There are Little Raptures Everywhere

As days go, this one has been pretty good. I helped my friends Alonzo and Teri move into their first non-rented house.

Alonzo and I were armorbearers at Miami’s Trinity Church, under the authority of the fine family of pastors that made public-nudity enthusiast Kim Kardashian one of America’s best-known Christians. The armorbearers used to meet for breakfast at a Denny’s on Hallandale Beach Boulevard, and I used to talk about the importance of speaking in tongues and getting free of iniquities and demons. Alonzo was always quiet. I thought he was just waiting for me to shut up. In reality, he was taking it all in.

He and his family lived in a pretty bad situation. They had part of a house in Liberty City, which is about like South Central L.A. He hated his job. Things weren’t going all that well.

Over time, he and Teri moved closer to God, and he blessed them. They moved to a place farther north, away from their relatives. Then they moved to Orlando. This was a step up from South Florida, which is a very dark and corrupt place, but it could have been better. After Orlando, they moved to Sanford, and now they’re between Sanford and Ocala in a very rural setting. They own the house they’re moving into. It has 5 bedrooms. It’s in a quiet, peaceful area packed with conservative Christians.

If you know this blog, you know I had a young friend named Travis Quinn. He was also an armorbearer. He was a lawless ghetto kid. He started listening to me. He tried the things I was doing. God changed him a great deal. He found himself living in Coral Gables, as my house sitter, going to the University of Miami on a music scholarship.

Unfortunately, he was shot accidentally in April. We were told his injuries weren’t a big deal. Then his condition worsened, and he died. During his last month, he wasn’t able to communicate with anyone except his family.

I had assumed Travis would be my big success story, but it looks like Alonzo and Teri got what I thought he would get. They have 5 wonderful kids. Their marriage keeps getting better. Now Alonzo says God is talking to him. He says God told him that if he fasted, God would do things for him, with no effort from Alonzo, that would amaze him. Alonzo fasted, and suddenly Alonzo found himself able to move into his house ahead of schedule. He didn’t have to pay his last month’s rent. He didn’t have to pay a power bill he thought was coming due.

The place where he used to live was better than the places where he lived before, but it wasn’t perfect. People smoked dope where his kids could smell it. The neighbors weren’t great. Now he’s in a thinly populated area where life is very, very easy.

His kids will be two miles from school. There is a big grocery store so close he can walk to it. There is a great pizza place a mile and a half away. Three of the kids now have their own bedrooms. It’s wonderful.

He and Teri have had the same coronavirus experience I’ve had: peace and plenty. They both have jobs. No one they know has gotten sick. It’s as though God has wrapped them in a blanket.

Moving was a breeze. It’s July in Florida, and it should be about 95 degrees outside. It was very comfortable today. I joked because I felt a drop of sweat at one point and had to run for shade. Ordinarily, my clothes would have been sticking to me after 20 minutes. I don’t even need a shower.

He took me to lunch today, and the pizza place we found was excellent. It was surgically clean, the staff was great, and the food was wonderful.

We talked about the time we live in. As former Miami residents, we agreed that it feels like the day before a hurricane. If you haven’t experienced a hurricane, you won’t understand, but things are extremely quiet the day before one arrives. The sensation is peaceful, but ominous. Many people are saying the rapture is nearly here. As Christians know, the rapture will be followed by the storm of God’s wrath.

I keep feeling the rapture will take place in December. For a while, it seemed like the 24th was the day. Then it seemed like the 11th was correct. I don’t know the answer, but I have a strong sense that I will not be on earth in 2021. I hope the rapture is coming, because the coronavirus, #MeToo, Antifa, and BLM curses we’re enduring seem to be part of a larger pattern of destruction which is going to get worse, not better. I have no desire to be here to see fools and brothers to apes rule us without God’s opposition.

I have been invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Alonzo says he wants to have a real Thanksgiving dinner at his own house. That will be great. It’s less than an hour away, so it will be very convenient to drive down and then transport myself back so I can lie on my back and recover.

They live fairly close to a 900-yard gun range, so that will give me more reason to visit their area.

I still know people who are mired in South Florida. Alonzo and I think God moves people to better places as they get closer to him. There are areas where nice Christian people are concentrated. It seems that God wants to preserve these places as though he were weeding gardens. I don’t think he wants to move too many backward people there. The same principle can be seen in the Bible. When the Jews behaved badly, their land spat them out. They only lived there and did well when they were obedient. The modern era is exceptional, because God moved them back while most of them were still atheists and leftists, but many have come around.

I think God let me fester in Miami because I belonged there. I would hate to go back. Today I saw “Miami” on road signs, and it made my insides tense up.

