My Religion

I am an agnostic. There, I have said it. I didn’t choose to be one. It just means that I am not convinced that God either does or does not exist. I confess that I want there to be God, a loving God. But, there are a lot of opinions about whether God exists. That tells me that God (if God exists) has not chosen to clarify to humans exactly what he wants of us. Oh yes, I’m familiar with the Abrahamic faith that has branched into three major faiths and countless variations within them. Abraham was was a semitic guy born a couple of millennia before Jesus. He is credited with launching the idea of monotheism (after receiving information from God) and becoming the leader and teacher of those of the Jewish ethnic group. After Jesus was born, the belief in God was spread well beyond ethnic Jews to others who proliferated. Then about 600 years after Jesus, Mohammed (also a semitic guy) came along and founded Islam. He admired Jesus but didn’t credit him with being God incarnate on earth like the Christians do. What do I think of these three big monotheistic religions today? They are on significantly different tracks. The most intense Christians are rather obsessed with what’s going to happen after they die. The most intense Jews are rather obsessed with what happened before they were born that makes them especially chosen by God and entitled to certain land. The most intense practitioners of Islam are rather obsessed with worshiping God, covering up their women, and defending themselves against being exterminated or expelled from their homeland by people identifying with the earlier two Abrahamic faiths. Lest I sound too cynical, I must say that I have had treasured friends of the highest character from all the big three including my Egyptian immigrant buddy with an Islamic father, a Jewish mother, and a Croatian Catholic immigrant wife who introduced me to my beloved wife. Where does all of the above leave me? I was raised as a Presbyterian. My parents were devout believers, attending church every Sunday. They took me to Sunday school, taught adult Sunday school, and sent me to a week of vacation bible school every June, right after school was out. I would have preferred to stay home and dig holes in the yard to fill with water along with the neighborhood kids. But, I believed everything my parents told me about God and Jesus. Even as a child though, I had some tough questions. My parents once invited the minister over to answer the questions that they struggled to answer for me. I festered over questions about what to do with making defensive war with the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” commandment, etc. By the time I reached the 9th grade, I got welcomed into our church youth group. They were a wonderful group of kids who totally accepted me, unlike many of the snooty new kids at my Junior High school who came from wealthier neighborhoods. Of course I fell in love with one particularly beautiful, nice, and intelligent girl, Eve, who was two years older than me. She loved me too (like a brother - she said). I knew she was out of my league, but she mentored me to take a leadership role. Thus set in motion, I eventually advanced to the esteemed status of youth moderator of Congaree Presbytery. That was after Eve had gone off to study religion at Agnes Scott College. In spite of my strong Presbyterian heritage and community, I gradually became a doubter toward the end of high school and beginning of college. First there was abundant evidence that humans evolved from other apes millions of years ago. The Adam and Eve story seemed totally improbable. I had always feared Hell and hoped for Heaven but I became skeptical about the ways my religion asserted were required to make it into Heaven instead of Hell. First of all, the afterlife preached to me seemed to be divided into two extreme alternatives, being burned alive for all of eternity or living forever in a blissful spiritual place with loving souls including God, Jesus, angels and sinless loved ones. It seemed to me improbable that God would devise two extreme post mortem futures for mostly mediocre humans. Moreover, it seemed very improbable that I could sin my ass off, then atone with great remorse and believe that Jesus had paid the price of my sins by being tortured to death by the Romans. But, doing this was supposed to get me into heaven? Not convincing! Notwithstanding all my expressed doubts, I have consciousness or a soul. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. Lets just call it my spirit. I can believe that after billions of years of celestial bodies smacking together and creating elements, these could have resulted in a primitive mindless life that chemically reproduces itself. I can accept that this early life evolved into ever more complex reproducing organisms through natural selection. Finally there were humans like you and me. Sure, we have a big grey juicy computer called a brain in our head that is amazingly complicated. But no matter how sophisticated it is, how does that create consciousness? Some say that if a computer is made sophisticated enough, it automatically will have consciousness. I don’t buy it. Thus my consciousness, i.e. my spirit makes me suspect there just might be a creator God who transcends anything we can understand about physics and astronomy. There’s another reason I think there may be a creator God of unimaginable or infinite intelligence. The observations of physics have indicated that there are at least three spacial dimensions, and a time dimension. Recently some physicists have suggested that there may be at least three dimensions of time. Try to wrap your juicy grey brain around that. These aspects of physics have manifested in a finite number of particles or waves of certain forces and frequencies that are exactly interchangeably identical and have methods of connecting together into molecules like metaphorical legos. These legos tumbled around and attached until, voila, after a few billion years of natural selection, they made humans. Did this just originate from utter nothingness without design? It seems very improbable to me. Today I am an assembly of legos and consciousness. What do my years of contemplating lead me to do with myself. Well, I have this thing called a moral compass. Maybe it came from my parents and others whom I’ve interacted with over the decades. Though I’m skeptical about Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection, I am in lockstep with actions and teaching attributed to him about loving and caring for others, including foreigners. I love most people and even animals that don’t sting or bite. I feel compelled to be nice to these assemblages of legos with probable spirits. I want all others to feel the same way. I want the earth to remain longer without becoming a wasteland of human mismanagement and aggression. I hope there’s a God. If so, I hope God gives me an afterlife of some sort where I can be productive and joyful. Meanwhile, y’all be good to each other and take care of the planet after my legos fall apart.

