Featuring this year’s numbers and some more crimes of noticing.
It’s taken all the way until the 21st for me to finally do this. January is always a strange month for me. Anyway, let’s start with the numbers for A.D. 2023:
Fifty years ago now—our one half-century mark—is 1973. Rhythm and blues and “soul music” (remember when African Americans had soul?) predominated over the pop and rock offerings on radio then, enough that Rolling Stone magazine complained about it. (Rock ‘n’ roll was supposed to save us all from the crushing adult Establishment, after all. One catchy chord change on an electric guitar was all we needed to end the war in Vietnam!)
That means it’s 40 years ago for 1983, when I met and began dating the last woman who would break my heart. I have been married to my rescuer (she took me out of South Carolina, where I would have likely perished before my 30th birthday) for 33 years this August, and my daughter, born in 1993, turns 30 this year.
July 2023 will mark the seventh year since we left Colorado Springs and settled into the San Luis Valley. On 4 February, we’ll have been living in Colorado for 16 years. It’s as good as my home state now. There was nothing for me but a sad, lonely death back where I came from in South Carolina.
Speaking of death, it will have been six years since my brother from another mother, Steven Mock, died of sepsis in November 2017, and five years since my cancer diagnosis in 2018, which brought me back to God. Not because I feared dying, mind you, but because I was so grateful I’d had a decent life, despite my odds growing up in South Carolina as a high-functioning working class alcoholic with aspirations. God dropped by that night to tell me I was welcome, and to stay in touch, big things are coming.
It’s been a slow turning, but as of the first week of this year, I’ve been on the worship team of my church for one year already. That I’m a member of a church at all is something. That wasn’t happening so much as two years ago this month, not until September.
Our Last Normal Year in what we’re still calling the United States of America was four years ago. Yes, 2019 is four years ago. I'll never forget the shadow that came in with New Year 2020. There was mumblings about a virus from China that was reportedly dropping people in the street, staged videos and all. The last elected president of the country was strangely silent during his last full year in office. Getting banned from Twitter certainly didn’t help. (A head of state getting banned? What?) It was finally on 11 March 2020, one week after we had to put down my family’s first cat (Otis T. Cat, R.I.P.) that America died in lockdown during the fake pandemic. This year will mark three years since freedom and plenty as we grownups have understood it came to an end. But no more mean tweets from Orange Man Bad, the most evil Hitler since real Hitler, so there’s that.
November 2023 will mark 60 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA. This was officially admitted towards the end of December, and no one blinked. Of course, a sizable amount of people—we can’t know the exact numbers—have scorned the idea that the attacks on 11 September 2001 were orchestrated by angry Muslims for years now. We know it was all about ramrodding through the USA PATRIOT Act and getting us into forever wars with Afghanistan and Iraq.
By the way, 2020 wasn’t the first stolen national election. It wasn’t even the second. I suppose it’s good that so few people understand this.
A lot of us have lost faith in the institutions. The more observant ones note that there was little basis for that faith to begin with. Of course, there are still too many people out there who think we just need to vote for the Right Candidates and all will be hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet again. Verily, they will have their reward. I know too many people now who know otherwise, and thank God for that. Lord deliver me from the mindless media parrots and NPCs.
This country, the Great Babylon of the Bible’s book of Revelation, has been messed up for a long, long time, now. Some put the date of No Return at 1913, 110 years ago when the Federal Reserve was formed. It was a major nation-wrecking event to be sure, but those who say Lincoln and the Civil War were the tipping point are probably onto something. Maybe it was the Whiskey Rebellion, when it was clear our new “free” and “representative” government was representing its ends and with lethal force towards the New England farmers who voted for them.
Does it matter? We certainly learned nothing from the mass murder machine that was our involvement in Vietnam. Remember Vietnam? Remember that massive “peace dividend” we were supposed to enjoy with the end of the Cold War in 1989, only for everyone to forget about it as we were goaded into war with Iraq the very next year? From everything and anything that has happened, we have learned nothing.
So much water under the bridge. So many things I remember that others do not. So many hard truths I’ve had to accept, most notably, that most people will not accept, let alone even notice, the hard truths if they hit them square in their faces. Like that poor pseudo-intellectual sap Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, they’ll die of either fake vaccination or deliberately engineered famine or lack of natural gas for heat and go all the way to the end insisting these are better times than when that mean guy who said bad things about women and Mexicans was President.
I know God my Father loves me because he put my wife and I into a rural high valley where we can get our eggs and beef fresh from home suppliers. Inflation may be an issue now (as it never was for over 40 years!), as well as fuel costs, and unstable supply chains, but at least we’ll eat, and eat quite well, thank you. Enjoy your “impossible (plant-based) meat” and acquire a taste for the bugs, chump. You’ll eat ‘em and say they’re the greatest through your clenched teeth. No more mean tweets, though. Think of that while you get your latest “vaccination” booster shot. Isn’t it great living in the city with all the trash, traffic, crime, and expense? At least you live among smart people who “follow the SCIENCE®!” Not a bunch of dummies who grow food, make and repair things, and don’t trust homosexual predators around their children. Oooh, bigots! As if there weren’t worse things to be….
My biggest hurdle as a Christian is my clenched-teeth hatred of the media-led cattle that is so much of the public. I should be moved to pity—I could have been born without the eyes to see and ears to hear as easily as they. I’ve been bad about taking my own advice and avoiding inflammatory content online. My very soul depends on learning to avoid the invitations to anger. The evil in this world is as nasty vicious as one can imagine (and most can’t) but it’s getting its comeuppance. The trick is to make certain one isn’t part of that evil getting Divinely comeupped for repaying evil with evil.
I’ve learned the hard way about making prognostications for any given new year. It’s apparent Joe Biden is being eased out of the White House with this media-driven classified documents story, but President Kamala Harris? That should be amusing for as long as that lasts. The Republicans will continue to show themselves as controlled opposition despite a few permitted minor victories of policy.
These things are assumed as given because they’re already happening as I write. The important takeaway here is these days are the prologue to the Tribulations to come and things will keep getting worse and worse until Christ Jesus returns. Until then, there’s nothing more to do than pray and persevere.
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