I think I’m as happy about Alonzo’s move as he is. It’s wonderful to see someone get in gear and catch God’s blessings.

We Think he Will Make his Move Soon

I made an important decision today. I decided to buy hundreds of rounds of Sellier & Bellot 6.5 Creedmoor FMJ ammo for rifle practice.

The ammo problem is pretty bad right now. You can still get nearly anything you want, if you’re willing to pay maybe 1.75 times what it’s worth. Personally, I am not willing to do that, and I do not understand people who are.

I don’t buy ammunition in person, because you have to be a chump to do that. You drive around to the few stores in your area, and then you find out they don’t have what you want or they do have it and the price is insane. A lot of people still do this, and it must be a good thing from where I sit, because I use the Internet, and if they were using it, too, there would be no good deals left for me.

Some people buy in person, and others go to ripoff websites and pay their insane prices. I know this, because the sites run out. It amazes me that people would rather be milked than spend a few minutes searching the web.

I just spent about an hour looking for what I wanted at a good price. I could have spent well over a dollar per round and given up after 10 minutes. I knew someone out there had to be selling for between 60 and 70 cents, so I persevered, and I got what I needed.

Why did I buy Sellier & Bellot? I’ve already mentioned it. This stuff is phenomenal. If you look around, you can find a site showing 2″ groups fired from 300 yards. This is about 2/3 MOA. The guy who tested it got a velocity spread of 7 fps.

Is it the best 6.5 Creedmoor ammo available? I’m sure it’s not, but I will be very surprised if, during the next year, I get so good I can shoot 2/3-MOA/300-yard groups with anything. This ammunition will shoot better than I can, and I don’t see that changing any time soon, so it seems to me it’s a tremendous bargain.

Any ammo that will hit a rat reliably 900 feet away is good ammo.

I should try their soft-point ammo. Maybe it’s just as good, and it would work if I needed to shoot for food.

Some people look down on Sellier & Bellot. It tends to be cheap. Thing is, they have an impressive modern factory. You can see a video tour on Youtube. In comparison, CCI’s .22 factory looks like a converted garage. That is not much of an exaggeration. Sellier & Bellot is a serious company. If their ammo is cheap, so much the better. Cost and quality are not always closely related.

I could not shoot today. Of course, it rained. It rains every day. I have no idea when it will stop. I’m going to have to start shooting before noon. It’s nearly always dry then.

I am cornering the .17 HMR market, and if I can ever get outside to shoot, I’ll be using my Savage 93R to work on my prone shooting. It’s cheaper to shoot than most pistols, and if the wind is still, it will shoot into an inch at 100 yards. Hard to imagine a better cheap training round. If the wind isn’t still, that will be fine, because I’ve had some training in dealing with wind, and I need to put it to use.

I’m going to try an Athlon scope on the 93R. I already have a Burris scope, but having trained to use mil-dot optics, I see no point in continuing to fool with different technology. I like the idea of learning to use the Burris correctly, but after that, there seems to be no reason to continue.

With the Burris, you shoot at various ranges and take note of where your shots land, and then you use the information later to help you make use of the holdover marks on the reticle. With my training and equipment, I’m supposed to test the ammo with a chronograph, enter data into my ballistic calculator, determine the range to targets, and aim where the calculator tells me to. It’s supposed to enable me to hit things on the first shot at any distance. I didn’t pay a load of money to take a class to learn all this so I could forget about it and go back to Elmer Fudd technology.

In order to get an Athlon, I had to go for crazy magnification. I had to choose between 8 and 25, and 8 was not going to fly. I think 25 is a lot for .17 HMR, but on the other hand, if I hunt with it, I might be hunting tiny critters with kill zones the size of ping pong balls. It seems like the best choice for the money.

The Vortex company made a name for itself using Asian-made scopes to compete with expensive Caucasian optics. Primary Arms came along and did the same thing to Vortex, undercutting their prices. Now Athlon is undercutting both of them, and the scope I’m getting is supposed to be as good as, or better than, the thousand-dollar Vortex I own. It costs $400. How can I not try that?

What if it turns out to be better than the Vortex? I’ll feel pretty stupid. I paid over $800 for it.

I still need to make a few ammo purchases to get me into the security zone. Once I feel like I have a few years’ supply, I’ll put my ammo away and start buying fresh ammo to shoot. That’s the plan.

Thank God I’m not doing this with food. Today someone sent me an ad for dried disaster rations. On sale, they wanted about $120 for 25,000 calories. So 12 dollars per day for 10 days, and then you starve. I think I can beat that at the grocery store. I fail to see the bargain. Ordinary stores carry a lot of things that will last a decade or more in a pantry.

