Pseudo-Theological Nonsense

If I were a religious person, I could spin this moment in history into the coming of the Antichrist. That event has been talked about so much, in the early Church when the Second Coming was a thing still expected daily by all people, in the Middle Ages with various Popes and Antipopes being burdened with the title by their rivals or enemies, and in the modern period, when former President Obama was the most recent figure to be called the Antichrist by various fringe figures.

President Trump though, he fits the profile pretty well. A charismatic deceiver, a man of lawlessness, the ruler of the (free) world, he's got most of the points down. You can look at the already burgeoning problems of his administration, the fact that he's gotten most fundamentalist Christians to back him despite being not at all religious and an awful human being, and you can see easily the ways in which he matches all the qualities that are supposed to figure in the Antichrist.

And of course, he's a defender of, perhaps a supporter of, Russia, which has in relatively modern times been identified with Gog and Magog, the destructive force that will help to end the world, and which came from beyond the Gates of Alexander (that is, the border fortresses set up in the Caucasus and in northern Persia to keep out raiders from the vast plains beyond.)

I could spin this case, and predict a three and a half year term for Trump before he dies, because that's how long the Antichrist is supposed to run the show before the Second Coming and his defeat.

But I don't believe in any of that stuff, so while it would be a comfort to suspect that he only had 3.5 years to mess things up, and that the mess would be swiftly cleaned up for the elect, that's not going to happen. We have 4 or 8 years of this guy (or his VP, if Trump ends up impeached as I suspect will happen at some point) and the damage from it will last for decades. We're well and truly screwed, even if we spend all our time resisting. It's a grimmer future, in some ways, than what the fables of Antichrist predict.

So, that's gloomy.

What am I reading? A couple of Glen Cook's Garrett Files books, which I greatly enjoyed the earlier ones of (especially books 1 and 4) and which continue to trickle out one every few years now, going on 30 years after they began. The writing has gotten choppier (I'd edit lots of one sentence "paragraphs" together into bigger ones) but they're still fun.

What's the weather? There was snow, several inches of it, a few days back, followed by rain, several inches of it, yesterday, that melted off the last of the snow, followed by winds, today, that will likely cause all sorts of downed trees. We lost power for a few hours from a downed tree in the snow, which was unusual. I got to try out my little solar powered radio/flashlight, using the hand crank to run it first, and then getting enough light through the clouds to keep the radio going. It doesn't take much power for that.

How's the pills? Reduced the dose back to the starting level, and my side effects went away, and I fedl good still. I think this will work. But I have to drink so much more water than I am; there's some dehydration going on that I need to adjust to.

Writing? Planning, really. I'm writing character sketches for the characters on a thing I want to write. It's not properly writing, but I'm doing something, so that's nice.

Hey, how's the job? Frantic. We were down a bunch of staff, but finally got to hire people who all are starting nowish, and that's great, because our annual inventory is in a couple weeks, and the Garden Show is in a couple weeks, and all this is troublesome and crazy to have happening at once along with getting ready for the new inventory system we're building. So much stuff going on all at once makes things difficult, but I'm managing, and the store hasn't burnt down yet. Yet.