Give Us Barabbas

Beneath my What If? What If? What If? post, Barabbas himself became an Apologist For Jesus, and left this extended comment.

Allow me to apologize for my brothers. I believe God gives every person a choice to believe or not. I’m not responsible for your choice and though it saddens me, I must respect your choice. May God meet you where you are and draw you to Himself “with chords of kindness” not clever or manipulative arguments or threats of eternal punishment. Have a wonderful day and again, I apologize for my fellow Christians that may have pushed too hard and far without respecting your freedom. – Barabbas

One:  Do not apologize for others.  It only highlights their misdeeds, mistakes, and contradictions.  It also makes both of you appear weak and needy.  Be honest.  Only apologize for your own errors.

Two:  Do not ever label my disbelief as merely a choice!  Never have I suddenly just chosen to be a petulant, rebellious asshole.  My Atheism is as fundamentally part of my being as my gorgeous brown eyes.  I have been an Atheist longer than you have been alive.  I got that way, not through choices and options, but by observing Reality as it presents itself to me.  The reality is, I see no God/gods.

Three:  A little convincing evidence of the existence of your specific God, and that you are somehow privy to what He/She/It/They will and will not do, would be a lot more useful than your vaguely-expressed wish and hope that someday – somehow – your Reality-impaired pet entity, will finally show up to see me, and validate all your unproven assumptions.

There was a reason that saccharine was banned.  Your ‘all sweetness and light and love and kindness’ delivery is, perhaps, a little less grating than those Apologists who promise me Hell and eternal damnation if I don’t agree with them.  At least they have the courage of their convictions, and are not afraid to express them.  Yours is cloying, and sickly sweet.  I feel religious diabetes developing.

Four:  Are you in the church choir, or should the line read, “with cords of kindness”?  You promised me no tricks or threats, but that sounds suspiciously like church BDSM – a little God bondage.  😳

Five:  You must lead a sheltered life, if you think that Mr. Torpedo-Victim did more than ruffle my hair.  I have engaged with Bible-thumpers who would have him for breakfast.  I feared none of them on a philosophy and logic basis.  The only reason I have hung back from some, is the modern, technological concern about flaming, hacking and doxxing.  Some of those good, loving, Christians quickly forget that ‘turn the other cheek’ command, when their beliefs are refuted.

Online Christian debaters give me as much freedom as I give them.  I allow them every opportunity to make foolish, irrational claims, and they let me point out the errors in their arguments, and make fun of their presentations.  See, everybody has fun.  👿

Jack Fell Down

Jack fell down and broke his crown, and bureaucracy damn near killed him.

Actually, it was the wife who fell down.  She was just pulling up her pants after using the main-floor washroom, when her tinnitus, and other inner ear disorders upset her balance, and she keeled over backward, smacking her head against the door, and the floor.  Then followed five minutes of painful wriggling to move far enough so that the son and I could get the door open and help her up.

With COVID distancing mandates, it was three days before she even got a telephone interview with her doctor.  The doctor called at 2:00 PM.  When she heard of headaches, sleeping for 12/14 hours, and slurred speech, she suddenly insisted that we attend her clinic, immediately.

At 3:00 o’clock, she found bruising, and a droopy eye.  What we took to be a mild concussion, might be internal cranial bleeding.  She needs to know ASAP!  The city has two hospitals, but only one, shared, MRI machine.  A scheduled appointment could take weeks – too long.  She apologized, but said that, the only way to ensure an MRI today, is to go and sit in Emergency for seven hours.  Eventually, it will get done.

At 4:00 o’clock, we got the wife registered at Emerge.  It seemed simple.  Take the doctor’s work order out of the fax machine, and do the test as soon as a tech could be scheduled.  First, we waited twenty minutes to see a triage nurse.  She checked blood pressure, heart rate, blood-oxygen percentage and temperature, and directed us to the dreaded waiting room.  After another twenty minutes, another nurse showed up with a small cart, and took a blood sample for testing, and warned of a later urine sample requirement, and the need to see the on-call doctor before anything is done.

Then we settled in for the siege.  It is not first come – first served!  We know that she will be seen after the guy who slashed his fingers in a DIY accident, the woman with a bloody nose running down her face, and the young man knocked off his bicycle in traffic.  If we have to wait (and wait, and wait), at least we could enjoy the floor show.  Stupidity and larceny are in plentiful supply.

