FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

A man walks up to the bar with an ostrich behind him. As he sits down, the bartender comes over and asks for their order. The man says, “I’ll have a beer.” The tender turns to the ostrich and asks, “What’s yours?” “I’ll have a beer, too,” says the ostrich.  The bartender pours the beer and says, “That will be $3.40 please.”

The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out the exact change for payment.

The next day, the man and the ostrich come in again, and the man says, “I’ll have a beer,” and the ostrich says, “I’ll have the same.” Once again the man reaches into his pocket and pays with the exact change.

This becomes a routine until, late one evening, the two enter again.

“The usual?” asks the bartender.

“Well, it’s close to last call, so I’ll have a large scotch,” says the man.

“Same for me,” says the ostrich.

“That will be $7.20,” says the bartender. Once again, the man pulls exact change out of his pocket and places it on the bar.

The bartender can’t hold back his curiosity any longer. “Excuse me sir. How do you manage to always come up with the exact change out of your pocket every time?” the bartender asks.

“Well,” says the man. “Several years ago I was cleaning the attic and found an old lamp. When I rubbed it a Genie appeared and offered me two wishes. My first wish was that if I ever had to pay for anything, I could just put my hand in my pocket, and the right amount of money would always be there.”

“That’s brilliant!” says the bartender, “Most people would wish for a million dollars or something, but you’ll always be as rich as you want for as long as you live!”

“That’s right! Whether it’s a gallon of milk or a Rolls Royce, the exact money is always there,” says the man.

The bartender asks, “One other thing, sir, what’s with the ostrich?”

The man replies, “My second wish was for a chick with long legs.”

I’m happy to report that I’ve discovered the secret to a clean and organized plumbing truck. For sixteen years I’ve struggled with my truck being a mess. Now I think I’ve finally hit on the secret. As you can see, my truck is now the epitome of clean and organized.

And what is the secret to such a clean truck? You just have to dump two-thirds of your junk onto the carport!

People call me nearly every day with a stopped up drain problem, but they almost have to know someone in order to get my phone number. It’s on my web site, but I never advertise in the ordinary sense of the term and, therefore, practically all new customers begin by saying “I got your name from ….”

One day the caller said “I got your name from John Shelton.” I’d never heard of John Shelton, but I didn’t mention that to the customer. I was just glad to get the call and the chance to earn some money. Then such calls continued to trickle in. Finally I asked a caller who “John Shelton” was and found out that he had an appliance repair business in Memphis.

Naturally, I got a call one day from a customer who asked me if I knew someone who repaired appliances. I said I’d check around and I found John in the phone book. I found out from him that we had had a customer in common who told him about me. John’s reaction was “That’s the plumber I’ve been looking for! I often have to refer my customers to a plumber and every time, the plumber ends up doing them wrong.”

We met in person eventually, saw one another occasionally on job sites or at supply houses, worked together on my furnace one evening, but never became actual friends. We were about the same age, but of different lifestyles. We shared a common business philosophy, though, and it caused us to cling together in an informal way and to refer customers to each other constantly. It is very hard to find a trustworthy tradesman, and we who are trustworthy form an alliance nearly as strong as a blood oath. John expected me to treat his customers just as he treated them, and I knew that those customers thought that he was the appliance man from Heaven.

I left a message on his phone a few days ago. This morning the executor of his estate called to inform me that he had died by his own hand on Dec. 18th. Checking back in the Memphis newspaper (which I seldom read), I see that he first shot his estranged wife in a restaurant where she sat with a male friend, then he turned the gun on himself.

Memphis had found something it really needed when it found John. John needed something too, but I guess he never really found it.

So many readers have written in to ask me this question, I decided to just make a blog entry so that I can refer them here.

Recently I and several relatives visited the graveyard where our people are buried. Vandals had gone through the property and kicked over several grave markers, one of which belonged to my aunt’s mother. It pained my aunt to see the monument in this condition, awaiting action by the cemetary’s board. My brother-in-law and I are both pretty strong, but we couldn’t even budge that huge granite slab. It had sat on another granite base and, when toppled, still had its bottom on the base. Its head, however, was now lower than its bottom and the massive weight combined with its position was just beyond the abilities of two men to handle.

