacks…my Last Nerve

Yesterday I decided to watch The Martian to kill time while the birds were out. Now I am annoyed.

Spoilers ahead. Duck and cover.

This movie is about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who gets left behind on Mars. The rest of the crew thinks he’s dead, so they go back to earth. Then they find out he’s alive, so NASA goes nuts trying to bring him back. Because life on earth without Matt Damon is unthinkable. Without him, his duty to preach sanctimoniously to the public would fall on Leo DiCaprio, making it necessary for him to charter twice as many carbon-belching jets.

The rescue job is not easy, because Mars is not very close to the earth. At best, in the story, it takes over a year just to get him new couture underpants from Dolce & Gabbana, let alone bring him back.

I don’t care about the nerd issues. Some people, I’m sure, are flipping out because of minor technical errors and deceptions. They’re probably upset because the sand storm that drives the crew off Mars couldn’t possibly be as damaging as it is in the movie. Stuff like that. Hey, this isn’t science class. News flash: there is no such thing as warp drive, either, and during your lifetime, there never will be. Get over it.

The plot issues are what bug me.

First, the deus ex machina problem. More accurately, let’s cut off two letters and call it what it is: deus ex China.

Ancient Greek dramatists often ran out of bad ideas, just as dramatists do today, and one of their fixes was the god machine. They would rig up a contraption that lowered a totally new character onto the stage. This was the machina, or machine. The character was the deus, or god. The god would wave his magic wand, click his heels together three times, and make the gorgon disappear or afflict the Spartans with the pox. Or whatever.

These days we don’t see Greeks being lowered with pulleys all that much, except in German nightclubs, but we do see similarly unsatisfying copouts in movies and shows. It’s a crappy trick to play on an audience. You spend an hour or more developing a terrible problem for your protagonist, and the audience tries to guess how he will fix it, and then you slap them in the face with Proteus or Poseidon or Steve Jobs, swinging in on a rope.

I mean, obviously, it wouldn’t be Proteus today. It would be Bruce Willis or maybe Sylvester Stallone, whose machina would probably be a walker or mobility scooter. “Stop, or my Certified Nursing Assistant Will Shoot!”

I love obscure references.

Screenwriters should take the time to come up with clever solutions, instead of sandbagging people with unsatisfying cavalry charges from left field.

I also love mixing metaphors. And to joyfully split infinitives.

In The Martian, NASA tries to send a supply ship to Mars, and it blows up. Matt Damon is a dead man, right? And he can forget about that crate of Clinique moisturizer. Or maybe they’ll come up with some clever plan! But no, nothing like that happens. Instead, they cut to a mysterious office in China, where two Chinese people start talking about giving their secret Chinese rocket to NASA for another shot.

Come on. Where was this rocket six months earlier, when the whole world was clamoring over the potential earth-shattering loss of Matt Damon? Nowhere. The writer hadn’t thought of it yet.

Cheap.

Maybe it was still on the truck to Harbor Freight.

By the way, the rocket doesn’t have a fuse or a colorful wrapper with something like “Dancing Fire Dragon Cluster” printed on it, and it’s not launched from a bottle. Chinese technology has improved a lot.

I think it’s safe to assume the owner’s manual is incomprehensible. “For make mission Mars, to apply pressure dial A in direction of Mongolia.”

Here’s another thing: one of Damon’s main torments is the presence of disco music. The mission’s commander is a woman, and woman have hellish taste in music, so she only brings disco, ignoring the desires of the rest of the crew. When the crew leaves the planet, the only music Damon can find in the Mars shelter’s computers is garbage like “Ring my Bell” and “Push Push in the Bush.”

The cruelty is appalling.

