28. August 2010 by Frank.

I’ve been moving furniture and am in a great deal of pain.  Which is normally what happens when heavy lifting is involved.  The problem for me is slightly more complex because I don’t know what caused which pain.

I have been feeling like crap all week.  The symptoms vary from day to day.  Some days I feel like I have some kind of intestinal virus but nothing ever develops.  Other days my head gets all plugged up and headachy.  Some days my back hurts like I pulled a muscle, other days it feels like some of my initial stroke related pain.  Still other days it feels like my guts or my kidneys are inflamed but there are no other symptoms indicating such problems.  And then the next day it feels like something else entirely.

This is Year 12 of this sort of thing.

I can hurt myself mainly on my right side without any indication that I did so.  I think I may have pulled a muscle when I lifted my wife’s TV about ten days ago.  It’s old fashioned, huge, and weighs about 80 lbs., very awkward to pick up.  But if I did pull a muscle, I didn’t know it until a few days later when it started getting harder to move my arm and my back started hurting.

Or I could have some kind of infection.

I just don’t know and I can’t afford to go running to the ER every time I have some real or imagined pain.  I can’t tell the difference.

When I first had the stroke, the pain in my arm that has never relinquished began that first day.  I never had any chronic arm pain before.  I sure didn’t have the bizarre agony I live with now.  So after it became apparent it wasn’t going away any time soon, I had them run some tests on it, including x-rays.

In typical “give this guy crappy medical service” fashion, they announced that  I had a massively bad case of arthritis.  How does one develop massively bad arthritis instantly?  This is not arthritis.  It’s a painful variation of paralysis from the stroke which left me still able to move.

Uh oh, contradiction of terms. 

So be it.  I am a walking contradiction of terms.

I am in more pain than most people, I guarantee it’s bad enough it would incapacitate a great many of you without the use of heavy narcotics.  But despite what I feel, I have more energy, more joy, more passion for living than I ever did before.  I am far more determined than ever.

Which is all a very good thing.

But it is a nuisance when I do something that hurts me more and I can’t tell that I did it.  I don’t necessarily feel more pain, I just become aware that something isn’t moving as well or something gets weaker inexplicably.

Phantom pain is quite strange.  There isn’t anything physically wrong with my arm yet I could easily give it a “10” on the pain scale.  This is aggravating to say the least.  I could have a serious sprain or pulled muscle and not know it until I try to move in such a way as to cause the muscle to fail.

So until something else confirms what’s wrong, I’ll just muddle on through.  The worst of the moving is over.  Everything will be back to normal soon.

Which for me is anything but normal.

Posted in interpretation, humor, wild guesses, listen, emotion, stroke | Print | 2 Comments »

21. August 2010 by Frank.

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of my mother’s death.  I found myself in a rather foul mood but I’m not sure if that was caused by the tragic memories or because I’ve been feeling quite sick all week.  Or maybe it’s just a combination of ingredients.

A very close knit family I’ve known for a very long time is having a bit of a stressful time.  The mother had open heart surgery yesterday.  She came through it okay.  This family is religious to an extreme so they were all gathered together praying for the mother.  20 – 25 people begging god to let her live.  How do I know this?  I have a reliable witness who was there and admired the family’s bravery in confronting the traumatic event.

My mother also had a fairly large number of people gathered together begging god to let her live as well.  She, obviously, did not.

Does god love this family more than mine?  Were their prayers more fervent or more persuasive?  Did their group have more actual faith than the ones praying for my mother?  Both women were roughly the same age; why was it my mother’s “time” but not this other lady’s?  Does god call people home arbitrarily?  What exactly is the difference?

It was god’s will.

I can’t believe how lame that sounds now.  I couldn’t believe how lame it sounded three years ago.  All the talk about how it was mom’s time and how god called her home and how she was in a better place now.  My mother died horribly in excruciating pain; they were giving her massive doses of drugs far stronger than morphine to try to ease her suffering.  How could anyone find comfort in thoughts of a loving god who couldn’t come up with a more peaceful way to call her home?

It was quite obvious god didn’t give a damn about my mother or my family.

Jesus suffered hell for three days, my mother got three weeks of hell, the entire time suffering the equivalent of third degree burns on the inside of her body.  Who do you suppose actually suffered the most?  Please, Jesus was god.  He only had to do a three day stint for all of eternity.  What exactly did he actually suffer that was so impressive?

Writing these thoughts down like this just makes the whole thing seem so much more ridiculous.  There is no way to explain these tragedies; why one lives and the other doesn’t.  You can’t compare to see who’s the most loved of god.  And just as obviously, you can’t determine god’s will.

So there’s all these variations of doctrine, guesses about what god’s will really is, worrying that you didn’t have enough faith or that you didn’t pray hard enough or for the right thing, or what else you should have done.

There’s no comfort in any of it because if you think about it very hard you realize that your god is an amoral monster.  He allows unimaginable suffering to be inflicted on human beings as part of his will, his perfect plan for your life?  He turns a deaf ear not only to your pleas for help but those of your family and friends as well.  He blames you because you either don’t have enough faith or you didn’t avoid sin.  All this sickness and disease is the result of sin and he’s already done everything he’s going to do about that.  God moves in mysterious ways.

The reason they’re mysterious is because they’re non-existent.

Shit happens.  To you and to people you love.  All you can do is deal with it and move on.

Posted in interpretation, sarcasm, wild guesses, hearing, emotion, religion | Print | 2 Comments »

15. August 2010 by Frank.

I drove by a sign a little while ago that said, “Living for Jesus is the only life worth living.”  In other words, a life apart from god is worthless.  Which is not only insulting, it’s quite inaccurate.  Unfortunately the people who create these signs and slogans will never acknowledge they know not whereof they speak.