We returned later with an eight-foot landscape timber and a number of wooden blocks. We dug out a small hole and poked the end of the timber under the top of the fallen slab. Using a block for a fulcrum, we raised it a few inches and put some blocks in place to keep it up. Then we used a car ramp for a fulcrum and raised it much higher, which made it easier for two of us to grab it by hand and set it completely upright. Once up, it was easy to rock back a little so we could place construction adhesive under it in hopes of discouraging future vandals.

Many have written about this issue recently, therefore I will be brief.

Science, by definition, tends to be atheistic; that is, it denies the existence of any god who matters. To an atheistic scientist, one may posit the existence of a god or gods so long as that god does nothing related to the behavior of the material world. If your child is dying of an inexplicable malady, you don’t want some pious doctor to tell you that God is working a miracle and defying the laws of medicine. No, you would take your child to the atheist doctor down the hall whose attitude is “There must be some natural cause for this problem and I intend to figure it out and save your child’s life.” That would be the scientific approach.

But what if God did work a miracle? If he did, then science would be unable to respond to it correctly. For instance, if God were to create a man today, science would look at that man and see evidence of him being, say, thirty years old. But in fact the man isn’t thirty years old; he’s only one day old. The scientific method assumes that no god has messed with the material world and confused us.

“Intelligent design,” put simply, says that the universe bears undeniable evidence against the theory that it came into being through random processes. Evolutionism says that no god intervened to make the world the way it is. Why do evolutionists say that? Because “science” requires it to be so. To say that God did it would be to depart from the scientific method.

Therefore, even if God did do it, science requires the scientist to deny that God did it.

“Intelligent design” is as obvious as an eastern sunrise. Spiders did not learn to build webs through random processes, trial and error, and natural selection. Heck, I have an I.Q. above 120 and I can’t even keep track of my plumbing tools as well as a squirrel keeps track of the nuts she buried a year ago.

Most pundits do not understand the issues at stake here at all, and they don’t want to.

Our daughter is home from college, a son is coming over with his wife soon, Old Christian Radio is streaming through the computer, and Wonder Wife is producing various dishes in the kitchen that fill the house with appetizing aromas. Yes, it’s Thanksgiving morning at the Barleys’ again.

It won’t always be this way. Already we have one son who didn’t come home for the holiday, so the process of disintegration has taken its toll. Eventually the kids will be all over the world and “the old days” will be a memory. But that’s how it needs to be. God didn’t call us to huddle together like a pile of baby turtles in the pet shop aquarium; he called us to go into all the world and preach the gospel. There’ll be time enough for togetherness once we cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.

Gratitude is a proof of God’s existence. Today is cloudless in Memphis and the temperature is about 60 degrees. Whom does an atheist thank when he perceives natural beauty, and perceives within himself that he has received far better than he deserves? There must be someone to thank, or else gratitude is a perverse condition of the mind. But we know when we experience it that gratitutde is right, not wrong. Therefore, we know that there is a God who grants us the good things we enjoy in this world.

That is an informal logical argument, but I doubt that I have any readers who have studied formal logic enough to be offended by my lack of rigor. I think I developed this argument on my own, but I found out later that G. K. Chesterton articulated it a hundred years ago, and I may have seen it in his writings, or even somewhere else, and simply forgot it. But I know that in my heart I feel profoundly grateful to God nearly every hour of every day. I even believe that I feel more gratitude than the average Christian does, just from casual conversations on the topic.

The Lord said that he who has been forgiven the most will love God the most. We who are saved have all been forgiven more than we can measure, but some of us don’t think about it enough.

Adrian Rogers died in the hospital this morning, succumbing to the combined attacks of double pneumonia, colon cancer, and chemotherapy.

