Black Pill Catholicism

Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.

JOHN 16:20 DOUAY-RHEIMS

I officially entered the Roman Catholic Church in 2013. This was the same year that Ratzinger called it quits, and the wolves put Bergoglio on the chair. Bergoglio is now deceased, and we have a new pope in Prevost. I have many thoughts on all of these things, so I will discuss them in a list of topics.

1. White Pill Versus Black Pill

I began as a white pill Catholic because this is natural for any convert entering the Church. It didn't take long for me to become black pilled as I dug into the scandals that don't get reported much on EWTN. This parable from our Lord is what gave me comfort and the knowledge that things have always been this way and will always be this way until the Lord returns. The result is a mix of doom and hope that is captured in John 16:20 as quoted above. We will be losing right up to the moment of victory.

The only thing I have to do as a Catholic is not quit the faith. You have to be in it to win it. The trials and temptations of this life are aimed at making us quit. Watching the last 12 years of Bergoglio, I am sad to say that many have quit.

2. Bergoglio

I strongly suspect that Bergoglio was an antipope. The final decision is above my pay grade, and I am open to being wrong in my suspicions. I think this matter was always going to fall to the next pope to clear up, and the next pope is here. Some people have wanted to take me to task for this position not realizing that our judgments on these things must be subordinate to that of the pope. This is why we are Roman Catholics and not Protestants. I don't care to gamble my soul on Ann Barnhardt's knowledge of Latin which is virtually nil. I pray for a resolution to this issue.

3. Leo XIV

I strongly believe that Leo XIV is a legitimate pope even if fiends engineered his election. This has happened before yielding legitimate popes. I will wait and see, but I will consider him legit until things go awry.

4. Clerical sodomy

I believe the unnamed sources who claim that 90% of Catholic priests and bishops are sodomites. I believe their agenda is to turn the Catholic Church into the Anglican Church of Rome where such perversion is openly tolerated and celebrated among clerics. The cure for this falls to the laity to uncover it through investigations and journalism. Some are doing this now like the folks over at Complicit Clergy. It is clear that the sodomites wanted Prevost. Why? What do they know that the rest of us don't know? This is where the black pill becomes necessary.

At the end of the day, what happens in Rome and with the pope has little to do with the daily lives of Roman Catholics. We live in an age of media saturation, and Bergoglio took full advantage of this to scandalize the faithful. Now, people want a quiet and boring pope for awhile. I know I want that. Regardless of how things go, I am on the black pill and will remain that way until the end. The quickest path to losing faith is disillusionment that comes from unrealistic expectations. I expect sinners to keep sinning. There is no surprise in that.

Advice On Giving Advice

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Recently, a friend of ours was in a jam. Instead of giving her advice, we just prayed for her and her situation. That turned out better than any advice we could have given her. God turned her situation around. May He be praised.

There is a certain arrogance that comes with giving advice. This is a key reason why people don't want to ask for advice or take it when given. I have learned to keep my advice to myself. I don't think I am smart enough to fix everyone's problems. I also make a mess of things for myself, and I have concluded that I am an idiot. How I have learned anything in life is a mystery to me.

You will find wisdom and advice in the Holy Bible, but the cornerstone is to put God first in your life and observe His commandments. When people have a problem, I tell them to pray. That should always be the first words out of your mouth. The second is that you will add your prayers to their prayers. The third is to ask them to pray for you. The first great blessing of this advice is it makes you humble. God is what makes the difference and not your clever tricks.

The second thing is to remind people of what God commands. So many of our problems come from living in the wrong way. As I say, you can't go wrong doing what is right.

The last thing is to recognize those areas that are just practical. What is the best way to wash a dish? How should you kill fire ants? How do you hem a pair of pants? I love practical tips like this because they don't carry the same heaviness as telling someone how to deal with an abusive spouse.

Most people don't listen to good advice. This is infuriating because these people don't recognize our wisdom, and this wounds the pride as it should. One of the things I have discovered in life is that people gladly follow my practical advice when I demonstrate it without commentary. People love tips, tricks, and hacks. I know I do. This phenomenon proves that people actually can observe and listen. This should settle your mind about "helping" people. People know better. They choose to not do better. No one is ignorant.

You have to get used to being overlooked and ignored in life. The humble person has no problem with this. If someone asks me for advice, I just tell them what I think with the caveat that I am an idiot. Most of the time, I tell them I don't know because I don't. I recommend going to Google for the things you don't know.

Humility is the path to true wisdom. Pride is the path to folly. Be humble before God, and He will set you straight. Tell that to everyone you know and tell it to yourself.

Charlie's TV Issues

When I was your age, television was called books.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN

One of the issues that plagues me with my traumatic brain injury is visual processing. I get sick and fatigued when I get overstimulated in this area. Big box stores are bad for me especially Lowe's and Home Depot. I can handle the grocery store because I let my wife do the shopping as I push the cart. If I had to hunt down what we eat, I would get that sick feeling there, too. It is not seeing that causes me issues but actively looking for things. Another issue is when there is an overload of visual stimuli. They have these kaleidoscopic videos on YouTube that take me to the edge of vomiting. When I went blind with the cataracts, life was hard, but the dimming of my vision provided relief from the visual processing issues. I have learned that wearing dark sunglasses helps, and I destimulate each day in a dark room.

I have never been a huge fan of movies or television shows. I spent the entirety of the 1990s without owning a television set. I preferred the radio and my CD player. I prefer listening to watching. The brain injury only added to a way of life I already had. I don't feel deprived of anything. The only thing missing from my life is binge watching which I don't need.

