Category: Relationships

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Did I miss a memo from God?

God & I have a relationship.

Right at the moment I’m a little angry at God but not so much that I’ve turned my back on him. He knows why I’m angry and that I have faith perhaps everything was, or will be, for the best.

I’m willing to acknowledge he knows more than I do. I’m sure that he’ll forgive me for being a bit angry because I can’t see the whole picture like he can. I’m also sure he’ll forgive my ignorance and demands for answers. Compared to God I’m a petulant child and like my Father used to do, God is probably sighing in a slightly annoyed way, but is not angry at me.

I think of God very much like a good Dad. I treat the relationship with God the same way.

So I am generally confused when I see or hear things like, “I prayed over whether I should purchase an ice cream cone,” or something equally insignificant.

I understand having God in all aspects of your life but come on, would you call your actual Father up 50 or 100 times a day to ask about trivial bullshit?

No. You call your Dad to ask about serious stuff. “Hey Dad, I think I’m in love and want to get married. What do you think?  You’ve met ‘em.” Equally, I can see praying to God about getting married and asking for a little guidance on the question of, “Is this person the right person for me?”

That seems appropriate and I totally get it.

I’ve never thought of God as genie or Santa Claus. Even as a child somehow I knew that you only asked God for serious stuff. “God, please help Grandma get out of the hospital soon. I really miss her biscuits.”

(Yes… I did actually make that prayer as a child.) I’m fairly certain that God smiled at that childish, selfish prayer much the same way that my Father did tucking me into bed.

So when I see people saying they prayed over this, that, or the other trivially stupid thing, all the damn time I find myself wondering if they’re serious or just virtue signaling. I honestly don’t know, and am trying to refrain from rushing to judgement.

If these people are actually praying like this over any stupid thing, then I feel sorry for God. How many people are doing this all day every day? Even God has his limits. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? How about the flood? Yeah what happens when God finally has enough of the whining and bitching and flings the planet into the sun for a 5 minute cleansing.

My Dad used to joke that if I didn’t behave, he could give me away and make another one just like me, who would behave properly.

With God… He could actually do it!

So all you bible thumpers out there. Y’all keep on preaching,  but how about not clogging the heavenly switchboard or voicemail with moronic shit?

There are some folks trying to get through with really important stuff. You know like, “God, should I marry this person? God, could you please help Russia and Ukraine tone it down a little bit?”

Most importantly, “Hey God, could you give me a little help making Grandma’s biscuits, I just can’t get ‘em quite right.”

How about all of us just thank God for another day and give him a break?

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In Florida

I came to Florida to visit my parents. They’re both getting up there and my Mom isn’t doing well.

She calls it a vacation, this is not what I call a vacation. To me a vacation is going someplace that I want to go, and doing stuff that I want to do. Something like hanging out at the beach, or diving a reef, or wandering through a national park.

Her idea of a vacation is having the TV blaring and shouting over it to have a conversation. Her other idea about vacations is stuffing your face all the damn time. As a rule I eat when I’m hungry but that is not allowed here. I think part of the reason I eat only when I’m hungry is because everyone in the family is pretty obese. I do not want to be obese, so I eat in a way that’s dependent on activity. If I’m very active burning a lot of calories, then I’m hungry.

Sitting around blocking out the noise from a TV at 75% volume screaming to have a conversation as if I’m in a bar is taxing but not overly physical.

I’ve not been able to write because if I go into another room to reduce the volume of the TV, then I’m apparently being antisocial. Truth is, I can’t think clearly with the noise, and my stepfather droning on and on about something that is only obliquely related to a question I asked 25 minutes ago. Typically, the question I asked has not been answered, and I’ve forgotten what I asked in the first place.

That being said, I’ve finally come to realize that he’s always been this way, which is why it was so hard for me to get my homework done, and so hard for me to read my schoolbooks when I was a kid living under their roof. I was one of those kids that hated homework, It was a real effort for me to put in the work because I’m easily distracted. So some of this is absolutely on me, but some of it is on them because they didn’t recognize the problem. 

