The Story So Far -- newness coming Sept

So far two of the 11 songs on the album are already available.  2nd single was released a few+ days ago.  Just got through listening to it.  good stuff.  Their 1st single was good.  This is more my kinda thing, but both are what I'd expect from this group of pop punkers.

CD edition not yet available for pre-order via Amazon.com.

mp3 edition is only $7.99 so I assume the CD edition will be slightly more, maybe $9.99 (+tax).

Was feeling really frustrated yesterday or one day not at all long ago about the lack of things that I want.  Well, I guess God decided to throw me a bone.  Thanks! //    It always seems weird that I have X amount of dollars and can't think of a single thing I'd be happy to find in my mail box.  The only things I ever consider are things I've already "been there done that".  How rediculous is it to depart with something only to find it swim to shore again?  At $7+ a pop, to boot.  Crazy.  It's now almost a miracle if I can find a CD that costs less than $5 that isn't cheaper or just as cheap locally.  If it's not cheaper or just as cheap locally, then Amazon or WalMart are offering it BRAND NEW for the same price as the lowest priced used copy.  Mailing a CD via USPS First Class used to cost $2 apprx.  Now it's over $3.  And Amazon's marketplace fees have seemingly skyrocketed, and they were never all that low to begin with.  There's this band of shady pawnbroker types selling under the name Decluttr who also have their own website.  I've never had any problems with them.  Whenever I have had problems, they rectify them quickly.  I've read many a horror story from people who have sold stuff to them and claim to have been ripped off.  These stories usually surround stuff like smartphones etc.  I've only heard crybabies complain about selling physical media to Decluttr.  One guy took an issue that was his own making --- attempting to sell an item to them that did not meet the condition guideliens --- and turned it into an enormous conspiracy theory with an even longer tirade that morphed into 3 or 4 mini tirades.  Other than that, and people who probably sent in scratched CDs without looking at them to see if they were scratched and felt cheated that they didn't get the amount they were promised..., I haven't noticed anyone cite them for suspicious retail practices buying up media.  I think the smartphone issue might be just a tricky thing to get resolved.  I myself would not do a factory reset on my phone and then sell it to somebody.  There's probably a good amount of scrubbing involved in eliminating your personal data and even if you pay for a software that promises to get that accomplished, I don't see how you can know that it did what it was supposed to do UNTIL you try selling your phone to someone via the mail service.  And that's on top of the fact that phones do get damaged in transit and customer service representatives often don't have adequate information to give to customers seeking explanation, as infuriating as that can be often times.

but in any case, decluttr's prices are generally rock bottom, even on Amazon, but they're even lower on eBay and their own retail website.  So it's not *always* a high price to pay to re-buy something I want, but it does seem extremely wasteful nonethess.

I really don't think I need to give every dollar I have to the church or some other charity.  I don't think it's my place at this time to be doing that given the reckless way I eat and sleep and do everything else I spend my day doing and not doing.  If my monetary giving lined up with my physical health which lined up with my spiritual health, I wouldn't feel so bad about it, but I feel it's a dangerous path and a path I would regret, however selfish that sounds because of the truth being what it is.

Honestly, I have about $20 circa August that isn't budgeted for and there's nothing I haven't already owned that said $20 can buy me.  At least nothing that is edifying to the soul and pleasing to the mind.  Sure, I could probably find some dumb piece of music that I don't even like or subscribe to Hulu or something....the household shares Netflix, so it's all good on that front.  I don't like Amazon Prime because they have a ton of nothing.  75% of their stuff is now original programming and most of that is a bunch of junk.  They offer little snipps of greatness but 2 or 3 movies worth watching doesn't equate a worthwhile service.  Hulu is basically an assortment of TV shows with a random assortment of movies that generally line up with Amazon's Prime offerings.  Amazon has what they describe as "channels".  Collectively, the channels have a good lineup of suff and if I could get them in a bundle, that might make Amazon Prime altogether worth about $20 a month when you factor in all they have to offer aside from movies.

Anyway.

