Thoughts From a Boiling Frog

Over and over, I am surprised to find out how far I am from God. He gives me a revelation, and I think I get it. Then a week or two down the road, he tells me the situation is even worse.

It reminds me of dealing with house renovation. The contractor comes in and says he can fix your house for $60,000. Then work starts. A month later, you have a $15,000 surprise. You keep going. Two weeks later, another $20,000.

Contractors do it because they miss things at first, and because they’re dishonest. They like to hook you with low prices and then jack the cost up later, when you’re too committed to say no.

God does it–I think–because we can’t handle all of the truth at once. His criticism is life-giving, but receiving too much at once would be like injecting yourself with a whole bottle of insulin. You would be crushed by despair and self-condemnation.

Modern America is not as far as we think from the kind of corruption that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. We are extremely filthy these days. We are cruel and obsessed with sex. We are very arrogant. We lack empathy and patience. We celebrate sadism and abuse.

I want to think I’m above all that, but that is not the case. I participated in it with enthusiasm for decades. I worked to make myself prouder and less kind. The whole time, I felt I was a better person than I really was.

You can’t undo that process in a minute.

Israel’s Muslim enemies know that the Messiah is supposed to enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate, also known as the Golden Gate. They also know Elijah is supposed to be his herald; he shows up first. In a childish gesture, the Muslim ruler Saladin bricked up the Golden Gate, and the Ottomans established a Muslim cemetery just outside it. They believed a Jewish priest could not pass through a graveyard, and they apparently thought Elijah was a priest. No Elijah, no Messiah.

This is a classic physical illustration of what the Bible calls “a stronghold.” Strongholds are barriers that seem impregnable. They are big and intimidating. They defeat people who have no faith.

The devil uses strongholds all the time. Slavery in Egypt was a stronghold. Jericho was literally a stronghold; it was a massive walled structure designed to prevent enemies from coming in and taking over. The other walled cities of Canaan were strongholds.

For Jesus, death was a stronghold. Satan killed his flesh, and he thought the job was done. The barrier between the dead and the living is a pretty serious barrier. Satan didn’t realize it was impossible to keep a sinless man in hell.

Satan–with our eager participation–builds strongholds in us. He causes bad things to happen to us, and he gets us to blame God, so we will never turn to him and be saved. He tempts us to do evil, and then he convinces us God will never want us, or that God has given up on us. He puts filthy habits in us to grieve the Holy Spirit. He makes salvation and victory seem impossible.

Over a period of decades, you can build walls of petrified filth around yourself, so deep and so high you can’t see any way past them. This is what I did. I am still in the process of getting free. I still slip. I still do things I hate.

God is wonderful after I fail. At the very moment when I think he will surely give up on me and let me be destroyed, he comes to me with more power than usual, as if I had just done something that pleased him greatly. The process continues. It can’t be stopped. It’s very strange. It’s hard to get used to receiving that kind of charity.

Our values and our knowledge of God are not adequate. We are very backward. We are lost. We are jaded. We aren’t disturbed by things that should shock and disgust us. We’re in our necks in sewage all day; we think it’s normal. When we make a few small moves in God’s direction, we think we’ve done a great deal, and we wonder why he’s still distant. We wonder why things go wrong. We don’t realize we’re still standing on the dock, in a land across an ocean from God.

People–especially liberals–use the term “slippery slope” with contempt in their voices, the way they used to say “domino theory.” Christians say our values and beliefs move gradually toward depravity. We say abortion cheapens life. We say condoning perversion will lead to the approval of things like incest and bestiality. We’re right, but our enemies can’t see it.

I was driving on I-95 the other day, and I saw a sign advertising something, and in big letters, it used the common slang term for testicles. Like that’s okay. Kids ride past the sign in cars and see it. No problem.

When I go to serious news sites on the web, I see sexual clickbait. Fox News and The Daily Mail, to name but two of many such sites, have little photo links with sexual content. A current Fox ad says, “Wardrobe whoopsies: On purpose, or an accident?” It shows a woman’s rear end in a see-through dress. A Daily Mail ad says, “Leggy blonde Victoria Silvstedt struggles to control her flirty mini-dress and flashes her behind as she boards a boat in Cannes.” Another Fox ad says, “Khloe’s wardrobe whoops.” Thanks to major news organizations, grandmothers now know what “nip-slip” means.

Imagine yourself in 1975, when things were already pretty bad. Try to picture news organizations and advertisers behaving this way back then.

If you could move someone from 1975 to 2016 instantly, he would be shocked and disgusted. We made the journey gradually, so we became acclimated.

We can’t even imagine how God-fearing people are supposed to live. We’re completely unfamiliar with their mindset. We eat excrement and think it’s caviar, because our frame of reference has shifted.

I am part of this. I can’t claim to be exceptional. When I slip, and when things go badly for me, I have to admit that I still belong to the class of people who live filthy lives. I am not a finished work. I have barely started. The walls of the stronghold are thick, and I’ve barely scratched a depression in them.

I write this in order to understand my situation better, and to give hope to other people. It may sound strange, telling people they’re filthy in order to give them hope. But it means there is room for improvement and increased victory. How would you feel if I said you were doing everything right, and that this is as good as it gets? That’s not a blessing. It’s a statement of despair.

My advice is to give up the idea that you can belong to the world and still get along with God. It’s the fountain of youth. It’s a perpetual motion machine. It’s a mirage you will never reach. TV ministers keep dangling the carrot in front of us in order to get our money and admiration, but it’s a lie. It will never, never happen. It never has.

Being filthy is bad. It’s terrible to know that the things you’ve done can never be undone. But think about it. If you’ve risen above it, how can it harm you? It’s terrible if you call yourself a Christian, yet you’ve beaten your wife or you’ve used prostitutes. But what if it’s behind you, and you can say so with certainty? Whatever you used to be, you don’t have to be ashamed of it if God has given you victory over it. That’s possible, and it’s something to pursue.

It would be painful to have to tell people you’re a junkie, but telling people you used to be a junkie wouldn’t be so bad.

I plan to keep going forward. Things are being removed from my life; it’s as if God were digging up the bodies outside the Golden Gate. The more things are removed, the better life will be. I don’t have to be perfect or even very good right now, as long as I keep going. As God has told me many times, location is nothing; direction is everything.

I think this will help you if you apply it. It is certainly helping me.

Rum Wears Out its Welcome

I had a lot of fun fooling around with tiki drinks this week, but I think I’m done for a while. I’m starting to think there is something poisonous in rum.

When I was in college, I thought drunkenness was a good thing, and I worked at it. It was very unusual for me to get sick, but I managed it a few times. I also got sick once after I graduated from law school. The two worst hangovers I ever had were from dark rum. It won’t just make you sick the day you drink it; it will make you sick for half of the following day.

I had some Jamaican friends when I was in law school, and one of them told me they don’t drink dark rum. She said it was for the tourists. I guess the Jamaicans know something.

Anyway, I had maybe four rum drinks this week, which is not exactly binge drinking, and today I feel sort of off. I really think there is something in that stuff, apart from alcohol, which the body does not like.

I didn’t use dark rum; I used Flor de Cana golden rum, which is about the color of brandy.

Interesting.

I had a few days of nostalgia, and I really enjoyed cooling off after working on plumbing and so on, but I would not want to drink this stuff every week.

A lot of Christians are very worked up about alcohol. I don’t worry about it. Every once in a while, I have a drink. On rare occasions, I have two. I think I’ll be okay. I would not encourage anyone else to drink, if it’s a problem.

Some people rewrite history. They claim Jesus was a teetotaler who drank fresh grape juice and called it wine. Yeah, okay. And for five bucks I’ll sell you a keychain made from a fragment of the cross.

I used to brew my own beer, and it was wonderful, but I don’t do it any more. When you barely drink, what do you do with five-gallon kegs of beer? They sit and go to waste. The extra fridge takes up space.

The down side of giving up brewing is that it’s nearly impossible for me to get a really good beer. There are a few beers that are good; I like Flying Dog Snake Dog ale and Dogfish 60 Minute IPA. But it’s nothing like having four or five utterly magnificent beers on tap.

It’s not a big sacrifice. I don’t care much about it.

I did a lot more work on the house yesterday. I removed a lot of useless PVC from the pool pump, and I replumbed it. I broke down and bought a reciprocating saw, like a Sawzall. I got a DeWalt. They get good reviews. It did a wonderful job of hacking pipes out so they could be thrown on the trash heap.

I’m still bummed out that I can’t find anyone competent to take my money. I would be satisfied with work that is merely good. It doesn’t have to be fantastic. Good is too much to ask in Miami. Everything is done to the Latin American standard, which is very low. There is a reason why BMWs are made in Germany instead of Honduras.

Call me a racist if you want. Cultural differences are not imaginary. Defending your sick culture is a sure path to loserhood. Admitting its faults is the beginning of improvement. If you want to hear some heavy criticism, ask me about the backward, defeat-oriented culture I came from.

Yesterday one of my Cuban friends used vile language in a text message to tell me how much he hates Miami. He has plans for bookshelves, and he can’t find anyone who can build them. Ridiculous.

I’m trying to figure out what to do about the pumphouse’s electrical ground. There is a bar hammered into the ground outside the pumphouse, and there’s a big wire next to it. It’s not connected. Is that because some idiot knocked the clamp off, or is it because it’s bad for the pumphouse to have its own ground? I’m trying to find out. I’m tempted to call an electrician, but then I think about all the potentially deadly electrician errors I’ve found and fixed.

As far as I know, there are only two wires connecting the house and the pumphouse, and neither is a ground.

