Stuff is Happening

I made my pineapple upside-down banana nut cake, and I wasn’t that happy with it. A lot of the pineapple sauce leaked out, so it needed more, and I was out of pineapple stuff, so I was stuck. Also, I was not totally pleased with the way it went with rum raisin ice cream.

I thought it would be fantastic served hot, and when it wasn’t quite fantastic, I figured the sauce was the problem. Then I stuck it in the fridge, and later, I tried a cold slice. It was magnificent! Very odd. You would think hot would be better, but this cake definitely has to be served cold.

I didn’t get a chance to try it cold with ice cream. It was too good to keep. I had to throw it out. I could have given it to friends at church (in fact, I got hollered at for failing to do so), but I don’t know if I could have avoided eating it before I got a chance to deliver it.

I used a 9″ springform pan. That was a mistake. I can’t remember why I used a springform pan in the past. It’s not a bad idea, but the cake is too tall, and 9″ is the wrong diameter, because you can only fit 4 pineapple slices in it. And you have to have extra-wide foil to keep the sauce in the pan. Next time I think I’ll go to 10″ and use wider foil.

In other news, I changed my oil today. “Big deal,” right? Well, it IS. First of all, it looks like vehicle dealers have universally adopted a strategy of jamming oil plugs so they’re impossible to remove. I think they do it to force you to come back for help. I had this problem with the Harley, and today I had a tough time getting the plug out of the Dodge. An impact driver had no effect. I finally put a half-inch socket wrench on it and basically military-pressed it open. I would guess I put over a hundred pounds of force on the wrench. There is no reason for an oil plug to be that tight.

I had a lot of fun dealing with almost 3 gallons of dirty oil and removing the air inlet hose to get to the filter. The truck is so tall, I have to stand on a box to work under the hood. On the up side, there’s tons of room under it.

Anyway, by the time I was done, my arms were pretty much black from the fingers halfway to my elbow, and I had blood on my shirt from a cut I still haven’t found. It ought to be worth it, however, because I can go 37,500 miles before my next oil change.

I used Amsoil and an Amsoil filter, for the best possible performance. That meant changing the oil myself, because I couldn’t find anyone around here who would do the change and just charge for labor.

I also had fun moving my spare tire back to the storage doodad under the truck bed. I got up on the side of the truck and started to shove the tire toward the back, and I felt a horrible sensation in my side. I still don’t know what it was. Now I have a sore spot between my ribs. And to make things even more pleasant, this happened before I did the oil change, so I got to enjoy feeling the soreness increase while I was struggling to drag myself around under the truck.

Once you get past a certain age, you can hurt yourself badly enough to justify an ER visit, just by breaking wind without warming up.

I’m trying to get the garage fixed up. I threw out some of my beloved scrap items. A big box of Cat 5 wire, spools of copper wire, the steel frame from a desk, and so on. I know I’ll need all of it ten minutes after the garbage truck comes by, but I have to de-clutter. If only I had a shed…no, TWO sheds…and a barn…with a lean-to…and a blimp hangar…

I have been going nuts trying to build a Telecaster-type guitar from six slabs of walnut, and I finally decided to accept reality and order a jointer. I got my planing sled to work, and I even put feed tables on my wonderful DeWalt planer, but you know what? It still sucks. I pretty much solved the planer jointing problem, but I just don’t care. It sucks.

I watched a woodworking video last night, and the old guy doing the work grabbed a piece of wood and tossed it on the jointer, and BANG, he was done. In about seven seconds. I wanted to strangle him.

I started thinking about the horror of mounting wood on the planing sled, lifting the planer onto a table, using duct tape to cobble together a dust collection scheme, and then fighting snipe, and for a time, I went insane. I found out it was possible to use credit card points to get the price of a jointer down so low they almost paid me to take it, so I gave up and pulled the trigger.

This is one reason I need room.

I decided on a Rikon 10″ jointer/planer combo. Wait! Shut up! Don’t lecture me! I know it’s not a classic 8″ Powermatic, and I will even admit that some nutcase just sold a like-new Powermatic for $500 on the local Craigslist. But I needed something small, and I wanted to be able to joint wide stuff. The Rikon is a blatant copy of an old machine made by Inca, and people still love the Inca machines and pay high prices for them. I feel sure it will work for my needs, and it has a neat stand with wheels, and it doesn’t weigh three tons or whatever the Powermatic weighs, and it doesn’t have a forty-foot wingspan.

Sometimes you have to compromise.

Jet makes combo machines for much less, but nearly everyone who reviews them says leprosy is more fun than getting a Jet to work, so I couldn’t make myself face the risk. Seriously, the reviews are like little treatments for brief horror films.

I made myself a router fence so I could do edge-jointing on the router, but I started thinking of the geometry-based ramifications my project would involve, and I realized it would be a torment straight from hell’s pit, so there’s another reason to throw in the towel.

Making the router fence was surprisingly hard. The table saw is the tool from paradise. It does everything with microscopic precision and drug-fantasy ease, and it made the parts in no time at all. But putting them together…not fun. It turns out you can’t screw into the side of 1/2″ MDF, even with pilot holes. I had to go with all-glue construction, and I had to make the fence parts perfectly square. I don’t know if glue is strong enough to hold this thing together under stress, but there is no other way to do it. We will see.

I have an idea for combining angle iron and scrap wood to make a dynamite router fence that will slide on my Biesemeyer rails. That would be beautiful. I could just order a short Biesemeyer fence, but that would cost a pile. It’s impossible to buy a pro fence, by itself, used.

I now have a spiffy restored vintage Stanley No. 6 plane (cheap!), but I have to learn how to use it, and I don’t think I’ll regret getting the jointer. It has become clear to me that I need to learn to use a bench plane and a shoulder or rabbet plane, in order to have any type of respect for myself as a man. There are too many problems they solve quickly. You can’t witness them in action and then not lust for them mindlessly.