They updated their Roku app to reflect the Prime member music available selections and the Amazon Music Unlimited streaming catalog.  This was much needed good news as Roku only had Spotify and then Spotify left the Roku platform and apparantly has no interest in coming back.  Rhapsody is still available on my LG Blu ray player, but it wasn't working the last several days I had access to it.  I think it might've been something about the weather at the time.  I might re-subscribe to that.  But honestly I'm almost not sure why I even have a blu ray player.  GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) is one of my favorite movies by default, a lifelong companion so to speak, and I don't own it on Blu ray or DVD.  I have it on streaming and my Roku does it really well.  If my LG player could do Pandora the way it does Rhapsody (now known as Napster powered by Rhapsody, if anyone is confused..), then I wouldn't need a Roku, but Pandora is almost more fundamentally necessary than any on demand streaming service could possibly be.  Streaming services are good for playlists that you can fall asleep to.  Something about the unpredictability of radio -- even a station that is often guilty of lacking variety -- just adds something to the experience of hearing music.  On the other hand, that unpredictability can be extremely annoying when you know you can't sit there and listen forever and some song you really hate is taking 6 minutes of your time loudly and proudly not crawling in a hole and dying.  Well, actually, radio doesn't play 6 minute songs -- except with online personalized stations i.e.: Pandora, if you like 6 minute songs........... -- at least not 6 minute songs unedtied.  Well, sometimes they do I suppose.  I think the radio edit of Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" was apprx 6 minutes.  If you wanna balk at that, just change the station already.  It's a freakin' awesome song unless you just don't want beauty in or around you.  The stations that play ugly music are somewhere further over yonder.  Well, that's not necessarily so.  There's a station in my old hometown that played a genuine MIX of genres and it was always an annoyance when they'd play a really really really good song and then follow it up with some "I'm too sexy to care about you" type song.

Man, this blogpost is never going to end.  Y'all still reading it?  Ugh.  Sorry.........

wiseguys

There seems to be a parallel between wisdom and folly in The Bible and even in the present world of today.  God forsaw this with the Tower of Babel and put an end to it.  He had high hopes for Solomon, and they were dashed, although Solomon did eventually realize the error of his ways.  Now we have a world filled with every kind of abundance one can think of and freedom to enjoy it, and arrogance against God is at an all time high, at least as far as since the gift of God's Holy Spirit. People blame the freedom that we have as a country, but forget that this freedom we have was not a problem until people started distancing themselves from God.  It's kind of similar to the Israelites' insistence on having a King rule over them.  God was their King but they didn't want God as their King.  They were given stern warning of the consequences of having a King, but they were stubborn and didn't listen.
I do wonder about the people who die every day without the ability to read God's word or even hear about it and I do not hesitate to help out charities that work to spread The Gospel.  I can't say I have enough Love for my fellowman to risk my position in the world to go to these people and there's no justifying that.  It is a little worrisome to think that any minute/month/year(?) now, the whole world will have access to God's word, as many organizations are ramping up efforts to distribute it, since anytime after that is when the Antichrist will come and have 7 years of reign and The Bible does not provide any clear cut indication of weather there will be any Christians in the world when The Antichrist comes.  Jesus speaks to the Apostles and tells them that the leaders of the world will persecute them in His name, and that in the midst of the persecution, they will be a witness of Him and in the same paragraphs he speaks of climate change and political distress etc.  It's hard to know if he's speaking of day to day variances of these things and trying to tell them not to take them as signs of the End Times or if he's speaking of a marked increase of these things that indicates The End Times.  I'll have to go back and read what he says again.  I do remember he says stuff about rumors of war and not to be deceived etc....
I probably worry too much to be taken seriously as a Christian, in general.  I think I worry significantly less about the Antichrist's coming than one would ordinarily expect given that worrywart fretting I'm often wasting my brain on, but it's hard to know what exactly to expect.  Will there be any indication that I can detect?  It may not even happen in my lifetime anyway.  I have to resist temptation to fall back on that, but at the same time, it's not happening, to my knowledge, and as far as I know it hasn't happened.  So what's there to worry about?  The danger of a perished soul is a imminent threat right now as I type this.  There really shouldn't be any time to devote to thinking about The End Times, but somehow I find room to do so and still enjoy food and music and sleep overtime mostly out of boredom (it's called unemployment/retirement -- mentally disabled).

SIDE/EXTRA POST (Off topic):

Not sure if I need to go on and say this, but being mentally disabled doesn't mean my mind isn't valuable.  It just means the value it has to people who have the position of employing people is slim to none.  I am scatterbrained and emotionally convoluted.  "Well what does that mean?"  You don't know what it means because you don't have experience with it.  If I said I was happy to someone who had never experienced happiness, firsthand or secondhand, I'd get the same response.

 Furthermore, even a part time job puts me at risk of losing access to my antipsychotic medicines (I take 2), and there's no job I'm qualified for that pays enough to cover the expense of those.  The government may have overstepped its boundaries in deciding to step in and keep people such as myself from living in the streets, but this is the same government that everybody whines and cries to for every other societal ill that plagues humanity, so if welfare is a societal ill, I'm sure someone can get something done about it.