Another nearby sign said, “Miles away from Humdrum!”  I happen to know for a fact that Humdrum is nowhere near here so it’s at least truthful to some extent.  This particular church strives mightily to be hip and upbeat, obviously for the younger generation who respond better to nontraditional services.  I have no intention of going there to find out if they actually manage to accomplish that  goal.  I’ve seen quite a few churches with that same goal over the years, they all admit that tradition just doesn’t draw them in like it used to.  Usually the strategies include up-tempo music instead of hymns, drums, guitars, any instruments other than piano and organ, more socially conscious sermons, more family oriented activities, more spontaneity and less tried and true tradition.  All too often these youth-oriented efforts wind up offending  the older base of the church because they get pushed to the side.

Most places go for the middle of the road combo service.

Or they go for the multiple service model in which they try to appease different groups at different times.

But it all amounts to the simple fact that there is no such thing as the unity of the faith that the bible talks about.  If you think there is any kind of united faith in christianity then you have never been to a Baptist business meeting.  Knowing this, however, leaves me wondering how the religious right has such sway over current politics.  Obviously, something more than just the religion itself unites their causes.

Which probably explains why the atheist movement doesn’t seem to be much of a movement.  What, exactly, do we have in common?  We don’t believe in god.  That’s it.  But even that has variations.

Some say all it takes is proof to get them to change their minds.

Some say there’s no way we can be 100% certain there is no god.  So all we can claim is there is no evidence so it isn’t probable.

Some don’t like the word atheist so they call themselves agnostics, not willing to go all the way.

Some may renounce the christian god but leave the door open for some other.

Some are “militant”, whatever that means.

Some roll over an play dead rather than getting labeled by coming out in the open.  Many are atheist in secret for fear of their immediate society or culture.  Many keep quiet because of family.

Personally, it’s a pet peeve of mine, being told there’s no way to be 100% sure and that no “real” atheist makes that claim is as obnoxious as some christian billboard telling me my life is worthless.  I spent 18 years of my life absolutely certain god was real and was actively involved in my life.  I studied his word, prayed,and served far more than any ordinary pew warmer.  I was a total fanatic. Completely devoted.

But all that fell apart as if it were held together by wishful thinking.

In reality, that’s all it actually amounted to.  When you finally realize that you have an extremely convoluted rationalizing system in place to explain all the failures of your faith then you must finally be willing to admit that your faith and your god aren’t real.  Christians have so many excuses for their god failing to live up to his promises, it’s hard to see why anyone remains attached to him.

I know a deeply devoted christian who is in a bad financial situation similar to what I’ve been going through for years.  He is trying desperately to cling to his faith that god will provide.  By his own admission god isn’t providing and his job isn’t enabling him to live up to his obligations.  I tried to operate this way for many years deeply assured that god would indeed provide.  I borrowed and made deals with the world because god never came through but I continued making excuses for him.  I never once got any money in any manner that could remotely be described as miraculous or praiseworthy.  But, like the good little sheep I was, I continually offered up praises of gratitude.

After awhile you know deep down that you’re just kidding yourself.

But you keep on anyway.  Because the concept of living without faith has been presented as such an abhorrent method of living by every pastor you’ve ever submitted yourself to, that the very idea is repulsive.  Atheists are such depraved, miserable, pathetic excuses of humanity that there’s no way you’d ever want to become like them.

I’ve heard a religious fellow use the word atheist several times recently.  He puts so much absolute disgust into pronouncing the word you get the feeling he thinks they are the worst form of life on the planet.  But if you challenge him on it he admits he has never even met one.  He’s been trained to believe the worst.

Without a shred of evidence or a real encounter.

So the church signs continue to imply that life without Jesus isn’t worth living.  Somehow, without their god, you are less than human or, at least, less than they are.  The thing that is really truly bizarre about all of this is, except for those pious individuals born and raised in the church, all christians were at one time or another unbelievers.  Maybe they believed in a god but they didn’t believe in “the” god.  If they didn’t believe in any god, they were atheists rather they admitted it or not.  I get the feeling atheist has such a negative connotation in our society that even raging atheists don’t want to be called atheist.

It seems as if we need to show them otherwise.

But I often doubt that will ever happen either.

Posted in interpretation, humor, sarcasm, wild guesses, listen, education, hearing, signs, religion | Print | 2 Comments »

4. August 2010 by Frank.

Unbelievably, another anniversary is upon me.  It’s time for my annual “Life After Stroke” report.  Curiously enough, Pandora just played Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, which I’ve mentioned before says a lot about me.  Obviously the song isn’t about my life but if I had any talent it might be something I would say.

(Songwriters: David Jon Gilmour & Roger Waters) “Relax

I’ll need some information first

Just the basic facts

Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain you are receding

A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon

You are only coming through in waves

Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying

When I was a child I had a fever

My hands  felt just like two balloons

Now I’ve got that feeling once again

I can’t explain you would not understand

This is not how I am

I have become comfortably numb.”

I realize a song can mean different things to different people but something about this one really connects with my experience.  Comfortably numb truly describes how I am with my pain.  I have been suffering with this for 12 years now and it’s the only way I’ve been able to handle it.  I could ask my doctor for a prescription for some heavy duty narcotic pain pills and he would gladly oblige.  He did that back at the beginning which is when I discovered that being doped out of your mind is no way to live.

