Brendan Shea's Blog, page 34

Sometimes I feel this way

Though Jesus, being the only one good, had far more reason to feel this way, sometimes I, with all my sin, feel that I am being mistreated. If I’d known His grief personally, I’d probably feel differently… Have you ever felt like this?

I don’t mean to blaspheme or anything, I’m just saying I feel like a martyr or a doormat at times. Jesus died for us all…

But to be truthful, the depth of my despair at times, I am at sea and feeling without a savior

Isaiah 53:1-5 (NKJV)



The Sin-Bearing Messiah

53 Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.

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Photo copyright FitzGerald Press, courtesy of Hearst Castle (tour) Collection

$5 Mac?

I made some sautéed onions and garlic with zucchini and sausage, and boiled small pasta shells to go with. Figuring to pair with a bit of olive oil and grated cheese, I set to work. The meal came together nicely, and I realized this seemed like mac and cheese, partly because I didn’t have any romano or parmesan to use. Here are the ingredients:

1 lb small pasta shells ($.99)1 largish diced onion ($.25)5 cloves minced garlic ($.50)1 large zucchini ($.99)2 large diced pork sausages ($1.40)4 ounces grated sharp cheddar cheese ($.50)1.5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil ($.15)1 teaspoon butter ($.15)1/2 cup water

Place large pot on stove filled 2/3 with water and 1/4 tablespoon olive oil. Place large cast iron or other pan on stove with 1 tablespoon olive oil, butter and 1/2 cup water. Turn pasta pot on high flame and turn pan on to medium flame. Peel and mince garlic, peel and dice onion, dice zucchini, and add veggies to pan and place cover over most of pan. Once pasta water boils, set pasta timer for 8 minutes, stirring periodically.

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Meanwhile, remove casings from sausages and dice. Move veggies aside to accommodate direct cooking of sausages. After about 6 minutes, sausages should be cooked.

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If so, mix into the veggies in same pan and reduce flame to low. Once pasta is done, turn off both burners, drain pasta and return to pot. Add 1/4 tablespoon olive oil to prevent sticking. Grate cheese and serve over pasta & veggies.

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To me, this tasted like a very rich and healthy mac ‘n’ cheese… the total estimated cost? $4.83 for 6 helpings of pasta and 3 generous helpings of sauce. I plan to have the extra pasta later with something else, and for another $1-2, I could have made enough sauce for all the pasta.

A special shout to Grocery Outlet, for keeping the cost down on the ingredients

Unlike the News: Good Cop/Good Cop

True Blue is possibly the best Baldacci I’ve read, in fact, one of the best mystery thrillers overall. Why? It is a seamless blend that intersperses wry romantic humor, familial loyalty, and intrigue. There are good guys and bad guys, but the line gets uncomfortably drawn between them now and then. One machination required a momentary suspension of disbelief, but only slight, and the plot and characters so relentlessly driven and fun, that it was harder to dwell on that nuance, and quickly forgotten. True Blue has a compelling female protagonist, balanced by a close male supporting character, kind of like Leslie Connors and Bradley Carson in Randy Singer’s Self-Incrimination, but grittier than Singer’s book, and together with the other players, the story moves forward quickly, builds momentum, and hurtles to a great finish. I hope others are as entranced with this book as I was… I’d be proud if I’d written it.



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Happy Independence Day?

Here are some thoughts from Facebook from others and myself as I reverse engineer from Social Media to my blog in “celebration” of a mixed victory:

Colin Carter

A true daughter of the confederacy has written what should be the last words on the monuments:

By Caroline Randall Williams
June 26, 2020

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trumpand the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams(@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

2.

(Brendan Shea)

1 hr · 

(Nay, do not think that to be sensitive to humanity is to be neglectful of the Almighty -Anonymous)

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass

A speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852

(very small excerpt of an 18-page document should be correct in context, but is a very narrow snippet of an eloquent and fervent speech that is telling at these points at the least)

…

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness. The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

…(much later but seems in direct context)

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. -The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

For the complete speech, click here.

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If one can say anything after Mr. Douglass’ legendary mic drop, I guess we can remember in our recent pop culture that when we unite against a common enemy we learn to come together.

It’s a cheesy thought, but I love this movie, not like Sidney Potier’s tremendous canon: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, one of my childhood (and current) favorites, nor the awesome, To Sir with Love, or the amazing In the Heat of the Night, but the Will Smith/Jeff Goldblum Sci Fi yarn, Independence Day, it’s more subtle, but what I thought of just now. Maybe why producer Gene Roddenberry and actress Nichelle Nichols produced and starred in Star Trek all those many moons ago.

Please forgive my post-serious subject, pop culture diversion. I think the pressure of my life was getting to me, and I’ve been on social media too long today; time to get outside or read a book.

Sincerely, FitzGerald Press

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An Easier Way to Download My 100% free eBook

(I only ask that you rate or review it)

Please note:

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Free Download of My Short Story, Flat Lens

From FitzGerald Press’ Facebook Page:

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Remembering Uncle David/2

I just wanted to create a footnote about my Uncle David. I just know that he prayed for me or meditated, regularly. The Transcendental Meditation folks say that meditation creates a unified field of harmony.