If starvation becomes a widespread problem, I would rather just die and leave. How much should I be willing to fight to stay in this world, when I’m a heartbeat away from a place where no one is hungry and they never need air conditioning? Eating rehydrated desperation food from a 5-gallon pail is not my idea of living.

Now that the RPR is working, I should go visit the long distance range. Wednesday would be a good day for that. My farm is fine for a hundred yards, but the range offers 900, and there are no cattle walking between shooters and targets.

I’m not far from completing my basic armory and ammo dump. Once I’m done, the credit card companies may send people to see if I’m okay. When I stop spending money, they may assume I’m dead.

The Party is Over; Back to Hermiting

My weekend guests are gone, and I can breathe again.

I was scheduled to have two families show up. A third jumped in, and one of the original families bailed, thinking the increased population density jacked the coronavirus risk up too much. Then the third family bailed because of coronavirus. Then the second family decided to come after all.

Complicated.

I thought there would be 16 people here, so I bought 6 pounds of hamburger, a pack of hot dogs, a couple of smoked sausages, two boxes of Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches, and brownie ingredients. The actual load was 8 people, so let’s just say I have a lot of leftovers. I sent about half of the brownies home with some friends from Pompano, and I think I still have 6 left. I have 3 pounds of ground chuck that absolutely have to be turned into patties and frozen today.

We had a great time. The kids managed to swim a certain amount, between thunder peals. The adults sat in the shade and criticized. There were fireworks. I got one kid to eat his first chili dog.

Last night, three of us had a wonderful prayer session. We prayed in tongues for nearly half an hour first. If I were married, I would be doing this every day. With another person, I mean.

Today I’ve been working on firearms. I can finally say that for once in my life, I’ve set a gun up correctly. Nearly. My AR-15 has a LaRue trigger, a Magpul bipod, a pretty decent quick detach scope mount, and a Primary Arms mildot scope with an illuminated reticle and a sun shade.

Why do I say it’s nearly set up? I have not lapped the scope rings. This is an interesting topic.

Okay. It’s interesting to ME.

Rifle scopes are held in place by rings that are tightened onto scope tubes with screws. This sounds simple, but of course, it is not.

Most people will buy a scope, put the rings on the rifle, put the scope in the rings, get it more or less level, get the eye relief more or less right, and tighten the rings. I’ve done this a number of times. It turns out it’s not the right way to do it.

First, scope rings tend to be machined pretty badly on the insides. They can have all sorts of high spots and low spots, so when you tighten them on tubes, they may not have much area touching the optics. This leads to gouging, and it also makes for a scope that can come loose under heavy recoil. Also, the rings may not be aligned perfectly, even if they’re machined out of a single base. This makes the contact problem worse. I suppose it can also put a bending torque on a tube.

For anything more precise than a $75 scope on a .22 rifle, you need to check your rings to make sure they’re aligned, and you need to see if the insides should be lapped. Lapping means grinding irregularities off with an abrasive compound. You can lap a scope yourself. You get a kit with a bar the size of a scope tube, you put abrasive on the bar, you mount it as though it were a scope, and you work it until the abrasive cleans up the rings. A kit for one size tube runs around $45, and you can get a kit for 30mm and 1″ tubes for $65. I was going to make my own bar, but when you add it all up, it’s not worth the trouble. If you think about it, the most you could save if your homemade tube were free is $65. You would have to pay maybe $20 for steel. Then you would have to machine it. Then you would have to pay almost $20 for lapping compound. It’s a waste of time.

Second, your scope’s rings need to be tightened carefully Too tight, and you can dent your tube and even screw up mechanical stuff inside it. Too loose, and well…too loose. You need a tiny torque wrench to do it right.

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll repeat it anyway because I can make it easier to understand. In fact, I may repeat a lot of things in this post.

Gunsmithing companies make torque screwdrivers, and they’re cheap. Problem: they fall apart. A real torque screwdriver is a $400 tool. Solution: use a real torque wrench instead of a screwdriver. You can buy a 1/4″-drive inch-pound torque wrench for $40 or so. I bought one, and I spent another $3 on a 1/4″-drive 1/4″ socket with a magnet in it. You put whatever 1/4″ hex-drive bit you want in the socket, and you have a gunsmithing torque wrench that will work forever. And there are no batteries.

I got high-end rings for my Viper scope, which I plan to attach to my Ruger Precision Rifle when it arrives. For my AR-15, which is a less snobby weapon, I got a $280 14x scope, not a fancy Vortex. I bought a quick-detach cantilever mount for it. This is a one-piece mount that has two rings cut into it. Presumably, they should line up pretty well, because they were cut by the same tool in one operation.