A chubby street hooker, with more ink than the New York Times, but no obvious distress, showed up.  A young homeless (?) woman, with a giant backpack and two stuffed shopping bags, managed to find a seat in the crowded room, to get out of the rain.  A young, female addict, who survived a minor overdose, stormed out and across the parking lot, still wearing the hospital’s blanket, and screaming, “Get away from me!  I don’t want to have anything to do with you!” at a boyfriend who has had enough, and is already half a block away.

Two security guards have an office with security monitors, just inside the entrance.  We caught a glimpse of them rushing outside, and chasing someone around the building.  Two male, and one female, Police officers patrol in and around the Emergency ward.  I looked for Tasers, but in tight quarters they might get grabbed.  At 6:00, I got her a coffee, and me a hot chocolate from the in-house Tim Hortons outlet, upstairs.  At 7:00 I got her a buttered tea-biscuit, and me a crème-cheese bagel.  It’s going to be a long night, and her diabetes needs to be fed.

At 8:00 a patrol-car cop brings in a young, female shoplifter.  He’s wearing a Taser, and she’s wearing handcuffs in front of her.  The wife later said that, around midnight, two cops brought in three young males involved in a bar fight, not only handcuffed behind, but also connected to ankle shackles.  One of them wailed that, He was just being paraded around, and everybody was going to know!

I had to reluctantly leave her alone at 8:30.  Our two little dogs have been locked in a cage for six hours.  The son needs the car to get to work at 10:30.  I was going to drive him across town, pick her up when she called, and drive back out to pick him up at 7:30 AM.  Already under work-stress, when he heard what was (not) happening, he took the night off, and ordered a pizza, because none of us was eating properly.

At 3:00 AM, she called to say that the (next-shift) doctor had examined her, and she was on her way to Nuclear Medicine.  At 3:45 she called to be picked up.  She entered the hospital at four PM, and finally got out at four AM.  The threatened seven-hour wait had stretched to twelve hours, for a five-minute test.  Thankfully, we now know that all is well.  Without any visible blood or injury, she still could have collapsed out of her chair at any moment.

Do you have a hospital horror story that you’d like to recount?  I will listen patiently, and commiserate.

The Saddest Funny Story

We recently had to attend a funeral service for one of the wife’s sisters. That was only the beginning of the sadness. A nephew of the wife’s sat down opposite us, and related his sad tale.

For about five years, he’s been fighting a neuropathy, a neurological syndrome which has been causing increasing pain in his extremities. First his hands, then his feet, became agonizingly sore. He was up to gobbling eight Oxycodone tablets a day, just to keep the pain level down to a 2.

He married a New Order Mennonite girl who increasingly involved him and the kids in their church. There had been a two-day weekend Salvation Convention. The church brought in speakers to lecture on different sins, and what to do to get rid of them.

After one seminar session, the moderator paired each attendee off with another church member who they were not particularly close to. They were to go to small tables, where each one would confess his/her sins to the other, who would then pray for them and forgive them. Then the process would reverse.

He said that he hunched over the table and told the other man about all his sins. The farmer devoutly prayed for him, and told him that he was forgiven. He said that he suddenly realized that he could no longer feel the continuous pain in his hands and feet. He called the pastor over and told him this, and the whole room had a Glory, Halleluiah, Praise-The-Lord, prayer session of thanks. God had cured him.

I manfully tried not to smirk, and wondered if his posture had kinked, or un-kinked, a spot on his spine, or if the power of suggestion had caused a psychosomatic (perhaps temporary) cure. He might even provide the possibility of a God-answered-prayer miracle. I was all ears!

He continued his tale. He can now not feel anything with his hands. His legs are numb from the knees down. When he had to call an ambulance for his wife’s apparent heart attack, he stood outside for ten minutes, in a foot of February snow in his bare feet. This condition is dangerous, especially for him, because he works in HVAC. This is like leprosy, or diabetes. If he cuts or burns himself and doesn’t notice it, he may have to have an amputation, if infection sets in.

This is the normal, worsening progression of the disease. GOD didn’t cure him, but he believes that happened. I just sat there in stunned disbelief, thinking that it was his belief that was stunned.
What’s the problem with a comfortable delusion?
There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Seinfeld Rerun II

The solution to the crossword clue, “Many blogs”, the other day was, “Rants”.  I’m glad to know I’m holding up my end of the bargain.

