Does anyone reading this remember the Duck and Cover drills from the 1950’s? Just in cases you missed them, the drills were part of President Harry S. Truman’s Federal Civil Defense Administration program and were aimed to educate the public about what ordinary people could do to protect themselves in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
Like this was going to save you from being turned into radioactive Rice Krispies
I don’t remember doing these when I was a kid, but I didn’t start going to school until the 1960’s. By that time everyone had probably figured out that ducking and covering was a stupid idea, so they started smoking pot and protesting against the Vietnam War and marching for civil rights. And stuff.
You wouldn’t be allowed to have a mass protest right now because the whole world is on double-secret probation lockdown in an attempt to control the Coronavirus pandemic, including the Lakeside Area. Yesterday, my golf course closed until sometime next week, but probably maybe later. There’s a whole lots of nothing to do here right now.
I’ve completed every home maintenance project within my ability here at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa. I added about five hundred gallons to the pool yesterday. It took seven hours and twelve minutes. If you think watching paint dry is boring… And I watched five hundred videos on Facebook and the YouTube®.
The first two were funny.
I’ve weeded some of the gardens. Todd has weeded all of the others. Miguel, our gardener and pool guy, is going to cry when this quarantine is over. I repotted all of my plants on the patio this morning that I was planning to get around to doing, someday.
Right now, I’m listening to my collection of Mozart CD’s that I bought twenty years ago and never took out of the box. And it seems like a good time to try to write something/anything to pass the time away…
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Way back when I wanted to become a rich and famous author, I wrote an epic, three volume tale about the End of the World. There were a couple of plagues of Biblical proportions in it. Hundreds of thousands of people got dead. I thought I had a pretty good idea of how people would react during a crisis, but I know I didn’t write anything about people hoarding toilet paper…
But wait, there’s more!
There were a shitload of natural disasters that ruined the lives of almost everyone on the planet. And more than one unnatural disaster that, if you were unlucky enough to survive, would probably make you wish you had gotten dead. And there were a couple of world wars where millions of people got killed to death.
My book was a lighthearted comedy romp through the worst fucking things you could imagine, and then doing them all over again because you just weren’t miserable enough yet.
And I seriously wondered why no one wanted to publish it at the time.
I know I didn’t foresee the current political divide in American politics. Even if I had, I’m sure I would’ve predicted that the two parties would put aside their differences and work together to try to save their country from ruin.
That has not turned out to be the case with the Coronavirus, has it? It’s like unto those old Miller Lite commercials:
Tastes great. Less filling! Bitch! Whore!! CUNT!!!
It’s time to grow up, you politician guys. And it’s time for America to wake the fuck up. No party in the current system, not Republican nor Democratic, has all of the answers to fix all of the problems America is facing. And if they can’t start working together, neither of them will.
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The End of the World has been predicted pretty much ever since civilization began. And the one constant I can see is this: every one of those predictions of imminent doom, destruction and death has been wrong. Including mine.
As far as I know, there has been only one (unverified) case of complete and total worldwide death and destruction since human beings appeared on the scene.
The Great Flood.
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Some of you probably know the story about Great Flood and Noah and his ark. As the story goes, wickedness and evil were prevalent all across the world at that time. It was like unto the Sin City movies, only worse. And if you’re looking for a story about a compassionate, loving God, you won’t find one here.
According to legend, a group of angels called the Grigori were living on Earth to keep an eye on things while God was busy doing other things somewhere else. One of the things these angels noticed was the daughters of Men were some serious babes. They broke General Order #1, the Prime Directive, and interfered with the normal and healthy development of Earth life and culture. The children of this mixing were called Nephilim.
They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
Think back to those mythology classes you thought were stupid and boring because all that crap had to be made up by someone doing mind-altering drugs. All of those gods, demi-gods, and heroes: Zeus. Osiris. Apollo. Odin. Vishnu. Thor. Achilles, Perseus, and Hercules. Bilibobus Thorntonicus.
They were half-mortal, half-divine beings with an impressive array of abilities and powers unknown to the rest of the world. And they were most likely the real reason God decided to destroy most of the civilized world when He did. I don’t think He liked all of the competition. And He clearly kicked the shit out of all of them. There were a lots and lots of stories about their exploits. And then, kind of just like that!, there were no more stories…
Something happened to all of those guys.
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According to the Bible, God regretted ever creating humans because they were so fucking wicked bad. According to the way I interpret this story, the cause of all that wickedness appears to be a group of rogue angels that decided to have unprotected sex with a bunch of hot girls. And they produced a race of Giants with magical superpowers. So God decided the best thing He could do to fix this problem was kill every man, woman and child on the planet by drowning them in a great flood.
Everyone except Noah and his family because Noah was a righteous dude, like unto Ferris Bueller. And you probably know the rest of the story. Noah built an ark, then he gathered together a bunch of animals and herded them into his big-ass boat. And then it started raining like unto a bastard, and it rained for forty days and forty nights.