I have been adding visual entertainment back into my life in small bites. After six years, I can watch two hours of dramatic content without getting sick. Action movies and eye candy movies sometimes make me sick. An old black and white show like Perry Mason where talking is more prominent than action is the fare I can handle now.

My attention issues make it hard for me to listen to people talking. People will talk, and I will miss a sentence or two. It is like someone hit the mute button briefly and turned it back on. This is aggravating in a conversation, but I can tolerate it in a podcast because I sometimes listen to the same program twice. You can't hit repeat on a real world conversation. I carry a voice recorder for times when the conversation counts to play back later. I never had these issues before the TBI.

Physical Media and the End of OAB TV

I could live the rest of my life just reading books, but reading is not a shared experience. I could read aloud, but this becomes tedious. Passively listening to audiobooks is not the same as actively reading a page. So, I took to watching the free programming that was available on my dog ear antenna. I remember that we watched Andy Griffith on MeTV, Columbo on Cozi TV, and a bunch of western movies on Grit TV. We had a good time until our old second hand TV gave up the ghost. When I looked into buying a new TV, the market is dominated by smart TV sets that I can't stand. When people cut the cord on cable, they replaced it with the streaming cord and now pay more to watch movies and TV.

Instead of buying a new TV set, we bought a portable DVD player. This solved one problem for us. As for watching television, we have turned to watching free streaming channels like Tubi and Pluto. This leaves OAB TV that still exists for free and the temptation to buy a new dumb TV. This is where things get nasty.

TV broadcasters don't want to broadcast TV anymore. I learned this from the Antenna Man on YouTube. They make more money from rebroadcast fees on cable and streaming. Those stations are now lobbying the FCC to make it possible to turn broadcast TV into over-the-air cable TV where you pay for programming you now watch for free. Naturally, this will kill broadcast TV, but these stupid bastards don't care. The people that will feel this the most are folks living in rural areas that don't get cable or streaming. The broadcasters are hoping to shut it down by 2028.

Knowing that they want to put the screws to me, I don't see the point in buying a new dumb TV set to replace the old set. They don't want my business. It is sad to see things going this way. Some folks like the Antenna Man don't think it will come to this. I think he is wrong. I totally believe they can and will kill broadcast TV as we know it.

Like I said, I don't watch much visual content. I would be more upset with the loss of AM radio which is also endangered. At the end of the day, I like watching old movies and TV shows with my wife. I can get those on DVD, and those portable DVD players are big sellers right now as people reject streaming. I think this will become more of a thing going forward. Physical media will persist especially among people who live in rural areas who don't have high speed internet. I think these people are the ones keeping DVDs alive.

Failed Runner Syndrome Revisited

I'm not an athlete. I'm a ballplayer.

JOHN KRUK

John Kruk uttered this response to a woman who asked if he was an athlete. One look at Kruk's waistline would give you the answer. But that is the cool thing about baseball. You can be fat and still be a world class ballplayer. The same is true of golf with John Daly smoking cigarettes and sipping Diet Coke. The simple fact is that "athlete" is an abused term. The sad thing is that so many people want to be athletes. I consider this to be a ridiculous vanity.

The running boom of the 1970s fed into this vanity. No one was hitting the baseball diamond or the football field in middle age to recapture glory days or to fulfill unrealized fantasies. Road racing was something virtually anyone could get into, and they did. Nevermind that they were far slower than the actual winners. They could make the claim that they were "athletes." Naturally, they took this athlete thing way too seriously to the point that anything less than running for fitness didn't count. Everything got turned into a competition.

Now, not every outdoor activity suffers from this athletic mentality. For instance, surfers don't have this same competitive mindset. Most just enjoy being on the waves. There are surf competitions, but that requires judges and subjective measurements. Surfing is not racing, and it isn't a game. You can add other activities to this non-competitive world such as hiking, paddling a canoe, rock climbing, and on and on. These things are enjoyed for their own sake and not for the sake of finishing times and trophies.

Fitness walking falls between these competitive and non-competitive worlds. Many fitness walkers began as runners but discovered that walking for fitness was the better fit. The downside is that many of these walkers still retain that quantitative competitive mindset that I refer to as "failed runner syndrome." For instance, if you walk in a local 5K and hope to finish before they close the course, you suffer from FRS. If you wear running shoes for walking, you suffer from FRS.

The better mindset is to think of yourself as a daily hiker like John Muir or Henry David Thoreau. Those fellows hail from a time before the athletic mindset took over for so many people. Walking was about exercise but also about thinking and exploring. I am disappointed that this older and better mindset has been lost to FRS.

Walking should be an enjoyable outdoor activity like hiking, surfing, and canoeing not an athletic activity like running, ultrarunning, and the triathlon. This doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise and get in shape. But it does mean abandoning the training mindset of always preparing for some sort of competitive event.

You are either a runner or a fitness walker. There's no shame in running if you want to nurse your fantasy life of being an athlete. Fitness walkers need to learn to let this go. These are two different animals that share some similarities like a tiger and a zebra. But you would be a fool to think these two species coexist on the same plane. They don't.

I used to run, but it looked like jogging. I am not a failed runner because I had no business doing that nonsense. Like John Kruk, I am not an athlete. I am an old man who wants to keep moving in life.

I suggest channeling your inner Thoreau and turn your daily walk into a daily hike where you get in touch with God, His creation, and your own thoughts. This is much sweeter than the vanity of training for a marathon that you have no chance of winning. And wear some comfortable shoes.