The Electronic Media and Me

I can remember all the way back to 1947, when I was three. At that time I was still illiterate, so my contact with the outside world came from the radio. We had a wonderful one, a Silvertone made by Sears Roebuck. As the years passed the Roebuck name got smaller until it disappeared, then the Silvertone store-brand name also disappeared. Today in 2021 Sears itself has just about disappeared. So anyway, back to my pre-literate information acquisition: I loved staring into the back of the radio and seeing the glowing tubes. I wasn’t sure they had anything to do with the sound coming out but they had a cozy appeal like a tiny campfire. I was pretty sure the sound came from a little metal cube that (looking back) was probably the power transformer or the magnet housing of the speaker. Initially I didn’t really realize that the human contact was from the outside world. I theorized that the cube was where tiny people who spoke, sang, and played music for us were housed. It made perfect sense. How else could motionless lifeless parts communicate to us if there weren’t intelligent life inside? Eventually my parents explained that there were no little people in the radio. We were hearing real full-sized people elsewhere, like when our friends called us on the phone. That seemed more inconceivable than my little people theory, because phone wires were hollow (or so I assumed). But, I believed it because my parents were smart and trustworthy. Soon after my radio education I encountered and admired record players. I understood that they reproduced music that people had made in the past. That seemed almost more miraculous than the radio. I didn’t understand the principles of operation, but I observed them carefully and decided I could make one for us. They somehow worked by a needle scraping on a large thin disk. My first prototype experiments involved getting a shallow round pan from the kitchen and scraping a sewing needle around in circles on it. It didn’t sound like music; it sounded like a needle scratching on a metal pan. I had to be missing something, but I didn’t know what. My parents to the rescue again: They explained that the sound was placed in the tiny spiral groove that the needle rode in. They said it took the form of special microscopic bumps and wiggles in the groove, but they didn’t know much about how they were put there. One day when I was perhaps five, my mother came home with some exciting news. There was a new kind of radio that showed moving pictures like when we went to the picture show. “Picture show” was what we called the movies. This fabulous invention was called “television”. I wanted one! Not long after, we went to visit a friend who actually had a television. It was a huge piece of wooden furniture with a modest-size screen in the middle. I was impressed that it worked, but not too impressed with the picture quality. The nearest television broadcast station was in Charlotte, 90 miles north of our home in Columbia, so anyone who had a TV had to have a huge super high rooftop antenna aimed at Charlotte. Even with that, they had to endure snowy reception. We didn’t get a TV any time soon, but the radio was pretty darned wonderful. My mother listened to the soaps in the mid afternoon while cleaning or ironing. In the late afternoon I listened to Ruth Gotlieb’s story hour and the Uncle Remus show presenting tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Then there was the Lone Ranger and Tonto! In the evening we split our sides laughing at the Amos and Andy show. Saturday night was super special after bath time. Tarzan came on! I loved Tarzan; I wanted to be Tarzan. I perfected the Tarzan yell, which he judiciously used to either call his significant other, Jane, or to proclaim victory over some attacking lion. Oh, he also used the yell to call Cheetah who was not a really a cheetah but Tarzan’s chimpanzee friend. My best buddy, the girl over the back fence, became Jane as we role-played for years. We’d call each other to the back fence with the blood curdling Tarzan yell. That brought us lots of kidding from the adult neighbors. “Hey Johnny, give us your War Whoop”. OK, four more years had to pass before TV came to us Douglasses. During this time we took lots of Sunday afternoon drives. A big thrill during these drives was to look for houses with TV antennas and envy the lucky occupants. TV proliferated. In a bit of sour (but healthy) grapes, my parents began to repeat the theory that TV spoiled people for reading books, and our broader education might suffer because of it. I reluctantly began to believe them. After all, they were smart and trustworthy. Then one day in 1953 my daddy came home from Southeastern Freightlines -- where he was a bookkeeper -- with a mile-wide grin on his face. There had been some freight damage and the customer had refused to accept a TV that had a cracked cabinet leg. My father paid a pittance for it and it was his. Hallelujah! Thereafter my afternoons were filled with Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee, Superman, and the Little Rascals. In the evenings we all enjoyed I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Gunsmoke, Have Gun; Will Travel, etc. Columbia had about three channels by then. TV was still black and white, remotes hadn’t been invented, and somebody had to jump up every minute or so to delicately adjust the horizontal and vertical hold knobs, or just give it a hard spank on the top to get it to behave properly. But it was worth it. About every six months it would poop out altogether and the service man would have to come. I had my nose in his business all the time, and pretty soon I had realized he was always replacing the same one or two vacuum tubes. Then I started doing the repairs myself by pulling out these tubes and taking them to the nearest mini-grocery store. These always had do-it-yourself tube testers and a good inventory of replacement tubes. This minimal TV repair success (plus a donation from a generous neighbor of obsolete telephone parts for experimentation) convinced me that I wanted to become an electrical engineer. The generous neighbor was a telephone serviceman and he was the same man who teased me about my war whoops. I made a slight career goal adjustment to mechanical engineer after I became old enough to yearn for a motor scooter or a car. I figured I could always maintain a stylish and powerful set of wheels with mechanical engineering skills, so I went to Clemson to become a mechanical engineer. I finally ended up with claim to the title of electrical engineer in the last years of my career. In the energy field my mechanical engineering had eventually taken me to industrial electrical motors, which put out mechanical energy thanks to an input of (Ta Da…) electrical energy. Some big contracts that my employer had gotten for training and writing of guidebooks on motors gave me exposure. The Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) decided to elevate my standing to “Senior Member”. The big secret was that I was not a member at all. I had to rush and join IEEE for my elevation in the institute to take place. Today I’m out to pasture, but I can still install a new electrical outlet, sometimes with a little counsel from my electrician daughter.

