Chateau Lloyd

Americans are uniquely troubled by having too much stuff.  By the time we reach old age, we can be buried with a lifetime's worth of purchases.

At the very least, this creates a burden on those who inherit the estate, because instead of wealth, they are mostly bequeathed significant logistical problems.

De-cluttering - the removal of surplus items - can be a timely solution and both of my grandparents practiced this long before the term came into being.  They sold their houses and distributed most of their personal property before settling into more modest dwellings.  This removed many of the potential disputes over who should get what, and made the final distribution of property something of an afterthought, since instead of a multi-bedroom home with 3,000+ square feet, a garage and a full basement, the family only had to deal with a small apartment's worth of good.

Alas, not everyone has the time for foresight to do this.

That is where I find myself, helping a parent who has lots of stuff part with it and doing so in a gradual matter.

Is it a corporal act of mercy, or merely an act of charity?  Perhaps filial piety?  It's hard to say.  On the one hand, opening up more room and re-creating a sense of orderly space is definitely a bonus.  However, this is not entirely altruistic - the cleaning now will reap benefits later, and some of the items can either be sold, or will allow what they replace (say, furniture) to be sold.

The ideal solution would be split the proceeds, and I have done that with other elder relations.  But some people can't bear to sell off their stuff, but they can give it to family.  What happens later is out of sight, out of mind.

And of course giving monetary gifts will only result in new clutter.

I'm thinking the best option is to make use of it for a while, and document this in some way - photographing the stuff in its new setting, showing people enjoying it, which then validates the decision to let it go.

I suppose it could also count as "visiting the sick," since there does seem to be a psychological element to this.  If it gets out of hand, other risks emerge, such as vermin or mold, or even the piles collapsing.  Certainly it inhibits mobility and the loss of exercise can accelerate physical and mental decline.

However one defines it, it is a good thing, and time well spent.

Five years ago, I almost died.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and I was feeling awful.  The weekend started well, and I had a slight fever on Saturday, but by Sunday it had cleared up.

In the interim my kids managed to break first the washing machine (by overloading it) and then the dryer (by filling it with dripping wet clothes).  With school about to hit high gear, my wife implored me to fix the situati  Ion by Tuesday.

So that's what I did.  I went online, found a local store that had both machines in stock ordered them to be ready for same-day pickup, and set about dismantling the old ones and hauling them out of the basement.  That done, I picked up the replacements (which required two trips), and got them installed and running by 5 p.m.  

Not a bad day's work.

The next morning, I drove the kids to school, and I was not feeling well at all.  I'd already made up my mind to call in sick, but even driving was a strain.    My arms were tingling, my chest was tight, breathing was difficult and by the time I got home, there was an edge of darkness around my eyesight.  I laid down on the floor and suggested my wife might want to dial 911, which she did.

It wasn't a heart attack, though it presented as one.  It was instead an attack of myocarditis, an obscure affliction in those days before Covid "vaccines" spread it far and wide.  The ambulance crew was polite and professional, and I quickly rallied.  After every test imaginable over the next two days, no clear cause for the attack was established.  One of the nurses in the cardiac unit suggested it was a combination of physical exertion, general exhausting and whatever bug or virus I was fighting off.

It was during my convalescence that I began the research for Long Live Death and the pleasure (and success) of that project inspired me to write Walls of Men.

If nothing else, my literary output benefited from those extra five years.

I've also lived to see all my kids finish high school and welcome two wonderful grandchildren into the world.  I've lost a few friends along the way, made new ones, and reconnected with others.  My faith has grown by leaps and bounds, which is kind of surprising because I thought I was in a good place back then.

Maybe I was, but now I'm in a better one.

Death has its own schedule, and no society in history has expended so many resources and developed such extensive technological means to forestall its arrival.  And yet we also are craving it to a greater degree than ever before, murdering unborn babies, harvesting their best parts and encouraging the old, the disabled and the depressed to kill themselves.

It is something of a paradox.  The world is worse than it was five years ago, but maybe that was also necessary to people to return to God.  I notice Mass is filling back up with younger people.  The vocations in my area are strong and healthy.

As for me, I'm more attuned to my health, and have had to reluctantly accept that I'm not in my 30s anymore.  This is a realization that is also a paradox because knowledge of my limitations has made me more reasonable about getting word done and I stress less on things outside my control.

In any event, I think it's a good idea from time to time to pause and consider where we are and what else we could be doing.

When I was a child, I had a regular cycle of ear infections, and two of the dark memories that haunt me from that time are getting an injection in the butt and the taste of yellow Triaminic.

I've the worst one I had in many years and decided to go into the clinic to speed my recovery.  Before I left, I got word that come coworkers had tested positive for Covid, and I have to confess I thought it rather quaint.  It never occurs to me to test for that.  It's over.  Covid is just another cold and - as we now know - was not much more than that to begin with.  