I am Googling around, and it looks like the ground rod should be connected. I think I’ll hook it up and see if anything explodes. I would rather have grounding than no grounding, even if it causes some comparatively minor issue with the electrical service. When I say “comparatively minor,” I am using “instant death on the pumphouse floor” as a reference.

The plumbing is not right. The pipes are generally on the floor or close to it, inviting breakage. People step on things. Also, the pipes are not supported. I looked it up, and PVC at 100 degrees has to be supported every five feet. I’m going to figure out how to do that. Whatever I do may not be the recommended method, but it will work, and it will be better than nothing.

Things keep going well in my prayer life and personal development. God keeps moving me to higher levels.

I’ve started to get a better feel for the degree of brainwashing mankind has experienced. We feel self-conscious about God. Why is that? Why don’t we think God is cool? He creates galaxies. He confers invulnerability and power. He is in charge, and if you’re aligned with him, you’re in charge, too. Why do we think that’s something to be ashamed of?

Being right is cool. Being powerful is cool. Not wasting your life is cool.

Our perceptions are completely warped. But with time, prayer, and submission, it changes.

The longer I live, the more I realize the people around me are foolish. Look at this place, though. We run around in circles, doing things that don’t matter. We devote our lives to things God is eventually going to burn. We love man’s temporary, cobbled-together solutions to problems. We hate God’s solutions, which are perfect and come without regret. This place is horrible. It’s like Sodom. We can’t do anything right. We hate the very notion of doing things right.

I can’t respect humanity. It’s too much to ask. I was a mistake to try. It was a rabbit trail. People have a lot of knowledge, and you shouldn’t ignore all of it, but it’s stupid to put human beings on pedestals. As far as we know, Buddha is in hell. Alexander the Great is in hell. Albert Einstein. Aristotle. All sorts of human beings we think of as superhuman. You can push respect way too far.

We ruin everything down here. The worst part about it is that we destroy human beings.

I thought about that this morning while I was watching a show about technology. They were talking about a special ship that upends itself and turns into a research platform. It reminded me of an experience I had when I was a kid. Don’t ask me why.

My dad represented the Alcoa aluminum company. They had a special aluminum ship which was built for research. It was docked in the Bahamas or somewhere–I forget–and they invited my dad to bring me to see it. They took us on board and gave us a tour.

Today I thought about how little I got out of that experience, which should have been very rich.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of everyone. I had no self-confidence. I could not talk to people. I had been raised in a house of abuse, and my response was to wilt and hide.

Some kids are not like that. They choose to be as aggressive as their abusers. I believe Freud called this “aggressor identification.” You could also call it a generational curse or a cycle of abuse. Kids decide it’s better to be the abuser than the abused, so that’s the path they take. My sister went that way.

I couldn’t cope with life. Mainly, I wanted to be left alone. I was so used to losing, I was highly motivated to avoid trying. A lot of my encounters with my dad consisted of him verbally abusing me until I gave up and left him alone, which was what he wanted, so you can imagine how I felt about approaching people. He actively, deliberately worked to make me back down, feel bad about myself, and leave in fear.

I think this is why I love tools so much. Tools represent power and success. They counter feelings of being unable to cope.

Parents are supposed to prevent kids from growing up to be as I was. When a kid falters, his parents are supposed to notice it and take him aside and teach him how to stand up and respond to life’s challenges. I was afraid of my dad, and my mother was not much better off than I was, so I just sat back and decayed. When I was in my twenties, I started trying to compensate, but change was extremely gradual. The chains we put inside ourselves are heavy, and it takes a lot of time to cut them and push them out.

My dad didn’t seem to realize he was supposed to do anything to help me or my sister in life. As long as food was on the table, he felt like his job was done and that everyone should be grateful and obedient. It’s strange, because his own father was not like that.

I wonder if the men on the ship noticed the destruction in me. I notice it when I meet kids who can’t engage. I wonder if they tried to interest me in the ship and the research and then pulled back, realizing I had been ruined.

I don’t think shyness is normal. I think it’s a flag that exposes abuse. No matter how much you pretend in public, if your kids are shy, there has to be a reason, and you’re probably it.

You can have sympathy for other people’s kids, but usually, your ability to help them is limited. If you want to help, you have to look for opportunities to do or say something effective. Vigilance is important.

We ruin our children. We don’t submit to God. We put our flesh in charge. Our flesh puts Satan in charge. The result is that we become poisonous to people we are supposed to help.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. I can’t undo my childhood. I have been able to help a few younger people, though. Maybe that’s an acceptable exchange. Satan screwed up my youth, so I am being used to screw up his plans and help several other people. His evil is being multiplied back to him.

Interesting stuff.

I should have done better, but here I am, as I am, so I work with what I have.

Today I plan to make some adjustments to the pool pipes and put a clamp out the pumphouse ground. After that, I think I’ll relax and knock off some more of The Odyssey.

I have to say, I’m disgusted with mythology and the characters of Greek literature. People like Odysseus and Achilles were the scum of the earth. They were pirates, and “pirate” is not a flattering term. They were murderers, rapists, thieves, and slave masters. They were sadistic. They were greedy. They thought nothing of pitching babies off of city walls. It’s strange that we see them in a positive light. If there is a significant difference between these characters and the drug gangs in Mexico, I am hard-pressed to see it. The more I read, the more I root for them to lose.

I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday. Go easy on demon rum.

Some Concepts are too Small for the Brain to Cope With

I have been studying accounting today, and here is my conclusion: if you have a choice between poverty and studying accounting, choose poverty.

It is astounding to me that anyone can stand this stuff for more than half an hour. They say dentists and lawyers have the highest suicide rates. How can that be, when there are accountants? Maybe accountants drop dead spontaneously from boredom, before the urge to commit suicide can come to fruition.

As readers who are up to date know, I had to take over my dad’s bookkeeping, and that means using Quickbooks. You can’t use Quickbooks if you have no idea what the little words in the windows mean. You have to know something about accounting.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found a guy who runs a website that helps rental property owners use Quickbooks, but his PDF that “explains” accounting is pretty horrid. I had to find something super basic, so I went to Udemy.com and signed up for a free course. I found a nice old guy who explains accounting by drawing bad cartoons on a whiteboard. This is more my speed.

I’ve probably sat through twenty minutes of the course, and to my credit, I haven’t put a firearm in my mouth even once.

I have a B.S. in physics, plus some graduate school. That means I had no problem with advanced math. Unfortunately, accounting is all addition and subtraction, and it uses filthy ARABIC NUMBERS, not clean little variables. I hate addition and subtraction. They are the toilet-scrubbing of math. Keeping track of endless pluses and minuses drives me nuts. So tedious. It’s like digging your way out of the Chateau d’If with a teaspoon.

There isn’t one single interesting concept in this mess. It’s all first-grade math, combined with the hassle of keeping signs straight. If you have any kind of a brain at all, accounting is paralyzing. If the Nazis had captured Oppenheimer and Einstein, they could have used accounting to torture them into revealing nuclear secrets.

It reminds me of a story my dad told me. He was in the army, and he and some other men were sitting around. A sergeant showed up and asked if any of them were college graduates; he said they had a special task for educated people. My dad raised his hand, expecting to get a cushy job. He and the other graduates were led away and forced to unload a huge truck full of typewriters.

Love that blue collar humor.

All that being said, this will be a good experience for me (when it’s over), because everyone should understand basic accounting. It would have been nice if I had realized the importance of accounting when I was in college. I could have made my dad foot the bill for a couple of leisurely courses. Sadly, I didn’t realize it until I was older, and when I did, I learned as little about it as possible. Now I have about a week in which to catch up.

How do people stand it? It must be a mental illness, like the one that makes some men want to be wrestling coaches. “Now, Tommy, put your fingers under my butt cheek and pull forcefully.”

Over the last few days, I have experienced a sudden need for big fruity alcoholic drinks. That his how badly accounting has damaged my brain. While I’m studying this horrible stuff, I have to have a big fruity drink at the end of the day to unwind. It’s either that or go to a doc-in-the-box and get a prescription for Xanax.

I might as well post the recipe for the drink I invented yesterday. I am not recommending drunkenness to anyone, but one nice cocktail probably won’t kill you.

I started with my friend’s creation, the chupacabra. That’s Mountain Dew and light rum, with a lime slice. It’s much better than it sounds. I like it a lot, but I felt like it needed the tiki treatment, so I went to work. I still don’t have a name for the drink I came up with, but you won’t believe how good it is. You have to like girly drinks in order to enjoy it. If all you drink is straight bourbon mixed with kerosene and your own chest hairs, it won’t do a thing for you. If you aren’t ashamed to be seen holding a pina colada (while caught in the rain), you’ll like this drink.

Ingredients

1/2 shot pineapple juice
1/2 shot lime juice
1 shot (maybe a little more) Flor de Cana rum
2 teaspoons Coco Lopez
2 teaspoons grenadine
Ginger ale (Seagram’s, which has less sugar than most)

You start by dumping the Coco Lopez into a tall glass. Then add ice. Then mix the lime juice, pineapple juice, and rum and pour them in. Then add ginger ale to fill it up. Put the grenadine on top. I added four raspberries and a lime slice, too. Pineapple chunks would work.

This thing will blow your mind. It’s like chewing a whole roll of tropical fruit Lifesavers. When you’re done drinking it, you can scoop the bits of congealed Coco Lopez off the bottom and eat them along with the fruit.

I had two whole drinks yesterday. For me, that’s practically a binge. That’s how much I hate accounting.

It looks like I have a gift for inventing mixed drinks. I don’t plan to pursue it, but it definitely made this week less painful for me.

In two weeks, I will be either an accomplished accountant or a hopeless alcoholic. One way or the other, this ordeal will be over.

