One hurdle down. Another hurdle next week. Thanks for the cat, Lord. 🙏🙏🙏



At the vet ER.  you’ve been worried about Bill for a while. Took him to the vet a month ago for vomiting almost daily, but blood work was negative. Shallow breathing today brought you to the vet who in turn referred you to an ER. A dear friend is a vet tech here; she’s the one that didn’t like vid you sent her of the shallow breathing.

Three hours in the parking lot since you’re not allowed in. From what it sounds like it’s either a minor inflammation or lymphoma. 

You don’t have children, and you know what they say; as soon as you have children you see pets differently. Wouldn’t change the tears of fear or worry, or magically give you an appetite.

Little guy literally trotted into your life and heart one night when you really, really happened to need a friend eight years ago, and you’re not shy on occasionally looking up to God and saying “And thanks for the cat.”

You’re not ready to lose him yet. Not now. Sure as anything not now.

Deep breath. Stay calm. Keep it together. 2020 can end now; this everything going to hell in a handbasket schtick is really getting old.

Bill is Falkor, not Artax. He’s your bro and he’s gonna be fine. 

Frustration is having chest pains in the morning because you keep falling asleep on the fucking recliner at weird hours during the day and night away from the damn mask. It doesn’t do any good to get a good nights sleep with a mask to try to repair the brain damage if you go into the living room and fall asleep again watching TV.

You don’t have much money left but apparently you need to spend it on five hour fucking energy, though God knows what that’s doing to your blood pressure.

You’re not used to this. You’re used to being young and careless. Please learn this lesson before you have to learn the hard way. That’s not something you’re good at. Find a way. You actually matter to some people. Fucking act like it.

You can’t be positive without occasionally keeping it real and being honest with yourself.

If you don’t want to be successful, tell yourself lies so you don’t have to take action.

If you do want to be successful, tell yourself the truth so you do.

Make it happen.

Fascinating. Flame wanted to watch the NeverEnding Story with you. No video, but you synced the viewing and talked on text during.

I mean, you’re going to watch it anytime someone wants to. But…yeah. Yeah. Go ahead and say it. You remembered sharing it with Crow. Couldn’t stop being reminded of sharing it with her and how exited you were. Seeing her smile as you degenerated into an eight year old. Opening up a part of your life that you don’t share with people in general. The level of comfort. The wonder. I mean come on it is really stupid, but it is what it is. Sharing it with her made you so happy. Anything with her made you so happy.

You had never watched it with Flame, because honestly when you were with her you could be described as being in the grip of The Nothing. Not focused on the bliss of imagination, But grounded in the mundanity of the real. Well, the temporal…. 🤔

You actually found somewhere online where someone identified all of the symbolism of The Neverending Story with references to Hinduism or some such, but the symbolism reached into your heart so differently, and spoke to your own faith so clearly.

The death of Artax, which you amusingly refuse to watch again to this day… in the swamps of sadness. Atreyu went into the swamp with Elements of his world… and they died, victims of the sadness of a mundane life. And still he pressed on. Found the answers from the giant turtle Morla and hopelessness they gave him. And he still pressed on. And all seemed lost as he slowly seems to give in to the sadness. And he still pressed on. The swamp sought consumed him he even has he pressed forward with the Gmork about to schew up what was left…. when he was saved at the last second by ‘Luck’, in the form of Falkor.

We fight against our weaknesses. Against sin. We fight in the hopelessness of swamps of sadness. And we learn we can’t escape. We can’t make it on our own. We try. We struggle. But only with faith can the gap be bridged. Faith not just in ourselves, but of more. Of those that raised us and inspired us, who support us and love us. Though a nonbeliever might call it Luck.

But why? Why struggle so hard to try to reach that point? Well… what on earth is so enamoring about this unremarkable existence? What is it about nearly going to work to pay bills and dealing with the mundane aspects of life day in and day out that is so appealing to so many people?

Why are we so “perfect”? Why are we so satisfied with who we are?  Our entire culture grapples with arrogance. We are what we are, and don’t seek to be better. I mean why be better without a cause, and what cause is there besides our own self gratification?

And at the end of the day… focusing on short term gratification just bites us. No, we don’t have to be some big activist that wallows in drama, or try to be something we’re not. There’s nothing wrong with even just being yourself you guess. But there’s no excuse to not work to be better.