All I got from a neurologist was more prescriptions for even stronger narcotics and the knowledge that I have a “fluffy” brain.  Supposedly that meant my brain looked normal for someone 10 years older than I was at the time.  Which probably means that right now it’s most likely dead already and my body just doesn’t know it yet.

I have done everything I can over the last 12 years to keep my mind active.  I read everything under the sun (except novels I used to love) and constantly try to learn new things.  I keep up with technology.  I plow into things I have no experience with just to keep my mind actively engaged as much as possible.

And I have learned how to ignore pain most of the time.

Unfortunately, I was never able to afford the kind of care I actually needed to overcome the effects of brain damage.  My doctor had little or no experience with stroke survivors and the neurologist I had was of the drug them into a stupor and forget it variety.  I had two pastors at the time and neither of them had any counsel or wisdom beyond keep praying and god will fix you.  My wife told me she wasn’t going to support the family and my “friends” proved to be nonexistent.

So I did what any self reliant brain damaged survivor would do, I studied everything I could get my hands on that described anything remotely similar to what I was experiencing.  My doctor kept insisting that stroke didn’t cause the things that were happening to me but the more I studied the more convinced I became that it did.  When I made contact with other survivors I found out that my experiences were not that unusual and that my doctor wasn’t the only medical idiot out there who denied it.

I have a very dim view of the medical profession.  The most they ever offered me was stronger drugs.  Drugs that essentially made it impossible to function in normal everyday life. 

My religion failed me at the same time.  The love of god was a joke.  How can you be a member of two churches and have no one from either ever call, write, or visit after you suffer a life-altering stroke?  The healing power of Jesus?  Yeah.  Whatever it was that I thought I felt from god all those years was gone in an instant.  I searched diligently for it afterwards but I could not find it.

I did not know how to walk after the stroke, I had to be retrained.  Now it is my favorite thing to do.  I’ve lost at least 20 lbs just from walking the last few months.  I still have problems keeping my balance at times and my feet hate me.  I got in nearly 3 miles this morning before the heat, humidity, and rain ruined the day.

I feel miserable.  That’s my normal condition.  You would be curled up in a little ball, sucking your thumb, and whimpering for your mama if you felt like I do on one of my good days.  You would shoot yourself if you felt like I do on a bad day.  No brag, just fact.

I don’t get any sympathy and I really don’t want any.  Compassion might be nice but I seldom get any of that.  Most of the time I just prefer to be left alone.  I can deal with what I feel like but it takes to much energy to put on a show for people who want me to be happy, bright, and cheerful.  Actually, considering my normal pain level, I am the most cheerful man alive.  I can make other people happy and I can make them laugh.  I just wish someone would make an effort in my direction once in awhile.

And now I live my life just one disaster away from total disaster.

Like the song concludes:  “When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse

Out of the corner of my eye

I turned to look but it was gone

I cannot put my finger on it now

The child is grown the dream is gone

I have become comfortably numb.”

Posted in interpretation, humor, sarcasm, wild guesses, listen, emotion, hearing, stroke | Print | 2 Comments »

2. August 2010 by Frank.

The sign says, “A smile is a curved line that is the quickest way to straighten someone out.”  I think they think that’s clever and witty or perhaps maybe even pithy.  Personally, I think it’s rather lame.

But then I’m grouchy and having a lazy day.

I was fine until I had to go to work for an hour for the weekly sales meeting.  Since I am on a 5 day vacation before the start of Back To School, it was more than a bit of a nuisance to have to go in.  Apparently, no one felt like working yesterday so nothing got done.  Whoever did work thought it was all right to throw trash in the cardboard baler.  None of us at the meeting were scheduled to work today but the boss figured the only way anything was going to get done was to make us do it before the store opened.  So I got to clean out the baler and take out the trash.  I was not dressed for such activity and was more than annoyed.  My vocabulary descended to it’s lowest depths with great volume.

I really hate that damn store.

Yesterday I watched The Princess Bride to start my day off on the right foot.  Then I went to see Salt, the new Angelina Jolie movie.  It is a non-stop action movie, much more serious than expected, and quite exciting.  I would almost call it an old fashioned cold war spy movie.  I enjoyed it.  Afterwards I solved someone’s computer problems.  As soon as I got home it was time for my weekly three mile hike with my friend followed by a visit from my daughter and son-in-law.  My wife was gone for the rest of the evening so I had to place to myself and got rather mellowed out.  It was a good day.

It wasn’t a good night.  At 4 AM my little cat buddy leaped on my stomach twice.  Right after the second leap she started making noises like she was about to hack up a hairball in my face.  This got her thrown off the bed in a hurry.  I managed to go back to sleep for a couple more hours.  Woke up in a fairly good mood.

But then my hour at work ruined my attitude for the day.

My wife came home from church and announced that she had a meeting with the deacons because she joined the church.  That’s fine for her but it will be thrown in my face somewhere down the road because I should join, too.  It’s just not right that I don’t go.  But I told her before that I would never join that church even if I still went to church.  I read their constitution and there’s several passages in it that I would have been unable to agree with even back when I was super-christian.  Basically, there were several anti-Pentecostal statements which not only contradicted what I used to believe but were also direct contradictions to scripture.  Agreeing to those statements would make me a hypocrite.  Shit like that was important to me but it never phased my wife.

We were never on the same page when it came to religion.