I Wonder Where the Crab Rangoon iz

I guess I’m going to have a Singapore Sling every day until I decide I’ve gotten it right.

Today I made some progress, so I will pass the information along.

This drink is shaken, but because it contains soda, you can’t add the soda until after you shake it. That means that once you’ve shaken all the red ingredients and the gin, you have to strain it into a glass with ice in it, and then you have to get the soda in there. If you add too much ice or too much soda, you have problems. And it’s important to make sure the red stuff and the soda are mixed up a little, unless you like soda on top of a layer of cough syrup.

I took a pint glass and put around 4 ounces of ice in the bottom. Maybe 5. Then I added a mandatory skewer loaded with fresh fruit. Then I shook the red stuff and poured it and the soda into the glass simultaneously. That way, the ingredients mixed, and I was able to meter everything so I didn’t end up with too much soda or leftover red stuff.

Yesterday I said the red ingredients tasted a lot alike. Today I did a little research, and it looks like I was not imagining it. The stuff we call grenadine is supposed to be pomegranate syrup, but it’s really cherry syrup. Look it up. You can get the real thing at a Middle Eastern grocery, but since bar owners are cheap, it probably won’t be what they use, and it won’t have the taste you know and love.

Bartenders have a longstanding practice of using the juice from cherry jars in recipes calling for grenadine.

Cheap creme de cassis tastes a whole lot like cherries, too, and so does cheap sloe gin. It’s probably the same basic batch of chemicals and natural flavors.

Real sloe gin and creme de cassis exist, but you will have to look for them, and again, they may taste nothing like what you expect.

I decided to go with bottled lime juice this time because I wanted to see if it was any good. I used Mrs. Biddle’s key lime juice, which must be made with real key limes, because it says “key lime juice,” not “Key West lime juice” or some other such nonsense. Key limes are a little bitter, so that’s something to consider. I think fresh Persian lime juice would probably be better, but not a whole lot better, because this is a big, sweet, sloppy drink with lots of stuff in it.

I used Gordon’s gin. Last time, I used Boodle’s, which is light and full of flowery flavors. It was slightly better, but it costs over twice as much as Gordon’s, and I am not so dedicated I’m willing to put $25 gin in a tacky tiki drink.

I bought some skewers, fresh pineapple, and Maraschino cherries. I took a skewer and put several chunks of pineapple on it, along with three cherries and two lime slices. I stuck that in the glass before I poured the drink.

Here is the current recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1.5 ounces gin
0.5 ounces cherry Heering
0.5 ounces creme de cassis
1 tablespoon grenadine
1.5 ounces key lime juice (bottled)
0.25 ounces sloe gin
club soda
fresh pineapple
fresh lime slices
Maraschino cherries
cold club soda

Put everything except the soda in a shaker. Put 4-5 ounces of crushed ice in a tall (I used a pint) glass. Skewer some fruit and put it in the glass. Shake the red stuff with ice. Strain the red stuff into the glass while pouring club soda in from the other side.

That’s about it. It’s really nice. Not the classiest drink in the universe, but very pleasant.

Tomorrow I plan to make one with a spoonful of Coco Lopez in the bottom.

I wrote a big long blog post about the challenges of taking over my dad’s responsibilities, but I decided to trash it and post this instead. I think I’ll be having one of these drinks every day until I get on top of his taxes.

Trump Needs a Visit from Mr. Shhh

Yesterday I wrote about Trader Vic’s, the famous tiki bar and Polynesian restaurant. When I was in college at Columbia University, my friends and I used to go there and get obliterated on sweet drinks with fruit in them.

I do not miss getting obliterated, but for some reason, yesterday I felt like I needed a tiki bar drink. The stress of instantly taking over my dad’s taxes and real estate was getting to me, and the weather here was heating up after a wonderful, relatively cool April, so I felt sorry for myself.

It was hard to decide what to do. I didn’t actually know how to make tiki drinks, or as Jimmy the Saint used to call them, “boat drinks.”

I found some help on the web. It turns out Trader Vic was a real person. His name was Vic Bergeron, and he wrote a few books. Some are useless, because the drink recipes say things like “2 parts Trader Vic’s Prefab Zombie Mixer” instead of the real ingredients. Others have information that can actually be helpful. There is also a forum dedicated to tiki bars, and when you Google, some good information comes up.

My repertoire was not completely empty. A friend of mine came up with a surprisingly good drink which he called a Chupacabra. Very simple.

INGREDIENTS

Flor de Cana light rum
Mountain Dew
Juice of half a lime

That’s about it. You pour it over ice. The proportions are up to you. Flor de Cana is very smooth, unlike the ammonia-like products of Bacardi.

You can dress it up with things like Grenadine or creme de cassis. You can add a splash of coconut rum or Grand Marnier. It’s much better than it sounds.

Yesterday I made something sort of similar, using ginger ale and pineapple juice, along with a small amount of Grand Marnier. It was okay, but not ideal.

I decided to try my hand at a Singapore sling. Today I went out and bankrupted myself buying ingredients. It requires gin, sloe gin, grenadine syrup, Heering cherry liqueur, and creme de cassis. You mix it with lime juice, shake it, and top it off with club soda. I’ll be trying that later.

Vic called his version the Trader Vic’s sling. I think he served it with a rock candy swizzle stick, but that may have been the sloe gin fizz. It’s amazing that I remember any of the drink names, given the condition in which I usually oozed out of the building.

I found the recipe online. Is it authentic? I do not know. But here it is.

Singapore Sling

1 1/2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. cherry brandy
1/2 oz. creme de cassis
1/4 oz. sloe gin
1/2 lime
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1 tbsp. grenadine
club soda to top

Lovingly pour each ingredient except the club soda into your cocktail shaker with some ice. When shaking is over, pour into a collins glass and top off with club soda.

I could not find any high-end brands of sloe gin or creme de cassis around here. I don’t think that matters, because I very much doubt Trader Vic went out of his way to get the best.

I brought home my red ingredients and tried them, and they all tasted pretty much the same. The cherry Heering is fierier than the others, and either the creme de cassis or the sloe gin has a scary aftertaste, but they all taste more or less like a mixture of black cherries and pie cherries. I think you could eliminate two of them without changing the drink at all. I would keep the Heering and grenadine.

Later on I’m going to mix up a sling and see if it’s any good.

I barely drink these days, so if I manage to finish one of these things, it will be remarkable.

It would be neat if they had a Trader Vic’s down here. Once a year I’d like to go and enjoy the tacky decor and the weird appetizers.

I learned something interesting. The bartender my friends and I knew as Buck was actually named Shek Gong. I guess he didn’t actually invent the Buck’s Fizz. Or maybe he did, and it’s really the Shek’s Fizz. I read about him in the article I found which detailed the disgraceful way Donald Trump (the real-life Man With the Plan) ejected Vic from the Plaza’s basement.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get Quickbooks working, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to face the day without even thinking about Tiki Puka Pukas and Kama’ainas.

Buckwheats for Trump, though. Definitely buckwheats.

Update

I just completed my experiment, and I concluded a few things.

First of all, it’s a real trip back to the past. The flavor is right on. Wonderful. But there are a few things to fix.

The recipe I quoted says “1 T grenadine.” I assumed “T” meant “teaspoon,” but after I tried the drink, I realized that was wrong.

The purpose of the grenadine is to cover up the dubious flavors of the other ingredients. It smooths them out. Cherry Heering is not exactly Hennessy XO, and Hiram Walker creme de cassis is not that great, either. So I concluded “T” means “tablespoon.” When you increase the amount from one teaspoon to one tablespoon, it tastes like the drink Trader Vic’s used to serve.

Also, you need to stir the soda into the drink, or else you get a drink that’s pure soda on top and cough syrup on the bottom. Stir it gently once or twice. It doesn’t have to be thoroughly mixed. Just make an effort to blend it slightly.

What else? I used lime juice instead of lemon. Lime juice is fragrant and complex, and it brings out the complexity of other ingredients. Lemon juice is kind of dull. I used a fresh lime, not a bottle.

Final thing: I think it would be best to add some fruit to this. I used a lime wedge, because that’s what I had. In the future, I would spear one or two chunks of fresh pineapple with a lime wedge or slice between them, and I would put a cherry on top just for laughs. That would be great. The rock candy swizzle stick I dimly recall from Trader Vic’s would work great, but you would need to work fruit into it somehow.

I may have imagined the rock candy swizzle stick. Fair warning.

It was very nice. I think tomorrow I’ll have another.

Get Off That Plateau

As exciting as Trader Vic’s, irrigation systems, and Greek epics are, I think it’s time to get back to something important.

A while back I got a big revelation on the importance of praise. I realized we don’t give it enough emphasis. It’s like a key to the door of God’s throne room. It’s the tool you use to get into his presence.

I put this knowledge to work, and I was instantly bumped up a level in prayer power. VERY nice. Christians are like bodybuilders and dieters; we get stuck on plateaus, and when that happens, you don’t move until you find out what’s wrong. Increasing praise got me moving forward again.

Last night I got another promotion.

Jesus has manifested himself to me, actually touching me, twice. I’ve written about it. His presence had a physical location, and although I could not see him, there was astounding peace and joy in the area he occupied.

Once he appeared as a beam of invisible supernatural energy, and the joy and peace in him were so strong, any part of my body it touched felt happy and protected, even if the rest of me did not. Very odd.

This is one of the reasons why I can never give up my faith. You should not demand signs and wonders and depend on them, but they can provide valuable footholds that prevent you from slipping back. When you feel like God has given up on you, or that you were wrong to believe in him, the memory of a sign or miracle can make it impossible for you to quit.