Racist Monument Can Become Mystery Monolith

America’s top news issues are Covid and the presidential transition. An even more compelling news item in Asheville is what to do with the Zebulon Vance monument. A majority, myself included, agrees that we need to quit honoring old Zeb. He had a despicable history of defending slave ownership with continued racism after the civil war. We just can’t agree on what to do with his dad-blamed giant obelisk monument. Hey, the solution is right before our eyes. Another hot current news item in America and beyond is the mysterious appearance of monoliths in remote places everywhere from Utah to Romania. So let’s have some fun. Remove all telltale inscriptions and haul Zeb’s monument to a remote spot beyond the news range of western NC and plant it in the ground. Then we can sit back and chortle over the theories that arise about its origins and purpose. I’m betting they will run about 50 – 50 between snoopy space aliens and a deep state antenna for transmitting 5G signals to alter election results. It shouldn’t be hard to move. We can hitch it to one of those CH-53 Super Stallion Marine helicopters. Those suckers can lift 33 tons. Of course we’ll have to paint the chopper black, and snatch it up at 3:00 AM on a Sunday morning to maximize the conspiracy effect. Heck, the marines would probably welcome the opportunity for a special sneak attack training exercise.

Me 'n' the Marchese: We go way back

“Go down to the Palazzo Pucci on the Via del Pucci and see if you can get us a private showing by the Marchese Pucci for Saturday morning.”

Those were my marching orders one day fifty years ago in my brief job as a travel escort. “Mark who? Poochie what?” These words meant nothing to me. I was a recently laid off aircraft engineer trying to fake savoir faire and European style with a Carolina accent and a cheap polyester sport jacket and trousers.

The travel company boss/owner, whom I’ll call Dr. Hector, brusquely explained every detail. I learned that Emilio Pucci -- pronounced like the slang diminutive of “dog” -- was an Italian nobleman who lived in a palace near our hotel in Florence. He was best known internationally for being a famous fashion designer of skiwear and fancy print fabrics. He was also a sportsman playboy. Dr. Hector explained that they were great old friends and had even raced cars together. (Decades later I searched Wikipedia and discovered much more, including the Marchese’s intrigues with Mussolini’s daughter and how that led to him being arrested and tortured by the Gestapo.)