After I left work I drove by a poorly attended church that had a new name on its sign.  Now it is called (something or other) Grace Temple.  For some reason, the word Temple jumped out at me.  I have been noticing quite frequently lately that many religious words seem to be much more superstitious sounding than I ever realized before.  Temple (at least this morning) seemed to have a rather pagan connotation to me.  Images from pseudo Greek mythology popped into my head (maybe because I had just seen a poster for Clash of the Titans a few minutes earlier), but I just had a sense of primitive people afraid of a thunderstorm bringing their offerings to appease their cruel gods.

I went downtown intending to take a walk but there were several hundred people down there because of the chalk art on pavement event.  No place to park so I headed home passing several more churches.  A couple only had a few cars in their parking lots but most were full.  The two biggest churches probably had about a thousand people in attendance each.  That’s more people than you normally see in one place around here at any given time.  I kept wondering why none of these churches had services at 1, 2, 3, or 4 in the afternoon?  Does god take a nap after lunch?  Is god an early riser?  Every one of these places has a 9:30 & 11:00 service and maybe an evening service at 5 or later.  But never anything right after lunch.

I whipped up a ham & egg & cheese sandwich for brunch and then I took a nap.

I awoke grouchy as hell and feeling quite the curmudgeon.  Unfortunately, I haven’t got much fresh material to work with.  I could rip on the reports that the Jordan River is too polluted to allow baptisms.  That brings up the question of just how the water in that particular river is any different from the water anywhere else.  I am quite sure the water that Jesus got dunked in is not the same water that is there now.  So how is it “holy” today?  I read some nutcase that thinks contraception is morally wrong and that people should let god decide how many children they should have.  Doesn’t sound like a wise plan to me; where’s those statistics on unwanted pregnancies?   Another report was a bit more interesting at first in that it covered the rise of some of the spiritual guru nonsense of the 60’s and 70’s.  Because of the Beatles.  Unfortunately, the writer is still looking for more of the same enlightenment.  Sarah Palin used the words on the hand trick again. 

Nonsense up one side and down the other. 

In case I wasn’t clear at the start: the sign was at a church.  At least it didn’t say that a smile is just a frown turned upside down or that it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile.  Those slogans make me throw up a little in my mouth whenever I hear them.  Smile, it will improve your face value.  Ugh!  I have to concentrate to be able to smile and then I have to be careful because I don’t want anybody to see my missing teeth (which would be quite the feat, I must admit.)  Although I will admit that all it takes to brighten my day is to be smiled at by an attractive woman.

But straighten me out?

Not very likely.

Posted in communication, humor, sarcasm, interpretation, wild guesses, emotion, hearing, signs, religion | Print | 3 Comments »

26. July 2010 by Frank.

Toothache.

Pain.

Ice pick in the eye.

Oh, yeah, I’ve been having a wonderful time.  What’s really disgusting is that yesterday was the first truly decent day in over a month; mid-70’s, low humidity, sunny.  I did go out and walk two miles despite the pain.  I am rather proud I can go two miles without the least bit of trouble even when I feel like crap.  I was feeling quite ill at the time but I didn’t want to let a perfect day go by.

Although I have dental insurance, I’ve got nothing left for the co-pay so I can only hope this passes like it has before.

**********

My sister was here visiting last week.  I picked her up at the airport Monday and then didn’t see her until Friday.  She actually came to my house on Saturday and stayed all of an hour before she had to rush off.  When asked if she wanted to go with us to a concert at the band shell last night she said no, she had to pack for her return trip.  She brought one small carry-on bag.

My family could be the poster children for dysfunctional families.

My parents always treated my sisters and their revolving families differently than they treated me and mine.  This sister has been married 5 or 6 times, has seven children and thirteen grand children.  My parents raised her first two daughters like they were a replacement family during the time I was raising my daughter.  They never once offered to take care of my daughter at any age, they wouldn’t even come to most of her birthdays.  They never came to see any of the events she was involved in.  They didn’t come to her high school graduation or her college graduation.  I’ve been married once for 29 years with one child but somehow I’ve always been the black sheep of the family.  It makes no sense.

I don’t know if I should say these visits are painful for me but they make me feel bad.  They dredge up these memories and feelings that I really have no use for dredging up.  It does make it painfully clear to me why I never had any self confidence when I was younger.  Nothing I did or was good at interested my parents in the least.  The most I ever got from them was, “that’s nice, IF you’re interested in that sort of thing.” It was painfully obvious they weren’t.

**********

Although I am sick to death of politics, I keep up with the latest bullshit.  Watching the whole Shirley Sherrod fiasco unfold was quite painful.  The absolutely blatant racism on display from Fox News is rather disturbing but not unexpected.  What’s really pathetic is the Obama administration’s fear of Fox News and Glen Beck and their pathetic attempts to placate them.  So, instead of being a story about a lying sack of shit “reporter” making up a racially charged lie in order to promote right wing fantasies, we get a story about how the white house has no backbone.

Who cares if some innocent person’s life is ruined in the process?

**********

Tell me something.  Why is it national news that poor little Lindsay Lohan is suffering?  In the VIP section of the county jail with hot tub and other amenities?

**********

And while you’re at it, tell me how I’m supposed to smile through this toothache at work today after I just got an incredible 12 cent raise last week?  I mean really.  A 12 cent raise is like your boss pissing in your shoes while you’re still in them.

**********

Where’s the three stooges with a great big mallet to your head for anesthesia?

Posted in humor, sarcasm, interpretation, wild guesses, listen, emotion | Print | 3 Comments »

19. July 2010 by Frank.

As we enter our 4th week of 90 degree + very high humidity weather, a number of interesting events have taken place.