It won’t work if you’re dishonest. A dishonest person will tell himself he imagined the sign or miracle, and he will make himself believe the lie. An honest person will not be able to pull that off.

Lately I’ve been starting my prayer sessions with a lot of praise, and with time, it can become somewhat repetitive and unsatisfying. You can only say, “I praise you in the highest,” so many times without wondering if you’re doing a good job. It never stops working, but you may start to feel the plateau under you.

Very often, what seems like revelation is just God giving you a fresh look at something you already know. He’ll drop a powerful bombshell on you, and you’ll start thanking him, and then you’ll realize you already knew what he just told you, but you didn’t feel it with your heart, or you didn’t believe it with the correct intensity.

We are separated from God the way the princess in the famous story was separated from the pea. She lay on a tall pile of mattresses, and an ordinary person would not have been able to feel the pea buried under the column. God’s truth is like the pea, and the lies and nonsense Satan and the world spread are like the mattresses. As you continue in your prayer life, the mattresses–the misconceptions and inabilities to perceive–disappear, one by one.

Why doesn’t God just drop the truth on us all at once? He’s God, right? How can a loving God withhold good things from us?

Look, he’s God. We are evil. He doesn’t owe us anything; not even air. In order to be God, he has to be exalted. We have to be humble. He can’t just forget justice and give us everything all at once. It’s a process; a series of partial ascents. We grow in increments. If you don’t like it, well, tough. Who are you to judge God?

We improve bit by bit, and as we do, we draw closer to him. That’s how it works. It’s not your place to change that.

When Jesus manifested himself to me, his presence, which is an extension of him, was by far the most beautiful, most desirable thing I had ever perceived. Think about it. I had perfect peace. I had complete assurance that no evil could touch me, and that my future was guaranteed. While he was there, I knew nothing could go wrong.

I knew this, but until last night, somehow it didn’t click inside me. I didn’t realize it was a good basis for powerful, unforced praise.

I miss his presence. There is nothing I wouldn’t give to get it back. It was complete victory and complete peace. When he was fully with me, I knew I had won, for all eternity.

When I remembered this and felt it in my heart, I incorporated it into my praise. I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner, but I had had a supernatural blindness. There was nothing I could do. I had to wait until God, who deserves the glory, removed that particular mattress.

I got up today and prayed, and the supernatural faith that comes from the Holy Spirit was dramatically increased. It’s a tremendous gift. Better than a billion dollars.

When things like this happen, it helps you understand why the early martyrs chose fire and knives over renouncing God. He is just too good to give up, and this world is a stinking cesspool run by morons. It’s not a close call. Getting out of this world isn’t something to fear. It’s a bonus.

When you pray, spend a while in praise. Give it ten or fifteen minutes. Then go into tongues. Wait on God; don’t expect him to wait for you and jump up to serve you as soon as you start praying. He’s God; you’re basically a redeemed monkey. He is not your valet or chambermaid, so get off your high horse and honor him. Stop resenting him for not being your fairy godmother.

The main purpose of prayer is to get God to change you internally. If you remember that, and you quit making a priority of begging for money and houses and a husband or wife, you will move faster in the kingdom.

This information will help you if you put it to work. When God said his people perished for lack of knowledge, this is the kind of knowledge he was talking about. Don’t wait to learn it from painful experience. Benefit from my testimony and try it now. Why should both of us suffer? The concept of inheritance is important in the kingdom. We’re not supposed to reinvent the wheel in every generation. What one person builds up, he passes on to others, and that way, the riches accumulate.

If we don’t learn from others, life becomes a cycle instead of a linear progression. We repeat the mistakes of the people who came before us instead of building on their victories, and overall, there is no progress. This is how people in the United States of America got stupid enough to support a socialist in the presidential race.

Whenever I read, “Feel the Bern,” I think of the flames of hell. It’s too perfect.

If you get results with this, let me know. And more importantly, let someone else know.

I am Godzilla! He is Japan!

I had to work on my dad’s taxes today, which means I had to deal with Quickbooks. Not the most pleasant day of my life.

Now I’m thinking how great it would be to be sitting at the bar at Trader Vic’s at the Plaza Hotel, enjoying the shade and a tiki puka puka or a Trader Vic’s sling. Unfortunately, I am in the wrong city, and Trader Vic’s is no longer at the Plaza. It was ousted long ago. Until today, I didn’t know the story.

I just found out DONALD TRUMP closed it in 1989.

I was pretty cool with his candidacy until today, but now I’m voting for Hillary.

I will never forget how crushed I was when I went to New York in about 2001, cabbed to the Plaza in joyous anticipation, and found a cheesy lunch restaurant in the glorious space Vic’s used to occupy.

I don’t ordinarily fantasize about tropical drinks, but it has been that kind of day.

Boat drinks, my friends. Boat drinks.

Songs Without Music Without Words

My progress through the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus continues.

This weekend I knocked off Sappho’s Lyrics. This is about 340 pages of song fragments. The original Greek is included. The book is arranged so you see Greek on one page and the English translation on the other.

Here is my verdict: I don’t get it.

Take 340 pages and divide it by two. That gives you 170. Then jack up the margins so they take up half the page. Then lose maybe two thirds of the original material. You end up with a very short work. On top of that, many of the fragments are completely incomprehensible. Some lines contain only one word.

There isn’t a lot of meat here. There are some full paragraphs and pages, but they are separated by big gulfs of emptiness. You pretty much have to take it one line at a time.

Here is how page 15 reads, if you string the words together: “. . . so . . . Go . . . so we may see . . . lady . . . of golden arms . . . doom . . .”

This is not just literature; it’s archaeology. It’s like trying to guess what a pharaoh’s tomb looked like after 75% of the contents were removed.

There are some pleasant bits of poetry, and there is information that tells us a little bit about Greek culture. All in all, I would say it’s a lot like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You visit just so you can say you saw it, not so you can praise it as a coherent, useful work. Have I used that analogy before? I like it.

I think Mr. Cliff agrees with me. He never wrote notes for Lyrics. If Cliff don’t care, I don’t care.

I looked around for information, and I learned a few things about Sappho. It looks like she was the Madonna of her time, except without the tastelessness and lack of talent. She was a sort of rock star. She wrote songs that were so popular, they were disseminated around the Mediterranean during her lifetime.

In the ancient world, Sappho was a big deal. She was mentioned by many ancient authors. They thought she was swell.

That’s great, but her melodies are long gone, and most of her words have also disappeared. It’s as if we were trying to reconstruct the Beatles using LP’s with big wedges cut out of them. Actually, it’s worse. It’s like trying to reconstruct them by looking at old captures of Leo’s Lyrics (a webpage that contains popular song lyrics) with half of the words corrupted: “Rocky Raccoon . . . checked into . . . Gideon’s . . . legs.” To say that finding meaning in this stuff requires value added is a gross understatement. If a scholar isn’t careful, he will end up publishing his own thoughts and feelings instead of Sappho’s.

Not that a scholar would ever do a thing like that. Oh, no.

I have to wonder: are the scholars who seem excited about Sappho just overheated? Are they letting their emotions drive them to make more of the ruins than they should? Probably.

If someone found the feet of the Colossus of Rhodes and started giving tours in a glass-bottomed boat, I wouldn’t sit in the boat shrieking that it was the most beautiful statue I had ever seen. I would probably say, “Wow, it must have been neat before it was destroyed.” That seems like a realistic reaction to reading Sappho.

I can’t find the fierce lesbianism modern scholars impute to her. She was apparently married, and she makes references to children. It sure looks like she was a mom. There are lesbian moms, but they’re generally not homosexual icons.

Human beings used to have a thing called “platonic love,” which seems a little creepy by modern standards. It was okay for two men to hold hands and tell each other how beautiful they were; it didn’t mean they were sneaking around. The Iliad is full of this stuff. The men get excited and talk effusively about their love and admiration for each other, but there are no gay relationships.

The men of The Iliad are heterosexual to a fault. At worst, they’re on the down-low. They are enthusiastic about taking female sex slaves, and they seem to view rape as a healthy, liberating hobby. They are like goats on Viagra and bath salts. Their emotional behavior toward other men seems to stop at the bedroom door. Maybe it was the same with Sappho.

Platonic love is pretty much dead (whew) among modern American men, but it’s very much alive among women. Young women get together for sleepovers, do each other’s hair, lie in the same beds, and dance together in their underwear. Doesn’t make them lesbians.

So they claim.

Anyway, platonic love more than suffices to explain the things Sappho wrote.

Sappho says a number of clever things about human nature, but I don’t think that, by itself, makes her a genius. Human beings had been around for a very long time before she was born, and it doesn’t take a million years for us to size each other up. Being the first recorded person to say this or that doesn’t make you the first person to say it.

I will read up on her a little more, but I don’t think there’s that much to learn.

Currently, I’m reading The Odyssey, which is the story of Odysseus’ return from Troy. It was translated by Richmond Lattimore, the same guy who wrote the translation of The Iliad Columbia uses.

The Odyssey has two important virtues The Iliad lacks: 1) there is an actual story, and 2) it’s shorter.

The Iliad runs around 900 pages, and almost nothing happens. There is no structure whatsoever. Scholars pretend there is, but there isn’t. The Achaians do well against the Trojans. The Trojans get discouraged. The god start helping the Trojans. The Trojans do well against the Achaians. The Achaians get discouraged. The gods start helping the Achaians. Repeat this about fifty times, and you have The Iliad.

Spoiler: the Trojans lose. But the action stops abruptly before Brad Pitt gets shot in the foot.

The Odyssey is different in that things occasionally happen. It’s not an endless cycle of alternating favor. Odysseus gets captured by a nymph. He gets freed. He has adventures on the way home. When you read The Odyssey, you feel like you’re making progress.