Most people get older but don’t seem to grow up. And yet still they sacrifice their dreams to their own Nothing. Dreams of challenging her own confidence in front of your own Sphinx Gate, or confronting your true self in the Mirror Gate. So many people find their true self and then just yield to it. Easier. Don’t try to be more. Don’t try to be truly happy and at peace with the world around you. Good lord that’s the worst of all worlds.

Others use crutches. Substitutes for what truly matters to give them that feeling of accomplishment. Drugs, alcohol, gambling (though you’ve never understood why exactly that’s a vice because thankfully you don’t know many who suffer from it), etc. Things that get in the way of the beauty of existence behind the curtain of the real. That’s not to say they may have their place in a balanced life, but if they unbalance it, they’ve got to be a crutch for something.

This virus is the beginning of some really rough times for many, many people. At the end of the day, you can’t help feeling that the aftermath of the actions taken because of it will end up causing far more problems than the virus itself. That’s your grounding talking though, because it’s at odds with your nature of optimism and positivity. That doesn’t mean good things won’t come out of it – in fact you have high hopes that it will become a wake-up call to millions that they had their priorities completely misplaced. But you just have that feeling; especially seeing the divisions within the country and mindsets around the world. Thank God you live here though. The virus, like others, doesn’t like warm, humid places. Maybe you can suffer a little more humidity this year without being ungrateful for it as you’ve been for some time now.

The Swamps of Sadness, the Gmork, and its master, the Nothing. Perfect metaphors for the things we struggle with in our day to day lives. Depression, those who oppose us, but worst of all, the insidious forces of despair behind them all that seek to pound us down into nothing more than to be cogs in a machine with no hopes, dreams, or faith. Minions of darkness indeed.

And yet… always there are things and people entering into our lives providing Hope. And Hope is part of His plan.

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” says Jeremiah 29:11. Or, as your pastor paraphrased amusingly… “Hope is faith in the future tense.”

Put your trust in Him. You’ve been doing so well falling asleep with the mask on, but keep screwing up napping during the day out of boredom. Grounding is necessary. Something is wrong, and you’re drifting slightly into a realm of unfeeling. Well, back into one. That’s not good. Just because a new old you was unlocked a few years ago… doesn’t mean it needs to be abandoned. You’d learned that lesson a while back. And don’t feel bad. Loneliness isn’t something you alone are suffering from at the moment, lolz… As a matter of fact, it’s likely more people suffer from loneliness right now than ever in history… ironic.

Meh. You’ll get past it. Have faith. Focus on regaining what you’ve lost. Healing your wounds. Plank. Speck. Now…try to sleep….

 

Celt’s a very conscientious person. You’re fine helping a friend, especially when it’s not that much of a problem. Doing some cleaning, you run across $400 she’d given you for rent because she was tired of “charity” and she finally had the means.

It’s the simple things in life you treasure. Nothing mystical about likely cognitive damage helping you forget about a mortgage payment when money’s running tight.

Good people help. Good people help back. Tonight’s a good night to order some food from a hurting local business and leave a good tip. Because every once in a while you can go in havsies and both benefit from generosity. 🙂

Things are starting to look up anyway.

Because The end is in sight!

It’s only a matter of time before you find a couple of masks. 🙂

The exhibit at the airport in Columbia escaped you all those years when you and Mom picked Dad up from business trips when you were a kid. But one day, he pointed it out to you and told you that the Doolittle Raiders actually trained at Columbia’s airport. You didn’t think too much of it until you realized later on what exactly that meant to a nation reeling from five months of fear. 

78 years ago, April 1942. America’s fleet lay devastated at anchor at Pearl Harbor with only a few carriers and a handful of escorts seaworthy. Japan was rampant in the Pacific, consolidating power and taking Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Guam, virtually everywhere North of Australia and West of Midway. With access to the raw materials they needed in the Dutch East Indies they had all they needed to reinforce their fleet and take Hawaii. Who knew what else. Stalin’s USSR wasn’t fighting them, so their only other front was in China, and the US chose to focus on Germany first, leaving the US Pacific Fleet to fend for themselves. Full wartime production was still a long way off, and no one knew how industrious a fully mobilized America could be yet. But in order to even have one, they had to hold serve in the Pacific with what was left, or else they could be paralyzed.