Here’s the question: how does anyone get to Mars in the smartphone/micro SD card age without a ton of MP3’s? It can’t happen. Totally impossible. I think my phone has 80 gigs of storage. Not sure; whatever it is, it’s full of demotivational posters and pictures of Grumpy Cat. Anyway, there is no way NASA would let a crazy woman strand people in outer space with Leo Sayer, in an age when you can store 400 albums in a card smaller than a Chiclet. And if she did, he would kill himself after a week. He would boogie-oogie-oogie out of the airlock and do the hustle with his helmet off until he died.

Pretty lame, right?

When Damon sets up a communications link to earth, he is able to send email. If he can send email, he can receive music files, right? Apparently not. We can put a man on Mars, but we can’t send him The White Album.

Here’s another problem. NASA decides to send the crew transport ship back to Mars with stuff for Matt. He has to launch a rocket NASA left on Mars and rendezvous with the crew ship to get food. Being Matt Damon, he’s probably hoping for Evian and organic free-trade seaweed paleo yogurt.

Okay…if he can rendezvous with the ship and pick up food…WHY CAN’T HE GET ON THE SHIP AND LEAVE?

Final problem: Apollo 13. Hello? We’ve been here before. Unforeseen technical problems on a space mission, followed by frantic cooperation between astronauts and brilliant people on the ground, garnished with numerous astonishing McGyverisms that keep people alive. And Apollo 13 was a real mission, and the movie was better. So what’s the point of The Martian? It’s not even the first survival movie sited on Mars. Does anyone remember Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Maybe not. But it happened.

I haven’t seen the end of the movie yet. I assume Matt will live, although the person who wrote this thing may have the unfortunate idea that it would be original to let him die. Unhappy endings are not new to cinema, so I feel like he might as well live. If the movie ends with him sitting on a rock, watching the sun set on Mars, feeling peaceful about becoming a piece of frozen jerky, I will probably have another rant to throw.

They say there are no original plots. Maybe that’s true, but we can do better than this. The movie is entertaining; it shows what NASA disasters would be like in the lolcats era. But it’s not The Third Man. More like The Thirdteenth Reheating of the Corpse of Apollo 13.

I guess I’ll fire up the DVR and see if Matt Damon dies. I’m not optimistic. I own a lot of Chinese tools.

More

Well, now I’m even more upset. It looks like the plan was to bring Will Hunting back, not to drop off Chinese food. I totally misunderstood. But I still feel vindicated, because I remembered another plot hole.

To take off to get to the mother ship, Damon has to get to another rocket. His crew left on one rocket, and NASA had another one miles away, waiting for a new crew.

So…he’s sitting around for months, starving, scrounging for tools and food…and he knows he can get in his rover and go to the other rocket, where he can find useful goodies.

Why doesn’t he go? Why? Why?

I much prefer space entertainment that doesn’t even try to involve reality. Give me Captain Kirk with a flip phone and a phaser, engaging openly in intergalactic racism and genocide without a care in the world. Hipsters in space? You can have them.

More Bomb Than Bombshell

I have something important to write about today. The new Top Gear is really bad.

I got in the habit of recording TV shows because it gave me something to do when I took the birds out of their cages. Sometimes they interact with me a lot, but Maynard really likes standing on my ankle and staring into space, so his out time is not always exciting. Top Gear became a favorite. I don’t care all that much about cars, but I love good comedy, especially when it’s politically conservative.

Jeremy Clarkson was the soul of the show. He turned it into the biggest TV franchise on the planet, and on his watch, they brought in James May and Richard Hammond, two of the funniest TV hosts in existence.

If the BBC suits had had their way (I am guessing without proof), the show probably would have been about hideous practical cars actual people could afford, and it would have been full of boring information about mileage and reliability. Instead, it’s about ridiculous supercars that cost seven figures, and they spend a lot of time crushing stuff and blowing things up.

Clarkson had a lot of problems. Sometimes he offended hippies in ways no one cares about, but he had a few incidents that appeared to reveal racist tendencies. For example, he and Richard Hammond looked at a wobbly bridge in the Burma, just as an Asian man walked onto it, and Clarkson said there was “a slope on it.”

