Here’s that once in a blue moon coffee with a creamer. Chocolate the same, this bar 72% and I may eat two squares instead of one. Perfect coffee & chocolate are both dark and black. White coffee doesn’t set off the chocolate well. No matter. No, it does matter, but here we are. Creamer coffee: drink it while it's hot, because cold it's revolting. 69F 76%. Bay bedroom sliding-door open a foot overnight. Awake, Linda heard the shrimp boats, asleep, I did not. I don’t care, but because she likes the bedroom pitch black dark, the hall door is closed at night. When I opened it at dark 2:30, wind 13 mph shut it so forcefully I wondered what’s open on the Beck side. Nothing. Bathroom vents? Tiny daylight crack around the Beck door? Mail from “Life Line Screening.” Learned my lesson in 2010: had their most thorough screen thinking the chest pains might be an issue. Nope, tests showed amazing health so I let it go. This letter goes also, into the bin. Thursday: had cale...

Senator Texyak, the folks here have asked you several questions this evening, and my question is why have you never answered even one question but instead have wandered off into the ether, waffling and serving up a ration of skybalon and meaningless blather as though we were morons? Bill, thank you for that question, it’s an important question, and I’m going to answer it by nonstop taking about anything and everything else that crosses my mind . That question was important to my parents, and in fact it’s why they came to this country legally as legal residents to claim the benefits of the American constitution and bill of rights, and to work for equal opportunities for every man and woman in this great land. And my father, because of the very issue that concerns you and me and every law abiding American this election year, immigrated here from Lower Cubovia and took a job scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush in the garment district of East Mamivia Beach. Because of Hubamacare and H...

Mark 16:1-8, 9-20   Matthew 28:1-20 Luke 24:1-53 John 20:1-31, John 21:1-25 These are the canonical post-resurrection stories to be read, discussed and enjoyed in our Bible Seminar this morning. Seventy minutes, 10:05 to 11:15, is hardly time to do the material justice, especially including, in John the possible two endings and my notion about Lazarus; Luke’s eucharistic actions, tie to Jerusalem, and two Ascension accounts; Matthew’s transfer to Galilee; and Mark’s so-called “long ending” with its harshness and snake handling. As well, if there’s time, or maybe we’ll make time, the passion and resurrection account, including the talking cross, in the non-canonical Gospel of Peter.  Come one, come all. DThos+ mucking along ignorantly

Above: Easter Monday one is entitled. Early morning walk, but 100% humidity got to me so attempt at a nap, didn’t work, no matter. Sunset last evening: Easter Monday breakfast of thick brown gravy over carrots and animal parts. Bit of leftover lambshank, bit of beefsteak, bit of connecting tissue. At the commissary I intended to buy sirloin steak but that was distinctly ribeye, too fatty.     Breakfast dessert. Mama used to make lemon blueberry cake that we sweet-toothers loved, Gina brought me four slices that were left over from the Easter brunch at church, delicious. What am I doing. Messing around with Greek noun and pronoun declensions, but don’t be impressed: I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, they changed all this since I was in seminary decades ago. Or maybe I just rusted, how do you say "rustoleum" in Greek? Maybe that is Greek. Or Latin IDK. Bible Seminar tomorrow morning. We’ll spend this Easter Week session on post-resurrection appe...

Christos anesti! Every day is a beautiful day, including especially a rainy Holy Saturday with  nothing on calendar but nap, coffee on the porch, toast with fig preserves. Lamb shanks for dinner with thick brown red wine gravy they stewed in, cooked carrots, a garnacha from Spain, the label says Aragon, remembering the first wife of Henry VIII. I should have read and studied, but was lazy. Supper: avocado sandwich on extra thin whole wheat bread, water, pills. Friday we watched one of the larger ships we've seen enter port, three tugs. Not being here at 7H at the time, I got a picture of it from St. Andrews Marina as it rounded the bend. Pic is fuzzy but who cares. Three large ships are in port now, I'm guessing she is Seaboard Chile V38, general cargo, from Kingston, next port Houston. Easter day, snap of the hauntingly fragrant pink azaleas we brought from the house. Linda's cuttings, these were from azaleas I would have planted at our Cove house in the...

Himself the Lamb “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” … (Genesis 22:2 RSV) “Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.” (Genesis 22:10 RSV) In my mind’s eye, my mental picture, Abraham stands ready, knife raised. He has Isaac by the hair, head pulled back ready to slit open the boy’s throat and spill his blood on the altar for the glory of God. I am sickened. Appalled, sickened. And the very last thing, the farthest from my mind, what I absolutely do not want to do on this Good Friday reading Genesis 22, which scholars call “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” I do not, will not, I refuse to rationalize God or Abraham for this obscene outrage against the dignity of the human creature, and against humanity itself, the slaughter of an innocent, a child, much less as a blood sacrifice to the glory of God.  Nor will ...