I may still be inept, but I continue to strive. Success, or at least the comforting illusion of success, comes incrementally. It’s sort of like socialism in the USSR before it all went down the toilet and the whole country got a reality check from the back of Reagan’s hand.

Now if I could only find my tape measure…

Best Viewed Through Smoked Glass

Got a sick project in the oven. I’m making banana nut bread with my homegrown Orinoco banans. But there’s MORE! I got a tip from Mike, and I replaced a lot of the eggs with mayonnaise. And it’s not a loaf. It’s a BANANA NUT BREAD PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE. Made with fresh pineapple.

Even worse: a side of Haagen-Dazs rum raisin. I plan to serve the cake hot, with ice cream beside it.

I can’t wait to see what this is like.

Half-Day Job Only Takes Weeks

On the theory that people are morbidly fascinated by tales of inept woodworking, I thought I’d post an update on my continuing efforts to create six pieces of walnut suitable for assembling in a slab which can be turned into a Telecaster body.

Tonight I resawed a new chunk of walnut, stuck the pieces on my new, shorter planer sled, and face-jointed them. It actually worked, although I got a tiny amount of snipe on both boards.

Initially I figured my tools were 98% to blame and I was responsible for the other 2%, but it has gradually become apparent that those numbers needed to be reversed. Ignorance, lack of technique, and sheer stupidity were causing most of my problems.

I have learned that good technique can almost eliminate snipe when I use the planer sled, and improved shimming and a more manageable sled are solving my other problems. The infeed tables I ordered should make things even better. The orbital quarter-sheet sander I bought yesterday does an acceptably quick and effective job of fixing my jointing errors. I now have six 18″-24″ pieces of usable wood, and I only had to buy nine feet of walnut to do it.

I guess I won’t have to buy a jointer right away, although the little Rikon 10″ looks really enticing and may end up in my garage anyhow.

I look forward to the arrival of my restored Stanley No. 6 plane, so I can put the sander and maybe even the planer away.

By the way, here’s a great tip I came up with tonight. When using a shop-vac as a passive receptacle to catch planer dust, don’t connect the hose to the shop-vac’s blower side. Don’t ask me how I got so smart. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a gift.

Chilly!

It’s 57° outside, and it’s almost one p.m.! I LOVE IT!

I get so tired of sticking to things.

Help Out

From a reader:

Hi Steve. XXXX here, longtime reader, occasional commenter. I’ve noticed that you take prayer requests from time to time. I started to detail what it is I wish you would join me (and others around me) in praying for…. but it’s so long and convoluted that I think I’ll just say this: my mother is in danger from my father. Last week, in a fit of rage, he had her by the throat and pointed a gun at her head. Now they both behave as if nothing happened. (he doesn’t know that I know about this – I got details from my aunt, his sister, but this is not out of keeping with his behavior since my childhood) My mother refuses to leave, and he refuses to get help. And so the cycle goes as it has for decades, but the involvement of a gun strikes me as a critical escalation of his behavior. I love my mother and my father, but this situation is untenable as it stands. I would like you to pray for safety for my mom and for peace for my dad. Right now, there is nothing I can do if neither of them will ask for or accept help. I feel helpless and afraid. I have told them about your blog in the past; I don’t know if they read it, but if you do put a prayer request out, please keep the details vague for everyone’s safety. I don’t mean to put a caveat on how you choose or do not choose to pray – it’s just a safety consideration. I have been wanting to send this to you for a week now, but have hesitated because its difficult stuff to talk about, and I don’t know if you would want to be involved or not.

Telecaster Thoughts

I tried to get my garage cleaned up enough so I could work on a Telecaster body. It took me an hour and a half to do about 30% of the job. I guess you could say I let the place get away from me.

My big problem is that I work until I’m tired, which means I don’t set time and energy aside for cleanup. It’s sort of like swimming out to sea until you feel like swimming back. By that time, you’re too far out to make it home.

I do not understand Telecasters at all. It’s a board and a stick. It’s not even a pretty, curvy board like a Les Paul. It looks like a half-eaten popsicle, and what is the story with that stupid little headstock? It looks like Leo Fender ruined his original design by slipping with the router and then carved the current crappy design in order to save the neck he was working on. On top of all that, the Telecaster has only two pots. You can’t adjust the pickups independently! In spite of all of this, the guitar plays anything you want it to, it feels good in your hands, and it exudes kitschy American style.

When it comes to style, sometimes I like to try to imagine what Mickey Rourke would choose. This is one reason why I wear French cuffs with sportcoats and blazers. It’s one reason I bought a Thunderbird instead of a Boxster. I think Mickey Rourke would probably go with a semi-restored circa-1960 Cadillac, but I’m not made of money.

If Mickey Rourke could play the guitar, I think he’d pick a Gretsch, a Telecaster, or an ES345. Either that or a tobacco burst Les Paul that had been used as a murder weapon.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to get a slab put together for a guitar body. I’m shooting for bookmatched walnut, and if I can pull it off, I’ll inlay lighter-colored strips of some other wood around the edges.

“But I’m With the Band!”

I got some interesting insights into God’s mind this week. I hope they came from him and not me.

I feel like God uses my dealings with other people to teach me what his life is like. This is a fairly obvious thing. For example, God gives us children and makes us participate in creation so we can understand what it’s like to try to teach and improve people, and what it means to love someone more than you love yourself.

I’ve noticed that there are times when people do things for me, in a way that is not a blessing. They come up with ideas that seem good to them, and they go forward with them, even if I discourage them. They may put in a lot of time or money or effort, and then I get the result, and they expect me to be thrilled and to reciprocate, and of course, I am not thrilled, and I do not reciprocate. What they’re doing is not generous. It’s manipulation. They do it for themselves, not me. There is a certain amount of love in it, but it’s buried in selfishness and stubbornness.