I don’t know why Hammond didn’t get in trouble, since he was part of the joke.

Clarkson kept offending, and he was put on double-secret probation. Then he flipped out and punched a Top Gear employee. Something about not being able to get a steak.

The Beeb finally had to give principle more weight than greed, and Clarkson was “sacked,” as the British like to say. It conjures images of limp bodies of former employees being carried out of their workplaces in burlap bags.

I agree with their decision. You can’t let employees hit each other. It was cute when he punched Piers Morgan, but that was on his own time, and it was a public service for which he should have received a knighthood. Punching a subordinate is not acceptable.

Fans lost their minds, as though a frivolous TV show were essential to the survival of the universe. They cluttered the show’s cringing, defensive, groveling Facebook posts with comments reading, “Bring back Clarkson, Hammond, and May!”

Hammond and May joined in, refusing to work on the show without Clarkson. Maybe they’re loyal, or maybe they understand what a huge talent he is, and they want the money to keep pouring in. The merry trio departed the BBC and signed up for a show on Amazon Prime, which is apparently a network. If you’ve never heard of it, join the club. To me, “Amazon Prime” means a sucker deal where Amazon charges you a hundred bucks a year to bring your packages on time. Maybe people in England watch Amazon TV, but I have never felt like tuning in.

In the meantime, the BBC has made a lot of horrible errors.

1. They started 2016 with a whole bunch of reruns featuring the old cast, reminding people how great they were and that they would be impossible to replace. They’re still doing this, even though the new hosts are in place.

2. They hired Chris Evans, a squeaky-voiced Celt (perhaps I repeat myself) who collects supercars, to replace the boys. I don’t even know what to say about this. Evans is the opposite of funny. He is incapable of ad-libbing, he has no delivery, he is lacking even the rudiments of car-aficionado masculinity, and he throws up during fast laps. The man THROWS UP.

He seems like a nice guy, but he’s so boring I fast-forward through his segments. That’s how bad it is. He makes me feel sorry for him. I never felt bad for the others. Not even when they were driving through India in the summer and Hammond and May fixed Clarkson’s car so the heat couldn’t be turned off.

3. After they hired Chris Evans and made him look like a big deal, they faltered and hired Matt LeBlanc, the American comic actor and holder of the fastest Top Gear celebrity lap time. There are a number of problems with this.

First, LeBlanc is a riot. He is highly, highly talented. He knows cars. He has magnificent comic timing, and he is likeable. He even looks good and appears to produce testosterone. You can picture him with a wrench in his hand. He is everything Chris Evans is not. The contrast makes things awkward.

Second, they didn’t hire the hosts at the same time. When the BBC brought LeBlanc in, it looked like they realized how bad Chris Evans was and decided to undermine him, and this is probably exactly what happened. It makes Evans look threatened, which he clearly is. More awkwardness.

Third, they never came up with a third host. England is packed with funny performers, and they couldn’t find one. So now instead of a versatile three-man dynamic, they have two guys who look like they’re trying to cut each other’s throats. More accurately, it looks like Chris Evans has already had his throat cut, and they’re just waiting for him to admit it.

4. They hired two lesser hosts who don’t appear during the main show. I forget their names. They have zero stage presence. They are not funny. They are not entertaining in any way. They have no chemistry with the audience or each other. And their presence makes it look like the BBC is waiting for Evans to get fed up and leave so one of them can move into his place. This is probably true.

5. They made the show an hour longer. LeBlanc and Evans host the first hour, and the two young guys drag us through the second. When you’re struggling for ideas and content, why would you increase production demand by a factor of two?

They need to can Evans (cans are sturdier than sacks) and find someone else. It’s a shame Jason Statham is too big for the job. He’d be perfect.

