Author: Mark Alexander

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Why Isn't There a Manual For This? A Question for the Hive Mind

I woke up at 4:45 this morning and could not get back to sleep. I kept thinking about something my dad said to me the other day and try as I might I could not get it out of my head.

I asked how he’d been doing since my last call a week earlier. “Oh, not so good. Going downhill fast.” I asked what he meant by that and he said, “It’s these damn sinuses.”

My dad’s had sinus problems for the last couple years, and despite trying numerous prescription medications, nothing seems to clear it up.

As I lay there in the dark this morning, listening to (and quite envious of) Ben’s blissful, rhythmic breathing as he traversed the astral, it hit me.  The root cause of Dad’s sinus problems is the fact his place hasn’t gotten a proper, thorough cleaning in at least five years—and probably closer to ten. In addition, he never opens his windows to air the place out, so it’s not just dust, but probably mold and god knows what else. (He blames “the cats that come over and shit in his yard.” I find that as a source of nasal irritation highly unlikely; my dad just hates cats.)

Anyway…

The man is 86 years old. And while he’s still sharp mentally, he doesn’t have the dexterity or physical stamina he used to, so he admits that while domestic maintenance may get started, it’s never finished. He’s also become a borderline hoarder, and attempts over the years by my sister and I to get his place decluttered so that we can clean have been met with extreme resistance.

(If you watch an episode of Hoarders and see how the folks react when their stuff is being hauled off is exactly what we’ve gone through with Dad.)

A little backstory to his current housing situation is necessary: In 1994, after breaking up with a woman he’d been living with in the Bay Area for several years, he moved back to Phoenix and bought a nice mobile home across the street from his sister in what was, at the time, a decent little park.

A couple years later my aunt moved up north and in the years since the park has steadily gone downhill.

About two years ago, after a wind storm severely damaged his carport and patio covers, he said he’d had enough, and there was a brief window when he was open to the idea of moving into a proper apartment. Wrapped up in our own lives, my sister and I could never coordinate a time for the three of us to start looking for places and eventually our window of opportunity closed.

After Ben and I moved to Denver, there was even some positive discussion about Dad going into an assisted living household, but as of today, nothing more about it has been discussed.

I’ve thought about hiring a cleaning service to come in once a week to at least dust, vacuum, and clean the kitchen and bathrooms, but I can’t do that until the place is de-cluttered. Apparently the VA also has a program available to him where someone comes in and does basic housekeeping. That sounds like an even better solution since it’s free, but again—before that can happen, the place needs to be de-cluttered so that cleaning is even possible.

At this point I would be willing to go down to Phoenix and get the place in order myself—Dad’s protestations about “touching his stuff” be damned—but I don’t have enough accumulated time off yet to do that. I can’t ask my sister to undertake the project herself; not only because it’s unfair to her, but we aren’t exactly on the best terms these days. (She seems to be carrying around a whole lot of anger at the world, and resentment at me in particular for moving to Denver and “leaving Dad in her care.”)

So I don’t know what to do. It’s unhealthy for him to remain in his current situation as it stands, but I have no immediate solution to rectify that.

Any suggestions?  Certainly I’m not the only one to have ever been in this situation.

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One Step Closer

…to losing my Arizona identity entirely.

I took Anderson in for an emissions inspection this morning in preparation for getting Colorado plates. He passed.

I’m taking Monday morning off to go wait in line at the DMV. I can only imagine what a little slice of hell that is going to be. I haven’t heard anything good from the natives about it…

Fingers crossed that my personal plate hasn’t already been used here. If it has, I have a few backups in mind.

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Religious Absurdity, Part 1

Stolen in full (oops, there’s that pesky 8th Commandment) from Spewing Truth in the Face of Lies:

First there is Genesis 1:26
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Um, how many is god including by saying “us?” More than one god perhaps?

But it gets more interesting when the fall of man occurs.

We’ll set up with Genesis 2:9
And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

So we’ve established the trees that exist in the garden that their God set up for them. It will become more clear why I say “their” God as we progress.

Genesis 2:17 is where God lays down the law to Adam

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Above is where God tells a little lie. God conveniently leaves out WHEN thou shalt surely die.

The serpent enters the picture in Genesis 3, telling Eve a whopper.

3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Genesis 3:16 really gets into the misogyny of Catholic/Christian teachings:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Well, well—there we have it, the original misogynistic quote.

When God finds out what Adam and Eve did he starts the punishment:

3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
3:23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
3:24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

That last part, where the man is become one of “us” again. That’s that pesky construct, “us”.

Genesis 4:16
And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

Yup, there was a land OUTSIDE of Eden. So in essence Christianity, if true, is based on an experiment performed by a God of some sort.

So just going through four chapters of Genesis you see some of the more immediate problems in the Bible.

One is that there is an almost constant reference to “us”. Perhaps it’s God and the Holy Spirit and the Angels but you’d think enumeration would have cleared it up.

Then of course is Cain in Nod, you know, East of Eden. That means that there are others outside the realm of God’s kingdom. Imagine that!

As a friend of mine likes to say, she’s one of the “others”.

So too am I, I am an atheist, the other.

Don’t even get me started on the whole God is omniscient and knows everything riff.  If this god was so all-knowing, why didn’t he know that Eve was going to eat of the apple? Or was that the plan from the very beginning? I know from past encounters that pointing this shit out to die-hard believers is like arguing with a wall. The little hard drive light on their foreheads will flash violently for a few seconds and then they’ll respond with some bullshit like, “You just need to have FAITH.”

Blargh.

I’ll definitely be following along with this author as he makes his way through this piece of fiction…

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