I don’t feel guilty about refusing to get sucked into the game, or about hurting their feelings. Sometimes you need to have your feelings hurt, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re actually cheated. Christianity is not about being nice. It never was.

Seems like God uses these people to teach me how he feels when we do what we want, in his name. I believe this is what “taking the Lord’s name in vain” means.

Jesus said people would come to him–probably at the Rapture–and point to the things they had done for him, and he would tell them to get lost, because he had never “known” them. They would not be permitted to attend the wedding feast in heaven; instead, they would have to suffer the Tribulation.

The word “know” means “know” the way men know their wives in the Bible. Presumably, he meant the wedding rejects had never become joined to him as parts of the Body of Christ, executing his will instead of their own. A man and woman are supposed to be one flesh. Christians are supposed to be united with Jesus, as his flesh on earth. If you’re off doing things he didn’t tell you to do, you’re like Dr. Strangelove’s arm, doing things the owner does not intend.

Jesus made it clear it was possible to do amazing things, using supernatural power, without pleasing him. He said people would point to worthless miracles they had done in his name. Apparently, you can get divine power before you get divine righteousness. Isn’t that always the way life goes? The legal driving age in most states is 16. Enough said.

We’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and we’re supposed to be cleansed of demons and filled with supernatural righteousness. I think that’s how it works. Jesus got baptized with the Holy Spirit, and he immediately went out and fasted to clear the demons out. Satan himself showed up to tempt him, and Jesus persevered and overcame, and Satan fled. After that, Jesus began using God’s power and doing great things.

It may sound crazy to suggest Jesus had demons assigned to influence him, but of course, it must be true. The Bible says he was tempted as we are, in all ways, and we know demons are assigned to tempt us. They give us addictions and bad attitudes. They drive us to act impulsively. They whisper corrupt thoughts into our minds. Surely Jesus had the same problem. In fact, this is proven conclusively by the appearance of Satan during the fast. Presumably, after 40 days, all of his underlings had given up, and Satan had to go in person to hit Jesus with the heaviest artillery he had.

The prison-like habits and tendencies demons get us to take up are called “iniquities” in the Bible. A sin is an act. An iniquity is a chronic thing. You can prevent a discrete sin by an act of will, but getting rid of iniquities requires supernatural power, which is why we have to fast and pray.

What did Jesus call the people who did false works in his name? “Workers of iniquity.” They were not clean. They were under the influences of demons and the flesh, and they obeyed those influences. An evil influence may tell you to build an orphanage for Jesus, when you’re really supposed to write a book. It may tell you to work a flashy miracle when you’re supposed to stand back and pray. It may tell you to give money to a bum who actually needs to starve until he agrees to go to rehab and repent. It may tell you to build a giant, shiny church and ordain homosexuals and write books about self-esteem and positive thinking, and you may become a millionaire many times over, and when you meet up with Jesus, you may learn that you might as well have been running a brothel.

This is why the church has done so many evil things. People serve demons and the flesh, thinking they serve Jesus. They work iniquity. If Jesus accepted their works, he would be serving Satan. The workers of iniquity are led by Satan, and they do works that please him, so if Jesus goes along with it, he himself serves Satan. That is not possible, so he rejects them.

It makes perfect sense. We are supposed to be the Bride of Christ, and those who are faithful (not all Christians) are to be spared the Tribulation so they can attend the holy wedding feast in heaven. If you serve iniquity, you are unfaithful, like a cheating fiancee. Over and over, even in the Old Testament, those who turn from God’s voice are compared to unfaithful wives. Look at Hosea’s wife. We are supposed to be one with Jesus, as a man and woman are one. Three’s a crowd. You can’t marry Satan and Jesus.

It’s a sobering concept. If it’s correct, most Christians are wasting their time (that part seems indisputable), and they will be left behind in the Rapture. Then they will have to suffer unspeakable persecution, as well as martyrdom. Probably at the hands of Muslims and “progressive” Christians.

I truly believe this is correct. It’s a natural extension of things I’ve learned from Perry Stone and Robert Morris, and it makes sense of scripture, and I didn’t sit down and figure it out. It came to me. Had it been the result of study and conjecture, I would have much less reason to think it was sound. Revelation does not come from the puny human mind. The Bible itself says only the Holy Spirit explains scripture.

In other news, I already received the router templates I ordered, so today I am going to try to work on building a Telecaster clone. I have to joint and plane some walnut and put it together with Titebond and clamps. I think I’ll get a crummy piece of pine for router practice, to use while the walnut sets up.

Yesterday I realized I have already found uses for the upper part of the 24-fret neck on my Telecaster, and I will not be able to reach that area when I play my Les Paul and 335 clones. That’s important knowledge. I didn’t realize upper neck access would be so important to me. I thought those extra frets were a novelty. Now I’m wondering if I can build a double cutaway Telecaster, to make neck access even better. If you look at the design of the Telecaster, you will see why some people think a DC design lacks solidity. Maybe glue would solve the problem. I know of no reason why you can’t combine screws and glue. Matsumoku did it when they made Gibson clones.

Hope this works. It should be tremendous fun, and I think it’s fairly easy, as woodworking projects go.

Delicacy

I got my cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pies made. I stuck a new ingredient in the relish, and it made a huge difference. I think it’s new, although knowing me, I may have done the same thing last year.

I have two pones of cornbread mashed up in a pot with sage, salt, pepper, fried onions, too much butter, and some other stuff. It’s so good I could eat it right now, cold and wet though it is.

I decided to use some of my precious shucky beans. I grew these a few years back and dried them myself.

