Job 17:6

God has made me a stereotype among people,

   I have become like Tophet* of old (with people spitting in my face).

*(Tophet was a pagan shire where children were burned and people spit in disgust at Tophet.)

 

Talk about needing context. This verse with its reference to Tophet makes no sense if you do not know about Tophet. Kind of like referencing Fonzie if no one knows about Happy Days. I never really understood the appeal of Fonzie or John Travolta’s character on Welcome back Carter, but I probably was not the target audience for those characters.

‘Stereotype’ was ‘byword’ but since I did not know what that meant, I put in a synonym.

‘Tophet’ was sometimes replaced with ‘one whom people spit on’ in order to catch the meaning.

I spent some time Tuesday outside and Wednesday working out in the garage. I now have a running nose and a persistent cough, again. Last night was not good and I laid in bed until 10:15 this morning. Fourteen hours and I am still tired and sickly. I am becoming a stereo type to my wife of a sick old man. Fortunately for me, she experienced this right along with me last time.

I deleted Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Chrome (access to Facebook) off my phone yesterday. I got tired of my lack of discipline to only look at baseball cards or family/friends. So now I have more time on my hands to get stuff I want to get done done. I mentioned this to someone who said they had to do the same thing with twitter and tiktok. I want to learn more about science progress and financial news, but I do not want to have to wade through all the crap to get it.

I got some boots worked on a couple weeks ago and I was surprised at the cost. It averaged $50 a pair. I took two pairs of shoes in a few weeks earlier and the estimate for them was 80-100 each, so I had him throw those away. As it turns out my boots are worth a little more, so I paid the cost. Now I just need to need to wear the boots ever again beyond church every week or so.

That ran long, but I was trying to show that all this drive to entertain us and extract profits from our wasting time is increasing the cost of living for everyone. If we were content to watch tv on three channels fifty years ago, why do we need more content than we can possibly watch to parse through in fractions of a second? I mainly watch Astros games on tv, and even then, I get distracted or walk away when they start losing. I wish I didn’t care enough so that I could watch it anyway, but if I didn’t care I would watch in the first place.

Already longer than normal, I am going to keep going to wrap this all up. Tophet was so bad that the name became synonymous with evil and drove people to spit whenever it came up. Evil is that bad, and we need to push it away even today. We do not need to spit in peoples faces, but we need to actively show God’s displeasure while loving the offenders. Pitting regular people against doctors and drug logistics groups is not a way to show love to people who are thinking about abortion (killing babies). Yes, I am against abortion as birth control, but it is a valid medical procedure when required. But I do not want to be seen as showing hatred to those who had one, are thinking about having one, or who are just fighting for the right to have an opinion about the topic that others don’t agree with. People are making money off this disagreement, and those are the people who might desire a spit in the face. But not from me.

Written 9/5/25, Posted 9/19/25, Job 402/~1070