Not raining, lightning in the Gulf offshore but not raining. Weather radar shows last night’s storm passed to the east, trailing clouds south of us, clear and no rain coming. Is this the same storm that gave Colorado a blizzard earlier in the week? 66F 96% looks good for the Friday morning walk and day at hand. Kona hot and black, first half of the chocolate square on the tongue. For the church, today is Good Friday with its busyness that could tax an old man but also seems energizing. In the early 1950s, Roman Catholics and Episcopalians could leave school at noon to attend three-hour services commemorating the Lord’s time on the Cross. I’d go but not stay the three hours.  Our fourteen years at Trinity, Apalachicola, we had the noon to three o’clock service, always one of the year’s best for me. Part of the liturgy, homily, more of the liturgy, another homily, liturgy, homily until two-thirty when we walked the Stations of the Cross. Between segments I would go to the re...

62F 91% wind at 9 mph this 201603240437CDT. Not using things or knowledge, it fades, use it or lose it, although I might still be able to ride a bicycle. I was trying to remember how zulu time works, i.e., what zone we are in, but it’s too early, neither the chocolate nor the coffee have kicked in, and too late here in +Time+ Looking east, full moon rising last night, noticeably not a perfect circle, maybe that clip off luna's right edge was the minor penumbral eclipse, IDK. Lovely on the porch, cool for sitting out in the wind. Still at my house, μη γενοιτο, I’d sit on the back screen porch, not on the Bay side this morning. Things keep changing around me, but then transition is the name of life, my life anyway, always that feeling from Navy years of waiting for PCS orders. Going back to 1957 this morning, 1958 and ’59, remembering various duty stations, if starting over I’d be a surface warfare officer because it was the destroyer duty that moved me to stay in the fi...

Spring 2016? Spring this morning? Maybe, Time says so but I’m not sure, certainly wasn’t spring Monday morning, bitter walking along the Bay in the wind, too bitter to pause for a sit-down on one of the E.BeachDrive benches, gaze across the Bay out the Pass and remember how it was, current slang is “back in the day,” where eighty year old men go to hide. The blog has wandered there before, as does the mind, into Time, and it isn’t so that all we have is the Present. In the Narnia chronicle The Silver Chair , Poe, Eustace, and Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle are led captive through Underland. Herded along toward their destiny of finding Prince Rilian in the mission Aslan has laid on them, they come upon a very old man lying asleep in a crevice. Asking who it is, their captor and escort tells them, “That is old Father Time, who was once a King in Overland. Now he has sunk down into the Deep Realm and lies dreaming of all the things that are done in the upper world. Many sink down and fe...

Along with a copy of The Five Gospels by the Jesus Seminar, and my seminary text by Kurt Aland, Synopsis of the Four Gospels that has the Greek on the left page and the English on the right page, and a stapler, a thumb drive, an extra MacBook my old one that I try not to use any more, and the “ear buds” that tap into the edge of the computer so I can listen to music without driving Linda out of the room, on the smooth and made up bed in our extra bedroom there’s a leaflet about a one-day event in Pensacola next month, sponsored by Baptist Hospital Department of Pastoral Services, “Clergy Health Fair.” Having read it and somewhat found myself, I may go. Or not, I usually don’t do these things. But it says, and I agree, that clergy as a group are “consistently twice as sick as our lay counterparts,” and that “this sickness includes obesity, diabetes, psychosomatic illnesses, depressive disorders and even suicide.” Last evening I was contemplating returning to one of the Jesuit personall...

It’s been over a week now, and still not okay. CDT that is, daylight savings time. I don’t know what the alphabet daylight savings time is all about, it hasn’t saved me one gardenia sunbeam of daylight, not one. Even though an early riser, make that early riser, I don’t like this, not at all, whoever thought up daylight savings time should be wakened even an hour earlier and hanged at sunrise without a cup of coffee. This morning, counter to all resolutions, I did open email and scroll down before letting the fingers trip lightly over the keyboard toward the destination of a fairly coherent blogpost. There they are again. I’m not into hurting folks’ feelings, and I keep meaning to say it but forget while saying something about cars, or early Panama City, or the old ice plant here in St. Andrews, or the red and my green navigation lights spread out on the Bay, or the religious challenge at hand, or God help us, the political landscape; but it keeps falling through the cracks...

Palm Sunday sermon in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida, March 20, 2016. The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke. The Rev. Tom Weller. How could this happen, how, HOW could this have happened, have you seen movies, films, pictures showing and telling how hideously the Romans tortured, brutally executed criminals by crucifixion? And a man flogged before crucifixion — not covered about his loins as artistic modesty has it, but bloody naked, flayed and bleeding, sinew, bone, veins and arteries laid open by sadistic scourging with a whipping instrument having bits of metal that tore out strips and chunks of flesh left hanging and bleeding. Then as for the agony of the cross itself, some years ago, if you were here, Father William, physician turned priest, described in excruciating detail the nightmare of death by crucifixion, the suffering, the gasping, the crushing and grinding, the searing pain, the physical, mental and emotional horror. H...