These will be incredible. If you’ve never had them, go get some fresh green beans, remove the strings, dry them strung on threads, and cook them in a few months. These will soak overnight, and then tomorrow I’ll toss the water, replace it, add salt pork, and simmer them.

What a joy it is to have shucky beans on hand! I probably have the only shucky beans within 800 miles.

I thought Thanksgiving would be boring, but it’s starting to look like it will be a fantastic meal.

Youthful Stupidity is Not Cheap

This week I got depressed. That’s interesting, because it’s something that almost never happens to me.

I spent the first thirty years of my life depressed. My family was dysfunctional, and my childhood was pure misery, and it took me decades to outgrow the habit of depression. I still think of childhood as a prison; if I had to choose one thing for which I’m most grateful, other than my relationship with God, it would be my adult status. I have never gotten over the thrill of adulthood’s freedoms. I don’t have to ask people for money. I can get in my truck or on a plane and go anywhere I want. I don’t have to worry about older adults threatening to beat me up. I don’t have to deal with sadistic teachers any more. If someone makes my life unpleasant, I cut them off and never speak to them again. There is nothing like being an adult.

Maybe we feel the same way when we leave the earth behind.

I think my status as a perennially depressed person ended when I started law school. A career in law wasn’t exciting, and law school was fairly dull, but I had a lot of friends, and I had something to do with my time, and things went reasonably well. Since then, I have never been depressed for more than a day or two.

I got depressed this week because my father invited me out for a drink and then started nagging me about getting married.

You have to understand the history. My mother was a wonderful woman, and when she met my dad, she decided he was IT. He may think he caught her, but the truth is, she caught him. I believe this is usually the case in marriages. Men don’t like to admit it, because it ruins their reputations as ladies’ men, but we are much less picky than women, and women usually end up deciding whether a marriage is going to take place. Men like to think they set their romantic goals and achieve them, and that’s probably true when it comes to casual sex, but when it comes to marriage, women make the decisions. I know there are exceptions, and pride will drive men to dispute it, but the rule seems solid.

My dad was in his twenties, and God dropped a great wife on him without requiring any diligence on his part. As a result, he does not understand that life is not like that for all of us. Asking him about romance is like asking Lindsay Lohan about making money. He landed a great lady early without any real effort, so he thinks it works that way for the whole world.

The Bible says a good wife comes from God, not from your own effort. And it will not always happen on your schedule. According to the Jews, even Isaac, who was highly blessed, did not find a wife until he was middle-aged. Some fine people never marry, and it’s not because they didn’t try. There are some things in this life you can’t control completely, and finding a mate is one of them. You can play the field and then settle; to that extent, you have control. But if you’re hoping for a real blessing, it’s like waiting for rain. God supplies it when he feels like it. And the biggest factor in his timing is your progress as a Christian.

If I had stayed close to God back in the 1980s, when I started attending church and changing my life, I would surely have found a wife long ago. But I stepped outside the flow of blessings and into the domain of the enemy, and I got the kind of wages enemies pay. I accept that. Like all human beings, I was born an idiot, and idiots suffer until they recover from idiocy.

God is repairing my life now, but it is not an instantaneous process, and I am not going to saddle myself with an awful woman just because I’m getting old. I enjoy life tremendously, and there is nothing that can match a woman’s potential to cause misery. I am not going to try to force a blessing.

I didn’t enjoy being reminded that I had frittered away my youth. Ordinarily, I don’t think much about it, but parents have a way of pushing buttons. So I was down for a couple of days. I wasn’t looking for a bridge to jump off of, but I’m ordinarily very happy, so two or three mildy gloomy days have a big impact on my perception of my life.

It’s particularly upsetting to get this kind of speech, given the choices my dad would make for me. He means well, but he tries to fix me up with cocktail waitresses and cashiers. He used to try to fix me up with his paralegals. Anyone he thinks is good looking will do.

This highlights the magnitude of the blessing he received when he found my mother. He could have married some sleazy woman who saw him purely as a meal ticket. God blessed him, pure and simple. I could have a wife next week, if a cocktail waitress was what I wanted. And before you start lecturing me, I’m not referring to a nice Christian girl who had no choice but to serve drinks for a living. That should be obvious to any intelligent person.

My church is full of nice women, but most of them are black, and only a small percentage of black women are willing to marry outside their race. A lot of the women at my church are young, and while a woman should be no older than her husband, I feel a little odd talking to women in their twenties. Quite honestly, I always think, “This girl would be cheating herself.” Some of the women in my church are too old to have kids. That rules them out; I don’t care how nice they are in other ways. I’m not closing that door. It may seem unfair, since it means I won’t date a woman my own age, but then I didn’t make the rules of biology, and I won’t be held accountable for them. God put Ruth and Boaz together, after all. I don’t know of any Biblical stories of young men marrying old women. Feminism is a modern conceit; it has nothing to do with reality.

There are also women who already have kids. There are a couple of problems with this. First, I am not a kid person. I know I would love children of my own, but I don’t like being around other people’s kids all that much, except for really good kids, for short periods of time. And women with kids tend to be overly eager to get remarried, partly for financial reasons, and that causes problems. Second problem: being injected into a prefab family complete with a family court judge, a hostile adult male, and two sets of in-laws does not appeal to me.

Psalm 37:4 says God will give us the desires of our hearts. I have seen that happening to me, and I know it applies to all aspects of life. I’m not going to wreck it by making a desperate lifeboat-style grab for a wife. I have a wonderful life as a single man. Why would I trade that for a miserable life with a woman who was unattractive or unpleasant or lacking in faith? God will provide, or he won’t. I keep my eyes open, and I will make the effort, but I know the difference between carnality and spirituality, and I am not going to let my flesh run the show.

I don’t know if my church will provide a solution. I’ve only met one woman who seemed to have potential, and she’s young, and there are other issues.