“Cantilever” means the forward ring is out on a sort of stalk, hanging over the gun’s handguard. Why not just put a ring on the handguard, which has a picatinny rail? This is what the people who sold me the gun did with the first scope I put on it.

Here is what I’m told: the rail on top of an AR-15 has two sections. One is on the upper receiver, and the other is on the handguard. Between the two sections of rail, there is a joint. The handguard hangs out in space, attached to this joint at only one point. If the handguard bends at all, the forward ring moves in relation to the rear ring. Does this actually matter? I don’t know, but a cantilever lets you connect both rings to the part of the rail which is on top of the upper receiver. No joint.

The people who sold me the gun didn’t tell me any of this, and I know why. It doesn’t matter when you’re a doofus who wants to get lit up on cheap beer and shoot golf balls in the national forest. It doesn’t matter when you’re shooting hogs from 50 yards or when you’re shooting junk ammo at the range. It only matters when you know what you’re doing and you’re shooting accurately from long distances. I would guess that 99% of the seller’s customers just want to fool around. For all he knew, I was part of the 99%.

In truth, at the time, I was part of the 99%, and I pretty much told him that. I said I didn’t know anything about the AR-15, and I needed to buy one–even the wrong one–just to have a place to start. What he gave me was completely appropriate at the time, but things changed very quickly.

I have no idea what to do with the scope he sold me. It’s useless for target shooting. I guess you could shoot deer with it.

When I attached the new scope, I didn’t know whether I should lap the rings on the cantilever mount. I didn’t have enough steel to make a bar to use to measure the contact areas inside the rings. I tried making something quick and dirty from wood, but it didn’t work. I decided to mount the scope, order a lapping kit, and worry about it later. After all, it’s just an AR-15 with a factory barrel. I’m not going to use it to shoot Osama bin Laden’s cousins from 2000 meters.

Did I buy a fancy tool to level the scope on the rifle? Uh…no. I’ve been reading a book by a prominent shooter named Ryan Cleckner, and he pointed something out. You can level a scope on a picatinny rail by jamming a flat piece of metal between the scope and rail and making sure it touches both. This will get me within a fraction of a degree. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me and my non-precision gas gun.

I may want a different bipod eventually, but then again, I may not. I may want a high-end barrel eventually, but then again, I may not. I don’t have any problems with the no-name adjustable buttstock, which seems to give a great cheek weld at just the right height. The handguard is very nice. The rifle is ready to go, as it is right now.

I now have most of my precision rifle setup. The gun is not here, but I have the scope, some ammo, and a nice rifle bag. The rings should be here before the gun, along with the shooting mat. I still need a backpack. When I was taking my shooting class, I was surrounded by guys with suitable backpacks, and it did’t occur to me to ask for a recommendation. I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure how much volume I need. I guess I should go look at backpacks at Bass Pro, check the volume figures, and figure out how much more or less I need.

Long-range shooting can involve a lot of stairs, so the rolling Stanley toolbox I tried to use during the class is a nonstarter. It has to be a backpack.

I’ve learned some great things about 6.5 Creedmoor ammo. The best thing: you can use extremely cheap ammo up to at least 656 yards. How do I know this? There is a guy on Youtube shooting a small gong at 656 yards, over and over, using Sellier & Bellot FMJ. It’s less than 50% more expensive than Fiocchi .223. It’s a wonder to behold.

Most good shooters can’t shoot 1 MOA at 100 yards 95% of the time. Give them 100 rounds, and excluding flyers, they’ll shoot a mess covering 3 MOA. At 656 yards, 1 MOA is something like 7″, and shooting 1 MOA gets harder with distance because of wind and other problems. The guy shooting the cheap ammo was doing 0.6 MOA over a third of a mile away. For practice fodder, that’s unreal. It means he can shoot people in the head economically at a distance of 5 blocks. If he wanted to shoot coyotes, he wouldn’t even have to leave his house. He could just open an upstairs window and scan his area with a telescope.

I kid. He may live in a crowded suburb.

This ammo may not be as accurate as Hornady at 1000 yards, but I won’t always be shooting at that distance. It would be very useful most of the time.

I got some Hornady match ammo, but I also bought a little Sellier & Bellot. With the Kestrel ballistic calculator I bought, it should be no problem shooting Sellier & Bellot up close and then switching to Hornady once I get farther out. I’m limited to 900 yards in this area. Maybe S&B will work fine for everything I’ll be dealing with.

In retrospect, maybe it was an error to get match ammo. Hornady makes a hunting round which is nearly as accurate, and it would be useful if I ever actually got out of the house and located a coyote.

