Neanderpundit

I have all my taxes and personal files and several years of old magazine articles and newspaper articles I have written stowed in several cheap filing cabinets.They’re ungainly and frankly a big pain in the ass. So I decided to find a decent used lateral file and replace the three cheap regular ones.

On Craigslist I found a guy selling two and three drawer laterals, and sent a mail.

The Craigslist picture showed a couple that were obviously Hon, so I knew they were good, so I went to pick one up Friday. The guy met me at the townhouse garage at the appropriate time, and I liked him right off.

He had run an architechtural/contracting firm- a large one, by local standards- for a long time. No, he wasn’t retiring, he was downsizing “It’s nice not to have to wrangle thirty, forty employees” he said, and the predominant reason, “I can’t afford to pay them and give them health care anymore”. THe increased cost of healthcare absorbed his profits, and he had just had enough.

He felt bad for some of his employees, but not too bad, he said. “The ones who are good, they’ll land on their feet, most already have other jobs after less than a week”. The ones who are bad? “Most of them were obama voters. Let him take care of them”.

He had enough business he could keep hmself and his wife busy for most of the year, the rest of which they’d spend in a condo in Boca. They bought that selling the building his old business was in. And they had all this furniture.

So i loked at the cabinets- there were a LOT of them- and selected one I recognized. He helped me load it, it was chock full of hanging file folders (I counted, two hundred and fifty plus) and I handed him thirty bucks, which barely paid for the file folders.

The filing cabinet turned out to be a Steelcase, around $650 retail and $200 used anywhere on earth. Heavy enough that it’s necesary to remove the bottom drawer and use the jackscrews to level it to get the drawers to glide properly, and boy, do they ever. It had a scratch on top that 5 minutes of mequiars car cleaner made disapear, and four pieces of double stick tape with took another 5 minutes of Goo Gone to remove. And now I’ve about filled it, and have three crappy two drawer Walmart cabinets that I have already found a new owner for on Freecycle.

I had taken $40 out of the bank to cover the cabinet, and the guy threw in a new condition Steelcase chair for another ten bucks- it still had visqueen sticking out from between the upholstery.

I don’t blame the guy one bit for doing what he had to do, and if his effort and others like it help to turn the tide of this nation, I’m for anything that helps. It’s a pity this isn’t a long term winning strategy, but I wished him luck, and I’m happy to have gotten such a good deal on the stuff.

That the church considers “mortal”; in other words, sins which commend one specifically to hell. There is, most churches teach, no sin beyond redemption, but you must come to the redemption via your own contrition.

The only sin that I have ever been concerned about- (And believe me, I have sampled from pretty much all of them) is despair. For those that didn’t have the benefit of six sweltering years in the seminary, Despair is the voluntary act of abandoing your faith. (I like when people say “My faith has left me!” No, it cannot. You left it. And it’s right where you left it, waiting for you to pick it up again) Despir is the moment when you choose to accept the lie that there is nothing left you can do, and you should give up.

Witness Job. Like the young America, he had a wonderful life, and his was a moral and upright existence, a faith so complete that the Creator of the Universe gave Satan the power to test Job in every way, to try to make Job curse the name of the Lord.

And he never did.

Because he knew that the real power was the Creator’s to wield, and nothing could happen to Job, he knew, that was permanent or fatal. Had Job given in to despair, had he assumed that Satan was more powerful than the Creator, he would have been lost. His unshakable faith that the Creator had the last word and would always have the last word made all the difference. We may not understand everything that is happening to us these days, but only the faithless give up.

A lot of people I know are infected with what I call the “Veruca Salt” virus, which makes them want their change and want it now. We do tend to be a culture of instant gratification.

Since none of us were here for the revolutionary war, we have no personal memory of the amount of time it took for that sea change in Liberty to take place. It wasn’t overnight. And we didn’t get to where we are overnight. And there will be no savior that gets us out of this hole we are in overnight- Jesus came here two thousand years ago, and people are STILL fighting over the correct interpretation of his word.

I will stand before my Creator someday, as will we all. I will hang my head in shame as my sinful life is replayed. But I will be there, because at no point in my life will I ever have made the assertion either aloud or in my heart that there is no hope, that the agencies of evil be they the minions of the left or the idiots of the right are in any way stronger than the Creator or His plans. That assertion itself is the height of ignorance and personal arrogance, and to make that assertion, to “Give up”, is to stand before the creator and deny his ultimate power.

Let me know how that works out for you.

that the weatherdrones just don’t have any damned idea at all what the hell they’re talking about? Yes, yes, I think that is so. I get a more accurate weather report sticking my damned head outside than I have gotten from any weather source for the whole summer.