I’ll say this for my church: for young people, it’s a marriage factory. I’ve seen a number of great young people get hitched there, and some are also developing good careers. They’re so lucky. They have stayed within God’s protection, and they are getting blessed early in life. Hopefully they won’t have to go through the chastisement and droughts people like me go through.

In other news, I’m planning to build a guitar. I found out how easy it is to build Telecaster clones. A factory neck is a necessity, unless you’re a skilled woodworker, but anyone who can run a router can make a body, and you can get perfect results and great control, without spending much. A Fender American Standard sells for $1000; for that kind of money, you could build the finest Telecaster known to man.

I’d like to make a guitar with a bookmatched walnut top. I already have the wood. I want humbucker-sized pickups and a Bigsby. Truthfully, it would be a Les Paul in a Telecaster shape. It’s very hard to build a Les Paul, and a Telecaster-type guitar would do the same things.

Telecasters are amazing. A Telecaster is a stick and a board, and it only has two pots, but it can still have an incredible action, great responsiveness, and all sorts of wonderful tones.

I’d like to play slide blues, and you need a guitar with a fairly high action for that, and I don’t want to dedicate any of my existing guitars to it, so building seems like a good way to go. For $500, I can make something wonderful. We’ll see what happens.

Last night I had a playing breakthrough. I keep studying theory and scales and whatever, and so far it has led nowhere. I had some ideas for “Sweet Home Chicago,” so I started working on it with no real plan, and before I knew it, I had a complete solo.

This tells me I may be able to do what “natural musicians” do. That would sure be a nice shortcut. Some people play and compose beautifully without getting into theory, and if I could do that, it would make life a lot more satisfying while the theory studies progress.

I know of several ways to approach the guitar. One is to sit around studying theory and scales. Another is to memorize other people’s arrangements note for note and go from there. Another is to hear arrangements in my head and try to write them down in tablature form. Last night I realized there’s a simpler way: just pick the guitar up and play. This is probably how B.B. King did it. I think I can guarantee you it’s how John Lee Hooker did it, because he played whatever he wanted, all the time, and he complained that he had no freedom when he worked with bands.

While I was working with the guitar, I realized I was getting to know the fretboard instinctively: which notes worked and which didn’t. I was finding positions to use. That stuff could be very useful. So from now on I plan to spend a certain amount of time every day, just PLAYING. I think it will work. One of the things I hated about the piano was that I practiced and practiced, but I never played.

I have to go make cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and two pumpkin pies now. Happy Thanksgiving.

Tragedy

I can’t believe this. I can’t find my recipe for blueberry cornbread.

Put Those Twinkies Behind You

I always worry that I don’t do enough to give God his glory. It’s very dangerous to fail to credit God (before others) when you get an obvious blessing.

Here’s something I want people to know. Mike went on an Armorbearer Freedom Fast with me a few months back. He weighed 335 pounds, and it was all due to overeating. Mike loves food even more than I do.

As of the weekend, he was down to 288. Like me, he is not dieting, nor is he losing weight through exercise. It’s grace. A miracle. He hasn’t been this thin in years.

So far, maybe six or seven people have done the AB fast with me, and only one got the miracle. One of my armorbearer buddies wants to do it in a week or two. I hope he gets it too.

I suspect that attitude has a lot to do with it. If you don’t admit gluttony is a sin, like looking at pornography or shooting heroin, and you don’t admit you eat too much, you probably won’t get anywhere. That’s my best guess, based on my understanding of God and the scriptures. And of course, faith is a necessity.

This is a very big deal; obesity and gluttony are terrible curses, and it’s wonderful to see a person get true, lasting freedom. Mike and I are “free, indeed,” as the Bible puts it. I hope others get free, too. God is both powerful and generous.

One of the big frustrations of Christianity is seeing God’s power in your own life yet being unable to help other people get the same good things. I think the biggest obstacle is refusal to listen. When I hear about someone who got a blessing I need, I try to do what they did, so I can get the same thing. I am trying to soften the block of cement which is my skull, so I can learn good things from successful Christians. I’ve gotten a few really good things. I want to pass them on. I also want good things others have gotten.

Too bad Christian development isn’t a force-feeding process. We’d all be free.

Give fasting a shot if you have an addiction.

Or be Buried Under It

Sometimes God teaches us in the weirdest ways.

What is God’s work like? It’s like this: he makes great plans for us. He prepares big blessings for us. He brings them to us. And we turn them down. Then he withdraws while we fumble around and waste our lives. He remains with us, but he limits what he does for us, because to endorse what we do would adversely affect his own perfect nature.

Okay. That’s the background.

I joined a church. I started working as an armorbearer. I started working on books with the pastor. I started working in the kitchen.

The book projects disappeared after a new PR exec was hired. I was driven out of the kitchen after a new kitchen manager was hired. I still work as an armorbearer, but I have learned that the good things I want to do in that capacity will be very limited, so I am maintaining a reduced role.

It’s a little crazy. I’m a published author with a literary agent and a lot of ability, and I work fast, and I was willing to work for nothing. As to the kitchen, I was making the church $200 per week, and I could have earned them a lot more, and my food got raves. But I could not get permission to do the good things I wanted to do.

Yesterday I realized God was showing me what his life is like.

God has all sorts of blessings in store for us, waiting like fleets of shrink-wrapped Rolls-Royces in hidden warehouses. He wants to shower us with them. He wants to give us great careers, wonderful spouses, healthy families, and intimate relationships with him. He wants to turn us into powerful warriors who are able to harness the same might that built the galaxies. He wants us to see our prayers answered. He wants to work miracles through us. He wants to make tumors vanish. He wants to raise our dead.

And we say, “No, thanks! We have a better idea!”

I tried to bless my church, but I hit resistance, and now I have to sit back and do nothing, even though I still want to be a blessing.