I’m not really sure what my LR-308 is good for. I can pop anything smaller than a deer with the AR-15, and there is no reason why I can’t use the RPR to shoot bigger animals. It’s heavy, but it will work.

I’m still thinking about a second AR-15 in 6mm ARC. If this new cartridge turns out to have legs, I may want to try it. It would be easier to carry while hunting, and it would be better than .223 for just about everything.

I used to think people who hunted with AR-type guns were just trying to make a point. Maybe they were, back then. Anyhow, these days, I can see why a person would use one. They’re handy, they have lots of aftermarket support, the .223 cartridge is great for all sorts of game, and you can take it home and use it to defend your house, unless you want something more reliable.

Maybe I’ll get out and pop off a few rounds today. It will be nice to see a plan come together.

Wistful Thoughts From a Sinking Ship

If you want a testimony to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, look no further. You only have to see how I behave in the morning.

I have three friends staying in my house; a couple and their teenage son. All are younger than I am. Yesterday, we went to the grocery. They couldn’t believe I didn’t have coffee in the house. They didn’t buy any, however.

This morning I woke up at 7:00 and started praying. Walked into the kitchen two hours later, and I saw two zombies peering into the refrigerator. My friend and his wife were squinting at the food through tiny slits. Their shoulders were hunched. They looked like someone had just rolled them out of bed at three a.m.

They were not happy about the lack of coffee, even though it was their choice.

I must have been annoying. I was bouncing around like a high school kid, feeding my birds and getting food ready for lunch. I kept trying not to talk too loud.

They managed to get themselves some eggs and bacon. Watching them eat was like watching a seating in the cafeteria at an assisted living facility. Thankfully, no one passed out in the food.

I felt great even though I strained my back yesterday. I was eager to get the day started. It has been almost two hours, and they are still trying to get into the shower.

When I was younger, I detested mornings. I was perfectly happy to sleep until noon. I hated getting up. When I was practicing law in downtown Miami, I used to drink an entire colada before getting started. A colada is a small container of espresso intended for several people.

I don’t want caffeine in the house now. I’m not a drug user. Why would I want to take drugs every morning?

When I used caffeine, I ground my teeth at night. I had to have some work done on some teeth that were worn. I don’t do that now. If I drank a cup of tea today, I would probably have to take benadryl in order to get to sleep tonight. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need help from drugs.

If you can’t get it together in the morning, there is a kink in the hose between you and God. You weren’t created to dread life.

By the time I’m ready for lunch, they should be dressed.

The husband is Nicaraguan, and his wife is Puerto Rican. They’re charismatic Christians. Yesterday, we talked a lot about the insanity (literal) of modern leftists. They support Trump a hundred percent, as does their son. How do their relatives feel? They’re not happy. They think all Hispanics should support illegal immigration instead of supporting the generous country they swear allegiance to in order to be allowed to stay. They have had fights with friends.

Blessed foreigners move to this country and then join our persecutors. How about that? Says a lot about human depravity.

Why are my friends on the right side of history? It’s the Holy Spirit at work. We look different, and we come from different places, but the Holy Spirit protects serious charismatics from the delusions of the Beast’s socialist, white-hating children, so my friends and I have harmony. I stand against white nuts who don’t know the Holy Spirit, and they stand against brown nuts.

My friends say there is a movement to destroy the statue in the Lincoln Memorial. I guess freeing the slaves was a racist move. Anyway, they are not pleased with what is happening.

I always feel a certain amount of gratitude on the Fourth of July, but this year, it’s different. We didn’t just get independence, which wasn’t actually that great a blessing. We got over 200 years of relative freedom from persecution. Now that’s over. Christians in the US are going to be like Christians in China, and after that, we’ll be like Christians in Iran or Indonesia.

Yesterday we watched a video by Zev Porat, the Israeli Messianic rabbi. He told how his family had tormented him after his acceptance of Yeshua. His grandfather, who is also a rabbi, threw dishes at his head and cut him so badly he needed stitches. His sister asked a religious court for a restraining order. He has never seen his nephews. He was physically thrown out of his grandfather’s funeral, by hired goons. He was fired from his job and ended up living in a tent. His multimillion-dollar inheritance was taken away because he refused to sign a paper saying he renounced Yeshua. He was punched and beaten by a mob. Seven rabbis barged into his tent, tried to bribe him to quit, and spat on him when he refused.

I have never had to deal with that kind of thing, which is very typical among religious Jews. I’ve been completely rejected by crooked pastors and most people who went to the churches I attended. I have stopped communicating with many aquaintances with whom I no longer have much in common. That’s the extent of my persecution and separation. No one spits on me, although I know a few people who would like to.