On a similar note, I thank God for my sister and her husband & their commitment to industrial and social excellence and for allowing my sister to bring her husband to God instead of the other way around.  And I thank my sister and her husband for their generosity in spirit toward me and my mom, who both live by the dollars of taxpayers.  And to the 45%(?) of voters who would rather not be paying for welfare -- you're not paying for welfare.  Less than 20% of tax dollars are spent on general welfare.  Taxes fund a huge variety of goernment operations.  So just think -- you're paying for the stuff that matters and your Democrat neighbors are paying for the other stuff.  This IS a Democracy, after all, inasmuch as China are Communists (Democracy, Communism, and Capitalism do not exist in the purist forms although capitalism did at one time exist prior to the Antitrust act that was passed long before minimum wage).
END RANT

END POST 7:09AM

Passionately sleepy

Watched about 25 minutes of THE GRADUATE (1967).  Not sure why the movie was such a huge topic of its day.  It's a really good movie, in the way of conveys what little story there is and draws you in to the character's mindset and it has a nice kind of metallic tranquality to it all.  Rather melancholy.  I'm not sure how that translated into the box office and critical smash it was and has remained.  I guess people in 1967 were yearning for a film that exposed some raw emotion to reflect what was going on in the hearts and minds of the nation's people.  Not many films have succeeded in that front in recent years, although that may just be me.  Sheelane Woodley was asked why THE FAULT IN OUR STARS was such a smash success and she remarked that there's at least one element in the film that everybody can identify with.  Everyone but me, I guess.  I felt the first 5 or so minutes of the movie could have been greatly expounded upon without all the nonchalant cool.  I guess the film was shying away from all that because so many people go through that themselves or have watched someone go through it and didn't need it replayed in a motion picture.  Hence, the movie was lost on me.  I knew a guy briefly who was in a Bible Study Group that I had recently started attending and he passed on.  I can't say I grieved his loss.  It was a little of a shock seeing him go on from here.  What shocked me more is the lack of emotion I felt toward it.  I am happy for him, that he is now in the arms of The Father.  I'm sure there are those in this world who sorely miss him.  Another guy in my men's group was good good friends with him and really had a bit of difficulty getting on without him.  I'm not sure what his relationship with his family was/is like.  But anyway.

When I think of films (more recent ones) that stir up emotion, aside from the 2-3 punch of FORREST GUMP and MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS, both now "old" movies (really, I'm not old, but I am getting there sooner than I tend to want to admit to myself), I think of MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2005 -- again, I swear I'm gonna be an old fart in another 15 years...geesh!).  But the subject matter of MYSTERIOUS SKIN alienates (no pun intended --...) much of the audience that it might have if it were some other movie............

I ordered THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK.  I started watching that movie when it was on Netflix a couple times but didn't get far through it.  From what I remember of it, it seems like it'd be a good film to watch while trying to get to sleep.  It seems to have this wintry chilling effect.  Maybe I'm wrong.  It's interesting that the movie landed Al Pacino his permanent status as Hollywood legend via Francis Ford Coppolla promoting him to star in THE GODFATHER based on having seen him in it.  Just kinda weird.  It's like FF Coppolla was the only one who saw the movie until news broke out that Al Pacino got hired b/c of his work in it.  And I'm certain most people who saw and enjoyed THE GODFATHER still don't have much if any interest in seeing THE PANIC IN THE NEEDLE PARK.

Mmm...odd place to end this post.  Seems there was more I had to say on this train...maybe.

I started typing this a few days ago on my phone.  Just couldn't figure out where I wanted to go with this.

xx

bad things

The heart is deceitful above all things
and exceedingly wicked

I am not a slave to sin, but I am free to choose sin over good and vice versa.
That's free will, I guess?  Does this mean those from before the time of Jesus had no free will?

Confusing.

Anyway...so many Earthly, petty, things that dance affront my eyes awaiting possession unto me.  It's easy to find ways to justify decreasing my giving to the church on God's behalf, and I probably wouldn't be damned to Hell I reckon for doing so but does it really benefit ME **or** anyone ELSE?????  No.  Really, it doesn't.  Some tiny short term goal is reached.  Then there's some other b.s. that comes my way.  And this life will end any moment.  As I write this, it's a good ways off, assuming I don't die in some car collision or of some freakass medical condition, but as I write this, minutes are passing, and hours upon hours will pass before I realize they've been wasted by a bunch of nothing.

Thank You Lord for your everlasting lovingkindness and mercy.  I am not worthy, but you have made it possible to come before You, the Great I Am.  Please move my heart continually closer toward you.  I am sorry for the wounds I've added to your Beloved Son Jesus Christ, King of Kings.