Dr. Hector also explained in great detail how to navigate the palace and get an audience with the Marchese. I followed these instructions flawlessly. I entered the palace and strolled confidently past the guard with my head held high, took the first left, and headed up the stairs. Just as Dr. Hector had said, the guard did not challenge me. At the top of the stairs I found a broad hall with a beautiful officious woman dressed in black at a desk and lots of beautiful models, also dressed in black, loitering around. I explained to the desk woman my connection to the great Dr. Hector and my need to see the Marchese about a private showing. She was unimpressed and said it was impossible, that private showings were scheduled months in advance. I pressed on, refusing to give up. Eventually, in disgust, she told me to head up the next flight of stairs and talk to the woman there.

I ascended to the next level and found almost the same scene, except that the officious desk woman there and the models were all dressed in white. I got the same response to my plea and I pressed on and on. Finally the officious woman popped up and snippily said, “I will speak to the Marchese.” Yes!

Eventually, she came back and, to my astonishment, coolly announced, “The Marchese will see you now. Follow me.” I followed her to a huge conference room where floor, walls, and ceiling were all beautifully finished in dark wood. The drapes and chair cushions were all wildly colorful Pucci prints. She bade me wait there. I waited … a long time. Suddenly the Marchese himself dashed in, protesting that he was very busy and that I must be brief. I sputtered away, beginning with how I worked for his great old friend Dr. Hector who desired a private showing the coming Saturday morning. He said he didn’t recall the man and repeated the familiar mantra about how private showings had to be scheduled months in advance. I negotiated and politely insisted, emphasizing how wealthy our American tourists were, and how they admired his designs. When my failure seemed eminent, to my amazement, he agreed and set a time for the showing. Then he dashed out and I all but skipped down the stairs and back to the hotel to report my success.

The showing happened. But, I missed it because I was sent on a mission to search all the nearby Florence bars to find our AWOL bus driver. Later I learned that the tourists (all university faculty and staff) were underwhelmed and they only purchased a couple of neckties.

I Took a Load to the Dump

I took a trailer load to the dump. This was in 2001 and it was not your ordinary dump run. Our second and last child had fledged and moved thousands of miles out of state for college. Our house, utility room, and garage were crammed with clutter from 18 years of our hoarding. Although our home had become metaphorically an empty nest, our storage areas were maxed out. I was suffering considerably from the empty nest thing as well as the obstacle course of clutter.

I cannot name all the stuff, but here are a few notable examples. I had tons of leftover building materials from do-it-yourself repairs and home improvements. These are the things one will never again need until soon after disposing of them. The toughest items to purge were the kids’ stuff. My wife Catherine couldn’t bear to part with the kids’ toys. After all we might need them some future year for anticipated grandchildren. One item was a diorama made by our daughter in elementary school. It was cleverly crafted, probably on the theme of a book she had read. It was the interior of a cabin with tiny furnishings like beds made from empty tuna fish cans. There was a very cute little mouse she had made of clay, peering out from a corner. The diorama took fully a square yard of table space and nothing could be stacked on top of it. Another item was the third row car seat I had fashioned for our children to sit in the back of our ’85 Subaru wagon when we had other car occupants. Its creation was a labor of love and engineering skill directed foremost to safety. I had welded a frame exactly fitted to the space and made seats of plywood and foam carefully contoured with Catherine’s electric knife for comfortable support. Catherine made seat covers for it. It didn’t fit anything but an ’85 Subaru and I couldn’t give it away to anyone after the children grew up and the Subaru was gone.

Back to the dump: We called it a dump but it’s really a transfer station. You drive your vehicle in and out over a scale. They charge based on the weight loss after the vehicle has been emptied. The first stop after weigh-in is the hazardous waste drop-off where you get rid of all the solvents, oil based paint, and other nasty gooey stuff. Then you dump off any recyclable metals. Finally you back up to the gigantic pits where you must unceremoniously hurl your junk, lifetime memories, obsolete electronic gear, and everything else over a precipice. Continuously some Morlock runs a roaring bulldozer over it to crush everything into black hole density to be trucked to a landfill. That’s the hard part. These treasures deserve a more respectful interment.

It was awful when I had to hurl the car seat to its doom. It represented hours of our creative craftsmanship. It had cradled our precious little children for many miles of family adventures. This nearly tore me up but it was even worse when I came to the diorama. I took an extra moment to ask myself if there was any way I could preserve it forever and cart it safely about each time we moved. The answer was “No,” - probably the wrong answer. I hurled it into the path of the raging bulldozer and instantly regretted my actions. Suddenly at my feet, still barely in the trailer, I spotted the tiny clay mouse, looking up at me in horror, pleading for his life. “Yes!” I cried to myself and pounced on him to rescue him for life. This was only to find that something terrible had spilled on him from my potpourri of toxics and he was already dissolving away. Why had I not thought of saving him before?! Sadly, I thumped him over the edge to join his diorama in oblivion, and I instantly began weeping. I guess that silly thing had brought the whole pain of empty nest to a catharsis.