This weekend is/was the third big crowd event in town; the 4th of July fireworks, the art fair, and the Venetian Festival.  I have no interest in any of that but somehow or other I have managed to either be there or on the fringe of each of them.  I’ve seen all the crowds and walked amongst them unnoticed.  I’ve enjoyed some of the stuff while not actually doing any of the stuff.

Despite how uncomfortable it has been I have been outside walking more miles than I ever have in my life.  My feet are killing me but that hasn’t stopped me.  I’ve been sweating so much I should be only a pile of dust by now.  I really feel like I’m accomplishing something.  My weight has gone way down.  Except for my feet the rest of me feels pretty damn good.

My wife has friends visiting from Florida for the Venetian Festival.  Their original plans only included my wife and her girlfriend but the girlfriend got married last month and brought her new husband with her.  They only had three tickets to all the concerts and events so they have been off on their own and I have been left to fend for myself.  Which is OK by me, I have never heard of any of the entertainment they have down there and I will not eat outdoors in 90 degree heat.  That’s a real sure way to get deathly ill real fast.  I drove them down there and picked them up later and wound up walking around several miles two nights in a row.  I went and set up someone’s new high speed internet service in the meantime.

When we picked the friends up from the South Bend airport I couldn’t help noticing how much more empty it’s gotten since the last time I was there a couple of years ago.  Everything is now concentrated in one little area for boarding and exiting and they’ve moved all the security checkpoint stuff right up front.  The people manning this station looked absolutely bored out of their minds.  The airport is still functioning at threat level orange, a fact they keep repeating on the PA incessantly.  The staff all wear their little sanitary blue plastic gloves and the feigned disinterest which they scrutinize passengers seems rather artificial.  Air travel is pathetic.  Even if I had money, I would have no desire to fly anywhere.  If we give in the terrorists have won.  Guess what?  We gave in, the terrorists won.  I remember when this airport was a bustling, living enterprise; now, it’s just a shell.

Yesterday morning, my daughter and I went to see INCEPTION.  It was mind blowing as promised.  I’ll write up a review of it soon, maybe after I’ve seen it a second time.  I’m not entirely sure I saw what I thought I saw or that I interpreted what I thought I saw correctly.  You really have to pay attention, you can’t be texting or talking to your date.  The movie requires and demands all your attention.  And it insists your brain must be engaged and functional.  A trip to the concession counter would mean you should probably just go home because you’ll never catch back up if you miss just one scene.  If you want mindless, Summer, popcorn fare don’t even bother.  Highly recommended for serious, heavy duty, movie nuts.  I will say the special effects in this movie are absolutely awesome because they look real, so real that you’ll be wondering how in the world they did that.

Yesterday afternoon, however, was the real surprise of the weekend.

My friend, who goes on walks with me, got two tickets to some kind of event in South Bend and wanted me to go with him.  I didn’t know what it was supposed to be other than it involved a lot of walking so I went along.  He asked me to bring my camera.  It turns out it was a garden tour of an area they are trying to revitalize.  Strange but it was something to do.

Let me establish a few background details.  My friend is from Jamaica, he has a very strong accent, and he is very dark skinned.  He was wearing white shorts, white socks, white tennis shoes, white baseball cap, and a white muscle shirt.  And he is definitely into gardening.  I am pale white, silver haired, front toothless, wearing black tennis shoes, grey socks, black pants, a dark grey shirt (because all my light colored stuff was in the wash), and a white baseball cap.  No interest in gardens whatsoever.  So, essentially, a black man all in white and a white man almost all in black.  Felix and Oscar, if you will.

Bear with me, there’s a reason I mention this.

The garden tour took place in a rather rundown neighborhood that bordered on a somewhat ritzier neighborhood, a rather stark contrast.  There were many abandoned houses and old buildings, boarded up windows and many with shattered glass.  The sidewalks were frequently overgrown with weeds and littered with all sorts of trash.  Not the kind of place you would deliberately want to walk though.

The whole area screamed poverty.  My friend called it a ghetto.  In slang terms around here, it would be called “the ‘hood”.

Keeping in mind the appearance of my friend and I, we attracted a lot of attention as we walked around for three hours in the oppressive heat.  We’re both carrying our guide maps with the gardens marked on them and I’m taking pictures with my very noticeably expensive camera.  My friend thought the people were reacting to us like they thought we were undercover cops looking for drugs or something.  It was an odd journey.

But here’s where prior perceptions come in.

When you think of poverty or people living in slums or dying neighborhoods what do you expect those people to be like?  Do you think they’re all hostile or angry?  Do you expect violence or drunkenness?  Are you expecting drugs and prostitutes?  Would you be afraid of getting mugged or worse?

We did see some of that in evidence.

But what blew both our perceptions out of the water were the people who were part of the garden tour.  There were over two dozen gardens on the self guided tour, many of which were quite elaborate.  Most were manned by the gardeners themselves who were exceptionally friendly, very informative, quite happy, and upbeat.  Not a trace of fear or apprehension about having strangers coming up to their houses and walking around their yards.  We were even welcomed into secluded, fenced in back yards that were like islands of beauty in empty fields.  They were genuinely delighted to have folks showing interest in their work.  It was interesting just to watch the behavior.  Such a stark contrast to what you would expect in such an area.

We were both exhausted after walking several miles but we both had to admit that were totally wrong about our original perceptions of the neighborhood we were in.  We both decided we had blinders on and that we made assumptions based on fears and prejudices.  Our worldviews are skewed to the negative and assume the worst based on certain visual indicators.  But, because we’re so different to begin with, our fears and prejudices stem from different sources, the results, unfortunately, are the same; we fear what we don’t know and we project that onto people whether they deserve it or not.

