Zippers, More Crap from China, More Crap from the World of Politics and Asherah

Another zipper snapped off in my hand ... this one on my green Newport hoodie, made in (you guessed it!) China.  Only had it for a year, which should surprise exactly ... no one who has any familiarity with the absolute junk China foisters on us with the full support of every politician out there, may they all burn and rot in the bowels of ... so anyway, I found an Amazon entry for a replacement full zipper hoodie ... called Joe’s USA! ... except for the small print that whispered that  Joe USA's entire product line was, I then learned, made in Honduras.  “Joe’s USA”, my un-American ass.

It’s been a struggle, opening Facebook every morning and reading nothing but non-stop crap.  I don’t care what side people are on, I just keep reading more and more insane political crap that stopped making sense a year ago.  I finally found some “safe” Facebook pages to park on when I’m chatting with a friend, so as to ignore all of it.

Example:  I have learned more about space travel, post-modernism and “Aviation Technology” in the last six months than I had in the last 20 years – can actually give you the names of different airliners; discovered that the symbol of Egypt Air is actually Horus.  (I absolutely love it - Who knew?  Yay, Horus!!)  ANYTHING but American politics.

No, not even politics, it’s just non-stop juvenile, brain-dead insanity.  And now, I don’t care what side you’re on – nothing you say at any point will change anybody’s minds, so just GROW UP and SHUT UP!  Everything you post is either a deliberate or unintentional lie, so you are perpetuating this 3-ring circus that the 2016 election has turned into.  In fact, this entire country needs an intervention, at this point.  The days until this insane campaign is over can’t pass fast enough.  Thus ends my 2016 Election rant for the day.

And Fall has set in. Any hope we had for a warmer fall to make up for the chilly May and June has wrapped itself in hoodies, flannel sweatpants, woolen knee socks and left town.  I have this sullen determination not to turn the furnace on ... so, as I sit here with my teeth chattering, grumbling at my perverse stubbornness ...

I would have changed the title from “The Changing Heart” to the “Watchful Heart”, but that’s just me.  (Woke up to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents program; that’s what was airing at the time).

Have just begun Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Saul M. Olyan, Society of Biblical Literature, Monograph Series,  (#34),  Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia,  1988.

What I like:  he doesn’t start out like a Judeo-Christian-Islamic defense lawyer (“Impossible!  Blasphemy!  There is no other god except ...!”), which is very refreshing.  Instead, he starts out with the various (and conflicting) interpretations of Asherah and her relation first to Baal and to El and to Yahweh.  What I’ve learned:  much like the christians swearing their Paulian version of their cult is the only correct one; the Torah went through much the same process of being politics-driven as opposed to anything spiritual.  Most christians have little or no knowledge of the numerous variations of christianity that existed until Rome took control and ruthlessly slaughtered adherents of the other versions.  Had nothing to do with whether there might have been any truth in those other beliefs – as always, it was a matter of who swung a meaner sword.  Since no one likes to look at the truth that their “correct” religious beliefs only came about by means of grotesque slaughtering of entire towns ... christians now believe their version is the only “correct” one for spiritual reasons.

Same was true of the Torah – Olyan makes a point of which schools of thought influenced which passages he quotes.  Christianity follows their political choice, the Paulian sword – and Judaism, for the most part, adopted the Deuteronomistic versions of the Torah, which were re-written after each tragedy (the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, etc.) to explain past history.  The exile, as an example – much of the blather about their one god being a “jealous” one came after they had been exiled, by way of explaining why such a horrible episode had happened to them.  You get together a bunch of pissed-off guys who had just been driven from their homeland, and who buy and sell women like cattle, and what else is their version of the Torah going to sound like?  The Queen of Heaven disappeared from early judeo-christian-islamic books.  They still don’t believe She ever actually existed in their belief system.  But She did.

This really isn’t contributing much to “C’era una volta”, and the origins of the Big Bad ... but for that I’m reading The Gnostic Gospels: Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan by Elaine H. Pagels (New York : Vintage Books, 1989, c1988), but I was in the habit of reading that, unfortunately, when I was laying on the beach, relaxing to the sound of the waves against the shore.  Fall comes around ... I have to change my reading habits.

So how do you resolve the issue of fallen versus not fallen in the matter of heavenly beings? If you go by the edicts of the medieval church, the only angels who are to be considered legitimate and not fallen are those three archangels whose names appear specifically in the Bible: Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael.