I would love to watch the new Clarkson show, which is called The Grand Tour, but how do you get it without sitting in front of the computer and paying for it? I get Top Gear with basic cable, so it feels like it’s free. I’m not going to shell out for a computer service and watch it on a 24″ monitor. Forget that.

If there’s one good thing about the 2016 season it is this: Maynard can’t tell the difference. He is happy to sit on my leg and watch anything I watch.

I hope Amazon finds some way to get the new show inserted into a cable channel real human beings will actually watch. Warts and all, Clarkson is giant surrounded by midgets.

If You’re not Climbing, You’re Descending

God keeps helping me by showing me how messed up I am.

Hooray. Hooray.

No, seriously; it’s wonderful. You can’t look at God’s correction as a source of discouragement. He wouldn’t bother to criticize if he didn’t provide a way out. The way out is the thing to focus on. When God criticizes you, he is helping you fix a problem.

I suppose this is not always true. I know God sometimes rules against people and puts his seal on the decisions, so there is nothing they can do. But if you’re a believer, and you’re striving to align yourself with God, that probably doesn’t apply to you.

This morning I realized the connection between receiving correction well and giving in the right spirit. Here is something Paul said about giving material wealth:

But this I say: He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.

From the context, it’s obvious that he’s talking about donations of earthly wealth, but the same principle applies to correction. When God criticizes you, he is asking you to give more of yourself. The usual response, if you’re me, is to feel bummed out and think, “Now I have to give something ELSE up.” In order to apply the correction you receive, you have to give something up to God; you have to cede more territory. If you feel resentful or discouraged, you’re a grudging giver.

The really sad thing is that you give God more of yourself, you’re not giving at all; you’re just returning something God already owns. And you’re not doing it for him. We can’t do anything for God. Everything we think we do for him is actually an imposition. He didn’t cause our problems. He doesn’t have to be here helping us. It’s all for us.

Sometimes when I pray, I ask God if the thing I’m asking for is available on the shelf of the homeless shelter. By that I mean to acknowledge that I’m receiving charity, not a paycheck I’ve earned.

Your attitude toward God matters. How do you like doing things for young people, when they whine and act entitled? Not a whole lot. It’s not rewarding for you, and it tends to reinforce their destructive mindset. Surely God has as much sense as you do.

So I am trying to be less of a jerk when God criticizes me. I’ve been begging for criticism for a long time, so it makes no sense to be discouraged when I get it. It’s the single best thing God gives us, apart from salvation. It is a path to power, peace, and authority.

If you’re having problems, and you can’t find peace, ask God what you’re doing wrong. I guarantee you this: whatever your external circumstances are, you can’t live in despair or gloom if you’re doing things right.

I wish I knew of a church that teaches this stuff and also adds teaching about prayer in tongues and the power of the Holy Spirit. Spirit-filled churches accept the baptism with the Spirit and prayer in tongues, but they teach us to be greedy hypocrites who do as we please and never grow up. Churches that deny the Holy Spirit teach us to grow and be corrected, but they teach us to do it all by ourselves, which is pride.

At my last church, it was just about impossible to get people to pray for God to correct anyone. They thought God never punished people. They thought all of our problems were caused by the devil and lack of faith. Their idea of sound prayer was to beg God to drive the devil out while they maintained a tight grip on the devil’s tail, to keep him from leaving. As a result, they saw very few healings, and there were deaths that were probably unnecessary.

It’s funny, but I got a number of healings there. Kidney stones, gallstones, and knee problems. It was frustrating to see other people who could not get help.

That church is still messed up. It’s still in a tiny rented room in a dirty, neglected building, and they still have a high turnover rate, because people don’t like the way things are done and the way they’re treated. The pastor’s brother and uncle left!

Things are not going great at Trinity Church, which I attended until 2012. Richie Wilkerson, the pastor’s son, presided over the marriage of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and thought it was a good thing. I don’t even know what to say about that. Rule of thumb: if you’re a pastor, don’t tie yourself to benefactors who are currently displaying their genitals online and have no plans to stop.