The response was grossly disproportionate to the threat.

As it happens, I did test positive, but it was something of a footnote because like many others, I have no symptoms.  My problem is an ear infection, which I'm in the process of shaking off.

That in turn reminded me of Stephen King's On Writing, a book I read some years ago after a friend recommended it to me.  This was back when I was just beginning my authorial career, and I'm sure he meant well, but his advice - ignore the biography and focus on the writing tips - was exactly wrong.

I despise Stephen King.  I dislike what he writes and how he writes it.  His politics are abhorrent and he seems like a very bitter, angry old man, which is strange given the immense fame and fortune he has achieved in life.  He's pretty much the prime exhibit that secular materialist goals only get you so far.  True happiness and love come from God, and the closer one draws to Him, the greater the joy and peace one will find.

That is why King's autobiography was of interest.  It was no shock to me that he had an unhappy childhood with frequent ear infections and painful treatments (in his case, the doctor just pierced the eardrum with a hot needle).  His family was poor, and he was surrounded by decrepit spooky stuff that he later incorporated into his works.

To me, that is the value of literary biographies/autobiographies - to see where the inspiration came from and how they came to write what they did.  Once you've visited Fort Monroe, you can understand  why so much of Edgar Allen Poe's work centered on oppressive masses of damp, dark masonry.  He wrote what he knew, which was the interior casemates of the fortress where he served part of his time in the U.S. Army.

I don't get sick very often, and once again I'm reminded that part of why we get sick must be to make us appreciate being healthy.  I'm certain that I will do that, and hopefully it will be soon.

For the past couple of days I've been unable to get into the site.  This may or may not have been related to the catastrophic computer failures that devastated the travel sector, but it's a reminder that the technology that now seems so vital to us is actually both fragile and still quote new.

I'm in the middle of middle age, yet I can remember burning through paper checks to pay bills not that long ago.  I now keep my ledger on a spreadsheet rather than on paper, but I can go back to it fairly easily.

An entire generation of people have no idea what I am talking about.

For a long time, modern technology increased both society's convenience and resilience.  Telephone and radio allowed for instantaneous long-distance communication, greatly enhancing responses to disasters or public safety emergencies.  Our medical system engaged and destroyed diseases like smallpox and brought polio to the brink of extinction.  

Yet at some point, it all turned sour.  Our communications are now extremely vulnerable to the extent that a backhoe digging near St. Louis a few years back crippled American computer networks.  This latest incident is a reminder that the profit motive can result in tremendous advances but also dangerous weaknesses.

The same is true of medicine.  Where bright minds once battled disease, our doctors now seek to unmake humanity itself, telling troubled children that they can and should be mutilated and chemically castrated in order to make them feel better.  The Covid pandemic demonstrated that modern medicine  is more about asserting authority than healing.

The key takeaway is to look at other networks for support.  Friends, family, community, parish - these are far more resilient and much less prone to corruption and exploitation.

Almost three years ago , I noted that the secular "scientific" experts claim to be merciful and helpful, but in reality they are incredibly cruel.

A recent column in First Things reminded me of this, and also how much the tide of bloody-minded scientism has advanced since then.   While the nominal topic is about the tension between religion and viewing pornography, it's really the old claim that the sin isn't a problem, it's the guilt from thinking it is wrong.

They used to call these "hang-ups," and the goal of sensible people was to break them down, because things like adultery, promiscuity, and sexual deviancy were actually normal and healthy, it was only the God-bothering scolds who thought them bad. 

Decades later, we have soaring youth suicide rates, a national mental health crisis, a collapsing marriage rate, falling birth rates and the "expert" solution is: more of the same.

How scientific.

The same logic pervades the transgender phenomenon, where women are told that if they dislike biological men walking into the female locker room and brandishing their organs, they should get counseling so that it no longer bothers them.  Again, their privacy and feelings are simply wrong - some talk therapy about their hang-ups will fix things.

This warm, compassionate belief system wants to kill imperfect or unwanted children in the womb, things that the world should run on a 24-hour clock and work seven days a week.  The old, infirm, disabled and depressed are literally better off dead.  The value of each life can be calculated to the penny, and society as a whole we are told benefits by the loss of this dead weight.

It is a variety of Yard Sign Calvinism, with reason serving as its god - a god every bit as bloodthirsty as Moloch or Baal.  Indeed, one can't but wonder if the animating power comes from those old, wily fallen angels.

Happily, the excesses of the pandemic (and the lies spread to justify them) are undermining this diabolical belief system.  Science has nothing to say about morality, and we are seeing just how quickly it degenerates when the guard rails are taken down.

I'm old enough to remember when it was the universal scientific consensus that we'd all be dead by now.  Without immediate, and radical economic reorganization, life on earth would be over by...uh, 24 years ago.