Blessing a Christian, even for another Christian, is like trying to feed an angry baby. Even if you get the spoon in, they spit the food all over the kitchen. You can only succeed where God has chosen and prepared the field of battle in advance. You can only succeed when he has given you flesh and spirit allies. And you can only succeed where people are willing to shut up and accept the blessing.

You see this demonstrated over and over in the Bible. God had a great idea, but Eve thought she had a better one, and the result was a long-lasting curse on all mankind. God had a great idea, but the rebellious angels thought they had a better one, so they interbred with humans and gave us forbidden technology, and the result was the flood. God had a great idea, but the ten spies thought they had a better one, and the result was that hundreds of thousands of people died in the desert, a few miles from the Promised Land. The prophets brought the Jews great ideas from God, and the Jews thought they had better ideas, so they murdered them. God gave the great idea of undeserved power and help to the Christian church, and we decided we had a better idea: we would get God’s help by being good, without the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The result was two thousand years of impotence before Satan, who has ruled as a god even though he lost his title at the crucifixion.

We were supposed to raise the dead and cast out demons and heal the sick. By and large, we have failed. Miracles became so rare in the early centuries of Christianity that people began traveling to places like Lourdes because they could not get help in their own churches. We now have a Catholic church that gives the official title of “saint” to a person who performs three measly miracles! That’s ridiculous! Every Christian should see more miracles than that, every year!

We are weak and blind and poor and lame, as supernatural beings, because we preferred our own brilliant notions to God’s tired old plans.

Before the Jews existed, men rejected Yahweh. The Jews came along, and they rejected Jesus. Christians came along, and we rejected the Holy Spirit. We are no better than the people we gloat over. We are pathetic. We have no humility. We think we’re superior to our predecessors, but we’re as blind as everyone who came before us. It’s like I always say: if Jesus came back today, we would trample each other trying to be first in line to crucify him.

If Jesus came back right now, he would tell us (as he did two thousand years ago) that he came to baptize us with the Holy Spirit. He would tell us it was essential to our growth and success. He would tell us to pray in tongues, worship, pray with our understanding, praise God, fast, and study. He would tell us to quit worrying so much about doing good and worry about BECOMING good, through the Holy Spirit’s transforming power. And we would tell him he was crazy, because we like to think we can earn our blessings. Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago so he could give us power and help through our faith, and we still want him to give us what we earn by our own effort, and we think that’s more righteous than being given things we don’t deserve. We think God helps those who helps themselves, but that’s not in the Bible. That’s pure pride. That’s Satan talking. God helps those who believe and obey in their hearts.

Did Lazarus earn his resurrection? Did the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda earn his legs back? Find me a person in the New Testament who received a healing because he or she obeyed the law. The most blessed person in the New Testament was Cornelius, and he got God’s attention by praying, giving to the poor, and fearing God, not by approaching perfection under his own power. He was a Roman soldier! He made a living ordering people to kill other people! God saved him and all his house, and he poured the Holy Spirit into them. Meanwhile, many of the religious Jews studied the scriptures all day and tithed on the worthless crap they grew in their herb gardens, and God blew right by them.

Jesus burns with desire to give us power and blessings we can’t deserve, and we are determined to get by with the garbage (Paul called it “dung”) we get by our own strength.

Read the Bible. I’m not making it up. See what Paul said about earning salvation and blessings. It can’t be done.

One of the things I wrestle with as a Christian is the issue of giving up on other people. I’ve heard all sorts of testimonies about Christians who struggled for decades with sinners, trying to get them to change. After years of abuse, they finally saw results. Glory to God. But are we supposed to behave that way? I don’t think so. God doesn’t behave that way.

God told the disciples that when they were rejected in a town, they should shake the dust off their shoes and leave. God removed Lot’s family from Sodom and Gomorrah and drowned those cities in burning sulphur. God killed Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts. God destroyed the temple in Jerusalem twice. The doctrine of unlimited patience seems inconsistent with the Bible. If God himself doesn’t abide by it, why should we?

I think you show patience until you realize you’re wasting your time (which belongs to God), and then you move on. You continue to pray, but you reduce your earthly involvement. Otherwise, you end up endorsing stubbornness and rebellion, and your own character becomes corrupted. Repeated failure leads to learned helplessness, and after that, backsliding is inevitable.

Paul said more or less the same thing. He mentioned a man who slept with his father’s concubine. Paul didn’t just abandon this man; he turned him over to Satan so his body could be destroyed and the punishment would drive him to repent. What if Paul came back and did that today? Christians would shriek at him. You’re supposed to embrace EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME! INCLUDE, INCLUDE, INCLUDE! Turn the other cheek! Imagine a multimillionaire TV evangelist telling Satan to come get somebody! It will never happen.

I’m sorry, but I side with Paul. You give people a reasonable amount of time and effort, and then you cut them off and let them fail. Otherwise, you’re an enabler. You’re helping Satan prevent them from growing up.

There is a dangerous idea spreading in churches: you are not supposed to say anything negative. Find that in the Bible for me. Read the prophets. Their writings were corrective, not laudatory. God didn’t raise prophets up to say, “Way to GO, Jews!” He raised them up to let people know they were headed off cliffs. Jesus himself was very, very negative much of the time. He whipped the moneychangers. He called the Judaism of the Pharisees “the synagogue of Satan.” He ridiculed the rabbis publicly. He even called Peter “Satan.”

Without criticism, there is no growth. The inexpressible value of criticism is the sole reason God wants us to be humble. A humble person will accept criticism and improve. A proud person will be like a clay jar that has been fired with flaws uncorrected. His neck, like the neck of the finished jar, will be stiff, and he will only be fit for the garbage dump. Hell is full of positive thinkers.