In the end (SPOILER), Odysseus wins. You have closure. Real closure, not the crappy kind you get in The Iliad, which ends with Hektor’s pincushiony, not-so-godlike body going home in a wagon. Even the coke-sniffers in Hollywood knew The Iliad needed punching up. That’s why they added the stuff about sacking Troy. If they had pulled the plug when Peter O’Toole got on the wagon, there would have been riots.

Here’s a theory which I would like to contribute to Iliad scholarship: The Iliad ends abruptly because the people who were subjected to Homer’s seemingly endless droning chose Hektor’s return as a good excuse to get up and leave. Or maybe they hit Homer in the head with a club at that point, to shut him up.

If anyone wants to offer me a university chair, I am open to negotiation. A chair may not be enough. I may hold out for an ottoman.

It will be hard to choose among the offers. Universities are clamoring to get conservative Christian professors who carry loaded pistols.

The next book in the syllabus is Genesis. I plan to skip that. I feel like I have that one under control. I’ve even read supplementary materials, such as Jubilees, Enoch, and The Modern Fundamentalist Fascist’s Guide to Homophobia, which I co-authored.

After that comes The Histories, by Herodotus. This book bears the distinction of having been not read by me in two different courses. I took an ancient history course in high school, and I’m pretty sure I avoided reading Herodotus, and then I almost certainly skipped it at Columbia.

Herodotus contains the story of the battle of Thermopylae, better known to Beyonce fans as 300. I watched 300 the other day, and I was highly annoyed to see bare breasts pop out for no good reason. You never know when nudity will reach out and grab you. I watched a movie about Beethoven the other day, and Ed Harris mooned the camera.

I think that was harmless. My feelings for Ed Harris aren’t even platonic.

As I so often do, I will go out on a limb and speculate. Because it’s easier than finding out the truth. I speculate that Xerxes was not an eight-foot-tall circus morphodite whose palace was actually a body modification parlor, and I further speculate that he wore actual pants. I doubt he had a ten-foot-tall giant that could fight even after you shoved a spearhead six inches into his skull (via the eyeball). I doubt the Spartan army dressed like a dance team from La Bare, and that they went on long journeys equipped only with spears, velvet cloaks, and dark red Speedos.

I don’t think the Spartans built a mountaintop temple on a crag so steep a fit man could barely climb it. How would you get the construction materials up there? How about food and water? What about wifi?

Anyway, that’s next.

I’ve learned one nice thing about the ancient Greeks. They treated their gods better than we do. They didn’t just hop in boats and sail off to kill people. They prayed and sacrificed beforehand. They were constantly asking the gods what they were doing wrong, so they could fix it. Imagine how much easier our lives would be if we treated the actual, real-life God that way.

I also noticed a major problem with the Greek religion. Well, two problems. First, the official name of the religion appears to be “mythology.” When you’re a Greek, that has to be bad for your faith. But also, the Greek gods do not get along.

Imagine that. Imagine you pray to Jehovah, and he gives you the okay, and then Jesus says, “Yeah, right, we’ll see about that,” and then he sneaks around behind the scenes, shipwrecking you on islands populated by one-eyed giant cannibals. That’s not how Christianity works. Christianity says, “God is one,” meaning, “God is unified.” The Spirit-led are unified. If we disagree about anything, it means someone is doing it wrong.

In mythology, you can’t make all the gods happy. Please one, and another one is on your case. That’s no way to run a godhead.

Another major problem: the Greek gods are a bit thick. None of them ever says anything intelligent or mature. Dealing with them is like placating huge, armed children. It’s like the segment of the old Twilight Zone movie, where adults had to kiss the rear end of an omnipotent little kid in order to keep him from projecting them into the violent horror of “Cartoon World.”

If stupid, immature gods are your thing, mythology is for you. And don’t believe the lies. It’s not the national religion of Mexico, no matter how many times you think you hear them say, “Yay, Zeus.”

That’s all I have for now. I am officially in charge of doing my elderly father’s taxes now, so I have to go and immerse myself in the new level of Tartarus known as Quickbooks. Odd name for the program, since “quick” means “alive,” which is the opposite how how I expect it to make me feel.

They say only death and taxes are inevitable. If only death came first.

No Wonder They Want to Get Away From It

The saga of the sprinkler pump continues, much like the decade-long siege of Troy.

It’s interesting to examine the gargantuan sprinkler/irrigation apparatus in the shed, and to note its many revolting flaws.

The whole thing is situated about two and a half feet below the water level of the pool. That means water is always trying to get into the shed, even when everything is turned off. Whenever a valve or a joint has a problem, water starts dribbling out.

The sprinkler pump is connnected to the pool system so the pool can be filled from a well instead of the tap, and so the irrigation pump can be used to drain the pool. The sad result of this is that if the valve going from the sprinkler pump to the pool-fill outlet leaks (it does), water leaks from the pool into the sprinkler pump. You never see it. The water level in the pool keeps dropping, for no apparent reason.

I doubt there is such a thing as a completely reliable valve. Maybe old-style metal gate valves are good enough to shut down the drips, but the valve that goes to the pool-fill outlet is in a section of the system that’s all PVC, so the valve is a crappy plastic ball valve.

The pool pump is also under constant pressure from the pool water, so water escapes from the plumbing and goes on the floor. The pool service people are absolutely inept. They can’t do anything about it. They can’t figure out how to fill the pool; they just leave notes for me. They can’t seat the skimmer basket lid correctly so it doesn’t leak. When the return pipe developed leaks, they couldn’t fix it.

I don’t know if they realize people pay them to do this stuff. People don’t want to be their own pool guys. If I wanted to be a pool guy, I’d get a crappy Japanese pickup and fill the back with hoses and go to work.

They’re fired, as of next week.

Today I went out and replaced several feet of PVC above the pool pump. Water was coming out through two joints. Instead of replacing those joints and the pipe between them, they put in two crummy repair joints (one of which leaked), and in the process, it looks like they loosened another joint. I spent 45 minutes working on it, and now it’s fine. And I’m just winging it. I’m not trained. Shouldn’t they be able to do this?

The sprinkler pump was connected to a wall box using flex conduit. The ground wire from the motor went into the box, where it led to…a cap. There was a second green ground wire in the box, screwed to the back of the box, leading to…another cap. Some genius disconnected the ground AND took the time to cap the disconnected ends. Explain that. In a sane world, that would be considered attempted murder.

I got some 12-gauge extension cord, a 30-amp plug, and a 30-amp receptacle, and I made a cord for the new pump. The cord goes into the motor housing through a strain relief fitting. The other end goes the new plug, which I wired. I replaced the ridiculous flex conduit with another length of cord and the 30-amp receptacle. Now if I ever have to move the pump again, I can just unplug it. And it’s grounded! What a novel concept.

I still have to fasten the pump to the floor and finish the pipe on the suction end. The floor under the pump is always wet, and that makes it hard to mark the floor and put holes in it. The floor is wet because the pool-fill valve leaks through the sprinkler pump.

The wet floor makes it hard to finish fixing the pump, and the fact that the pump isn’t fixed keeps the floor wet. It’s some catch, that catch 22.

I know this is boring. I don’t care. I have to release some pressure. If you don’t like it, go look at Gawker. Before Hulk Hogan eats it.

I’m about one hour away from finishing up the sprinkler mess. After that, I have to find a company that can come out and fix the pipes under the yard and the sprinkler heads. That, I refuse to do. Everyone has a limits. Nothing is worse than working on sprinklers.

Eventually I will have to confront the problem with the grade. The driveway is too high, so water runs into the pool and sprinkler areas. I’m going to have to chalk this up to the total incompetence of South Florida tradesmen, just like my other problems. It should be obvious that you can’t raise a driveway an inch every time you resurface it. Whoever fixed the driveway last time didn’t get the memo.

I need to put some kind of barrier on the doorway thresholds, to keep the water from running into the pump areas. The thresholds are concrete, and I don’t know of anything that sticks to concrete well. I’m thinking I may go get some aluminum channel and attach it with screws, filling the underside with gunk to seal it. Wood will rot, even if it’s pressure-treated. Steel will rust. Masonry won’t seal against the concrete under it. At least I think it won’t.

Tomorrow I expect to be done with this crap. Then I guess I’ll have to fix something else another person failed to do correctly.

Fool me Once, Shame on You. Fool me 30,000 Times, Shame on Me

Old people know stuff. Old people can connect the dots. I’m going to apply my old person skills right now and see if it pays off.

A man in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just confessed to poisoning produce at Whole Foods. Let’s add up the facts and see what we can guess.

1. Ann Arbor. This is a suburb of Detroit, which is a Muslim stronghold. That area of Michigan is almost a caliphate.

2. The criminal is male, and most Islamist terrorists are male.

3. In the store surveillance video, he appears to be pretty hairy, which is not exactly rare among people from the Middle East and nearby regions which are dominated by Islam. The Boston bombers were dark, hairy individuals. So was the nut in San Bernardino. For that matter, so was bin Laden, and so were all of the 911 killers. Is it racist to say people from that area are hairy? Yeah, okay. And there are probably lots of tall blonds in Japan.

4. The police have the man in custody, and they refuse to reveal his name.

My bet: low-budget Muslim terrorist. I would say “lone wolf,” but wolves are intelligent. Mouse poison on organic figs is not the way to kill people.

I could be wrong. Maybe he’s a Baptist whose ex-girlfriend runs the produce section at Whole Foods. Maybe she dumped him, and now he’s out to punish the world and get her fired.

Maybe he finally realized he was paying way too much for tabouleh.