In Muslim countries, Christians are crucified and beheaded. Some have had their arms cut off. Their churches are burned. The news doesn’t tell us, because Satan controls the press, but you can look it up. Socialist countries have killed innumerable Christians. They have tortured and imprisoned them. They have forced them to do slave labor.

America has been a beautiful haven. Many people have to fight their way into Christian-dominated cultures. I was born into one. I didn’t have to earn a thing. What a blessing.

It was wonderful while it lasted, and whatever protection God will give me in my remaining time will be a magnificent gift. I wish I had always understood what a treasure I had.

Today I Lived the Dream

This afternoon I did something some would consider unthinkable.

Long, long ago, in a country far, far away, which was known as the United States, where Bruce Jenner was male and it was okay to throw illegal immigrants out of your country for reasons everyone understood, I had my first chili slaw dog. I believe I ordered it at Uni’s, a small ice cream shack in the town of Cashiers, North Carolina. I recall being stunned that such things existed. I had to try one.

It blew my mind. The combination of cheap buns, hot dogs that were probably mostly saw dust and rat hairs, and chili which may well have been made from stray cats, was excellent. It was more than excellent; it was right.

Since then, I have often joked about eating something even more awe-inspiring: the chili-CHEESE-slaw dog. But I can’t recall actually having one. Maybe I did. At my age, a person has done many, many things. I can’t remember everything. I’m amazed I remembered Uni’s.

Today I decided it was time for my body to cash the check my mouth had written. Behold:

That’s two Ball Park dogs, homemade slaw, colby/jack cheese, and the worst chili you can buy without going to a store brand: Hormel No Beans. I think they generate this stuff from the meat residue too gross even for sausage-making.

I make what may well be the most astonishing chili on earth, so why the can of, for all I know, ground lungs and nipples? Couple of reasons. First, this was just a test run. Second, I’m not sure good chili would work in a chili dog. It’s trash cuisine to begin with, so using good ingredients could well ruin it.

I boiled the dogs in plain old water because I did not want to waste Sierra Nevada ale, and before I added the slaw, I melted the cheese with a Black & Decker heat gun. It went hot dog => chili => cheese => slaw.

Let’s state the obvious: they were magnificent. But there were issues, and I found room for improvement.

First: the slaw went absolutely everywhere. There was no way to contain it. I had to eat directly over the plate, and when I was done, I still needed a broom. In the future, I need to cut the slaw much finer. I used bagged slaw with my own sauce because grating your own cabbage doesn’t make slaw any better. The slaw was way too coarse to be managed easily.

Second: better chili would help. I was eating bland hot dogs, so the bland chili sort of blended into them in my senses.

Third: better hot dogs would help. I think a Hillshire Farms smoked beef sausage would be perfect. I’m not sure why anyone buys the unseasoned Slim Jims that pass for hot dogs in 2020 America.

Fourth: hot dog buns just don’t work. They don’t work for normal hot dogs, let alone beef sausages buried in chili and slaw. I think the best thing is to look for some kind of loaf that has a bun-like texture and cut it up to suit the geometry of the contents.

Fifth: more cheese. What food is there that doesn’t need more cheese? I would go with extra-sharp cheddar next time.

Sixth: onions. This sandwich needs chopped onions between the chili and cheese.

The slaw was pretty simple. Slaw mix, mayo, salt, sugar, celery seed, and cider vinegar. I have made slaw with Miracle Whip, but it doesn’t really work even though it seems like it should.

I recommend trying a couple of these when no one is around. You won’t be sorry.

I feel like listening to the Kentucky Headhunters.

The New Crazies Make me Miss the Old Crazies

Today I had fun mowing my yard in a T-shirt and a shoulder holster. And pants. Then I came indoors, made hot dogs, turned on Youtube, and found out Seattle had been taken over by leftists with AR15’s.

Okay.

By the way, something seems to have gone wrong with hot dogs. I am not a big hot dog eater, so I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure they used to be a lot bigger. I picked some up at the store the other day, and no matter which brand I looked at, they all resembled pink noodles. I grilled a couple of Ball Park bun-length hot dogs yesterday, and when I added the requisite ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions, the meat disappeared. I can only guess how awful it would have been had I gone to a full-throttle chili-cheese-slaw dog.

Let me digress from my digression. Smoked sausages are the best hot dogs. Unless maybe bratwurst counts. A Hillshire Farms smoked mystery meat cylinder is actually a lot thicker than hot dogs used to be, and it tastes a lot better, too.