They were both quick to tell me I was smart so there was no excuse for me getting poor grades. It became a no win situation so getting through school became increasingly difficult because my logic is, “If there’s no possibility to win, playing the game is pointless.”

By the time I got to my middle years in high school I’d stopped asking him or my mom for help or clarification on assignments because it always devolved into some weird conversation that didn’t answer the question I’d asked and left me completely confused. 

This was particularly true in math. Asking if I was doing an algebra equation correctly led to all the ways one could do an algebra equation, and how calculus was better anyway. But because the answer was all over the map, instead of looking at the equation on the page and confirming or correcting my process, I didn’t build up the fundamentals and was never sure if I was right or wrong until I got the quiz back.

All this time, I’ve thought I was simply a moron. This is perhaps why I had very little interest in college. 

If you’ve got kids, I beg you. Answer their questions about their homework in a simple straight line fashion. They don’t need to know about all the ways a problem can be solved, binary theory, or the history of the planet, if they’re asking about (a+b)-a*b.

Just a thought.

At the moment they’re at a doctors appointment. I’ve turned off the TV, am doing my laundry, have taken out the trash, and cleaned the place up a bit. I’ve caught up on e-mail,, text messages, and calculated the costs of my trip out here. It’s amazing what I can accomplish if I’m able to hear myself think.

My parents aren’t bad people, they’re just oblivious. My stepfather is a good guy but very self involved. Everything always has to circle back to him and something he’s done or seen.

So everyone in his sphere is minimized and he’s always the most experienced, most intelligent, most wonderful person in the room.

That’s not really good for children who are trying to build a sense of self worth. Sometimes parents need to step back and just acknowledge their children’s accomplishments without comparing them to their own personal accomplishments. Unfortunately that’s now how I was raised when my stepfather came into the picture.

My sister, and my deceased brother who lived in this house much longer than I did are, (or were,) damaged in similar ways.

Like me, my sister has worked very hard at developing her own sense of self and value. I don’t think my deceased brother ever did. I think he might have tried to fill the hole in his heart with sex, (I still don’t know how many times he was married,) I suspect that part of his fantasy world, and substance abuse may have been him self medicating. I don’t know, we didn’t talk and had very little contact through the years.

When they get back, I’ll not be able to write because as soon as I start writing one or both of my parents will want to have a conversation. That’s reasonable since I’m here for a visit. The problem is that it’s kind of the same conversation over and over again.

I’ll hang out until Halloween because it’s one of the holidays that my mom likes, and it will lend itself to family time, the day after halloween I’m probably going to bail. A week of this is enough and I’d like to see my brother in Northern Florida. I can spend a couple of days with him and be in a more normal environment. Then I need to get back to California before Winter really hits.

There’s so much I haven’t gotten done around the house this year. Maybe I’ll be able to do some of those chores before it gets too cold to do them. Then again, maybe we’ll have a warmer year this Winter. 

Guess that’s one of the perks of Climate Change…

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The moment I saw the word, I knew this would happen

The word is PureBlood.

This is a term that some unvaccinated people are using to identify themselves. These folks are specifically referring to the COVID vaccine and while they’re probably vaccinated against other common childhood illnesses they’re drawing the line at the mRNA vaccines.

In a way it makes sense. Unvaccinated people were demonized as pariahs. Many of them lost their jobs, some of their children are being denied the opportunity to attend school (in person or via remote learning), our military is still dismissing trained soldiers who have requested and been denied religious exemption. Latest reports I’ve read, put the number of unvaccinated at a little north of 30% of the population.

The story of the COVID vaccine has shifted over the past 2 years. First it was, “you won’t get sick,” then the storyline morphed into, “you won’t get as sick”. The story in the beginning was that if you got vaccinated you’d not spread COVID, now data is suggesting that you can still spread it and that may be worse because you might be asymptomatic. Therefore spreading it unknowingly, although this is no different from unvaccinated people who are asymptomatic so that’s probably a wash.

The shifting winds of the efficacy and repeated boosters have not lent a lot of credence to the narrative presented by the powers that be.