It was quite the eye opener on many levels and food for thought for weeks to come.

One last thing:  there’s one of those internet sites that takes a sample of your blog and awards you some kind of rating.  Like NC-17 if you swear a lot or talk about sex.  This new one that only seems to have just shown up this week promises to tell you what “real” writer you’re the most like.  I noticed a couple of bloggers did it and were informed they were like Stephen King.  Yeah, right.  So I did it, too, submitting my last two posts here separately.  The first one also got me the Stephen King rating but the second one earned me the H.P. Lovecraft award.  Which obviously means the website just generates random nonsense like every other website that gives these ratings “awards”.  Since I’ve read both King and Lovecraft, I’m quite certain I write like neither of them nor is there any correlation in my style to theirs.

The only down note to all of this was that the memory card in my camera failed.  Although it appeared to be working at first there are no photos to go with the story.  In six years I have never had a memory card fail under any kind of weather conditions.  I have been out in higher temperatures and extreme humidity before for a longer period of time.  So far, I’ve found no way to salvage anything off the card and I have yet to disprove that it was the camera that failed.  I’m worried that it’s the camera, I can’t fix it or replace it.  My dreams live or die with that camera.

Wait a minute!  Part of the premise of the movie was that you never know how the dream begins, you always just start in the middle.  It tells you to ask, “How did I get here?” and “Whose dream is this anyway?”  Maybe I just dreamed the camera failed.  Maybe if I wake up soon enough it will still be working. 

That’s it!  I’m still laying on the floor having a stroke in the factory 12 years ago and nothing I think is currently happening is actually happening!

I mean, seriously, Sarah Palin almost became the vice president of the country, christians feel the need to carry guns to church, George Bush got elected president twice, Rush Limbaugh is the head of the Republican party, the FCC decides you can say dirty words on TV, the Supreme Court decides corporations can make all the political contributions they want, a liberal, black, Muslim, law professor from Kenya who has no birth certificate and who’s a communist, socialist, Nazi all at the same time is the current president, and I went from being super-christian to atheist blogger?  Oh, come on!  What kind of sick, warped mind dreamed that up?

See, I’m right!

It is all a dream.

Wow.  I’ll have to write this down when I wake up.  I hope I can remember all of it.

Posted in communication, interpretation, technology, humor, sarcasm, wild guesses, listen, emotion, religion, education, hearing, signs, stroke | Print | 4 Comments »

10. July 2010 by Frank.

Take a look at this:

There is a verse (Romans 2:24) in the bible that says, “….. God’s name is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you.”  I think this video is a perfect example of that.  It’s certainly one of more ridiculous religious extremist events I’ve ever seen.

It’s things like this that cause some of the gigantic rifts between Pentecostals and everyone else in christianity.

If you are at all familiar with Pentecostal, Charismatic, Word of Faith denominations you surely recognized Kenneth Hagin, the bestower of holy laughter, and his disciple, Kenneth Copeland, Mr. holy excitement himself.  Several other people in this looked awfully familiar as well but I couldn’t put any names with the faces.

Hagin wrote a considerable volume of books and booklets which cover the holy spirit fanatic branch of christianity rather thoroughly.  I read almost all of them.  But this is the first time I have ever seen a video of the man.  I left this religion back in 98 and YouTube wasn’t around then, all I had ever seen of Hagin was still pictures.  I had read about so called holy laughter but that was one experience I never managed to participate in.  Looking at this piece of tripe, I’m glad I didn’t.

The absolute absurdity on display here almost caused me to have some LSD flashbacks. 

While I was of the gifts of the holy spirit are for the church today persuasion, I was deadly serious about it.  I was all for joy and freedom of worship but this sort of thing embarrassed me because of it’s excessiveness.  I had been at conventions and services where the bizarre behavior was in evidence but it had never gone quite this far. Unfortunately, my calm practical spirituality was not what the church I was involved with wanted.  The pastor wanted Hagin’s level of nonsense.  He wanted to “dance” in the spirit.

I never understood why people wanted to act like idiots and claim it was the holy spirit making them behave that way.  I tried to teach what I considered a more “rational” method of behavior.  I failed miserably.  Somehow or other the word “holy” in holy spirit did not make me want to behave like I was having seizures.  Perhaps because I have to deal with my wife having real seizures from epilepsy, I don’t find that something worth mimicking.

People seem to me to be perfectly able to make complete fools of themselves without any spiritual influence at all.

The apparent involuntary muscle spasms on display are not isolated flukes.  I saw one young woman who could turn it on and off with such ease that I got the impression she practiced the behavior in front of a mirror.  She was perfectly controlled until the worship service started then she would begin convulsing and genuflecting spasmodically.  As soon as the worship time was over, she would stop and become serenely calm again.  Instantly.  While not as good at it as she was, I have witnessed hundreds of people exhibiting the same behavior.

Mass hysteria, I think is the proper term.

The extreme presented here obviously isn’t representative of mainline christianity in the least.  The vast majority would rightly condemn this sort of thing but there are untold millions who eat this stuff up.  I pretty much agreed with most of the related teachings of these people but I was convinced you could do it without the bizarre behavior.  I thought it was some clever plot of Satan to keep the rest of christianity away from the real power of god.  They might want that power but they don’t want to act like idiots to get it.

If you’ve never seen anything like this before I imagine you found it rather shocking.  I wasn’t being facetious about the LSD flashbacks.  Watching this clip did cause me to flashback to those days quite vividly.  I participated in more services with this sort of excess than I care to admit.  The affected behavior disturbed me but the underlying sense of power compelled me to remain.  I wanted that power so much so that I was willing to ignore the surrounding stupidity.