I had heard a little of Dr. Rogers (yes, he had an earned doctorate) before I came to Memphis. I knew that he was a president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a key figure in that denomination’s controversy over whether Christianity or liberalism was to be taught in the seminaries.

When I entered seminary here, I heard him speak a number of times on campus. I came to believe, as I still do, that he was the finest preacher in the the English speaking world. Of course, since I haven’t heard all of the preachers, my opinion is a bit hasty. But I’ve heard quite a few great ones, with large followings, but I’ve never heard one who could match Adrian’s mastery of homiletics.

He was an unrelenting foe of Calvinism, which is the idea that Jesus died only to save a chosen few out of humanity. Adrian believed that he died for the whole world and that every soul was a real candidate for salvation. I heard him preach once “You can say what you will about election, but it’s a wonderful thing to see how many more get ‘elected’ in a red-hot revival meeting.” Only God knows how many thousands came to the Savior through his ministry.

I met him one day. His church numbered nearly 30,000 members, so I guess I had an opportunity that many of his own members never had. It was Thanksgiving morning, 1996. As befalls great and small alike at one time or another, it was a holiday and he had a house full of visiting relatives and no toilets. The sewer at his house on Grove Park Road had stopped up. Whom do you call at such a time? The mayor? The president? The pope? No, you call Kevan. It was quite difficult, but I got him flushing after a couple of hours with the assistance of my fine trainee at the time, Andrew Brawley.

We didn’t find ourselves dealing with a pompous, arrogant boss who considered the grubby plumbers to be a lower form of life. He was gracious and kind, and he gave us each a generous tip for being available on a holiday. Practically all great men whom I’ve met are like that.

I feel dwarfed when I think about Dr. Rogers, not worthy even to clean his sewer. But Adrian would be the first to confess the words of St. Paul. “I am what I am by the grace of God.”

Blogging, along with the rest of life, has been on hold recently as I feverishly work on a paper I have to deliver in Philadelphia this Friday. The Evangelical Theological Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, has its annual meeting in Valley Forge this year and I have to fly out of Memphis early Wednesday. Even at that, I’ll be late since the conference begins Wednesday morning.

I’ve been turning down plumbing calls for several days. I’ve been totally absent from the Internet forums for several weeks. Except for a couple of plumbing jobs today and seeing a guitar student tonight, I’ve been at this computer since 6:00 AM.

This is the price of scholarship. First you have to torture yourself by listening to papers until you become a Ph.D., then you have to write papers and read them out loud to people who have never done you any harm. They have to listen because it’s a part of being a scholar, and you have to listen while they read theirs.

If you don’t crawl around on the rim of this can with the other little caterpillars, you are scholar non grata and The System will make you clean sewers for a living instead of teaching college.

Writing scholarly papers is hard for me because my brain has turned to sewage over the past ten years. I received the Ph.D. degree (they paroled me for good behavior) in December of 1995. Since then I have taught college as an adjunct for a few years, learned to play the dulcimer and banjo a little, and successfully started a business and plumbed a restaurant and a few houses. My idea of reading a hard book is trying to decipher the Shelby County plumbing code.

Alas, I will take my stand this Friday in front of real scholars and follow the maxim that has served me so well for so long: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull manure.” I hate doing anything poorly; but I don’t have the choice of not doing it at all if I ever want to break into academe, so I keep trying. Maybe next year’s paper will be better.

We woke up this morning to hear that Harriet Miers was no longer President Bush’s nominee for Supreme Court judge. They say she withdrew her name, but one can never trust such statements. It might be true or false. We have no way of knowing.

I favored Miers. My favorite columnist, Ann Coulter, opposed her viciously, but I have a lower standard than Ann does. I just don’t think that it takes very much mojo to be one of the Supremes.

Miers had what I wanted in a judge: a clear mind. A judge has to know how to look up the law and how to think clearly. Furthermore, he needs to know the difference between interpreting and legislating. Many of the Supremes obviously don’t know that, but it appears that Miers does.