Find me a happy prophet who doesn’t criticize. I don’t mean a lying weasel who travels from church to church receiving big offerings for telling pastors what they want to hear. I mean a prophet in the Bible. There isn’t a single example. It’s even reflected in our language. Look up the word “jeremiad,” which was named for Jeremiah. It doesn’t mean “pep talk.” And you might be aware that one of the Bible’s prophetic books is called “Lamentations.” Find me the book of Congratulations. I must have overlooked it.

Gossip is wrong. Complaining with no godly purpose is wrong. But warning people isn’t merely right; it’s a commandment. God himself told us we would bear the sins of people we did not correct. Whom should I listen to? God, or itinerant Pastor Happy McFeelgood?

It’s right to offer constructive criticism, and it’s right to avoid getting overly entangled in situations you can’t fix. Imagine if Moses had stayed in Egypt and tried to reform the Pharaohs. He would have died there in obscurity, and his mission would have gone unfulfilled.

I believe God is telling me to respect my mortality and my limitations. Even with God behind me, there is a limit to what I will accomplish in this world, and I have to be a good steward of my time and effort. I am supposed to be helpful and patient and hardworking. I am supposed to pray for people (although sometimes that means praying God will discipline them). I am not supposed to get sucked into black holes that consume my valuable days and waste my faith and wreck my morale.

I am going to die. I’m pretty old already, and I don’t have that much time left to do God’s will. I have to allot my time and effort correctly, as led by the Holy Spirit. Stewardship principles apply to everything; it’s not just about money. The world is full of needy people who will listen to me and let me help them. Should I ignore them while I spin my tires with the stubborn? How will I explain that at the judgment seat?

If it annoys people that I say what I say, so be it. Find me a prophet who didn’t annoy people. Man-pleasing is one of the worst sins. We are told to take up our crosses, and that we will be persecuted (largely by other Christians). That tells me that it’s inevitable that plain-speaking Christians will anger other people. Big deal. Other people are puny, and they will die. The one I am trying to please will live forever, and he has infinite power to defend and reward.

I think I understand this lesson correctly, and I am grateful for it. I wish I were not so slow to learn, but there it is.

Now, if anyone wants to scourge me or put me in a cistern, I would appreciate it if they would call and make an appointment.

No One Else Can Help

Today a family friend is taking my father and me to lunch. This guy’s family has been devastated by one tragedy after another. I hope you will join me in praying that God uses this occasion to bring him into the kingdom where he can get some help.

Who Says Math Won’t Help You as an Adult?

I got a comment today after I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and how learning about it gave me new interest in selling pizza. Look at one of the first comments I got! I think it’s intended as advice for me, and that’s how I’m reacting to it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a general observation.

“Running a restaurant is not fun. I have seen wonderful restaurants fail and lousy restaurants fail.”

He makes it sound as if it’s all totally random! It doesn’t matter whether you know what you’re doing! You have no control, therefore no reasonable hope of success! Of course, that’s not how it is. If life were like that, there would be no point in trying to do anything, ever.

He may have seen wonderful restaurants fail, but he has never seen well-run restaurants in good markets fail. Businesses don’t fail for no reason. Somewhere down the line, someone has to make a mistake.

It’s an interesting comment. It shows why Dunning-Kruger happens! It’s a generalization, from the experiences of a lot of people who may be completely different from me. I shouldn’t see it as applicable to me and let it discourage me.

Let’s face it. Most restaurateurs can’t cook, have no idea how to manage money, have no starting capital, and know nothing about pleasing customers. That eliminates 80% of the competition right from the start.

Making a blanket statement about the misery and likelihood of failure in the food business is like saying motorcycles are dangerous. Start with the injury figures from cars and motorcycles, and things look pretty bad. Then eliminate the idiots who ride like maniacs and have no training. Suddenly, the disparity is WAY smaller. Motorcycle riding, like restaurant operation, draws risk-takers who ride aggressively and don’t plan, and those people suffer a higher number of casualties. Sift them out, and you get a more realistic picture of the inherent dangers of the machinery. Motorcycles will always be more dangerous than cars, but idiots skew the statistics, and the nature of the sport draws idiots like flies.

If I sold pizza, I would be up against a lot of people who are just as lost as Mr. Trobiani (the guy Gordon Ramsay couldn’t help). If I were in that demographic, I would already have started a restaurant and lost it. I would have picked a bad location, paid too much rent, cooked a wide variety of bad dishes, provided very poor service, tried to do too much, and failed to research the market. Those people don’t agonize about starting businesses. They rush in and, like Mr. Trobiani and his girlfriend’s parents, lose their homes and retirement money. Do I seem remotely like that? If so, why am I not selling pizza already?

I make pretty amazing food. I can afford to start a place. I have a basic understanding of customer relations. I know how to cook in an institutional setting. I live in an area where the pizza situation is a seller’s market, because there are almost no good pizzerias. And I’m smart enough to figure out Quickbooks and get help from the SBA and CORE and the Chamber of Commerce. I would not be competing against Mr. Trobiani. He competed against (and destroyed) himself; the restaurateurs in his area never harmed him at all. He never reached the point where the effects of external competitors rose anywhere near the level of his own self-destructive behavior. I would not be fighting people like him. I would be competing with people who have a real product and at least a little bit of common sense. That’s a much smaller segment of the population.

People love to tell me [secondhand] stories about the difficulties of running a restaurant. It’s inapposite, because I have no interest in that. You have to be crazy to run a restaurant; three fourths of it is expensive, time-consuming theater. I want to run a pizzeria, which is more like a convenience store with an oven. It’s basically catering, except that people come to you to get the food.