I’m also glad I caught a clue from BrainRants’ site last February, and started putting my posts in a Word file.  It has reduced tension and evened out my publication.  I pound out three, thousand-word treatises in 36 hours, then go into suspended animation for 8 or 9 days.

Lady Ryl has been diagnosed with type-II diabetes.  It should be to her to announce this, but she hasn’t felt well enough to post since the end of March.  Added to fibromyalgia and mobility restrictions from two damaged knees, this just increases her burdens.  It was caught early enough, that diet and medication should control it.

Her doctor got the blood-test results on a Friday, and wanted her to come in on Saturday, but she was already committed to the Cherry Park festival, where she had a good time, and made some sales.  The trip to the crazy cat lady was delayed a week, and I took her over on Sunday.  A male, and a female, doctor share the office.  Neither wishes to work a full week.  Her lady doctor is in on Tuesday and Friday.  The man she saw, is in on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, providing clinic-like coverage.

In my post about names, I mentioned Laurie Embro, and her sister-in-law, Lori Embro, who both worked in the same plant with me.  Recently, “Laurie Embro” turned up as a search term.  I hope I didn’t say anything derogatory.  Speaking of names, a local female executive carries the surname of Bodkin, so rare that the surname website doesn’t even list it.  In my May 12/13 post, You Don’t Say, I explained that a bodkin is a pointed tool, somewhat like a naval marlin spike, used to work on leather, canvas and rope.

Almost a year ago, on July 26/12, I posted the story of how I got into collecting foreign coins, titled, “A penny, lira, peso, etc. for your thoughts.” It got the usual 40 or so views, and disappeared.  Suddenly, about a month ago, I started getting, “A lira for your thoughts” as a search term, and usually 4 or 5 views of that post, each and every day.  The views come from countries all over the world.  Pleasantly puzzling!

While many of the larger auto-parts firms have left the area, it is still possible to get a job with some of the smaller ones.  The Workforce Planning Board held a meeting of HR executives recently, and, among other things, the topic of strange applications came up.  These are definitely not the usual ones, but they include an applicant showing up for an interview in a hoodie and baseball cap.  Mark Zuckerberg can get away with wearing that to a board meeting, but not a job applicant.

A candidate who had been granted a $17 dollars/hour, 40 hours/week, 9-week summer job, then wanted three weeks vacation in the middle.  Applicants tell HR reps that they’ll only work days.  They don’t do afternoons or night-shifts.  It is not appropriate for parents to call to set up an appointment for their child, nor is it appropriate for them to call, and follow up after an interview.  A parent showed up at one plant and asked to submit a resume for the son who was sitting out in the car.  Who wants the job, the kid, or the parent??  One mother even came to her son’s performance review, and fielded questions for him.

I recently took the wife to a local rheumatologist for a cortisone shot.  The building is filled with doctors, including one of her nephews.  Every door has two signs, “Leave all wet footwear outside.” and, “No food or drink allowed in office.”  Dr. Tom’s door has a third one added.  It says, “This includes Tim Hortons!”  This just shows how Canadians regard Timmie’s.  This stuff isn’t “food and drink”, this is Canada’s lifeblood.  It goes where we go!  Rrrrolll up the rrrimm on the large double-double, eh!

California became the first state to ban the Pray-The-Gay-Away repair therapies for minors, to change their sexual orientation.  These therapies have driven teens to depression and suicide.  Gay rights groups have labelled them as dangerous and abusive, and claim these practices have no basis in science or medicine and have been relegated to the dustbin of quackery.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon,

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this.

I accosted the man.

It is useless, I said,

You cannot….

You lie! He cried, and ran on.

I checked my stats today, and found that Akismet had protected me from 3,333 spam comments, such an interestingly round number.  They included a new one from Mona@bogusemail.uk, who wished me a happy belated birthday, and said she loved my wrinting??  I treasured it so much I could barely delete it.

My brother phoned to tell me that he had lost his job as a bank guard.

I said, “That’s awful.  What happened?”

He said, “Well, a thief came in to rob the bank.  I pulled out my gun and told him that if he took another step, I’d let him have it.”

Mesmerized, I asked, “What happened then?”

He replied, “Well. He took one more step, and I let him have it.  I didn’t want that stupid gun anyway!”

Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.  Coming soon to a blog near you, posts that make much more sense than this one.