A Dirty Old Man Stumbles On John Cowart’s 2007 Diary A DIRTY OLD MAN STUMBLES ON: JOHN COWART’S 2007 DIARY. Copyright © 2008 by John W. Cowart. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by Lulu Press. Apart from reasonable fair use practices, no part of this book’s text may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bluefish Books, 2805 Ernest St., Jacksonville, Florida, 32205. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. Lulu Press # 1858163. A DIRTY OLD MAN STUMBLES ON JOHN COWART’’S 2007 DIARY A DIRTY OLD MAN STUMBLES ON JOHN COWART’’S 2007 DIARY Monday, January 01, 2007 A Commandment Interrupted! Yesterday afternoon Beauty and I intended to obey one of God’s happy commandments — but we kept getting interrupted. Darn! Every time we’d begin to get started, somebody would knock at our door bringing us a belated Christmas present, wishing us well, or being a pest in some other way. They’d no sooner go away than the phone would ring and somebody would wish us happy New Year or some such aggravating nonsense. I need fewer friends! The ones we already have prevented us from following the commandment. And at our age and present state of health that is annoying in the extreme. So I cleaned the swimming pool and watched tv football all afternoon instead. Bummer. Oh, the commandment? I refer to Proverbs 5:18-19. You mean you don’t know about that one? Really, I think folks would be much happier if they read their Bibles more. The commandment of God in Proverbs says: “Rejoice with the wife of thy youth! Let her be to thee as a loving hind, a pleasant roe. Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times. Yea, be thou ravished with her love”. But sometimes it is difficult to follow the commands of God. I think we need fewer friends. Tuesday, January 02, 2007 An Explosive Start To The New Year As soon as the calendar flipped at midnight from 2006 to 2007, then as soon as the sparks from the fireworks fade away, right that minute, the 2006 models go on sale to make way for the 2007 models. Yesterday, Ginny and I went to the showroom first thing as soon as they opened to buy an “old” 2006 model at a greatly reduced price. We are to take delivery by 3 o’clock today. Whoot! Yes, the delivery men will come to our house, tussle it through the living room, down the hall into our bedroom and up onto the frame. They will cart our old model away forever. I’ll miss it. We bought it used back about 1985 and it served us well but Ginny has hankered for a brand new model for a long time, so we visited the showroom, stretched out on various test models and chose one. I hate to confess being so behind times, but I had no idea that mattresses came in model years. To me one looks the same as another. They’re indistinguishable — like modern cars. But the mattress salesman assures me that constant technological advances result in such improvements that each year calls for a new model. I found no fault with our 1985 model. I would have kept it. But time marches on without me. Anyhow, tonight we will sleep on the 2006 model mattress and we can trade it in on next year’s model in only eleven months. Life makes less and less sense to me as I get older. Speaking of getting older… I am going to write for another few minutes but this would be a good place for you to stop reading because my next subject is disturbing, unpleasant and embarrassing. Walking across the grocery store parking lot yesterday I had an accident. This sort of thing has not happened to me since I was a child. Abruptly, without warning, I explosively messed my own pants. I don’t know if this event is related to a flu bug, the prostate cancer, or just general old age, but it was humiliating, smelly and embarrassing. I could have cried. Shocked, I duck waddled back to our car and had to sit in stink with the windows rolled down as Ginny drove me back to the house. Once home, I changed and washed my clothes and showered — and trembled a bit at such an vivid reminder of my decline and mortality. If we don’t die first, we get old and senile. The theme of my blog says that I look for spiritual realities in everyday life. Well, I’ve told the reality, but what spiritual lesson can be drawn from such a disgusting incident? I can’t think of a one, not a single one. No inspirational Bible verse springs to my mind. No line of poetry. The only thing I can think of is the punch line from a joke for those of us over 65 years old: Never trust a fart!. Wednesday, January 03, 2007 Fun In My World — Ancient and Modern Tuesday Ginny returned to work downtown where one of her coworkers was mugged in the office parking lot and her purse snatched. I spent the day in quite, peaceful reading, reflection, prayer and meditation — except for two troubled visitors, two delivery men, and a phone call warning me the cops are searching for one of my daughters. Just a typical day at home for me. My studies alternated between two books. On one hand I’m reading a diary kept by Puritan Richard Rogers between 1586 and 1590; on the other hand, I’m studying a 445-page computer manual on how to work Google. I don’t understand either one. In the Google manual, I’m up to the part about using asterisks as wildcard search terms. In the Roger’s Journal, I’ve reached the 1587 attack of the Spanish Armada, which, in terms of newsworthiness, was the 16th Century equivalent of Nine Eleven in our day. But the Puritan preacher was a focused man. His diary concentrates on things that really matter, the state of the human soul in the light of eternity. “By fearfull noise of warre and trouble in our lande I laboured to bringe myne heart to a more neere drawing of it to the deeper contempt of the worlde,” Rogers said. And that’s all he had to say about the Armada! His diary makes for difficult reading not only because of the antique spelling. His language is neither the lofty Elizabethan cadences of Shakespeare nor the majestic prose of the King James Bible, but he speaks in the common idiom of his day. Not only that, but his thought patterns are so foreign to my way of thinking because here was a man intent on God to the exclusion of lesser things. I am not such a man. I envy his devotion. “It is the work and occupation of a Christian,” Rogers said, “To learn to understande the lawes of god and to walk in his wayes, and thus that should be the chieftest thinge which should be looked after and from thing to thinge practized”. If you think his language is difficult to follow, you should try that Google manual! Gobbledygook and techno-jargon fills the pages. For instance, Page Rank refers to which web site you see listed first, second, third, etc. when you search the web with Google; but the term PageRank has nothing to do with the web pages per se, it refers to a system of determining value developed by Mr. Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, and his system factors in over 500 elements in order to put my website down around number 8,427 in the listings. I’m tempted to scan in the Rogers Diary and publish it on the web or as a booklet on my storefront (www.bluefishbooks.info ). The copyright is open and I think the rare work of this good and godly man ought to be preserved. But the project would take a massive amount of work and would not make much business sense. I checked the library stamps in the back of the InterLibrary Loan copy I am reading and I see that this book was checked out on April 1, 1985 and returned the very next day; then it was checked out again on May 11th, 1994. I am the third person to check the thing out. Ever. If you want to read a copy, the line forms on the right. No shoving, please. I am reading the book for my own edification, to let this focused man’s thoughts from long ago nudge me closer to Christ in my own life today. If his diary can help me in that way, perhaps, in spite of the book's wild popularity, I should try to preserve his words on line to help some other struggling Christian in the future. I hope my own diary entries may help somebody in that way. Back in an October blog last year, I wrote: You know, I’ve always written with a specific reader in mind. The reader I envision is a teen-aged boy who lives 50 to 75 years from now, and who stumbles across my journals in a dusty attic on a rainy day and begins to read these old musty papers.