I worked at a Domino’s. Believe me, it’s not the same as running a restaurant. You have no wait staff, no linens, a very short menu, no dishwashing, limited equipment…it’s nothing like a real restaurant. My idea is pizza, rolls, and cheesecake, with no expensive alcohol license. You can’t compare that to employing ten waiters plus bus staff, bartenders, and so on, with a long menu and linens and china. I really don’t know how true restaurants survive. It seems like a very stupid business model, when you can cut out a huge percentage of the expenses and work and sell just as much food.

It reminds me of the difference between the shows American Pickers and Pawn Stars.

On American Pickers, two guys drive a van all over the US. They pay hotels and restaurants. They root through barns and attics, buying junk they haul back to a showroom. They have a full-time employee who works the showroom. Sometimes they go hours without finding anything good. Very often, they spend two hours at a “find,” and they end up spending $500 on a pile of junk they hope to sell for maybe $1000. A lawyer who had to divide $500 per day with a partner would starve. It seems highly unlikely that they make decent money purely from the business we see them do on the show.

On Pawn Stars, two principals have a fixed location. They have a large base of customers in the city where they work. People burn their own gas bringing them things that have already been selected for their value. The pawnbrokers offer them only as much as they think will allow them to make a profit. Then they resell.

The pawnbrokers have a big staff, which is expensive. On the other hand, they have dozens of people who come in every hour, and the shop is open around the clock. They’re constantly buying and selling. Their business appears to do very well. They drive nice vehicles. They pay their staff. They have no problem coming up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Who would you rather be? I think the pickers are insane. The pawnbrokers have a base of thousands of people who do for them what the pickers do for themselves. They sit and wait, and money comes to them, and it comes from foolish people who are already motivated to sell at or below wholesale. It’s amazing. People will come in and take half price for things instead of putting them on Ebay, and sometimes the discounts run into the thousands of dollars, and no one complains! It’s legal! No wonder the business thrives and supports a lot of people.

It seems to me that a pizzeria compares to a restaurant the way the pawnbrokers compare to the pickers. The math is better. More money in, less time and money out. This is probably why there are so many fast food millionaires.

The only thing that prevents me from selling pizza, really, is the knowledge that marketing is a huge part of the job. Some pizzerias get successful because of word of mouth, but pizzeria owners tell me promotion is the most important thing. Apparently, even if your pizza is excellent, you have to sell it the same way the bad pizzerias do. As if it were a commodity, no different from Domino’s garbage.

I cook well. I am willing to work. My judgment is reasonably good. But I am not a marketer.

Nonetheless, I think reading about Dunning-Kruger has been very beneficial. I’m glad I found out about it.

Not an Improvement, Unfortunately

I don’t watch much food TV. It’s misleading, and there is a feedback problem associated with the foodie establishment. Foodies can be very narrow-minded about anything that comes from outside their little realm. They seem to suffer from NIH syndrome, and I think TV makes it worse.

Nonetheless, last night I checked out Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. I loved it. Sometimes I dream of opening a pizzeria, but I don’t have the know-how that comes from experience, and Kitchen Nightmares provides a lot of insight. So far, it has confirmed what I already knew: training is no substitute for talent and common sense.

Last night he worked on a place in New York. The owner–this is unbelievable–was about 25 when he convinced his girlfriend’s parents to invest everything they had in an Italian restaurant…in a city full of Italian restaurants. Seriously, you have to be a fire-eating risk-taker to invest in ANY restaurant, but imagine handing your money over to a kid who has never run a place. He hadn’t even worked in an Italian restaurant. These poor people. They tried to do something good for their daughter and future son-in-law, but their actions were–there is no other way to describe it–extremely stupid.

The kid was beyond belief. He was extremely arrogant and refused to take advice. Mind you, this was a person who was in the process of impoverishing two old people who were trying to help him. I have to wonder if he’s a sociopath. How can anyone be that ungrateful? Maybe I’ve forgotten what a moron I was at that age.

Here’s a list of things Ramsay found:

1. The kitchen (the kitchen these people bought for him) was so filthy, it wasn’t fit for operation. It was disgusting, and the kid said CLEANING IT WAS THE STAFF’S JOB. We’re talking about HIS OWN KITCHEN. He thought the staff was in charge. Never mind the people who sacrificed to buy it for him. Words fail me.

2. The food was bad. Evidently, this boy had no idea what he was doing, yet at the same time, he was so abnormally confident in his abilities, he was sure the food was excellent. Ramsay used the word “hideous” to describe it.

3. He never tasted his own food! Surely they made that part up. No chef is that stupid. It’s like trying to play an instrument you can’t hear. Only an idiot would try it.

Ramsay practically had to mud-wrestle this kid just to get him to take suggestions. I would have left after half an hour. In fact, Ramsay did leave, but the kid managed to get him to return.

Human incompetence is so deep and so amazing, it is hard to maintain an understanding of how complete and pervasive it is. It’s natural to assume people aren’t utter fools. But many of them are. They say 90% of new restaurants fail. Maybe guys like this account for a lot of that.

They cleaned up the kitchen, and Ramsay just plain GAVE him new recipes. Then they tried to run the place for a night. The kid refused to taste the food, even after people sent it back! Some folks are determined to fail, regardless of what you do for them.

They finally redecorated the place at the BBC’s expense, and Ramsay even gave the kid an engagement ring for his girlfriend. I had always heard that Ramsay was a jerk, but he came across like a saint last night. The renewed restaurant did well that night. I wonder how it’s doing today. My guess is that a week of spoon-feeding didn’t do the trick. Ramsay gave him detox. What he needed was long-term rehab.

I wonder if Google will tell me what happened to the restaurant.

Oh, no! It was seized for failure to pay taxes! Unbelievable. That kid is either going to jail or setting out on a lifetime of working at places like T.G.I. Friday’s. What happened to the parents? I feel so bad for them.

I know this: it will be a long time before someone buys him another restaurant.

I wonder what the other episodes are like.