President Biden said COVID was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Then went off and got COVID after being quadruple vaccinated. It’s interesting to note that President Biden’s entire Presidency seems to have been about identifying and then demonizing “The Other”. First it was the unvaccinated, now it’s MAGA.

Fauci suffered the same embarrassment over vaccinations, He still got COVID, and later suffered a Paxlovid rebound.

Through it all there were people that chose not to get the vaccine. For some, it was a matter of religion, for others it was a matter of their particular biology which resulted in the vaccine being contraindicated. Still others had COVID early on and saw no need to be vaccinated against something they’d already had and survived. Others just didn’t trust the government and their mistrust only grew as the government brought force and shame to bear.

But one aspect has been fairly constant. Demonization. The unvaccinated were “Dirty”, “Unpatriotic”, “Selfish”, and “AntiSocial”. There were media pundits that suggested putting the unvaccinated into camps.

None of this would engender compliance for people who made their own decisions and were willing to live with the consequences.

Some of the unvaccinated believe that the mRNA vaccines will cause long term health issues and reproductive harm. Fauci himself admitted in an interview that abnormal bleeding and irregular menstruation, post vaccine, needed further study.

It seems that a lot of the unvaccinated also believe that the vaccines alter the DNA of the person. I’ve seen interesting justifications both pro and con in this stance. I don’t have sufficient information about genetics or the interaction of RNA / DNA to comment nor is there any need for the purposes of this post.

The point is, PureBlood is being used to describe in a broad sense unvaccinated folks. The unvaxed are owning it instead of covering it up. Now they’re making dating and mating choices based on their status.

There are PureBlood dating sites. 

In a way it makes sense. If you’re a PureBlood and you believe that reproductive harm is caused by COVID Vaccines, then you’d want to date and perhaps marry another PureBlood in order to insure that your children had the best shot at a healthy life without genetic abnormalities.

The added benefit is that you’re more likely to share similar political or religious beliefs.

Lots of people on the internet are sneering and making nasty comments about these sites. Why they’d bother? I have no idea. The unvaccinated are probably not going to be interested in them, and they’re not going to be interested in the unvaccinated. But the internet at large seems to NEED to find fault.

For the unvaccinated, it’s just more of the same.

Some of the younger unvaccinated males have made interesting responses. The best was a guy responding to a particularly nasty thread saying, “Don’t worry ladies, my sperm will only cost you 10K a vial when your man finds out he’s sterile and you want a kid. You have no worries that I’d ever put my dick in your diseased cooch!”

I read that, and blew water out my nose. (I should learn not to drink when I’m scanning comment threads.)

The responses from some of the nastier women were very unladylike. Most were generally along the lines of, “In your dreams you racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, piece of shit, better the species die out than have to carry your seed in my belly”

His response was, “Yeah remember that when you’re begging to jerk me off.”

Funny thing to me, (aside from his responses,) is that so many really nasty women put in the time to search for the site, and then took the time to raise a vitriolic stink by writing comments. They could have done what a lot of “Normal” people do, not bothered!

As I was reading about these sites, and there are a growing number, I wondered how long it would be before small enclaves started. This could be the seeds for the next Waco or Ruby Ridge type commune. 

A lot of the unvaccinated seem to think that the vaccinated will die off. I’m not sure where that belief comes from. There are statistics from other countries that suggest a higher than usual mortality due to all causes over the past two years. The numbers seem to be increasing.

I think that this is probably due to people not getting in to their doctors for routine checkups. By the time folks did get to the doctor, things had progressed too far to be stopped. In other words, I think the unvaccinated folks belief may be due to coincidence instead of provable fact.

Again, I’m not a doctor, biochemist, virologist, or anything in the medical field so this is just my opinion.

It struck me that this is how religions and / or cults get started.

Viktor

I wonder if the President’s next speech will attempt to demonize white supremacist PureBloods.

I have to admit, hearing something like, “The PureBloods are dangerous to us all, they’re evil!” has a lot sexier ring to it.

With a little PR I’ll bet you could make PureBloods out to be practitioners of blood rituals and satanic rites aimed at the destruction of democracy.

I probably shouldn’t give the spin doctors any ideas…

After all, I too am a PureBlood.