The Japanese for their part hadn’t lost a major battle in a thousand years; their victories against the world’s largest nation, China, had come easily; and the Americans couldn’t protect anything from the Imperial fleet. The very idea of Tokyo being bombed was as alien to them as an attack on the World Trade Center in August 2001.  

All eyes were moving towards Australia as the Japanese set their sights on it when two of America’s few carriers and what escorts could be spared were sent northwest instead. Sixteen Army B-25s put on the Hornet with Enterprise providing escort took off at an unthinkable distance on a single raid, unable to return. 

Thousands of men, half the remaining fleet desperately needed at the upcoming Battle of Coral Sea turned north in a single massive, coordinated raid that would accomplish practically nothing tangible in the grand scheme of the war other than a monumental “Fuck You!” to the great Samurai mindset of Imperial Japan. 

Funny, you’d discussed with the Greek, one of your best friends who’s wrapping up 26 years in the USAF that raid once and gotten into a disagreement about it. Waste of manpower, materiel, etc to accomplish little practical. Well, he was right about that and an authority on such issues. But he also sees it in terms of being a part of a world-dominating military that hasn’t been truly challenged in over 30 years. Those men in 1942 were desperate. A spirited debate; both of you stuck to your points, agreed to disagree and got another beer.

Considering the losses at Coral Sea while Enterprise and Hornet were returning from their mission, he did have a point…but given all that had been going wrong for America for five months… there could be fewer moments as satisfying that pulling the lever on a B-25 that day. You motherfuckers think you’re invincible? Duck, Hirohito. 

Months. In a history book they don’t seem long. The months the world is spending in quarantine now feel like they’re taking forever, with no end in sight. Idiot experts are forecasting models saying we’ll be in the clear sometime between May 1 and 2022. Gives you a new appreciation for the months that the Americans had to sit back and fume at being unable to fight back against a rampant Japan. The world’s most industrious and impatient people found a way to bitchslap a dominant nation who had never truly known defeat… just to fucking do it.

Fills your heart with spiritual fists just thinking about it. 

The fates of the pilots are a mixture of tragedy and adventure; some captured and tortured by the Japanese, others funneled through the warzones in China through diplomatic minefields negotiated between the Soviets and Iranians to get them home. Heroes all.  

Sometimes it seems like you set your mind to something and it just never happens. Even if you do what you know you ought to, the ball never seems to roll. The weight never seems to drop. The comprehension never seems to clear. Patience is a virtue, but an elusive one. You know what? Make up your mind to accomplish, and once you have… give your obstacle a “Fuck you!” just because you CAN. 

Walking an hour every day was derailed. Feet blistering. That’s fine. Stay in a day so they can be ready to go. Bitch, your overweight ass is RUNNING tomorrow for ten minutes. Collapse if you got to eight minutes in, but as soon as you’re good to go, you’ve got two more minutes. Is that wise? A good investment of your time and energy considering the exercise plan you’re putting together? Nope. But fuck it. You can, you will, and when you do and go back to the plan the next day, you won’t feel so bad for how far you’ve fallen since the days of being All-Region Cross Country.

Self-Discipline is a huge weakness you have. Accept it, and find a way to overcome it. Walking an hour every other day alternating with rowing won’t be fast enough to help you accomplish what you want to accomplish and you WILL become discouraged. Discipline is far more important than Motivation in the Long Run. Motivation is an emotion, and thus fleeting. Discipline isn’t. You’re good at what matters far less… so you have to make do.

It’s okay to get discouraged. When you do, remind yourself that you CAN run. It’s just really not very smart. The fact you CAN do something in the back of your mind gives you strength. A temporary boost of motivation when Discipline begins to unravel. Because it will.

Just a month later in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the American fleet had only two carriers, lost the Lexington and damage to Yorktown was so severe she barely made it back. Port Moresby was saved and Australia could finally breathe a sigh of relief. As tactical a defeat as could be and still be a strategic victory.

Which means you’re going to hurt yourself in your stunt tomorrow. Probably muscle failure. Fall, skin your knee. You know what came after Coral Sea though. And you know what’s eventually going to happen if your enthusiasm manages to thinly cover the gaps left by your lack of self-discipline. You need this. You’re sick of living this way. Not just with your health, but that feeling of disempowerment when you wake up at 10am and still don’t need to do anything. 