I can tell you that when David shuffled off this mortal coil, I could feel his absence. By that I mean that while his prayers and good thoughts may persist, it seems as though we have lost something here on Earth of him.

Maybe that does not square with his faith, I don’t know, nor do I mean any offense. I don’t want to be preachy, because I have misrepresented my own faith so many times in having an agenda, so I’ll just leave it there.

I wish you the best as you struggle with your own particular thorn(s), and hope and pray you will find peace and freedom. With good wishes for you and yours, FitzGerald Press.

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Crazy 8’s Rice? Go fish.

I had some veggies to sauté but asked, “Do you have any… rice?”

I had some veggies to sauté but asked, “Do you have any… rice?”, to which the answer was, ‘Sorry, go fish.’, but undeterred, I commandeered my forgotten intended lunch, a frozen box of Chinese chicken fried rice.

I sautéed the veggies in butter, olive oil and a little filtered tap water, added a bit of Grey Poupon and a dash of salt. The result was okay & I was grateful for the meal:

One, eleven ounce box Tai Pei frozen chicken fried riceTwo, medium zucchini, dicedAround five ounces raw mushrooms, dicedOne medium onion, dicedThree cloves minced garlicOne to two tablespoons olive oilOne to two tablespoons butterOne quarter cup waterOne tablespoon Grey Poupon mustard A dash of salt

As above, sauté the veggies in the oil, butter, and water, microwave the fried rice for 4 minutes and add to the veggies. Stir well, and when veggies at desired tenderness, let cool a bit and serve.

Hints:

Use more or less water for desired textureBrown onions before adding water & other veggies for more complex flavorDon’t add fried rice to veggies until latter are nearly done.



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From Bad to Worse

Race in America… race in the world. What to do? I hate anarchy, but as far as protest, looting aside, the bridge occupations, “Black Lives Matter” events and street murals, and other protests, reflect a desperate need for change. We as a nation are fraught with racism and we as the human race are cursed with sinful flesh.

Christ will come back one day and all will be made right, but I’m beginning to think that He’ll use issues like this to prepare people for the New Heavens and New Earth. Salvation may be once and done, but most Christians know that the process of becoming ready for life in Heaven is a lifetime journey called sanctification.

I did not set out to write a theological treatise¹, but rather, I’m concerned about the fear, anger, violence and loss that our communities are experiencing in the throes of a climactic racial and sexual revolution.

As Europeans should and did not accept Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake”, of her starving country subjects, so we Americans must not accept certain individuals discriminating, abusing and sometimes killing our citizens.

Not all cops are bad, but we can look back to the terrible shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and note that as mass shootings have exponentiated over the years since that sad 1999 event, and now we hear of such tragedies often, all too often.

So with race based killings, the incidents are multiplying at an alarming and hideous rate, a rate that is causing appropriate uproar. After all, to remain indifferent at such things is to risk losing heart and humanity.

This all smacks of the end-times where the antichrist arrives and after a short and terrible “reign”, Christ comes back to vanquish evil forever. But does that free humanity from responsibility to act and work for good? By no means; we are responsible.

I do not claim to be free of sin or have all the answers, quite the opposite, sad to say, but I felt compelled to write this post in the hope that it would touch a chord with others who struggle with racism, either in their hearts, or in the hearts of others who oppress them.

May you find freedom to do right, and may those who would oppress you find the same freedom. I feel that while humans may be weak against their own sin nature, that God supplies need to overcome, and as the great Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King sang, “We shall overcome…”

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¹A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject. (Google)

The Other Way of Tuna

On the lighter side, here’s a recipe for making tuna salad that you may enjoy the eating or preparing of. It was borne of necessity as I’m not a big carnivore but tuna was on the menu. Also of necessity as I get bored with the same old thing. Finally, as my cholesterol is high, I’m adding an experimental condiment that I want to use more:

Tuna Salad #463:

1 can Albacore tuna
2 tablespoons pickle relish
1 thick slice of onion diced smallish
1 heaping tablespoon bleu cheese
2 heaping tablespoons quadruple-bypass mayonnaise ¹‚ ²
Garlic salt

Mix ingredients in a medium sized bowl, using potato masher to crush and tenderize the tuna. Add a bit of garlic salt to taste. Enjoy as a melt over your favorite toast, or go low-carb with just the salad. Remember to use the special mayo if you want what I think is a slightly healthier option. I had a bit of bleu cheese dressing left over, and it made for a nice twist to the flavor of the salad.

¹This mayonnaise could actually be healthier, but I am not a physician nor a dietician, and this has not been tested, so please consult with a healthcare professional.

²Quadruple-bypass mayonnaise:

Combine solely for the recipe or in a mayonnaise jar for future portions, equal parts:

Your preferred mayo³
Nonfat plain yogurt or Greek yogurt
Reduced or nonfat sour cream

Optional spicy version:

Add curry or wasabi to taste

³The olive oil mayo I’ve tried is slightly lower in cholesterol than regular mayo, according to its nutrition label

Here is a nice instrumental to go with your tuna; it is called The Other Way of Stopping, and was written by Stewart Copeland & performed by his band, The Police.

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