According to the Bible, …everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Afterwards, God made a covenant with Noah and his family. God promised Himself He would never destroy the world in this fashion again, and He set a rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant He had made. It would be a reminder to God that the next time His children disappointed Him, He wouldn’t kill them all to death again.
You know, just in cases He forgets or something…
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I’ve always thought the story of Noah’s ark was the kind of story that parents would read to their children when they went to bed at night to encourage them to be better people, or God will drown your rotten little asses, too!
I thought that for a couple of reasons. One, God is supposed to be all-knowing and perfect, therefore, incapable of making a mistake. Ask any pastor you happen to see, they’ll tell you. And yet He appears to have done fucked up a couple of times in this story. I’ve said this before: if God wanted a perfect society, He should have stopped with bees.
The other reason is God supposedly doesn’t labor in vain. Everything He touches works out to perfection. But here we have a world gone to hell in a handbasket, with corruption and crap everywhere. God rolls up His sleeves and gets to work. He cleans up the mess His wicked and evil children have created by drowning them all in the bathtub.
And yet, after all of that, wickedness and evil still exist? That shouldn’t be possible, should it? Nor does it appear that God was even successful in killing all of the Nephilim. It clearly states in the Bible that some of them continued living after the flood.
Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make any sense. And yet if you want to be a good Christian you have to believe it’s true because it’s in the Bible and everything in the Bible is true. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a good Christian.
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There was one part of the story that I thought had to be true. After the flood Noah planted some grapes, made some wine, and got drunk. And it says he passed out naked in his tent.
But I imagine this as the first block party after the flood. Noah had no doubt been very stressed out from building an ark, gathering a herd of animals and somehow feeding them during the super storm that drowned the earth. But those may have been small change compared to being quarantined with his family for more than six months straight.
It’s something we can all relate to right now. With adjustments for inflation and the cost of living, six modern days are easily equal to six ancient months.
I imagine Noah drank a few flagons of wine at the Postdiluvian Block Party. Then he drank a few more… The next thing you know, he’s telling his family what a bunch of fuckin’ whiners they’d been during the dark days of the storm. His sons were almost no help. Their wives, those bitches, he would’ve fed them to the lions if God would’ve let him. Then took his clothes off and twerked his naked ass in front of all of their faces before he stumbled into his tent and passed out.
According to the Bible, Noah was 600 years old at the time of the Great Flood. That could not have been a pretty sight.
See? I told you
Don’t be surprised when this whole quarantine thing ends if you see crowds of drunken naked people dancing in the street. It could totally happen.
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At least one of my Facebook friends is convinced that the Coronavirus pandemic is the beginning of the end, and the End of Times is upon us. I was pretty sure the Gulf War was going to usher in the events that would end the world…
Yeah, I really do suck when it comes to being a prophet.
That said, I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, so here’s a couple of things to consider about the End of Times:
“Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Revelation 12:7-9
Every pastor I’ve talked to about this says that war was fought long ago. Go ahead, ask your pastor. See what he thinks. I think it’s a battle that is yet to be fought. And the reason I think that is this verse in the Book of Revelation:
“Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
For a malevolent spirit of ultimate evil, Satan has thus far appeared to be a bit of an underachiever when it comes to being, you know, a really bad guy. The worst thing he’s done lately is prevent the Saturday Women’s group from having pancakes. From what I can tell, he appears to be content to watch Netflix® and chill, just like the rest of us.
Desperate times require desperate actions. When Satan starts acting like a Russian mobster on a meth binge, then you’ll know that shit just got real.
And there’s one last thing. Revelation 19:19. That verse describes the armies of the kings of the earth assembling to wage war against the forces of Heaven.
Two billion people on this planet claim to be Christian. Every Christian will tell you the Second Coming of Christ is something they look forward to with great anticipation. Every Christian alive would say this is true, even if they happened to be a king of the earth.
If that’s true, then why would they gather their armies and prepare for war?
There’s only one thing that I can think of that could unite all of this world’s fractious leaders enough to pool their forces and fight together. And that thing is an invasion from outer space.
April Fool’s! Or is it?
* * * *
Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. But if you can think of anything else that would make all of the world leaders unite like that, I’m open to your ideas and suggestions.
Jesus Christ claimed to be the King of Heaven and Earth, and he said he would return again one day to rule. One quarter of world’s population believes with all their hearts that this is going to happen, and the sooner the better. But according to the Bible, Jesus will have to go to war to claim his throne.
You’d think he’d have an army of supporters waiting to welcome him when he returns, but it doesn’t appear that that is going to happen. Can any of my Christian friends explain to me how that’s possible?
I have one. When Jesus returns, he comes back in a spaceship. And because of that, no one is going to lay down a welcome mat for him
That, however implausible it might seem, would explain a whole lots of things. I’m not going anywhere or doing anything for a few days. If you have a different idea, leave a comment.
* * * *
Hang in there everyone. This quarantine isn’t going to last forever. It probably won’t last much longer. Maybe another week beyond what everyone has been predicting. But then simple economics will have to take over and the world will have to get back to business again.
But if it doesn’t, a lots of people are going to start praying for spaceships.
Reflections/Life in Mexico 