To digress even further…”bun-length” hot dogs??? Isn’t this a blatant admission that most hot dogs are too short? It looks like they shrunk the dogs lengthwise even before they went after girth. Now they’re selling length back to us, like they’re doing us a favor.

This tyranny has to end.

Slob cooking tip: when grilling hot dogs for one, nuke them first. Then they’ll be nice and hot in the middle, and you can grill them a lot faster. Just burn the outsides a little, and you’re off to the races.

So. The exact thing I predicted has happened, except that the rioters are white, not black, and the authorities are in favor of it.

The other day I pointed out that there was a huge danger BLMtifa nuts would realize they could take over cities, and when that happened, we would be in big trouble. Not “we,” really, because I live on a farm surrounded by wonderful people and zero targets of leftist interest. But still.

I figured black rioters would be the culprits, because they have gigantic support from huge ghettos. It didn’t occur to me that white lesbians and man-bun-sporting baristas would beat them to it.

Seattle is a very white city. Less than 10% of the population is black. Compare New York with 25%. Even with the huge white and black exodus and Latin influx, Miami is almost 20% black. Chicago checks in at around 30%. Black people like cities. They just do. But they don’t like Seattle. Maybe it’s the rain.

The takeover includes City Hall, and one of the rioters’ demands is that the mayor, who looks like someone on the editorial staff at Cosmopolitan, resign, immediately. Not one to take this lying down, the mayor says…wait, she agrees completely. I think. In any case, she is on the news forcefully defending the people who put her in the street.

She may not have a good answer to the problem of displaced people and illegally seized property, but she has pinpointed the true source of all of Seattle’s ills. Of course, I refer to Donald Trump. Obvious?

Why do I call these people rioters, given that they don’t seem to be very violent at the moment? Look, if you take over a city using semiautomatic rifles, it’s a riot. It may be a nice, polite, Caucasian-heavy riot, but it’s a riot.

It’s a wonder to behold. I knew white liberals were suicidal, but it’s still amazing to see them self-actualize.

There are a lot of weird things about the takeover. When did leftists decide it was okay to carry AR15’s openly? When did they even decide it was okay for AR15’s to exist?

Part of me wants to cheer them on for buying rifles, because it will be hard for leftists to keep throttling our civil rights if they’re also carrying guns. But capturing cities is not really consistent with the intent of the non-trans cis men who wrote the Second Amendment.

Here’s something weird: leftist crazies can legally carry rifles in Seattle, which is insanely off to the left, but I can’t do it here in Florida, where we are constantly under attack for our “loose” firearm laws. How did that happen?

I’m allowed to carry openly in two places: my home and my business, which, sadly, is my home. It’s really one place. That’s all I get. And I can’t permit you to carry openly on my property, in case you’re wondering. Of course, I would let you do it, if you’re a friend, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be committing a felony.

I saw a fascinating video by a guy in North Dakota. He calls himself Tiborasaurus Rex, if I spelled it right. Weird guy. I thought he was just another grumpy dad bod with various beefs he wanted to air, but I looked at some of his old videos, and I saw a young military-looking guy teaching viewers how to be snipers. Is it really the same guy? It’s terrible what a few years and some kids can do to you.

I’m kidding. You can’t spend your whole life living on the edge and looking like a recruiting poster. Sooner or later, you will probably find yourself wearing Crocs and driving a minivan.

This is why they always kill the girl before James Bond marries her.

Anyway, he apparently lives near a town called Dickson, which is across the state from–you guessed it–Minnesota. BLMtifa terrorists decided to send rioters to various small towns in North Dakota, perhaps because they thought they were good places to commit violent crimes and take selfies. Soft targets, they must have thought.

Oh, you didn’t hear about this on the news? Amazing!

The folks in Dickson knew they were coming, so they got out their guns and invited some bikers. When the BLMtifers showed up, they were greeted with a wall of barrels, more or less. The local mall was completely blanketed in parked Harleys. The people of Dickson must have realized that stealing TV’s was always high on the BLMtifa agenda. You can’t protest from the heart when you don’t have Ultra 4K on the wall in your mom’s basement.

According to Mr. Rex, the BLMtifers packed up and went home without damaging anything. Total buzzkill.

He says he sat at a table in a local restaurant and listened to BLMtifers planning violent crimes and thefts. He said they even planned rapes. He says they were intercepted outside a bank they intended to knock over. For the cause. Hey, lattes and American Apparel shirts aren’t free.

What he said was highly disturbing. It shows how dangerous and cruel these people are. They’re no joke. Well. They ARE a joke, but they’re still very dangerous.