Cops and journalists now have a well-established history of holding onto the names of Muslim terror suspects. If a random individual who is not a Muslim commits a crime, they release the name in a hurry. Journalists, especially, like to get the information out there fast. They don’t do that with Muslims or people who seem like they may be Muslims. They wait, as though hoping the suspects will magically turn into Norwegians. They keep trying to perpetuate the myth that there isn’t a problem among American Muslims.

For some reason, they love pretending Christians and white supremacists (same thing, in the mind of the press) are the real danger. The truth is that Christians have little interest in terrorism, and white supremacists can’t get it together well enough to do much. Most of them are too busy doing roofing, watching game shows and pirated porn in their girlfriends’ moms’ trailers, or working on chain gangs.

Place your bets.

Update

Sometimes it’s sort of nice to be wrong. It restores your faith in mankind’s ability to not be completely predictable.

The Whole Foods guy is a blond man named Kyle Bessemer. Assuming he’s not convert, he is a plain old non-Muslim American.

I was right about the San Bernardino dude, though, so it all evens out.

Sweet Freedom

I finally finished reading The Iliad. It happened yesterday. I feel like a runaway slave.

I got one good thing out of it: new empathy for my college-age self. I had forgotten how mind-numbingly boring liberal arts courses are, and The Iliad brought it all back to me. I criticize myself for being lazy in college, and I am correct to do so, but in my partial defense, college is really, really dull.

It’s not always dull. It’s mainly dull when you’re taking stupid the wrong courses.

I always did well at verbal tasks when I was a kid, winning the city spelling bee and so forth. I was an excellent writer. I understood literature without much help. I won a couple of statewide prizes in French.

When I was ready to apply to college, the head of the English department at Columbia College of Columbia University, a Mr. Carl Hovde, sent me a letter inviting me to apply. Columbia was top five, as American universities go. They claimed.

It was sort of assumed that I would be a liberal arts guy.

Further [seeming] confirmation came from my poor grades in math. I didn’t dislike math, but you can’t cram very well in math courses, so it’s an area where lazy students get eaten alive. I procrastinated doggedly, and my grades reflected it. My advisor “recommended” I stop taking math courses after the 11th grade.

It was bizarre, really. I got a D- in Algebra II, and then I got an A- in Geometry the class that followed it. Then I believe I failed the next course, which was called Math Analysis.

Why would anyone get an A- between a D- and an F?

In subjects like history and literature, you can do almost nothing until right before your exams and still get A’s or B’s. This is why most students gravitate toward them.

Incidentally, I always feel funny using the term “liberal arts” to describe the basket-weaving, distaffy side of the curriculum. Today we use it to mean anything except math, engineering, and science, but in reality, it’s supposed to include math and science. I don’t know where we lost track of that.

But I will persist in using the misnomer.

I thought of myself as someone not destined to be involved with math or science, and that was a big mistake. When I got to college and started taking classes in subjects like literature and philosophy, I did not have a good time. It was a lot like the past week. “I can’t believe how boring this is.” “I can’t believe they’re paying this guy to tell me about Don Quixote.” “Why does this book have to be so long?”

The literature courses I took were generally a complete waste of money and time. I am not saying that as a surly kid with a weed habit. I am saying that as a surly old person who actually knows.

Having graduated from college and ready many books, and having sat through many literature lectures, I can say with assurance that there is nothing, nothing, nothing you can learn from a literature professor that you can’t learn with a library card or an Internet connection. College runs around a thousand dollars per credit, so if you take a literature course, it will cost you several thousand dollars to have an old hippie explain Huckleberry Finn to you. There is no way in HELL you can convince a reasonable person that this makes sense.

I’ll bet there are literature lectures online for nothing, if you are really determined to suffer. I’ll check.

Of COURSE. There was no way I could have been wrong. Here’s a Harvard Shakespeare course, presented free of charge.

On top of the issue of waste, when you let other people charge you to explain books to you, you are very likely to be taught ancient, revered error few have the guts to correct.

I’ve been going through the Columbia College Literature Humanities syllabus, and today I read Sappho’s Lyrics. Don’t read it; trust me. I’m just mentioning it in order to make a point. Everyone thinks Sappho was a lesbian. The word “lesbian” comes from “Lesbos,” which is where she lived. “Sapphic” means “lesbian.” If you go to college, there’s a good chance your prof will tell you Sappho was a lesbian. I read her book today, and there is absolutely no way you can conclude that from the fragments of manic-depressive verse she left behind.

I went online and read up on her. Guess what? There is no proof that she was a lesbian. There are real scholars who say so. They must be lesbian deniers; they reject settled literary consensus.

Liberal arts professors generally aren’t all that smart, and they’re not original. They memorize and parrot. If one makes a mistake in 1100 A.D., another is likely to repeat it for money in 2016. Think about that while your life savings are paying for creaky, dubious insights on Dickens and Proust.

If you’re smart, you’re smart enough to make your own mistakes instead of swallowing someone else’s.

I realize our culture has to be preserved, and people have to take literature and art courses and pay for them. I’m just suggesting that you–the person reading this–would be smart to let someone else shoulder the burden. Take something useful instead. It doesn’t have to be math or science. Learn a language…well, Rosetta Stone software is probably better than college. Okay; study music. It’s tough to form a jazz orchestra on your own.

Some liberal arts professors are really good, but come on. No literature or history teacher is $3000-per-semester good. Especially not in the age of Youtube.

When I finally took some left-brain courses, it was a lot more fun than poring over the grey pages of Machiavelli and Joyce. I still did badly. I had never learned study habits, and I was perpetually depressed about the divorce-related drama going on in my family, so I didn’t have much energy. I had no self-confidence at all, as a result of growing up with abuse. But at least I enjoyed the lectures and labs.

I did well at gut courses I hated, because they were easy. I did poorly in great courses I liked, because they were hard.

Liberal arts people love to say left-brain people are not smarter; just different. That’s a load. They’re smarter. No one ever graduates from college and says, “Man, Survey of American Cinema was tough.” Everyone complains about physics.

Left-brain people are usually less capable when it comes to verbal stuff, but they are not as stupid as right-brain people trying to do math.

I thought I was a right-brainer because I did well in that area, but in reality I was just a shocking left-brained underachiever.

I could never be a literature professor. I can read it. I can understand it. I can come up with BS insights with the best of them. It’s still dull. It’s fun to read for recreational purposes, but choking down boring tomes in 100-page daily doses in order to be prepared for mildewed lectures your prof wrote 50 years ago and never revised…that’s not my idea of stimulation.

I still plan to read these books, for the same reason kids memorize the alphabet. There are some things a civilized person should know, and also, I will feel like I’ve partially compensated for avoiding reading them when I was young.

I got started on The Odyssey today. It’s only 400 pages, and some of that is surely notes which I can ignore. After that comes Genesis, which I can skip for obvious reasons. Then Herodotus, which I skipped in high school as well as college. Herodotus isn’t literature, so I plan to get a translation I can read, not one that makes literature profs happy.

It looks like The Iliad is the real Sunday punch of first semester Literature Humanities. It’s the longest and presumably most boring book.

When this is over, my understanding of the classics will be not unlike the understanding of Europe you get from a ten-cities-in-three-days tour of Europe. But that will more than suffice.

I expect praise. People may even say this was my aristeia.

Pleading and Sweet Talk are for Calmer Times

I keep waking up every morning, considerably earlier than I would like to, and when I do, I go into prayer. I learn a lot during these sessions.

Today it happened again. I found myself talking to God about the world and myself.

The closer I get to God, the better I understand how far away I am. I really messed things up. Over several decades, I forged myself into a useless tool, and it’s taking God quite a while to shape me into something useful.

That’s okay. As long as you have breath in you, all criticism is opportunity. It’s someone showing you the door that leads out of your problems. You just have to walk through. I ask God to criticize me every day.

Unfortunately, the news for the world at large is not as good.

Most human beings are going nowhere; Christians know that. A big portion of the world belongs to Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. There are many other cults out there that compete with the truth. Many people are atheists, so they have no faith at all.

That’s not news. It wouldn’t surprise most Christians. The thing that would shock them is the utter uselessness of the church.

It would be bad if church doctrine were wrong about 5% of its claims, but I would say 5% is closer to the percentage of things we get right.

One of the worst things we’ve done has been to turn Christianity into the new Judaism. The Jews had hundreds of laws to obey, and modern rabbinical Judaism teaches that God weighs your obedience against your disobedience and decides whether to save you. Most Christians believe something like that. They think “good” people (everyone except serial killers and child rapists) go to heaven and extremely “bad” people go to hell.

The single biggest gift we received as a result of the crucifixion is freedom from the law. We don’t have to stay home and refrain from work on Saturday. We can eat bread during Passover. We don’t have to tithe. We don’t have to put in years of study just to have some idea what the law actually means. All that stuff was swept off our plates, but traditional churches pulled it out of storage and set it before us again.

Most of us think we have to earn our way into heaven. That leads to a couple of major consequences. If you think you have to earn your salvation, you’re not saved; salvation comes by faith. It also makes you proud. Anyone foolish enough to think he is so good he can put God in a position where he owes us salvation is mired in pride.

We keep telling God we’re supposed to fix our own problems. We think it’s selfish and wrong to ask for help, so we say, “I got this.” When you say you don’t need help, God stops helping you. Satan, however, keeps right on attacking. It’s a bad situation to be in, and many churches encourage it.

The new legalism is bizarre. In many denominations, it tells us God doesn’t care about horrendous sins like sodomy and fornication, but it says he saves nice people because they’re good to others. That’s a lot of nonsense. Hell is full of nice people who didn’t believe in Jesus.