I mention this because the real threat has never been a warming earth, which generally means longer growing seasons, but a new ice age.  If one goes back 10,000 years ago, my house would be under a mile-thick sheet of ice.

Even short of that, the current sub-zero weather is playing havoc the neighborhood pipes and even modern heating systems are struggling to keep houses warm.  A drive through the neighborhood showed that HVAC and plumbing services were not observing the federal holiday.

The cynic in me notes that "climate science" is just another grift, the equivalent of itinerant preachers or snake-oil salesmen in days gone by.  But in a deeper sense, humanity needs to be afraid of something, and if God is no longer a concern, while a 4 degree rise in global temperatures will do the trick.

This meshes well with Yard Sign Calvinism, which requires frequent (and public) affirmation while keeping actual sacrifices to a comfortable minimum.

Nevertheless, it's interesting how dependent the Elect are on sinners for life-giving warmth.

Effective June 20th, Amazon raised the prices for print versions of their self-published authors.  I'm sure many authors are also looking at raising their e-book prices simply because everything else has gone up.

Inflation poses a unique problem for people who don't have major publicity behind them.  Such folks can charge a premium for their work.  Lesser lights, on the other hand, rely on a lower cost to help entice readers.  While inflation is distributed across the board in the book market, people still have a sense of what is expensive and what is not, and there can be a disconnect when prices rise as sharply as they have done over the last couple of years.

I supposed that - had I been market-savvy and seen it coming, I could have announced a big sale before the price hike.  I may do that anyway, offering "retro" prices over a big weekend.

The fact remains that when everything gets more expensive, that includes books.

I figured the end of No Mow May would be unpleasant for the participants, but I did not foresee that we would have drought conditions at its conclusion.

It has not rained here for two weeks and the plants are starting to show stress.  For those who regularly maintain their lawns, the solution is simple: stop mowing.  I usually mow once a week, but without rain, I held off because cutting the grass causes it to lose moisture, and driving over it when it is dry and brittle causes further damage.  When it gets enough rain, the grass will rocket up, and then there will be a job to do.

However, for the No Mow May crowd, waiting is no longer an option.  The city has an ordnance about grass length, and while the good burghers will willing to look the other way for a fashionable cause, such dispensations could not be prolonged indefinitely.

Thus, as anyone with passing knowledge of lawn maintenance could have predicted, the result is that many formerly well-manicured yards are now trashed.  This is because mowing actually helps sustain the grass - without it, weeds will take over and over time, crowd it out.  In extreme cases, there isn't any actual grass left.   More commonly, there are now bare patches that will have to be replanted and watered.

Those without excessive weeds may be in worse shape, as the trauma inflicted on the grass during drought conditions has killed the lawn outright.

The lesson here is right out of G.K. Chesterton, which is that lawns, like fences, exist for a reason.  The promoters of the event bought into the false narrative that trimmed grass is somehow wasteful, or harmful to the environment.  In truth it is nothing of the sort.

Grass is a time-tested way to provide sustainable green spaces for outdoor recreation while minimizing harmful insect populations.  Even with the drought, tall grass supported high mosquito counts as well as ticks - which I'm sure the dog owners of the area did not appreciate.  Misleading statistics that compare it to farmland ignore the obvious fact that residential neighborhoods can't support production agriculture, but often do support vegetable gardens. 

That it is aesthetically pleasing is also nice, but not the point.  The point is that the alternative is much, much worse, which is why so many cities have ordinances regulating lawns.

I'll be curious to see how many people want to repeat this next year.  Having a dead yard is indeed a cross to bear, but I doubt many of the participants expected it.

Given my interests, one would think that I am a huge fan of C.S. Lewis.  While I do admire some of his religious writings and particularly enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, I find his work a little too heavy on the allegory.  Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, I didn't approve of him mixing mythologies in the Narnia books.  Moreover, I came upon them late in life, and while the kids enjoyed them, I did not get much out of them.

However, I had heard good things about this "space" trilogy, which is a someone curious body of work.  It was written during the Second World War and could credibly be counted as "hard" science fiction in terms of how it explains space travel (which is confined to our solar system).  It is quite inventive and combines spiritual concepts in an interesting way.

That being said, it is not a conventional trilogy insofar as the plot only somewhat builds during the series.  Most trilogies (this includes my Man of Destiny series, which started out as a trilogy) are basically a story arc spread out over multiple episodes or periods.  The "space" books differ greatly in tone and character, and in the author's forwards (and sometimes in the epilogues) this is explained.

All of which is to say, there are good points to the books, but to me there is a fatal flaw that finally brought my reading to a halt, and that is the excessive use of allegory.

Tolkien himself was a sharp critic of using this method of storytelling, and made a point of separating stories that were applicable to other areas from ones that were simply extended metaphors for making a point.  The latter is what the "space" books are.