Seriously, do you know who you fucking are? What you can do if you put your mind to it? When you have the drive and energy you did at 25 but combine that with the Wisdom of having God in your life to chase that bastard of arrogance off when he dares rear his head? 

No. You don’t.

Yet. 

Whatever. Missed it by a day. Meh, this year is the 350th Anniversary of the founding of the Holy City in 1670 and immeasurable celebrations of history are going to have to wait a year. Far worse things have happened. You are blessed beyond measure. You have no right to keep those blessings to yourself. Every minute you don’t have the means to try to make the world a better place, you fail yourself. 

That’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s something to do something about. Let God guide you… but occasionally take the opportunity to go somewhere crazy on your own and ask Him to come with you. Why? You don’t know. It’s who you are. Something tells you He understands, and maybe there will be a learning experience down the road that changes your mind. If so, bring it. Last thing He wants you or anyone else to be is a robot. 

You’re hurting right now. It’s okay to admit it. You need this. Give eternal thanks you can do it, and if you fail, find something else to give eternal thanks for.

Now go make an idiot out of yourself on the rowing machine. 

 

 

 

Define Irony… keeping up with the News is essential given current events; yet it leads one to anger and frustration at so many voices in the world that know as little and yet have as strong opinions on what little they know as you do. LOL Step #1 in problem solving is always admitting you have a problem. Trying to reorient yourself away from negativity is a chore given the circumstances, but that only means it’ll be even more worth it in the end. 

The folks are doing alright; thank God they’re taking things seriously. Worried about you as always. Your money is precarious, but help is on the way there. It still burdens you not to have the means to come to people’s aid if they needed it, but it’s only temporary. Still can’t feel any difference cognitively from sleeping arrangements. Really hope this thing begins to pass soon so the Mayo Clinic will consider other ailments again. Nonessential means nonessential, and your problems are that. It’s nothing to be upset; far from it. Be thankful you don’t need essential treatment.

The Titanic sank 108 years ago today. Their needs were essential. Same for the victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing seven years ago today.

You missed a perfectly good Supermoon the other night thanks to cloud cover. Could be worse though. God willing, next year at this time things will be so different. You’ll not be worried about whether you can read something and comprehend it. That alone is worth celebrating. You’ll be back where you need to be – in charge of your own life and hopefully having a job that fits you more like a glove than the last one. You realize now the quality of character of people you work with is actually far more important than you had realized.

Relax; you’re not the most observant guy on Earth; you learned that years ago but had forgotten. It was at Dad’s retirement dinner from his company; you spoke in front of everyone and thanked everyone he’d worked with for making such a positive environment for him to be him in. It was a moment you will never forget; nor was it a toast you’ll ever be able to exactly remember. Just another sign. You’d prayed for the right words. The ones you spoke weren’t yours. They were so much better. Came with so much ease, like you were channeling wisdom from a lifetime of experiences in front of brilliant high-ups. Sure fooled them, lolz…

“It’s really easy to go to work every day when you love what you do. When you don’t love what you do, you can get by but you have to put on a mask. You can’t be yourself, and that’s what we always want to be….”

Pretty sure that’s how it got started. You wanted to thank them for being a cooperative, collaborative environment; the kind Dad thrived in. He didn’t have to wear a mask. He could just be himself. And he excelled. Well paid, well respected, well traveled… and every year he’d come home the day after his annual review with a smile on his face and said “Good news! I still have a job.” Because he never took it for granted.

That’s what you want. Something that fills you with a sense of belonging. Same way with finding a church. Searching for a new one back in 2012 seemed like it took forever. Self-righteousness pisses you off. Makes you hate it when you feel it in yourself. But you try to get past it; not much else to do. Personal faults are mere obstacles if we see them and fight them. All you can do is be thankful it’s not something you suffer from too badly – and then watch it to try to make sure it stays that way.

Our relationships with others tell us so much about ourselves. Not just friendships, family, or loved ones. Who we are around affect us. Spending eight hours a day at work with someone miserable and eager to share it over the course of many years can grind on one’s soul as easily as being in an abusive relationship. 

You want elevation. Can feel it. That time of year when you feel Table Rock calling you. Your home is by the Sea… but as soon as its safe to go, you need to go. This is the time you need to work on yourself. Be thankful for it, and don’t waste it… 

 

 

 

 

 

Surrounded on all sides by modernity and mundanity. Electrical lights and central air conditioning. Refrigerated  fruits and oven-baked meats. All maintained by exchanging labor for revenue. Division of labor. Goods and services.  Nothing has changed in thousands of years. 