The conservatives who whined about “qualifications” are wrong, probably misled in the herd mentality that typifies todays conservatism so often. Ann Coulter might have been the cowpoke that got them going. George Will certainly struck a stunning blow with his infamous column.

Conservatives have bemoaned the fact that Miers was an unknown and Bush passed over others who had taken a stand and paid the price over the years. Why all of the subterfuge, they protest? Didn’t Clinton avow that any judges he appointed must favor abortion?

I would answer that the left didn’t take power by announcing their intentions to remake America into something the founders opposed. They are only open now because they’re already in power. They own the courts, the law schools, the universities, the elementary and secondary schools, and even a fair percentage of “Christian” education. If Bush and Miers were open about their intentions, there’d be heck to pay.

Me, I’d be open and let the chips fall. That’s probably why I’m a plumber instead of a college professor. I’ll never sell my right to be open about my thoughts. And anybody like that would probably never get confirmed as a Supreme, either.

The spin machine on the left has swung into action: “The extremists had a litmus test and she didn’t pass it; Bush must not give in to them and bring a more conservative nominee!” It will take firmness and principle to regain the Court, and maybe subterfuge. I’m glad it isn’t my job.

I added another lock to my truck in hope of resisting thieves. My sliding door cannot open with this bolt in place unless the door is cut with a torch or hacksaw. Automobile steel is pretty tough, so I think I’m safe with this.

Here’s a closeup of my handiwork.

I recently accompanied my wife Jeanne to a teachers’ convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The Smokey Mountain scenery there is magnificent, but I didn’t care much for the commercialization. There were multitudes of stores and vast multitudes of people milling about like so many houseflies on a watermelon rind.

While wife was at the meetings, I stayed behind in the motel room and worked on a paper I intend to deliver in mid-November at a scholars’ conference. By placing a small table at my patio door I could enjoy the outside air without the rain falling on me. From that vantage point I could also keep an eye on the Episcopal church across the street, which I found inspiring because it brought Anglican history to mind–men like Jeremy Taylor, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Wesley.

The high point of the visit, second only to my wife’s company, was an afternoon trip to Townsend to see the Wood & Strings Dulcimer Shop. Fine folks with a lot of fine instruments.

Just got off the phone with my sister, who lives in Houston. Presently the hurricane is two days away from Houston. So what is Houston doing? Obeying the proverb that says:

When in trouble
When in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout

I called her because I was eating pancakes at the Daily Grind coffeee shop in downtown Memphis and saw the morning news on television. I don’t have a television at my house, so I miss a lot of the visual data that gets strewn around the nation. I saw on the tube a long line of cars on the North Freeway, heading out of town. Come to find out, the line was bumper-to-bumper for 100 miles. Why? Because the hurricane may be there in two days.

There is no gasoline in Houston now. It’s all been bought up. The city that oil built, the home of the refineries, is out of gasoline because the lemmings have bought it up. Result? People get on the freeway and sit and sit until they run out of gas. They’re what–fifty miles from home? And stranded. Or their cars have overheated and they’re stranded. Who can come and help them? They’ll be sitting out there on the freeway when the hurricane comes in. And you know that the poor mom & pop stations up north have all been bled dry as well–so the locals up there are out of luck for a while. After all, what trucker in his right mind is going to creep along in bumper-to-bumper traffic all day just to get a shipment to Huntsville or Livingston?

The grocery stores are empty. If anyone decides to go to the extra effort to bring gasoline or groceries to the consumers, he can command a high price. But if the whiners start yelling “price gouging, price gouging!” then the suppliers had just as well stay up here where the sane people reside and let the whiners starve. Thus the whiners are ground up in the wheels of the inexorable law of supply and demand.

Maybe the freeways will clear within two days. Then the folks who waited can decide whether to drive north or stay put.