We have the insane idea that Christianity is about what we do. We think there’s a big scoreboard, and we have to rack up points. That notion came from Satan, not God. Christianity is about what we ARE. It’s about inner change that comes from the Holy Spirit.

The ancient Jews were very interested in sin. They wanted people to obey the rules. Jesus came along, took the burden of obeying rules off of us, and gave us a new burden: we were supposed to change the way we felt. We were supposed to change our desires. Judaism didn’t make these demands because without the Holy Spirit, we could not comply. Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to clean us out and change our natures.

The new legalists don’t care that much about what you are. They just want you to act nice.

Yes, Jesus said people should obey his commandments. The problem is that he was not referring to the Ten Commandments or the rest of the fixed law. He was talking about the real-time commandments relayed to us by the Holy Spirit.

How could the apostles teach that we were under the law while telling us to obey it? It’s facially absurd.

A lot of the time, the Holy Spirit will agree with the written law, but often he won’t. He probably won’t require you to circumcise a son or give up pork. The Jews had hundreds of commandments, not just ten. If Jesus was talking about the law when he said we should obey his commandments, he was telling us to become Jews. That’s not what he meant. It should be obvious.

The church has denied the Holy Spirit for almost two thousand years. We have been cut off from the source of our power and growth. There are almost no preachers who can teach you anything useful. Almost all of them are like goalkeepers; they will do nearly anything to keep you from winning.

A typical preacher will help you receive salvation and then let you starve. Actually, it’s worse than starving. He will not feed you anything good, but he will fill you with poison. He may tell you to pray to dead people. He may tell you God will make you rich for sending him money. You’ll think he’s giving you treasure, and you’ll stuff yourself with it. The poison will take up the space the truth is supposed to fill.

The church isn’t experiencing a setback. It’s suffering a catastrophe.

The devil won. We had a few decades of freedom, and we gave it back. The Catholics ousted the Holy Spirit and turned the church into the biggest terrorist organization on earth, in order to intimidate people who might bring the Holy Spirit back. Now we have little pockets of people who are on the right path, but on a percentage basis, just about all of the world’s Christians are backward. They serve Satan all day and all night, even when they think they’re serving God.

Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. Maybe that’s when things went to hell. The world hates all true children of God, and it hates their ways. When Christianity becomes the world’s religion, something has to give.

It’s not possible to serve God and be accepted by the world. Read the New Testament and see. For that matter, read the Old Testament. The prophets were hated. The king who was greatest in worldly terms was Solomon, and he was a disgusting failure who practiced Satanic religions.

I thought about the state of the world this morning, and more than ever, I saw its corruption and hopelessness. We are at the point where the world is so filthy, God is going to have to start pulling his children aside. Just as he could not let Lot live in Sodom his entire life, he is going to have to put some distance between Spirit-led Christians and the stinking, vicious world of Satan.

When people insist on loving excrement, there comes a time when merely being in their presence is intolerable. That day is just about here. We will soon reach a point where the negative effects of keeping Christians in the world will outweigh the desirability of saving more souls.

I can’t believe the gross things people say on TV these days. I can’t believe we have entire cities where public nudity is legal. I can’t believe the government is forcing us to allow unvetted male perverts into locker rooms and bathrooms set aside for women. Humanity has become deranged. Up is down, and black is white. And because we don’t know the Holy Spirit, we can’t fight the world. Instead, we assimilate and fight God. When you can’t fight evil, you make good the problem.

I wish there were more time, and I wish more of us had the knowledge and power to help others. I wish the free will of those who hate God wasn’t set against him. But wishes aren’t horses, so I guess I won’t ride.

All you can do now is carve out a bubble of prayer and obedience and stay in it. If you’re not trying, you’re going to suffer a lot. God is kind, but history shows that he will allow believers to be tortured and killed almost without limitation if they’re not doing things his way.

We still perish for lack of knowledge. It’s not a joke.

There is hope for you. The world can’t be fixed, but you are not the world. Get with the program ASAP if you don’t want a lifestyle of defeat and despair. Don’t let the smooth seas fool you; they will kick up again before you know it. We’re not receiving a reward. We’re receiving time to arm ourselves.

Maybe someone will listen and apply my advice. I hope so. Maybe this blog will be up after the church has been removed from the world, and someone will read it and see the truth in it.

Whatever happens down here, God is still in heaven, and as long as there is blood in your veins, he is willing to change your destiny. Think it over. There is no alternative.

Bring in the Dart-Throwing Chimp

What joy I’m having today. I wish everyone reading this could share it with me. I mean it. All four of you.

Maybe it’s more than four. I finally decided to find out what Feedly is, and it looks like I have 39 subscribers. Hey, it’s your time. If you really think this is a good way to spend it, I guess I don’t mind enabling you.

I’ve spent a good part of the day learning to use a spreadsheet program. I mainly use my garage computer these days, and because I’m too cheap to pay for Microsoft Office, I put Open Office on it, and it includes a spreadsheet. That’s what I used.

I was comparing homeowner’s insurance quotes. Yes, you may shoot me if you are in the area.

If insurance brokers actually wanted you to understand what you’re buying, they would use a standard quote form. I can state with confidence, but without research, that by 2016, this thought has occurred to someone in the industry. Instead, everyone makes up a form, and comparing them is nearly (and intentionally) impossible.

Here is my primitive understanding of spreadsheets. They allow you to make huge tables of things you want to compare or analyze, and you can do bulk math on the stuff in the boxes. I think that’s correct. I haven’t done any of the bulk math stuff.

I made three lists for three quotes, and I tried to line up corresponding costs so I could compare them. After I was done, I found out I actually had two quotes that looked like three. Or something. I still haven’t figured it out.

I’m only a lawyer. I shouldn’t be expected to understand insurance quotes directed at the ignorant masses.

The quote I like is the one that appears to try least hard to hide things from me.

The main thing I’ve learned is that hurricane windows are probably a good idea. I guess that was helpful. Hurricane windows cut insurance costs by almost two thirds.

I found some people to give me window quotes. I wonder if I’ll be able to understand them.

I also found tech specs for the sprinkler pump I ordered, so I should be able to get the crap I need to install it and turn it into a plug-and-play job by the time the pump arrives.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I’m a riot.

No, what will actually happen is that I will scout out the correct parts and prepare them as well as possible, and then a bunch of unforeseeable stuff will happen, and I’ll end up in the pump shed, covered with filth, using the wrong tools to do a bad job fixing problems I don’t really understand.

This is not my first rodeo.

I can predict in advance that I will do a much better job of installing the pump than anyone I could hire. That’s a certainty. I guess the pros keep getting their parole revoked before they can get really good.

I’ve never been in a penitentiary (let’s hope my luck holds), but they must have really wonderful roofs, sprinklers, and landscaping. Practically everyone in there who isn’t a lawyer is in one of those fields.

I don’t know how Feedly works, because I do not read blogs. My fear (not a big one) is that subscribers get the first version of anything I write. If so, I feel for them, because I never proofread until I’ve published the first version. I feel especially bad for anyone who comes and posts an angry comment based on a typo or something I deleted during proofreading. Like I’ll type something like, “I like women who have a lot of class” and forget to type the “cl.”

I have been somewhat productive today, and I have suffered tremendously, so I feel like I can allow myself to get back to The Iliad and knock off a few dozen pages. Yesterday I did something like 130 pages. This is like reading 3000 pages of a normal book while someone sprays soapy water in your eyes. I was determined to get it behind me, so I made the sacrifice.

Just a normal sacrifice. Not a hecatomb, complete with bulls and boars and bird entrails.

It looks like Hektor is not long for this world. When I exited Scrib’d, he was talking smack to Achilleus.

Greek heroes are a great deal like WWE stars. They can’t just kill you. They have to stand in front of a crowd and give a juvenile speech first. It’s sad, really. Both guys will talk about how bad they are and how they’re going to send the other guy to hell in several shipments blah blah blah, and then one sentence later Homer is telling you how the head of one’s spear is going in the other’s ear and out through his tongue, separating his teeth from his jaws and causing his eyeballs to pop out and roll in the dust.

I guess the Greeks never heard the expression, “I ain’t going out like that.” They DO go out like that. Over and over.

After a Greek hero kills you, he strips you naked and takes your armor (lot of good it did you), and then he either leaves you there for the dogs to eat, or he cuts up your dead body for fun. And then leaves you there for the dogs to eat.

So your Greek buddies are still running around having a gay old time, jabbing each other with lances, and there you are, naked, several yards from your eyeballs. And the guy who did it is probably giving another speech and laughing his butt off.

I fail to see the appeal.

Dogs, worms, and crows seem to do well in these stories.

I may actually finish this book today. I certainly hope so.

Scavengers are Here to Pick Our Bones

I wonder how many people watched Larry Wilmore’s performance at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I listened to it on Youtube today. It was creepy and disturbing.

Larry Wilmore is the host of a cable offering called The Nightly Show. I haven’t seen it. I assume it’s similar to The Daily Show, which means it’s a comedy show that takes potshots at politicians, with most of the ammunition spent on conservatives.

Wilmore is black. I don’t know where he came from. Probaby a former Jon Stewart staffer?

From the standpoints of writing and performance, he did a great job. Most of the jokes were smart, and to people with lowered sensitivities, they were funny. But if the measure is kindness or good taste, he scored pretty low.

He used the word “jigaboo” in a joke about Ben Carson. He called the President “nigger” on national TV.

Things like that show our nation has turned a corner.

The dinner is an annual affair. It isn’t a government event. The White House doesn’t host it. But as the name shows, it is closely associated with the presidency, and the president sits in an honored place beside the podium, lending credibility. The journalists who attend supposedly represent a very select cross-section of the press. In a more ideal word, you would call them “dignitaries.”

