The First Day (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part One.)

Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay

There's always some reason
To feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day

I need some distraction
Oh, beautiful release
Memories seep from my veins

Let me be empty
Oh, and weightless, and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight

In the arms of the angel
Fly away from here
From this dark, cold, hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angelMay you find some comfort here. 

~Sarah McLachlan, In the arms of an Angel.

The day was dawning, bright, clear and cold. I found myself wide awake, awakened by some dream or other, ethereal and fading from my mind even as I awoke, nothing moving in the "guest cottage" where I slept. My girlfriend, Rose, slept soundly at my right side, between the two of us, George, one of my two Schnauzers, snored like a little freight train, the only visible evidence of him his little gray-furred butt and nub of a tail sticking out from the blanket. A warm, furry weight by my feet told me that his older sister Gracie was still in the spot she'd burrowed her way into maybe...four hours before. Sandy, Rose's Yellow Lab, was still snoring loudly at the foot of the bed. Without sitting up, I could see that the lights were on in the kitchen, on the opposite side of the back porch.

My liberal college-student Mom, up from Saginaw, was likely already making breakfast. Not a couple minutes later, a cacophony of small barks and yips split the morning air...my Mom had let her dogs out. George was up like a shot, growling, standing on-point with his paws on my pillow, his muscles all but vibrating with anticipation and pent up energy. Damn it, now he wants to go out. Lurching up to a sitting position I fumbled for my slippers, the dog bounded off the bed and bounced to the door, practically crackling with energy. As soon as I opened it he was off like a shot to join the rest of the pack in sniffing the cold morning air and making yellow snow out of a light dusting from clouds come and gone during the night. Gracie, for her part, growled a little bit but otherwise didn't move except into the warm spot my feet had previously occupied. Welcome to the first day of the new millennium.

And so it began, like any other, no Y2K computer virus, no Middle-Eastern wars, no Antichrist. All the "End Times" craziness of the past two years or so...basically for nothing. I tried and failed to get the other dogs up and out, Gracie actually growled at me. I threw on a faded Air Force sweatshirt and the blue sweat pants that went with it, and went in the house to find that my Mom already had breakfast made, breakfast burritos with some kind of spicy sausage and fruity salsa, and a chicken-and-spinach salad with grated cheese and raspberry dressing. I ate, making sure to throw a few bits of chicken to begging dogs, and then made Rose a plate and went back out to wake her up and roust the other two dogs out of bed. Rose was quite hungry, as she'd smoked before bed. She wolfed down the burritos and salad before putting her shoulder-length red hair up in a ponytail, throwing on her fuzzy pink robe over the lacy red slip she was wearing, stepping into her slippers that were on the other side of the bed and going in the house to get more food and talk about the finer points of social work papers with my Mom.

Rose already had the bachelors degree my Mom was in her last semester of getting, and ran some kind of food program for a small Native American tribe down by Grand Rapids...a job that required cooking and health and welfare checks as much as paperwork and going to meetings.

After all the usual morning routines we spent most of the day with my grandparents...who lived next door. I had to work at four P.M. and so threw on my chef's coat and black pants and...given the state of the roads...drove Rose's Subaru station wagon in to work. Things were rather calmer than New Years Eve had been. I actually spent most of the day working with my boss, an older Italian dude with a very thick accent, who seemed to me to be very liberal but insisted that in his country he was considered a conservative. We did most of the cleaning we'd been unable to do over the previous few days, and we finished off our shift on time with me bumming one of those Indonesian clove cigarettes he smoked and him laughing that it made me cough. He'd smoked a pack-and-a-half of those things a day forever. I don't know how he'd lived long enough to have gray hair or retire to my little corner of the world.

I had not managed to get online the day before, so after midnight when I got home, I did just that. Y2K had turned out not to be much of a thing, but I very quickly noticed an air of quiet desperation, the search for the apocalyptic "next big thing" had already begun. I went to bed rather disgusted by it all. Rose and I got up the next morning and went to church, driving the thirteen miles into town and stopping for gas before we went to what was at the time a little store-front church two blocks past the grocery store called Victory Baptist church. (Victory Baptist was actually a small mini-denomination, four of what most would call independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches. My ex-wife and I would later attend and get married in Victory Baptist of Black River.)