Then he got a reality show. Not doing well. He opened a new church, which rents a school auditorium for $1200 a month. No building. I am also told he had difficulty selling tickets to his yearly conference this time. If true, this is a new problem. It did well in the past. It may be that kids associated the conference with Trinity, not him.

The new church was recently sued for using copyrighted artwork in its advertising. Copyright suits can be incredibly costly; even the attorneys’ fees are astronomical. I assume the Wilkersons are shielded personally by the corporate veil, but the lawsuit is still very bad news.

It’s actually a little weird. Kim Kardashian strains the wiring of the Internet every time she posts on Instagram, and her show, which is surely boring, evil, and stupid, has made her very, very rich. Richie Wilkerson is doing more or less the same things, and his church can’t afford a warehouse to renovate and preach in. But then Satan is very familiar with the old expression: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You can’t align with his people and expect to be treated well.

Anyway, where are people supposed to go to church these days? Church doorways are like choke points where Satan’s troops pick people off as they enter. If the pastors can’t get blessed, what hope do you have if you listen to them?

Keep asking God to criticize and correct you. He will listen. If you can’t find a man to lead you, the Holy Spirit is always available. That’s the best news I have.

And stay away from crazy preachers. It’s better to be covered in leeches.

Faithful as the Dew

I am cogitating on the tenacity of household filth.

Today after I showered, I took a wet sponge and wiped the floor in the general area of the trash can. This floor was mopped with bleach this week. It should be as clean as a clean room at Intel. The sponge came up with a grey line of crud on it.

Where does this stuff come from? How can this happen in four days?

I think the underwear gnomes from South Park are shredding their stolen drawers, turning them into dust, and spreading them on my floors.

1. Spread underwear dust on floors.
2. . . .
3. Steve loses mind.

Is that reference too obscure? I don’t care. When did that ever bother me?

The hairs are even worse. They reappear on the floor within two hours of vacuuming and mopping. I actually find hairs on the floor while I’m putting the vacuum away.

Maybe I have some sort of condition. Maybe I’m the Reverse Bubble Boy. Instead of protecting me from the world with a bubble, I should protect the world from me.

MOOPS! MOOPS!

I can never resist a good obscure reference. Never.

I would ask for suggestions, but I don’t think the problems can be fixed. I should put grey tile on the floor so nothing shows.

I need to do what elderly women all over the world do: have one filthy bathroom for actual use, and one spotless, cordoned-off display bathroom which no one is allowed to approach.

MOOPS!

They do Exist

I’m in my dad’s office, waiting for the coffee to take effect before starting on some bookkeeping chores, so I will write.

I am very excited about the way my homemade shower spray worked out. I’m still using it, and the shower is cleaner than it was back when I scrubbed it once a week.

Back when I was SUPPOSED to scrub it once a week.

Every other day, before I get out of the shower, I spray the parts of it that are hardest to get at from outside, and then I get out and spray the rest of it. Takes one minute. I spray the glass and the metal, not just the tile. If you look at the directions from storebought spray, you will see they recommend scrubbing once in a while, in addition to spraying. I guess they can say whatever they want, to prevent angry people from calling up and complaining that their showers aren’t clean, but in my case, no scrubbing is needed. It would be a total waste of time. My spray even wears away the accumulated calcium scale on the plumbing.

The single biggest non-water ingredient in the spray is no-scrub shower cleaner. Home Depot sells Zep brand cleaner in gallon jugs, cheap. They probably also sell their own Chinese brand, but I’m not sure I trust it. Once ever ten days or so I refill my spray bottle with Zep, water, Dawn, and dishwasher rinse agent, and I’m ready to go.

The Zep costs around 40 cents per dose, and the dishwashing rinse runs about 12 cents, give or take. The dishwashing liquid costs three cents. So I’m paying less than $20 per year for a clean shower. And it also works on the sink. The prepared spray Home Depot sells (one brand) would run $200 per year. You would have to be out of your mind.