By the time I reached the exit weigh station I was wailing inconsolably and almost unable to communicate with the agent and pay up. No doubt she thought I was a nut case. All the way home and ever since, I’ve been mulling better ways to part with our obsolete treasures. Perhaps there could be grief counselors stationed at the dump. Maybe the treasures could ascend up a conveyor as if to heaven and we could receive a little certificate commemorating their good service on earth. No doubt, I am a nut case because I still have the real treasures. The little girl who made that diorama is very wonderfully alive, wiring peoples homes, teaching exercise classes, and operating an Air BnB while raising our two lovely granddaughters. The little boy who sat in the car seat next to her is a prince of a fellow, nearing age 40, loving his beautiful talented wife, and educating the next generation of college students. I have no cause for grief. Rest in peace little mouse. You played your role well in your hour upon the stage and you wont be forgotten.

My Electronic Gizmos are Driving Me Nuts!

My electronic gizmos are overwhelming me and driving me nuts. In our two houses, my wife and I have, 22 active handheld remotes, 2 computers, two smart phones, two modem/routers and two landline phones. We have 128 active and ever-changing passwords that are necessary to operate this stuff. The computers talk to two iClouds and several other clouds of questionable pedigree. They talk to each other and to both phones. The smarty-pants phones talk to each other as well as the computers and they talk to our security system. Even the landline talks through the cable provider to one of our computers. Everything except the handheld remotes passes digital photos and other information back and fourth directly and through the various clouds whenever it pleases and not when it pleases us. I can even talk (literally) to a gal name Siri inside my phone and she talks back to me. E.g. “Hey Siri, what’s the capital of Spain?“ Siri replies, “Here are some boutiques within 300 miles where you can buy Spanish clothing.”

I have no idea where digital photos and files reside any more but it seems that when I alter or delete something from one gizmo it gets altered or deleted from the other gizmos and probably rapidly fills the various clouds, which I am sure are watched over by Putin’s hackers.

Sometimes the gear plays impish tricks on me like a couple of mornings ago when the security system, which was supposed to be disarmed, made video of me shuffling through the living room wearing only a T-shirt. Of course it sent this to its cloud before sending me a “notification” that it had detected “activity” in my living room. I have no idea how to delete it. I’m sure it will resurface in four years if I decide to run for president against Trump.

Sometimes we go for help to the experts who sell us this stuff. In a typical visit we are greeted by the millennials who only thinly disguise their disdain for more geezers whom they suspect of being deep into irreversible dementia. Our visits usually leave us more confused than before and limping home defeated with yet another new $120 external hard drive.

At this point I am afraid to take a photograph and unable to access the landline voicemails that are piling up on my computer. Voicemails don’t really matter though because they are all from telemarketers or worthy organizations seeking money. These will call again in a few days or a few hours when I am frying bacon, sleeping, watching a movie, about to take a shower, using the toilet, entertaining guests, or some combination of the above.

Will somebody please stop the world or at least turn it back to 1958?

Doll Play with Granddaughter

Yesterday I was left home alone with 4-year-old grandaughter Yaiza for a while. As usual she orchestrated our play down to the smallest detail. We played with Barbie-style dolls. I was assigned to do the voice and actions of Ryan (a friend of Ken). Ryan was clad in a surfer swimsuit. In the plot devised by Yaiza, Ryan was to introduce himself to about a dozen Barbie-type dolls (At least one "Stella" was totally nude.) and invite them along for a trip to Paris. I don't know how the heck she knows what Paris is. Once Ryan had gathered a good-sized harem, Yaiza directed me to board them all into an airplane (a plastic box) for their flight to Paris. Ken had to stay home. He was dressed in a tuxedo and had to attend a ball at home with some other girls. As Ryan, I announced that the flight was about to take off. Yaiza looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "It's already in the air." When we arrived in Paris, I (as Ryan) suggested we all visit the Louvre. Yaiza nixed that idea and said we were all going for pony rides and produced a considerable herd of plastic ponies and unicorns. Then Yaiza announced that we were to attend a parade. Speaking as Ryan I suggested to Stella that she might want to get some clothes on to keep warm and be more appropriately dressed for a parade. Speaking as Stella, Yaiza said she was just fine and would go as she was. Ain't grandparenting fun?! Oh…yes. For more commentary on Barbies, see http://johdou.blogspot.com/2012/11/barbies-everywhere.html