Galveston has emptied out, and that’s a good thing. There’s still plenty of time, so they may have jumped the gun; but it looks like they did okay. The expectation currently is that Galveston is scheduled for demolition on Friday or Saturday. Too bad, but anybody living on the Gulf should know that one day he’s going to be blown to kingdom come. All of us have fond memories of Galveston–and photographs. So we won’t forget what it was like in the 20th century, after it recovered from the 1900 storm. Later generations can chronicle its rebuilding after this storm, and the eventual destruction of the 21st century Galveston. That’s life on the beach: build it, enjoy it, watch it blow away. Some folks like that kind of life.

Barley Services (i.e., moi) has been robbed. On Thursday night someone broke into my truck and stole two sewer machines and a five-gallon bucket of tools.

It’s a sick feeling to come out of the house in the morning and to see your truck door hanging open and your junk lying on the pavement; especially when that truck represents your business, the only way you have of making a living.

The robber(s) simply inserted a crowbar between my two rear doors and pried the right one loose from its catches at the top and bottom. Must have required all of ten seconds. I didn’t realize that I was quite that vulnerable.

So I addressed the matter today, as you can see.

I had to turn off the radio tonight. It was just too painful. I was in my truck going home after clearing some drains for a customer and I caught President Bush’s speech in progress. He proposed the creation of a “Gulf Opportunity Zone” in response to the sinking of New Orleans. Freebies, tax cuts, etc. for everybody who will squirm up to New Orleans and suck one of the government tits.

First: nothing in the Constitution authorizes the central government to take money from Memphians and use it to rebuild New Orleans.

Second: government money entails government controls, so the entire project will be subject to federal rules and regulations–a massive increase in the size and scope of government, which entails an equal reduction in personal liberty.

Third: the central government doesn’t have that kind of money. They’re trillions of dollars in debt and continue to overspend at the rate of billions and billions per year.

Memphis is crowded with piled up resources that are trying to find their way to refugees, and we are only one city. This is repeated all across the nation. Let people alone and they will work it out themselves. If an entrepreneur wants to try something in New Orleans, let him use his own money. If he succeeds, let him keep his own money.

I’ve observed for years that there is nothing so stupid that a smart person can’t build a case for it if he wants to. Now I find a new level of idiocy set forth by a philosophy professor. He justifies the snipers in New Orleans because they were being left to die by the lazy, incomplete Bush administration rescue efforts. By shooting the rescuers, they provoked more federal action.

This may provide a clue as to why I don’t seem to be able to land a job teaching in a college philosophy & religion department.

A vacant house behind me was vandalized. Everything breakable was broken, everything tearable was torn. The perps attempted to set fire in three places, but were too dumb to get one going. (One place was in a bathtub–duh!)

Obviously kids. They did thousands of dollars worth of damage. It’s no secret who they are. Their parents have been confronted. Do they feel any compulsion to make it right?

Ho ho ho. :rolleyes:

“Alas, alas, for the great city that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste.” And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning, “What city was like the great city?” And they threw dust on their heads as they wept and mourned, crying out, “Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! For in a single hour she has been laid waste.” Revelation 18:16-19

The level of Monday morning quarterbacking I’ve heard since New Orleans went under is absolutely overwhelming. The fever to spout off and declare what “they” should do covers the airwaves at all hours of the day and night.

Before the levees broke, I had quipped to my wife “I haven’t tuned in to Air America yet, but I’m sure that they’re blaming the hurricane on Bush.” I was, of course, being facetious. Although they blame everything great and small on Bush (flat tire, measles, pothole on Third Street–it’s all Bush’s fault), I wasn’t really going to slander them by claiming that they’d blame the weather on him.

But, sho ’nuff, they did. According to them, because he didn’t endorse the Kyoto Protocols and because of global warming, hurricanes are getting worse. And he cut New Orleans flood control funding and sent the money to Iraq instead.

But, interestingly, the conservative talk shows also are swamped with callers screaming about how somebody ought to do something. The unspoken presumption is that the caller cares about the sufferers more than do the rescuers who are risking their lives and wearing themselves to exhaustion. That presumption is, of course, stupid.

