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“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

Update: Trip to Texadelphia would now risk being shot, so no-visit list it is.

Seems it’s been five years since I last revisited this staple of my youth (and I find myself more curious about my circumstances when I did than what I left of them; hence the new tag); maybe by measuring the intervals I can determine the rate of my regression, though in this case the catalyst was the Shout! Factory channel on Twitch, which airs two episodes of the program weekday afternoons to all of a dozen viewers. It’s hard to stay focused on a traditional broadcast, complete with commercial breaks for their catalogue, when the Animal Farm that’s America is being addressed by other streamers, and there’s not even anyone in the chat. Wanting to see Sarah Douglas naked again, I opened Season 2 and found a story I couldn’t remember but seemed pieced together from various Star Treks. Title coincides with the final season of the satisfying Dark series on Netflix, who’s sure to remake it themselves. Small talk from Maya while resisting the urge to mate with Koenig on her study of “Comparative Universal Theology” is reminiscent of Serling or Seuss: “An interesting thing, we [Psychons] managed to find our God, creator of this universe, to find that He had a God, who created a bigger one.”

If there’s any proof Christians like this deserve all the hell they preach, it’s the claim that Job if ever there was one needs to thank God.

And as such, I could manipulate the wind beneath me precisely enough (however complicated the mathematics, I reasoned; after all, I was a god) to sustain my flight across the country. My traveling companion, alas, was not one of several comely candidates for oracle at my shrine, but old co-worker Jackson Chandler. We were amidst some discussion when I realized we had wandered into a cave lined with ancient pillars that had long existed unbeknownst to modern man. A change of perspective made me yet another person, and the now three of us stopped our horizontal movement to elevate through an opening above. Behind us, what originally appeared to be a giant statue of a camel broke from the wall and lifted off its brontosaurus neck to reveal several more of its kind, covered with leech-like parasites. [Bafflingly well-received White on Rice mentioned the dinosaur in a rather mean scene about an unusually tall Japanese woman.]

It was unseasonably warm yesterday, which brought out the crickets. One must’ve come up with a new strategy during the winter, that is to perch himself as high as possible and broadcast his mating call to a wider audience. And thus it chose the second floor windowsill above our bed, and at midnight to begin his song. Tapping the glass would stop it for a minute, and opening then shutting the small sliding pane maybe twice that, but always just longer than it’d take to lie back down.

I imagined him to be an angel come to give final instructions to Xavier (in which case he’d better not be the sort to have fallen there), maybe even a warning about the world. If so I’ll have to argue my case later because I was soon violently yanking on the screen to get to him, and when I got it dislodged enough to squeeze my hand through, whipping a tape measure in its direction. He would taunt me in the worst imaginable way, by allowing me to extend my sense of accomplishment before resuming. I forfeited an hour later, and slept through the 4.4 quake at 4:04am.

When you think about it, Kuma—Kutner made the most sense, as one-dimensional they kept his character; lets House struggle with the unknowable mystery of another. The only person I personally knew who committed suicide was among my headbanger clique in high school (or was it stoner, I can’t quite remember the prevailing term, as much as the black T-shirt, tight jeans and Indian boots). I remember clearly the large Teutonic assistant principal making a veiled announcement of her passing over the PA in a broken voice. The Vietnamese girl who saw her parents murdered in front of her, she broke down often, but survived. Perspective reminds us that over 200 real people lost their lives in yesterday’s earthquake, and with every one of them also went a microcosm of experience and interpretation not even God’ll be able to sort out.

Accounting’s idea for Friday’s Christmas party was to host a trivia game, and as this dragged on, I turned in my seat with its back to the front when there was a loud thump, and 老婆 said “oh my God”. Chunnor had collapsed while emceeing, in an apparent seizure; I could see her boots twitching between the crowd rushing to her aid. After she was taken away in them by paramedics and it had settled, Phil surprisingly didn’t call off the evening and asked one of his VP’s to lead a clumsily-worded prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ, then proceeded to karaoke with his wife before a solemn audience. My Office-inspired short film should have been about having to show it afterwards.

Her return this morning:

Dear all,

I grateful give thanks to everyone prayed for me on Friday’s night. The Lord has heard the pray. And now I feel fine and well!

I sincerely apologize to made the situation uncomfortable to you and your children.

Just the kind of thinking that keeps human beings such a fearful mob, less than the sum of our parts (if not a quotient of them), that if you’re sick and alone, you haven’t got a chance at salvation. If God is all around, why does He need that many more of us asking for Him to show up? Even I put the phone down when I saw that someone else had already dialed 911 for her.

I had already read what was, back when critics panned it, but wth, House wasn’t on yet and it made for カレーライス-eating fare. (NFusion’s latest bin seems to have reduced our watchable movie channels, as if I’ve been keeping track, so we settled on a Redbox rip from last week.) What puzzled me about the premise, apart from how cool M. Night must’ve thought it’d be to do the old Monty Python bit about people going by the window, is how the wind or plants or whatever managed to get this suicide signal by so many layers of cognitive insulation then to assert itself in such gruesome, yet arbitrary fashion. Maybe we’re asked to accept there’s a part of the unconscious that assesses every element in our immediate surroundings, whether it’s a loaded gun or cornfield-sized thrasher, for its potential to inflict deadly harm and that’s what was being tapped into? Occurs to me if God in His Infinite Wisdom were behind this so-called rapid evolution, He’d be neater about it and just target one of our autonomic processes instead, spare us from all the gore, and reduce the chances of these directives being misinterpreted and letting someone like me decide to kill myself with high fructose corn syrup or an STD.

Yesterday I posted the following comment for one of Dr. Phil’s case studies:

I thank you for sharing your story, and have long tried myself to understand and combat the addictive nature of gaming, but please indulge me, my “answer” to it was to be found in neither faith nor love. Those things I should hope aren’t even on the same level to replace one another. No, I just let the lure of losing reality to a computer-generated existence peak then fade on its own. In fact, I keep them all around, still installed and maintain my subscriptions as my actual playtime dwindles with each passing week because I believe to do so shows—despite claims that it defies the very concept of an open-ended MMOG—I have it beat.

Not the worst of her foibles, not after seeing 30 Days of Night this weekend. Alaskans need them, to ward off vampires. (Oh how I wish she’d have explained it that way.) So God gave us vanity to keep us safe?