The first book is the worst in this respect.  Out of the Silent Planet features three remarkably thin characters who are really nothing more than placeholders for points of view.  There is vivid description, lengthy discussions, and not much else of interest.  Lewis loves language, and major part of the book discusses how other life forms would utilize it.  At the end is a note promising the next book will be less heavy-handed.

It isn't.  Like the first book, Perelandra had a remarkably inventive setting (the first book was on Mars while this one is set on Venus) but apart from an attempt at better narrative framing, it is mostly description and long-winded philosophical discussions.

That Hideous Strength concludes the series but can also be read by itself.  Maybe that's what I should have done, because by now my tolerance for symbolism was non-existent.  I'm about 100 pages into it and have completely lost interest.  None of the characters feel in any way real - they are all archetypes placed in the story to make a political, philosophical or religious point.

Of course it is possible to do this while retaining vibrant and fascinating characters.  Tolkien certainly did it, as did Evelyn Waugh.  Indeed, the strength of Waugh's writing is that it feels like a real story and the sense of meaning and purpose only gradually makes its presence known.

That Hideous Strength is basically a Nineteen Eighty-Four style tale written in a much more elaborate way.  Indeed, George Orwell was one of the few writers who did allegory well, and his secret was he kept it brief.   Animal Farm is a very quick read, and while Nineteen Eighty-Four is more detailed, the doomed romance keeps it interesting.

Yesterday I reached the breaking point.  It was the perfect time for a good book, and yet after reading only a few words of That Hideous Strength I had to set it down.  Instead I reached for a Joseph Conrad anthology and started reading The Shadow Line, which actually held my attention.

I suppose I could soldier on and at least skip and skim my way through the remainder of That Hideous Strength, but I feel that's dishonest.  Since I'm not required to do a paper on it, I'm going to simply stop reading and perhaps at some later date I will decide to pick it up again.

My column on Ben Hur at Bleedingfool.com kicked off a modest debate in the comments.  What started as a discussion of the film has now turned into a debate about faith itself.

I'm not interested in litigating my side over here, but the course of the conversation is worth a closer look.

I'm sure most people of faith at some point will encounter an "evangelical atheist."  These people don't believe in God and they don't want anyone else to, either.  Marx had a big hand in creating these creatures, and while they deserve compassion, history has shown they can also be very destructive.

While it is unlikely that we will encounter the next Pol Pot at the bookstore or in an online comment thread, I think it is important that we understand where they are coming from.

In my area, a great many were raised by strictly religious parents and their unbelief is a form of rebellion.  "I refused to be brainwashed into your cult!" is their battle cry.  Others had faith, but for some reason lost it.  Again, the stories tend to have many points in common, but each one is unique. 

Just as converts often tend to be the most fervent believers, apostates are often the Church's worst enemies.  On the psychological level, we can explain this by noting that the same strength of will that can sustain a voluntary life-change can also give it enormous power and zeal.

But if we look spiritually, we a different dynamic.  Converts to the faith are trying to share something wonderful and new to them, something that they had overlooked before. 

The evangelical atheist, by contrast, has nothing new to share, no gift other than envy and despair.

In the last couple of weeks I came across one who explained that there was no God, and that people should just enjoy life knowing that they were going to die and that would be that.  The person insisted that he was perfectly fulfilled, thank you, but that did not explain why he went on a religious forum to spread this message.

I have been seeing this all my adult life.  Again, the reasons vary, but the actions have the same dull similarity.  The most virulent form of this are the ones who want to outlaw all religious practice in the US military.  And that is what gives the game away.

The old secular materialist explanation was that misery loves company, and having had their faith shattered or never being able to find it, these folks seethe with envy and anger when they see smiling religious people find meaning and purpose in their lives.  It's especially obvious when they go out of their way to hinder them - like going to an online religious discussion to spread their message.

But if we use the Spiritual Warfare lens, what we see is something different.  These people have declared themselves against God and therefore any hint of His presence is a threat to them.  That is why they want churches closed, and seek to undermine the faith of others.  They are allied with demons, but too blind to see it.

Such creatures regularly appear in the writings of Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, which shows how far back this particular strain of Spiritual Warfare goes.  Indeed, one of the Enemy's most successful tactics has been creating an artificial tension between faith and science.  Yet there is none.  Faith without reason is merely foolish while science without faith is diabolical.

Perhaps the most poignant part of the Ben Hur exchange with the commenter's refusal to even accept the possibility of miracles.  Given that the oldest writings we have confirm their existence - indeed there is an evidentiary chain leading to the present day - this is perhaps the most irrational aspect of atheism.

There are no magic words to break through to such people, but my hope is that by giving counter-examples to their misery, people who of their own choice embraced faith and found contentment and joy, they may look about themselves with new eyes.