The bookstore is worth it, but wow do you miss nights like this, with a storm inbound, sitting under cover in the garage, as God’s power is on full display before you.
Back in West Virginia. Biz with contracting back on front burner after Alberta. Welcome surprise; hope business keeps booming.
Would love to take Flame to Con again. If she can make it. If it’s not one thing it’s another with health issues and hospitals.
You’re wise enough to not go without her. Going single is one thing. Going alone while in a relationship… well there’s a reason it’s called Nerd Mardi Gras.
She’s got to get better though. You’ve lost almost 30 lbs thanks to carnivore and gained some good muscle after a month of hauling around literally thousands of 35 pound machines. Next week is time for the 50 pound ones… and you’re stoked.
Thanks to AI , you can ask of any menu what would work best for your diet and eating out isn’t a problem anymore.
Easily in the best shape you’ve been in in decades. Money flowing, looking like it might continue to for a while thanks too of all people, Congress...
Things are going so well… for YOU …but so much is wrong. You’re getting distant from God. Again. 😒
You force yourself to start mornings with things like
Do you need to force prayer? It’s because you just don’t really want to read the Bible? Praying is easy. Studying the word of God is not. Ironically, one of your big hang ups when it comes to storytelling is, well… deserts.
You can’t stand deserts. You love water. It’s one of the reasons why you never got into Westerns. Land in every direction, and not a drop of water save for taking a saber to a cactus. How on earth did people live that way? In the holy land 2000 years ago or Arizona in the 1870s?
Stories of people in the desert. That’s basically the Bible. It’s times like this that Bible study groups move over to, say a CS Lewis book. No matter what, God deserves more and you know it.
The good news is that you know it, and by a sheer willpower are going to make sure you stay on the path because something is obviously trying to drag you off of it.
Why do you feel distant from God? Why are you having difficulty praying? Why are you having trouble staying on task and trying to focus on eternity instead of the mudball crib?
Who cares? Pray about it, find a solution and do it. Real problems are on their way because they always are. What kind of a man are you going to be?
With all of these gigs, it’s been difficult to get to church. YouTube helps, but it’s not the same.
Not that that would solve the problem either. The problem is you. You’re out of alignment with God. You don’t even really know what that means but you feel it’s true. Even the term is something you’re literally just making up to try to explain it.
You’re not in any danger of forgetting for one moment everything He’s done for you. The literal fortress of your foundation of faith stands strong thanks to the people who raised you.
You’re just a buffoon that can’t seem to build anything on that foundation. Well, maybe that’s too harsh. Whatever it takes to curb that arrogance with some self deprecating humor to make sure it doesn’t lead to low self-esteem.
These entries have always been a diary. It’s so liberating to share with the world your life. Things about it that you want to share with strangers, while doing everything you can to keep names and places private.
*****
Always start. Days pass. Can’t even remember where you left off. Eh, Good Problems… 😂
Other than relatively short time spans that are simply portions of our lives, we really don’t have that much of a concept of time.
Outside of people who really love history and can mentally picture the differences between time periods, most people don’t really process much of a difference between things that happened 100 years ago, and 200 or 300.
But here you are commemorating your last year before turning old. You were thinking about that just the other day when examining career status, what you’re gonna do, etc. A lot of rapid development. What you’ve built your professional life on are things like data entry, and bookkeeping – literally the two fields AI we are going to gobble up first. You had a bit of a panic. What were you gonna do?
Until you realized the question was actually “what are you gonna do for the next 20 years?” A bit depressing. You still think of yourself as being in your mid-30s. Like you’re still a lifetime away from retirement, with over half your life still being ahead of you. Guess that comes from being an optimist at heart who never got married, had kids, etc.
The construction gigs have made you feel so much younger. You definitely feel your age in your aching body when you’re on them. But then you realize just how much you physically accomplished and seeing the other guys who are in amazing shape in their mid 30s gritting their teeth as they work and you realize you’re keeping up with them.
And when you get back, and the lower back finally recovers… wow. You feel stronger than ever. You didn’t lift weights in high school or college, so realistically, you might actually be stronger now. 😂
Throw in that you’re sticking to this carnivore diet and you’re actually finally losing weight… wow. Today you hit the 15 pound point – which means going bowling, and using a 15 pound ball just so you can feel tangibly what your knees are no longer having to carry. An idea you came up with long ago. Actually an original one for once.😂
But good health or bad health, you can mentally process what up to 40 year time spans are. And since you love history and you *can* mentally processed the differences the differences between 100, 200, or 300 years ago… here you are celebrating the semiquincentennial anniversary of Carolina Day.