When your shower and tub are off your back, cleaning a bathroom is a joke.

Sooner or later I will get real and add the Dawn and the rinse stuff to the big jug of shower cleaner, and then mixing the spray will be a lot faster than it is now. It will just be a matter of adding water.

Are you as thrilled about this as I am? I hope so. You are. I can tell. Try to contain yourselves.

I’m sorry to admit that I’m drinking coffee. It’s a problem. The good Lord showed me that coffee destroys peace, and it’s true. If you drink coffee off and on, and you react the way I do, you will find that you have more peace on the days you go without it. But I am dealing with my dad’s business affairs these days, and I find that a little jolt of caffeine helps me get moving.

I used to drink huge quantities of coffee when I was in law school and then practicing. Law school was a little dull, so I needed something to keep me alert. Actual legal work is much less dull than law school, but I still felt like I needed a boost once in a while. Now I find that very small amounts of coffee work very well. It’s like my normal state is just below the state where I need to be in order to do boring things, and a tiny amount of caffeine pushes me over the hump.

As for my new responsibilities, it’s very strange, dealing with someone who is slipping. It’s not a predictable or consistent thing. They stay strong in some areas while failing in others, and they have days that are better than others. My dad can still do math and crossword puzzles, but sometimes he will have a real problem with something that shouldn’t be challenging at all. Usually it’s memory related.

At some point a few months back, he reached a state where he couldn’t do a good job looking after bills and financial matters, and he simply stopped without saying anything. He didn’t stop completely, but a number of things got backed up, so here I am fixing them. He wasn’t aware there was a problem, or he just didn’t admit it. It wasn’t until this month that he told me I needed to take everything over.

I used to look at his office and say, “Can we throw this out? Can we clean this? Can we do this differently?” Now I just do it. Like the old joke says, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

The difference in his work area is beyond belief. I threw out so much paper, the garbage men refused to take some of the bags. I added longer cords to electrical devices that were in the wrong places, so they could be moved. I replaced his primary hard drive with a solid state job so I could search and boot the PC quickly. I got a good desk lamp. I must have removed him from fifty email lists.

I’ve dusted things. I’ve disinfected things. I’ve removed mysterious work-related films from things.

I have never been good at organization, because I have spoiled myself, and because it wasn’t my nature. I have never organized my own affairs well, except for keeping track of legal deadlines. I’m surprised to see myself doing a good job organizing someone else’s mess. It will help me with my own problems. Realistically, it’s helping me with my problems now, since my dad has nothing that won’t be mine eventually.

It’s easier to fix other people’s problems than your own, because you’re more objective. But when you fix other people’s problems, the problem-solving skills you develop may start to apply to your own life. I say “may,” because it hinges on whether or not you’re in denial. Some people can help others yet are unable to help themselves.

Actually, that’s pretty common.

Life is getting more peaceful and orderly as I get closer to God. It’s funny; the supernatural world has a binary quality to it. There is no “okay.” There are only “horrible” and “sublime.” God provided hell and heaven. He didn’t provide a middle ground. This life is no different. It can go very, very well, with God’s help, or it can go very, very badly (even if you don’t realize it) without him.

When I work in my dad’s office, I play Julie True in the background. She sings about the Holy Spirit. Peace fills the place. I could never have done that while he was strong enough to control things. It was always an area of atheism, disorder, and contention when he was in charge. We should honor God throughout our homes and throw out the stuff the devil likes. It makes things work.

I put Julie True on his hard drive. Don’t tell him.

As always, I hope my experiences are helpful to you. In my studies of Greek literature, I keep coming across a curse worth noting: only a fool has to learn from experience. The Bible agrees, saying, “Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools.” I can’t undo the beatings I’ve received, but I can help you avoid receiving them.