Brother Larry...the Pastor at Victory Baptist of Onaway...preached on Amos chapter five, his theme...to seek after the Lord, not the opinions or works of Man. He'd seen a lot of the same stuff I had, both before and after that Friday, and the Sunday before he'd counseled against taking it too seriously. That particular Sunday, I got the vibe that he was just as disgusted as I was, and he went full fire and brimstone when he got to verses eighteen through twenty-four;

"Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord. To what end is it for you? That day of the Lord is the darkness, and not the light. It is as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went into his house and leaned on the wall and a serpent bit him. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light, even very dark, with no brightness in it? I hate, I despise your feast days, and will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings, and meat offerings, I will not accept them, nor will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts! Take thou away from me the noises of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. BUT LET JUDGMENT RAIN DOWN LIKE MANY WATERS, AND RIGHTEOUSNESS LIKE A MIGHTY STREAM!" His voice, in the small church, was thunderous.

"Now" he said, holding up his opened Bible, opened to the first page of Revelation. Brother Larry always preached without notes "You tell me right here in this book, where it talks about this or that specific date or computers or micro-chips or some Ayatollah Cockamamie or something. Go right on ahead, we got all day." After a moment of silence...and no takers...he continued "The Bible speaks of specific things that must be present, yes, but Man is sinful and those conditions are always present somewhere in our world. Thus, the Word gives us no specific dates or times, saying only that God knows and we don't. But when that day is come, the Lord says that it will be obvious and able seen by all, as the lightning that strikes in the east is seen even in the west. Therefore keep watch, for ye know not when the master of the house comes. Peace be with you, and good day."

I've never forgotten that particular lesson, nor ever trusted the date-setters and apocalypse crazies ever again. Nor have I ever forgotten something else that dude used to say all the time. "The truth is simple, Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey."

How many of these Q-Anon types or "Reopen" protesters are preaching anything like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy might." How many? You tell me. I've got all day.

As you can probably tell I did not get my End Times eschatology or my knowledge of Christian theology out of a cereal box, but I had good teachers. I needed them. I needed them so that I did not become one of these fools. People divorced their spouses, or sold everything they had, for douchebag liars like Harold Camping. People are selling their souls out to Donald Trump or some dipshit Youtube person whose real name they might not even know.

I'll ask again, how is any of that stuff Christian?

And if there can be said to be anything like a "Global elite" how is big-city-Fat-Cat Donald Trump who spent most of his life being one of the faces of New York City Democratic nominal-liberalism not a part of said "Global Elite?" Oh, wait, the assorted elites of New York City never accepted him, so he ran for President to try to one-up them into having to do so. If anything, trying that hard to be a "Global Elite" and failing somehow seems even more pathetic.

There was a time you could be a Christian and a conservative without believing all type of woo woo bullshit or being a partisan fanatic or some kind of strange prude who was yet Okay with the sexual perversions of assorted authority figures. I know, I was there.

I can remember when conservatives and liberals alike thought that lying was wrong, and if there were any proponents of moral relativism or situational ethics, I could at least at that point with some degree of plausibility believe that more of them were on the other side than my own.

When I couldn't do that anymore, I had to stop being a Christian, I had to stop being a conservative. Hate, moral relativism, racism, open mocking of God, and every kind of immoral perfidy have become part of the brand for white American Christianity...and too damned few people in the pews even notice, much less care. The vast majority of those who formed and shaped my conservatism and Christianity are either irreligious and at least comparatively liberal...or dead...now.

There was a time when you could be a conservative without literally worshiping at the altar of Donald Fucking Trump.

How is it, that people will ignore what the Bible says about loving your neighbor or about how all people are created by God, but they'll cheerfully listen when Donald Trump tells them to put bleach inside their bodies or when Diamond and Silk tell them that 5G Cell Phone service causes Coronavirus? But they won't listen to a fucking doctor either?

Given Mike Pence's refusal to mask up, this may be relevant too.

It's like what Rose used to jokingly say about men, that God gave us all a brain and a penis but only enough blood to run one or the other was actually true...and Donald Trump and all the woo woo motherfuckers give all these idiots a big damned hard-on.