So all this wretched excess helped drive me away from christianity.

But the other side, the mainline side, is even more the reason for leaving.  My bible scholar side, my no emotion side, is even more convinced of the delusion of christianity because of the cold hard facts.

Put them together and the whole house of religion collapses on itself.

Excuse me while I head down to the Methadone Clinic.

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6. July 2010 by Frank.

Over the weekend I once again heard that Jesus has got to be coming back soon because the world is in such sad shape.

That actually almost spoiled my mood.  I walked 16 miles in 5 days this long holiday weekend.  I didn’t walk anywhere special but I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful everything was.  I enjoyed cool morning breezes, sweated to high humidity, startled a muskrat, examined a dragonfly, watched crows mating on top of a church (I wonder if god noticed?), saw a couple of million ants preparing for something big with an astounding amount of energy, looked at Lake Michigan, listened to a big band concert, said hello to dozens of people I don’t know, and even stopped to smell the roses.  Sad shape?  I don’t think so.

I also read up on all the latest political news.  If religion and politics were in bed together then I might could see reason why you were hoping for the soon return of Jesus.  Oops, religion and politics are in bed together.  My bad.  I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this or not, but the world isn’t nearly the dismal place the news media make it out to be.

Yes, I know there are a lot of major problems and disasters.

When was that not ever the case?  When in history were there not disasters?  When was there ever a time when there wasn’t political turmoil?  Moral bankruptcy?  How is that something new?  Ever hear of the Inquisition or the Dark Ages?  Something is always shocking or upsetting polite society.

I find it curious that the people who see the world as being in the worst shape are the religious.

It comes from the basic assumption that mankind is depraved, full of sin, corrupt.  There is no good apart from god.  I first became aware of this attitude back in the 80’s.  Like I mentioned before, I became obsessed with all the end times garbage that was so popular then.  It’s 30 years later and the exact same fears and desires for the soon return of Jesus are still motivating the same kind of people.  The person who made the comment this weekend was longing for a past that never really existed except in 50’s & 60’s sitcoms.  The good old days, I believe it’s called.  When we were much more moral.

Except that makes no sense because we’ve been corrupt since the garden of Eden.

Some people don’t handle change very well.  The familiar is more comfortable and easier to deal with.  And change that veers off too far from that accepted norm is more than can be handled.

This fellow lives in a religious fantasy world that is made up of bits and pieces he has heard various preachers and speakers promoting.  It is not based on knowledge of the bible, he hasn’t read it through.  Just the parts he’s been told to read.  And he has been provided with the “proper” interpretation for anything vague or questionable.  Yet he longs for the soon return of Jesus because the world is so depraved.  I used to be the same way.  I was much more negative when I was a christian.  I saw people as incorrigible reprobates and current events as a sure sign of the coming apocalypse.

The problem with that is simple and complex.  Ever since those parts of the bible that speak of all the calamity to come at the end times were written there have been events and situations natural and man-made that fit those prophecies precisely.  Precisely because they are so vague and general.  Jesus and Paul both told their followers that it was all going to be fulfilled in their lifetimes.  When it wasn’t, the interpretation machine kicked into gear.  As the years passed those interpretations grew more complex because no matter how much happened the world never ended.  At least not for two thousand years.

30 years have gone by since I first became aware of this.  Jesus was sure to come back in the 80’s.  Then it was certain he would in the 90’s.  We definitely weren’t going to survive Y2K without an appearance.  And for the last 10 years his return has been imminent.  You would think a couple of thousand years of failed prophecy would tell somebody something.

I remember when rock and roll was going to destroy the fiber of society.  Civil rights meant the end of civilization.  So did giving women the vote.  Now we have the awesome threat of brown people taking over our white country.  Surely Jesus needs to come and put a stop to that.  If not, then most assuredly he must come and stop the gays from wiping out the sanctity of marriage.  How much longer can this unholy ruination be allowed to continue?

I hate to tell all the bigots and racists but your eagerly awaited savior who’s going to restore your white world is a Jew, the most hated and despised minority on earth.

God got fed up with the depravity of man once before and destroyed the world with water says the bible.  Then he promised not to do it again.  So this time he’s going to destroy it with fire.  To burn out all the evil once and for all.  Evil which he himself created.  Evil which he himself allowed to exist in the garden with two innocents who had no idea what evil was.  Jesus was the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world.  All this was the plan of god before he ever created us.  All the suffering, all the misery, all the disease, all the death, all the crime, all the disasters, all the depravity, all the sin, all of it is because of god’s perfect plan.

Think about it.  Satan was perfect, the angels were perfect.  They lived in heaven in the glory of god.  Yet they sinned against god and had to be cast out.  Cast out on the earth where they were free to corrupt god’s other perfect creation.  Now god is going to come back and destroy all that imperfect corrupt depraved race and make heaven on earth for all the fearful little people who are awaiting his return.  All he has to do is slaughter a few billion people whose only real sin is that they reject Jesus as their savior.  What a wonderful thing to be looking forward to and eagerly anticipating.

I don’t think these people who long for the return of Jesus ever give much thought to what would actually happen if he did come back.

I used to fantasize that it was like the greatest disaster movie ever made with the most incredible special effects imaginable.  The slaughter of billions of people didn’t really matter because they weren’t really real anyway.  It’s actually a rather sick and depraved way of thinking.

Do you really want the beauty of the world to go up in flames?  All the animals, the birds, the trees, the flowers, the fish, the insects?  Do you really want everyone who isn’t just like you to be annihilated?  Is that really glorious?