Hired speakers who appear at the dinner are supposed to be funny, and they have to be critical. Nonetheless, you expect them to hold to a certain level of decorum. People all over the world see this event, and they see our president and vice president sitting there grinning. You don’t expect speakers to humiliate them or drag them down to the schoolyard level.

Wilmore said some things no one should say at this type of event. He said the people at Morning Joe had their heads “up Trump’s ass.” I’m sorry, but those are his actual words.

He said some harsh things about journalists, and some of his insults were appropriate and well-deserved, by our society’s standards. On the other hand, he was crass, and sometimes he was cruel, and at least one of his guests was just as boorish.

He called liberal TV head Don Lemon an “alleged journalist,” and Lemon held up his hand and gave him the finger for the cameras, proving Wilmore’s point. Try to imagine David Brinkley doing that.

Try to imagine a performance like this taking place in 1970. It could not have happened. We are no longer restrained by God. We have been given over to immaturity, cruelty, and poor judgment.

The tide has changed in this country. People who used to lose now win, and that’s a problem, because they are people who can’t handle power. Whatever errors and misdeeds we can lay at the feet of the old guard, they weren’t stupid enough to welcome foreigners who want to come here illegally and vote. They were generally aware that socialism destroyed nations. They were not supportive of sexual confusion and sexual sin; they knew these things caused terrible problems. They at least paid lip service to the idea that pride and cruelty are evil.

I suppose I’ll look bad when I say this, but suddenly, groups that screw up a lot have too much power.

In the past, women, minorities and sexually confused individuals had less power than they do now, and they suffered abuse. Their suffering matters, and it was never right to mistreat them. But now they have a lot of clout, and they’re showing they are going to be worse masters than the old mostly white men who used to be in charge.

If men could not vote, we would literally have communism and gulags. Just about everything would be “free.” Putting dangerous criminals in jail would be nearly impossible. Running a business would be nearly impossible. As a bloc, women vote for anyone who promises to take care of them, and in doing so, they make government their husband and god. They are extremely supportive of left-wing candidates, and they are the main reason we have abhorrent policies on things like convenience abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, environmental extremism, and socialism. They crave authoritarianism.

Minorities vote just like women. Anyone who will promise to help them “get even” gets their votes. People with gender problems are the same way.

The big danger used to be that we would put Caesars and Nebuchadnezzars in the White House. Now we vote for Nurse Ratched, Angela Davis, and Bill Ayres.

In the long term, people cause their own problems. I know a lot of blacks and Hispanics, and I’m sorry to tell you, the ones who do what everyone else does do pretty well. Generally, the ones who have hard lives are doing everything wrong. In 2016, you can’t claim you didn’t know felony arrests and face tattoos would make you unemployable. You can’t claim you didn’t know bad credit would cripple you economically.

I know former pimps. I know prostitutes. I know drug dealers and thieves. I know people who don’t pay their bills. I know a guy with a giant tattoo on his neck. Come on. Your skin color or your Spanish last name is not the problem. Being white won’t rocket you to success. White people who do all the wrong things end up on the bottom, too.

Latin Americans aren’t coming here because white people ruined Latin America. They ruined it themselves. They’re actually coming to flee other Latin Americans. Think about that.

They continue ruining their countries every day. The ones who had bad values at home bring those bad values here, and they live in neighborhoods that are a lot like their home countries: dangerous and poor. They even bring low wages with them by ignoring our wage-hour laws.

People from unsuccessful sectors of society should be copying the rest of us. It worked for Asians who came here as slaves. It works pretty well for anyone. Instead, many have decided to proclaim themselves victims and persecute everyone who disagrees with them.

There is a pattern in America; in the world, for that matter. People with old-fashioned beliefs build things up. Then they decay. Then people from unsuccessful groups move in to distribute the goodies, and everything falls apart.

I thought about this when Obama was elected in 2004. It was like watching people with bad values move into a suburb and turn it into a slum.

Obama has the most counterproductive ideas of any modern US president. He is a whiner who lives to make excuses and blame others falsely. He persecutes people who work. He rewards the lazy. He encourages racism against whites. He has the heart of a looter. He doesn’t build. He just mines the accumulated wealth earlier generations built up. He destroys it and passes it out.

The things Wilmore said seemed to have supernatural significance. There was a deeper message. I would sum it up thus: “Our side runs things now. We haven’t changed our ways. We insist on having power without self-examination or growth. We have no respect. We have no gratitude, compassion, or humility. We will show you how to run this country, and we will punish you.”

“We’ll take it from here.”

The old guard blew it. No doubt about that. People of European extraction committed genocide and atrocities. They bought millions of slaves from Africans and brought them here and made their lives hell. They did all sorts of bad things. But we’re about to find out that the people who come after them are a lot worse. They are less educated, and they perceive themselves as victims. There is no limit to the cruelty and barbarism of a self-proclaimed victim. A lot of their motivation comes not from a desire to reform, but a desire to make the other guy suffer.

What do we do about it? Nothing. Don’t put me on a list of possible insurgents. If I’m on one, take me off. I give up. I don’t care. It can’t be fixed, so to the looters and invaders, I say, “Go ahead and have your fun, and let me know if I’m in your way so I can move farther away from your power centers.” I don’t plan to do anything except talk about it. Eventually, that, itself, will be considered treason. One day, committees will go through old Internet posts. The Wayback Machine will be used to prepare evidence for criminal trials. You wait and see.

America’s goose is cooked. I don’t intend to get worked up about it. We made our choice. The people on the top, the people on the bottom…every segment of America chose destruction over God. I accept it. You should, too. When David’s baby son was dying, he fasted and prayed until the boy died, and then he got up and went on with his life. Part of Christianity is acknowledging finality and closure. You don’t want to become a pillar of salt.

The nation is finished, but some people can change. If you want to accomplish something, focus on the individual, starting with yourself. We are never going to see a day when huge crowds in America assemble simultaneously, repent, and beg God to bring back his favor. Shoot for targets you can actually hit. Choose your battles.

Wilmore makes me glad I didn’t get any attention when I was working as a humorist. If I had gotten everything I wanted, I would be just like him. Conceited beyond belief. Stuffed with success, yet eager for more promotion. Utterly insensitive. I would have made cruelty my profession; I was well on the way.

I wonder who will come after Larry Wilmore and his generation. Things can still get worse. They could do what the Romans did; they could torture people to death for laughs.

That’s probably coming. I shouldn’t say it lightly. We’re just like the Romans, the Germans, the Austrians, the Cambodians…

Keep repenting. Keep praising. Keep thanking God. You’re going to need his help more and more as time passes, and it will take time for you to grow into a warrior. On the job training doesn’t work well for combat soldiers.

It’s very sad to see a society develop tools that should propel it forward like never before, and then move backward. But we keep improving technology instead of ourselves. A monkey with an Internet connection and Google Glass is still a monkey.

Guess I’ll go outside and wave at the drones now.

Mexican Electrics, Unbelievably, Fail the Endurance Test

The sprinkler pump adventure is not over yet.

My old pump is supposed to have 1.5″ plumbing, minimum, and the motor should be 1.5 HP. When I cut the old PVC off, I found that the pipe had narrowed to 1.25″ or less, and it was globbed up with plastic. The walls weren’t smooth and straight. It was like the inside of a cave. The pump (a Mexican replacement for the original) was 2 HP, so I was paying for electricity I didn’t need.

For some reason, I thought irrigation pumps were expensive. I just assumed. The one I had was heavy cast iron, and it was made in America, so I figured it cost a ton. When I saw a replacement motor for $165, I thought it was a deal, so I bought it.

Today I got the motor out of the shed, which was not fun at all, and I carried it to my bench. That’s about fifty yards, and it probably weighs 75 awkward pounds. I took the motor apart in pieces and then found I was going to have a hard time getting the shaft out of the impeller. The shaft should have been stainless, but it was very rusty, and there was no way to access the impeller without taking the pump apart. The pump was pretty much a unit, with the halves welded together by rust caused by the installer’s decision to leave the iron base sitting just off the ground surrounded by wet leaves.

I decided to derust the pump. I put it in a shop vac tub with water and soda, and I connected a battery charger.

After all this work, I went on the web and started researching pumps, and I found out a new one is only $300. That’s not chicken feed, but I was thinking $600 or something, based on what the sprinkler guys were saying. They are just as hopeless as the pump.

Now I have a new pump on the way, and I’m trying to cancel the new motor. I’m hoping they didn’t ship it yet. I ordered it late on a Friday. I don’t care. They are welcome to the return shipping fee.

After all this misery, I have learned some important things. I already mentioned the bad installation and the screwed-up pipes. I also learned that the motor I just trashed wasn’t grounded. Somebody could have been killed working on it. The person who installed it deliberately left it that way. I believe that would be the same company that just came out here and failed in almost every regard. Now I know not to call them again.

I’m going to install the new pump myself because NO ONE IN SOUTH FLORIDA CAN BE TRUSTED TO CONNECT THREE WIRES AND DO ONE FOOT OF PLUMBING. I would love to pay someone, but apparently that would be like going to the vet for a vasectomy.

Once it’s in, I’ll find a reputable sprinkler company on Angie’s List and kiss the old outfit goodbye forever.

I don’t know what to use for a pump base. Wood will rot. Even pressure-treated wood rots eventually. I should go get some aluminum channel. It will outlast the sun. It will get pretty crusty in the damp shed, but it won’t disappear like wood, and it won’t petrify with thick rust.

Tradesmen are getting really stupid. At least it seems that way. I know virtually nothing about irrigation or electrical work, but I am miles ahead of the professionals who have worked here.