We can’t talk bad about the looters, you know. They wouldn’t be misbehaving if white folks weren’t so mean to them. We shall call them henceforth “undocumented shoppers” and consider their sniping at the rescuers as home rule and self determination. The fire you see in this entry’s photograph is just the indiginous peoples attempt at authentic self-expression and a symbol of their solidarity and their rejection of oppressive imperialist value structures.

And then we have the panic buying at the pumps: lemmings on the run. I have plenty of gasoline presently, so I look on from a distance. I stopped by a small independent station this afternoon to buy an oatmeal cookie for lunch (okay, in lieu of lunch) and I asked the proprietor “When will you have gasoline again?” He answered “I’ll probably get a delivery tonight. Yesterday morning I bought 6,000 gallons. It was gone by 6 PM. Usually 6,000 would last three or four days.” And Memphians are doing this in spite of the local refinery guys getting on TV and announcing “There is no gasoline shortage; we have plenty of gasoline in Memphis and plenty more where that came from.” But the lemmings are buying it so fast the delivery trucks can’t keep up with them.

Just to rub some salt in the wound, as if it could get any worse, we have the prophets announcing that God has judged New Orleans for its wickedness. But how can anybody know that unless he hears voices in his head? The Bible doesn’t say New Orleans is (was) doomed. Certainly God hates sin, but I question to what degree New Orleans surpassed her neighbors. How come San Francisco is doing fine tonight? What about Saginaw, Michigan? Or Miami, Florida? I’m thinking now of a small town in Mississippi where the divorce-and-remarriage situation was so foul, you needed a scorecard to keep the players straight. The day care center had to constantly update their records to know day-by-day who was authorized to pick up any given child. There were drugs, fornication, drunkards, hate, corruption, blasphemy, etc. All I could say in the town’s favor is that homosexuality was not open and accepted.

The Lord Jesus specifically said that a natural disaster should not be taken to mean that those who perished were more wicked than others. The prophets should know that.

Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.

Hurricane Katrina landed ashore this morning in New Orleans.

I don’t usually follow hurricanes. I figure that the world is full of tragedy and there’s little I can do about most of it, including the hurricanes. But Katrina caught my attention early because New Orleans is a little closer to home.

I spent ten years headquartered in Mississippi, and New Orleans was close enough to be considered a neighbor. Part of those ten years was spent pastoring in northern Louisiana. A number of my sister churches were in south Louisiana and they introduced me to cajun culture; another point of contact with The Big Easy.

More recently, I spent a few days in New Orleans in 1996 attending the annual meeting of two organizations: the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. These are professional associations of religion teachers and scholars. In those days, they held their annual meetings jointly. I opined that this was so that the participants would have to endure it only once. I’m tellin’ ya, if engineers were this screwy, we’d still be living in grass huts.

I got to know the city a little better during that visit. I walked the old streets and, plumber that I am, I took note of the sewer system. Some of those manhole covers looked to me as though they were a hundred years old or older. I came upon some city workers who had dug a big hole exposing part of the system for repairs. This was like an artist being invited to tour the Louvre.

Very few people realize the critical role that plumbing plays in civilization. Without it, little would be possible. Instead, we’d be living in mud, walking in our own waste, and drinking polluted water–which was once the description of places like Paris or London.

New Orleans depends on pumps for drainage, since it sits below sea level. As I write these words, more rain is falling down there than the system can handle. It will flood, and the waste that was previously kept at bay by the plumbing system will be unleashed on the city.

That old system of pumps and levees will finally get the appreciation it deserves once this typhoon has blown over and the mess is getting cleaned up.

Rose at 6 and was on the job at 8. Not very early for me, but it was, after all, Saturday, and I had to get in a little biscuits, syrup, bacon, and bluegrass on the radio.

I took my camera under the house this morning, just to see what a photo would look like. Now I know.

Pictured here are my two sons. The older one (on the right) got married in July. The younger one was his best man.

This is the bride, of course. Not the best photo, but what do you expect from a plumber?