Torch light and open windows. Salt-preserved foods in a pot over an open flame. Gathered either first-hand or second-hand.

Modern miracles. All the things that trick us into believing things are so different. So many fixated on the banality of existence. Obsession with what they believe is the Real because they can see it with their eyes and feel it with their hands. Because everyone’s brain seems to process the same way. Is the color Red you see the same as the Red someone else does? Most likely yes. Can you be certain? Most likely no.

What is our slice of perceived reality in an endless sea of possibility? For so many of us know that on the other side of this mundane place are realms of unimagined vastness that the mind of a slightly evolved ape is ill suited to seek to comprehend. And yet the stubbornness of so many of us demands that this unimaginable vastness conform to what we wish, seeking to fill our desires.

Surely there must be a way of cobbling together an understanding of this vastness in such a way to permit us to be the center of the universe as we are. Surely there is a way we can come up with our own path that makes things so easy. That asks nothing of us. Something tailor-made to our will. After all we were given the ability to comprehend concepts like infinity; why not use our imaginations to craft our own realities the way we harness electricity and the atom to reinvent modernity and mundanity?

Because at the end of the day… We delude ourselves. The reality we craft is nothing more then a reinvention of modernity and mundanity. Because it is crafted by us. Flawed evolved apes just conscious enough to reach out into a world of vastness that we can perceive, and then convince ourselves we can master like we did electricity in the atom.

Ironic that this is borne from the philosophy of Socrates “all I know is I know nothing”. There are so many things we know deep down that we choose to ignore, or we choose to fight. Things about the universe we don’t like because it fails to cater to what we want. And we disbelieve what we wish by hiding behind our own ignorance and wishing something was not so.

What kind of greater reality of universal truth all comes together to makes sense in the mind of a flawed, finite creature? There can be only one answer. Delusion.

What is at the center of a black hole? Surely there must be an answer. An exit to another dimension through a white hole? A place outside of time and space that slowly degrades into nothingness? There must be an answer and science will show us the way. If not now, one day. Our faith in our own magnificence is amusing. As we claw away at the secrets of the universe we forget how we are able to learn what we learn. We give credit to ourselves so easily, and forget so quickly that on the time scale of the universe that it was merely in the blink of an eye since we lived in caves. 

This world means so much to us. And yet instinctively we know how mundane it truly is. We sense, in primitive in vague terms, slivers of the worlds around us and demand that they fit into the world we create for them; in the world of electricity and frozen pizza. And when the worlds around us fail to conform to our desire to control them, the only result can be anger. Frustration at the arrogant infinity for not conforming to the box we create at the center of our lives.

And that anger begins to consume us. We begin to be disjointed deep within, as our connections to greater realms becomes incompatible with our concerns about finite money and fleeting happiness. And then we can’t even approach those things in our material life without that the sense of being disjoined and the anger that comes with it.

We become so very comfortable with anger. A sense of need for the importance we feel it gives us. The desire to control our lives because surely we are the ones most equipped to navigate through the sea of vastness and create broken spectacles for ourselves to see it through.

The faster we come to anger, the more uncomfortable we are with our place in the infinity of existence. And then we find we are uncomfortable with our place in the finite world of mundanity, because at the root of our anger is that we are uncomfortable with our place within ourselves. What we know about ourselves chews at our consciousness and as we fight against it we shield ourselves with lies and denials.

So what is the path through not just ourselves; not just our mundane lives of living to buy food for our bellies and mortgages for our shelter; but through the greater realms of existence that we know we know are there, but cannot comprehend? The answer is as simple as it is incomprehensible: Trust.

Trust. In what we know that loves us.

Trust. In what we know has our best interests at heart, even when we don’t understand.

Trust. That we are so much more than our flesh and blood that this life is such a tiny and minuscule part of the vast infinity of existence.

Anger in and of itself is the source of nothing but the disastrous effects it inevitably has on our lives. It is a side effect of us failing to trust that there is a purpose for all things. Incomprehensibly complex and simple at the same time.

Feeling and being. How do we align them from their naturally opposing places? 

With Trust. Not in ourselves. In More.



Life has conquered Death.

Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

Amen.