Of course, conspicuously, these three also appear specifically by name within the sacred texts of another culture entirely. In the Sumerian tale of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, Michael, Gabriel, and associates stand guard at each of the gates of hell. Those three beings who would later be adopted as archangels into Jewish myth appear as guardians who exact payment from the goddess before she may pass through the various levels of the underworld in her attempt to reach the throne of her sister, Ereshkigal.

The weird and wacky history of earth’s bizarre religious traditions continues ...

Winner of the “Most Obtuse Review of the Day” Award

“In the perfectly stirring stories of  Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, Sequoia Nagamatsu constructs a cartography of eye-stinging wonder with his fleet of wobbly wabi-sabi GPS syntax-spinning satellites. These fictions plot asymmetrically the raw terrain of the wasabi slathered human heart, leaving us lost in all our findings, the stunned state of boketto, empty yet teeming with that taste of awful awe.”

— Michael Martone

Things that make you go, “*duh* - what?” ... but on the other hand, after months of reading nothing but the depravity of the American condition and complete failure of the national educational system at its most fundamental level (i.e., politics on Facebook, when you realize that there are lots of people out there who cannot spell basic words, or employ rudimentary logic and yet are given access to a voting booth), I’d forgotten that there are a few people out there whose brains function occasionally.  Which is heartening.

Not THIS guy, no – (I suspect he had possibly just chopped a lot of onions – or perhaps couldn’t handle the wasabi – his eyes were definitely stinging, no disputing that one, before he wrote that) – but I ordered the book anyway because, despite the unintelligible and incomprehensible review, it sounded creative and interesting.  Along with a blender, and there may be some subliminal message in that too ... except I needed the blender.  Like every other blender in the USA, it was made in China, so I expect it to fall apart and stop working after a month.  Get out your stopwatches.

Speaking of which ... ah, the fun of watching the entire world fall apart at the seams ... Nice, Turkey, Dallas, Orlando, Brexit, Kansas City, BLM triggering police murdering squads, Germans being knifed and axed on trains, the world’s worst U.S. election of all time, Trump blurting out more and more insane nonsense ... all except for the election pretty much within one month’s time... feels like World War III is on the verge of exploding.  Well, at least I’ll have some reading material to enjoy before I go.  And maybe one frozen margarita, courtesy of China, before the blender falls apart.

It’s impossible, trying to make sense of this 2016 election.  It’s like a circus ... no other way to describe it.  As I write this, Trump’s “spokeswoman” (someone named Katrina Pierson, who appears to be a convicted shoplifter from Texas) has just blamed President Obama for something that happened 4 years before he was even elected in 2008 ... resulting in a Facebook and Twitter explosion of ridicule at her idiocy ... and you think, “Why would Trump pick a shoplifter as a spokesperson?”  Makes no sense.  Meanwhile a senator in CA just demanded that Trump be forced to submit to a psyche exam.  But that is the way this election is going – something like a massive April Fool’s Day prank or something.  You just give up and stare at the three-ring circus in amazement, unable to make much sense of it.

Toss “Midnight” out the Window

So I go back to the shelter to exchange the paperwork ... and discover that his name was actually “Panther”, not “Midnight”.  I just stared at them as though they had all lost their minds.  Was even more angry than I was when they’d told me they’d given me the wrong cat and his name was “Midnight” and not “Blackie”.  The only reason he’d even recognized the name “Midnight” was because they’d called him that for a month at the shelter, even though that wasn’t his name.  He’d been called “Panther” for 4 years!

After hitting the roof – AGAIN – (this makes “Roof Hit #3 or 4”, so I was getting a killer of a headache), I came home and peeked at him, still under the couch and regarding me suspiciously, as he must have been convinced I was the most clueless and inexplicable human he’d ever had the misfortune to meet, by this time.  

“Panther?”  First time I’d heard a definite and delighted vocal response out of him.  I swear, I am still about ready to blow up all over the ceiling at those people, whether their animal rescue intentions were good or not.  Yesterday was the first day that he’d actually ventured out from under the couch in daylight, rather than wandering around after dark.

And probably muttering, “Wow, miracles never cease,  (bleep!)ing human finally got my name right!” to himself.  Not that anyone would blame him – I sure don’t.

Next morning ... the very same cat who had been hiding under the couch wondering who the ^&*^ I was talking to for a week ... came out from under it and rubbed up against my leg quite happily, purring like a well-oiled engine.  Goes to show you that calling any animal by its right name is generally a GOOD thing.  Rescue centers take note.  I mean, really – how would you like it if you walked in the door and was told, “We don’t like your name, Betty Lou Smith.  We’re going to call you Mabel Horseface Abernathy from now on.”  Yeah, you wouldn’t like it, either.  Just saying ...