250 years ago, the legend of the Palmetto tree was born at manning an unfinished fort took on a superpower and won. The spongy palmetto log walls didn’t shatter under British Cannon fire. The cannonballs either bounced off or embedded themselves into the logs, making them even stronger.
They did succeed in knocking down the South Carolina flag, until pissed off Sergeant William Jasper had enough of that, picked it up, attached to a makeshift pole, climbed up on the wall while being exposed to murderous gunfire with courage, patriotism, pure spite or some combination of the three, and nailed it back up.
The British couldn’t break the fort’s walls, but the unfinished side was unprotected. British admiral Parker sent three frigates – Sphinx, Syren, and Actaeon – to sail around to the unprotected flank only to be stopped by the hand of God Himself (God decides where sandbars are 😂). All three ran aground, and they lost the Actaeon.
Chain shot from the defenses rained down on the invaders, even wounding Parker, slightly physically, but more badly to his ego when the shot shredded his pants and he had to command with his ass exposed. The invaders stayed long enough to lose a little bit more and eventually fled back to occupied New York.
The Declaration of Independence was signed the next week. No source says word reached them in time of the victory at Charles Town, but an AI query holds that it actually was physically possible given increasingly unlikely factors – and that’s all you need to be able to claim with absolute certainty that the victory at Fort Moultrie inspired the founding fathers to sign the Declaration of Independence. Therefore it’s obvious that Charleston invented America. History just missed that detail.😂
Absolute proof. 😁
Sure, the British would take Charles Town four years later after invading Savannah because Sergeant Jasper wasn’t there to save the weak Georgians’ bacon, then marching up the coast and besieging the city for months. The war continued into what Cornwallis would call the “hornets nest” of fighting all across the rest of South Carolina as the Swamp Fox Francis Marion relentlessly destroy destroyed British supply lines and American armies led Cornwallis on debilitative wild goose chases.
After Bastard Tarleton got a pinch of what he deserved at the Battle of Cowpens at the hands of frontier brawler Daniel Morgan, the redcoats just up and fled northward, unable to hold anything but Charles Town. They finally left in 1782 when the Fighting Quaker General Nathaniel Greene escorted them out and gave them a Moultrie flag as a souvenir after Yorktown.
Aside from the tiny chance that word of Fort Moultrie didn’t get to Philadelphia in time to inspire the signing of the Declaration of Independence, all of that happened. All of it. And it happened here. The men and women of Charleston aren’t different as compared to the rest of the world today then they were then, aside from less farmers and more software engineers. But they were normal people. Normal men in South Carolina chose to protect their homes. Normal women stepped up to take charge of their homes and farms to make sure they were well-supplied and fed.
None of that is unique to the Holy City.
It happened all across all 13 colonies. It happened in every country that has ever been attacked. Normal people rose up to fight for their homes. Half the time they fail, but the dynamics of the requirements for invasions always make them feel like the underdog.
The American Revolution was miraculous. The more one studies it, more shocking it is that the Patriots won… at least at that point. America even then was too different from the rest of the world – even the British empire – to remain mere colonies on the eastern seaboard. War after war would have eventually transpired every few decades given the American spirit embodied in men like Sergeant Jasper.
But never with the fervor and tenacity of the Patriots during that six years. Never in a manner that benefited the American dream. The desire to be citizens and not subjects. For every man and woman to be Lord and Lady of their own castles, to own the fruits of their own labor, to have public servants, not government masters.
Sure, current America has fallen far from these ideals, just as Jefferson said it would. We have our problems, but then so does pretty much every nation..
Reasonable people can’t compare modern America to Utopia; they must compare America to other countries. And what we have here is special and always will be. A country not founded upon ethnicity or geography, but upon the value of individual liberty in a federal republic with many states run many different ways, so all may be a free as they wish in their own paradise.
Reality may be what it is, but the blueprints are as well, as are the directions the founders gave us.
Your paradise is Heaven. Making your way Home the meaning of your life lesser until you have your own family. Then your meeting includes them too.
But while you’re here? South Carolina is a wonderful place to be from. As long as the Holy Spirit is in your heart, you can be happy living anywhere. And for the sake of a loved one, you would, and be just fine.
But if for some reason you were forbidden from putting one foot outside the borders of this state, you would be just fine until God called you Home.
So thank God for putting you here, and all of those who fought for it to be what it is.
It’s Not a Frame of Mind 