I think that if you seriously think about what would actually happen if Jesus did come back, you wouldn’t want him to.

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4. July 2010 by Frank.

So a $3 error in my checking account led to a $40 fine for being overdrawn which caused something else to be short which pretty much ruined my 4 2/3 day weekend financially speaking.

Nevertheless, I went out for photos and walking for about three hours in glorious humidity free, cloudless air with temps that barely made it to 70.  Something very refreshing about that.  A couple hours from now, in virtually the same conditions, I’m going to go take in an outdoor big band concert.

For free.

That’s a nice word; free.  Especially when you’re broke and tired of just sitting around unable to do anything that costs money.

The truth will set you free, says the bible.  But that’s not the case, actually.  What it really does is put you in bondage.  How exactly are you free if you’re a slave to Christ?  How are you free if you have to toe the religious line all the time?  Where’s your freedom if what you want to do is considered a sin?  How is carrying a burden of guilt in any way freedom?

How can you be free of sin and yet still be a sinner?

The bible gets very confusing on this subject.  If you’re in Christ, you’re dead to sin.  Simple statement of fact.  Yet you still sin all the time, you’re still controlled by your sin nature.  You’re never more than a work in progress even though you’ve been redeemed.  And don’t you dare claim you have no sin.

There are plenty of people who will set you straight on that one.

And yet believers won’t let go of the idea of spreading their version of freedom around at every opportunity.  They don’t seem to  realize all the things they put restrictions on do not add up to freedom.  You are not supposed to think on negative sinful things, only that which praises god or is uplifting in some way.  Thinking itself has religious restrictions on it!  While there may be plenty of evidence that an obscene amount of people don’t think anyway, it’s frightening that there are billions whose religion tells them not to think for themselves.

And they actually believe it.

Curious that atheists are frequently called “freethinkers.”  While the terms are not necessarily synonymous, it’s curious how free thinking can have the same negative connotation.   I passed a church sign this morning that said true freedom is only in Christ.  Free thought would disagree with that completely.  God is the source of freedom as long as you are constrained by his guidelines.  Unfortunately that really means someone’s interpretation of his guidelines because the bible is so vague about what it really means.

There can be no doubt the bible is pro-slavery.  It was perfectly acceptable for the Jews to have slaves.  It was the will of god to make slaves of conquered people (unless he ordered their annihilation).  If you’re a believer, you’re a slave of Christ.  Why would god use that imagery if he wasn’t still of the same mind?  Have you ever noticed that you’re either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ?  No other options.  Freedom from sin means slavery to righteousness.

And that produces guilt which keeps you in bondage to sin.

You never get free of it until you die.

Somehow that seems like a pretty lousy plan.  There’s all sorts of euphemisms applied but essentially the idea is to keep you bound to the church and its clergy.  Sin never really lets go of you or you never really let go of it so you need someone to lead you back to righteousness and someone to forgive all your transgressions even after you’ve been washed in the blood.  That isn’t freedom, it’s bondage.

I used to preach the freedom in Christ but I wasn’t truly free until I left the church.  It began when I realized I had stopped feeling guilty about all the little things I enjoyed but which the church said were sin.  Every church service I sat in on was a reminder that I was doing something wrong, that somehow I didn’t measure up to god’s standards.  No matter how hard you were trying to live a godly life, you weren’t trying hard enough.  You weren’t praying enough, you weren’t reading your bible enough, you weren’t putting enough money in the collection plate, you didn’t really love everyone with the love of Christ, you weren’t leading enough people to god, you weren’t a good enough witness, and on and on.  Get away from those constant reminders for a period of time and see if you start feeling some actual freedom.

The world of the bible is the exact opposite of what it is presented as being.

Since I started writing this post I have walked 6 more miles, 3 of which were with a christian fanatic.  He confessed that after several years of being a christian he has still not read all the way through the new testament.  This is not surprising but in its own way it is shocking.  I pointed out to him that atheists know more about the bible than he does.  I never could figure out how I knew more about the bible than christians who had been christians for 40 or 50 years back when I was a christian.  It never occurred to me that they had never read their own holy word.  This guy admitted he had never read it because he’s incapable of understanding it anyway.  Ignorance is bliss and freedom is bondage if you have no knowledge of the foundation of your faith.

I read the blasted thing all the way through about 85 times!

That isn’t a brag or an exaggeration.  It’s a simple statement of fact.  I do things to the extreme, it’s the way I am and always have been.  It seems perfectly normal to me, nothing special at all.  Even the stroke did not alter that.

But apparently since it’s the 4th of July, I’m not the only one thinking in terms of free or freedom (which aren’t necessarily the same thing.)  This fellow also brought up being free in Christ.  That only the truth in Jesus could set you free.  The problem with his philosophy is that he has no idea what his written word actually says.

I don’t believe there’s any freedom in ignorance.

True freedom comes from considering everything rationally.  Take the emotion of guilt out it entirely.  Deep down in your heart you know the bible is wrong or you know your church is wrong.  You know the universe doesn’t revolve around the earth.  You know there wasn’t night and day before the sun was created on the 4th day.  You know mules don’t talk and you know that every species of animal on earth could not possibly fit or survive on a man-made boat.  You know that women aren’t property and that slavery is wrong.  You know that a god who tells you to hate your family and yourself isn’t really a god of love.  You know that.

But you’ll never be free as long as you believe that.

Don’t let your faith blind you.

Be free of religion.

And walk 13 miles in 4 days, it’ll make you feel good.

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