Feel like this entire country has gone raving insane, anyway.  Police officers assassinated in Dallas.  Black Panthers calling for the assassination of all white people.  White Supremacists calling for retaliatory wholesale extermination of black people.  Neither side ever learned how to spell properly, so it’s nearly impossible to make sense of anything they’re saying.  The vast majority of the country (white, black and everything in between) is typically just staring at both extremes in bewilderment – nobody wants the extermination of anybody, but the media seems to be only paying attention to the lunatic fringe on both sides.  I can’t read the news anymore, I just can’t, it’s too ugly.  (And illiterate).

Black Cats ... and Other Issues to Vent About

You know, I’m all in favor of animal rescue centers.  Really.  I have always had infinitely more respect for animals than I do for human beings, who – due to a combination of so-called religious insanity, inbred viciousness and brutality, a complete absence of empathy and kindness, generations of retarded mothers who think their spawn is perfect no matter the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, relentless and unchecked pedophilia, bad food, bad parenting, corrupt police forces, useless schooling, goading by evil “politicians”, greed, arrogance, corruption, xenophobia, homophobia, war-mongering, the national IQ dropping to less than zero, all of it – are, for the most part, worthy of a mass extinction more than any other living beings on the entire planet.  I’m an equal opportunity racist, really – wipe the entire human race from the globe, including me – and I’d be fine with it.  Nobody deserves it more than this global collection of parasitic, mentally deranged certified lunatics, I don’t care what miserable excuse for a country you live in, what evil religion you stupidly claim is the only “correct” one, or what freakish excuse for a corrupt, evil politician you worship.

So speaking of IQ’s less than zero ... I decided to adopt a cat from a rescue shelter.  I won’t mention their name.  I suppose their intention is positive:  rescue innocent cats from the hellish existence they endure at the hands of evil human beings.  Cool.  I’m in favor of that.  Human beings, for the most part, suck, and deserve to be lined up in a row and shot dead, most of them, simply because they’re breathing air that other beings deserve more than they do.  You’re “offended” by that?  Good.  That means I hit a nerve deep down in your psyche that screams “TRUTH!” and you know that, deep down, you really are as big an a**hole as everyone else on the planet.  Take your offense and shove it up your ...

Anyway.  I decide to adopt a cat rescued by this feline rescue society.  Looked at the photos on their website, and picked one I liked, for all sorts of reasons.  Went there, and they put him in the carrier and I brought him home.  He made a beeline for the couch and hid underneath it ... no surprise there, lots of cats do that when they find themselves in unfamiliar territory.  I’d talk to him under there ... let’s call him, “Blackie”.  Not his name, but I don’t want to identify the rescue center.  For 4 days, I’d talk to him, “Blackie...” over and over again ... he didn’t respond.  Barely looked at me.

4 days later, the Rescue Center sent me an e-mail.  “Ooops!  We gave you the wrong cat.  They look so much alike we got them confused.  We gave you “Midnight” instead of “Blackie”!  His entire medical history is different, his age is different, his background is different, etc.etc.!  You have to come back and exchange the paperwork, do you want to bring him back??”

Needless to say, I hit the proverbial roof.  At least twice.  I went back into the living room and peeked under the couch.  “Midnight?”  His head popped up and he looked right at me with an expression of interest and surprise.  BINGO!  For four days, this poor cat had no idea who I was even talking to ... he had never heard “Blackie” before ... that meant nothing to him.  “Midnight” finally made sense to him.  Something familiar that he recognized in the midst of this strange new place.

As far as bringing him back – were they kidding me????  He’d already been in shock when his owner died and he was unceremoniously carted off to a rescue center by a disinterested relative ... and because the rescue center couldn’t be bothered to identify their cats properly, they thought I would do the same thing to him???  Just reject him – AGAIN?  What the hell were they thinking?

The difference between the two cats was age – the cat I’d asked for was 4 years old; Midnight was 7.  He also had teeth issues which would need expensive dental treatment at some point, and after I chewed the ears off of the Rescue Center, they agreed (in their defense, without objecting to my demand that they do so) to cover his dental treatment.  Good.  It was the least they could do, after that screw up.  I absolutely refused to put that poor animal through another abandonment and rejection – he’d been through enough already.

And he is finally coming out and roaming about ... after I’m asleep, naturally ... so I’m thinking of re-naming him “Vampire” after he’s come out of his shell.  He’s getting there.