I don't know what the real answer is, but I do know that it's extremely dangerous that so many people appear to have simply switched off their brains in response to all this garbage, whether to believe in it or to ignore it. Part of writing this article is getting to the bottom of this mess.

I should say I think it's worse than that, to be honest.

Some dude in Kansas "chugged cleaning products" because of Trump. Now, I don't know who this idiot is or how old he is but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that whatever cleaning products he consumed have had a label on them that said "Harmful or Fatal if swallowed" for all or at least most of his life. Why? Because such has been the case for my life. I wouldn't chug no cleaning products. It says right there on the packaging not to.

So, what, these fucking people think that the Clorox company or Proctor and Gamble have just been holding out on them for all this time? If Trump told these fools that a NATO standard 5.56mm bullet through the chest clears up breathing difficulties, would they shoot themselves? I'm serious, here. At least as long as I've been alive there's been a big damn label on most cleaning products that says "Don't eat me." Certainly, as long as I've been aware of them the rules of firearms safety have always been pretty ironclad, doesn't seem to stop idiots from negligently shooting themselves all too often.

Do these fucking idiots just want to believe this stuff?!

Somehow, that makes it worse. It's not that somebody is fooling these motherfuckers, they know what the labels say, they're just going in eyes wide open because Donald Trump said something and they want to believe it. They wanna believe in this motherfucker more than they want to believe in God. The men, at least, seem to love Donald Trump and/or this fascist bullshit more than they love pussy. (And in case any of you think I'm joking go right ahead and look it up. I've researched and written some about how much gay stuff there is going on among these hard-right lunatics. Go ahead. And no, I don't mean normal gay stuff which is fine, I mean they basically thought they were going to intimidate Congress by showing off their peckers. Although for the record, if the MAGA nudist Blue Oyster flash mob rally ever happened, I never heard about it.)

It gets worse, these fucking people also have an alarming tendency to sexualize violence, and for that matter to fantasize about homosexual sexual violence while they're at it. As I've said before, I'm starting to think these people are just lizard brain idiots ruled by base urges and brain chemicals who think Donald Trump is giving them permission to act like lizard-brain idiots who are ruled by nothing more than their baser urges and imbalanced brain chemicals.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of waving the flag and wearing the colors or adorning your stuff with them if you don't believe in the things that flag stands for? What is the point of even saying you're a conservative if you don't care about any of the things that go with that, and why thump the Bible if you believe in Donald Trump more than you believe in Jesus Christ?!

It's actually worse than that, day by day, hour by hour, Trumpism seems to be causing a fusion of various conspiracy theories with his cult of personality and various elements of religious fanaticism, including End Times Prophecy stuff, but somehow, without any belief in Jesus Christ.

It's like those people, 20 years ago, who still desperately wanted to believe that the End Was Near even though their years-long apocalyptic binge had been foiled simply by the rising of the sun and the turning of the calendar. I think, ultimately, this will be the same...but I also think we're going to get a new and rather malevolent religious movement out of this if we're not real damned careful, and if we do it's not going to go away for a very long time.

But it's like my old Pastor said.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at evening, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning, ~Mark 13:35

Christian influences aside, I am an Agnostic. I do not know for certain if all that stuff is true anymore. Certainly, the Believers themselves are not much of evidence of the truth of it. But I do know there are demons, and devils, and they are here...and very often, all too human in nature.

As for the rest, I'm pretty sure a Succubus could give Donald Trump a blowjob right in the Oval Office, on camera, and all Jerry Falwell Jr. and Mike Pence would do was criticize her technique.

And those who seek to claim Trump is some kind of super macho masculine dude would howl with glee, seeing themselves as having been proven right. Fear of demons is for cucks and liberals.

And far too many of the Christians are lining up to follow these demons in human form, because the devils tickle their ears.

Don't be those fucking people.

It occurs to me, that what I'm writing here probably would loosely fall into the realm of Christian Apologetics. If it is that, I don't care. Somebody's gotta speak up and I can only use the tools I've been given.

Against a lie, the truth is the only weapon.

Prequel

Part Two.