What would have happened had Mr. Rex and his friends lived somewhere else? Exactly what happened somewhere else. There would have been looting, beatings, and fires. Fortunately, he and his friends had the full cooperation of the police, and with their help, they not only kept their town safe; they made a name for it so BLMtifa will be very afraid to return.

Seattle, now…that’s another story. It’s BLMtifa paradise. But it’s relatively safe because the population is mostly whites and Asians who don’t want police records to prevent them from getting jobs at the Genius Bar.

I’ll tell you what I wonder. How are small-town Floridians supposed to be safe if we get arrested when we show up to deter BLMtifa with rifles? How can we help the police if open carry is a crime? It’s illegal to carry a rifle openly, and a concealed weapons permit doesn’t cover rifles, so it’s also illegal to carry openly.

What have we learned?

1. BLMtifa now knows it can take over cities.
2. Leftists may respond to BLMtifa aggression by apologizing and asking what they can do to assist in their own destruction. This feeds back into observation 1.
3. Open carry is the immediate answer to BLMtifa threats in small towns.
4. Open carry won’t be possible in Florida unless the cops issue statements waiving arrest in exchange for help.

One city has fallen. How long will it take for the next one to surrender? Of course, you could say places like Compton, Overtown, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chicago’s south side already exist in a state of perennial surrender. I grant you that. But when will we see blatant, Seattle-style takeovers spread, with more violence?

I would love to be a fly on the wall, watching girls in short haircuts waving rifles telling Seattle…ites? What to do. They’ve declared their area to be a “cop-free zone.” Okay, so that means you can do anything you want there, right? Probably not, because people would be going in and taking their property back. So if the short-haired ladies are not permitting that…wait for it…aren’t they…the POLICE?

What if someone resists them? Will they shoot? Will they get out the cable ties and pepper spray? How do you restrain suspects–people accused of eating meat or whatever–without force? What if they kick you or punch you? What if they grab you by your blue mohawk, pull your head down, and rain blows on your skull? Do you just walk away? Do you knock them down and kneel on them for 9 minutes? One wonders.

There is a musical called Pippin. It’s about Charlemagne’s son. It’s not all that historically accurate, because Charlemagne’s father was named Pepin the Short, and while he did have a son named Pepin, the son who succeeded him was named Louis. But let’s go with it.

In the play, Pippin gets all soyed up and woke, and he finds his father’s harsh treatment of his subjects reprehensible. He murders him and takes over, eager to show how nice life is under an enlightened king who loves chick flicks and walks on the beach. Of course, he finds he has to be tough in order to prevent everyone from taking advantage of him. Things come to a head when he tells the leader of a besieging army he wants to begin a new day of peace, joy, hot yoga, and pointless sham recycling. The leader sends word that he agrees wholeheartedly and will depart. As soon as Pippin sends him his severed genitals.

At this point, he pulls the knife out of Charlemagne, who magically comes back to life to say, “I told you so.”

In a truly dark country with heartless, despotic rulers, change may be a good thing, but here in the US, every insurgent who gets anywhere will eventually have a Pippin moment. It’s like the first time you open your mouth and, to your horror, hear yourself say something your dad used to say.

Maybe I shouldn’t take such a lighthearted tone, but what else can I do?

Since I appear to be predicting the future successfully, appling a mystical gift known as the ability to perceive the obvious, I’ll say we should expect more takeovers with a more violent, race-tinged (i.e. hostile to whites, Jews, and Asians) flavor. If it doesn’t happen during the current wave of insanity, it will happen during the next one. I’m not sure the current one will end, though. It may be of of them “new normal” deals.

I foresee people using cyberspace to rule through mobs. We are not quite at the point where that would be a slam dunk. Maybe the bread needs to rise a little longer. Maybe America will succeed in getting the current crop of babies to take their pacifiers and nap for a bit, and we’ll see them return with more power when Skynet gets its fingers into all of us sufficiently deeply.

I could totally see Google and Facebook working to make that happen. I’m sure there are Google kids talking about it already. If I’m smart enough to see true technocracy on the horizon, people who actually work for social giants must have seen it years ago.

They saw it if they read my blog.

If you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you better introduce yourself. You’re already way late for boot camp. You can’t save yourself, and the government will either be unwilling or unable to help. You need to know someone who can surround you with favor and tell you where to move and what to do.

Learn from my Bad Example

God changes lives with supernatural revelation, and he has been very generous with me lately. He gave me a compound revelation this month involving my attitude.

He showed me that I need to be much more reluctant to complain. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in cultures where people were pressured to bury their heads in the sand, and I have come to love exposing the truth, but I haven’t done a good job of separating exposure from pointless bellyaching or from reviling or ridiculing. Revealing the truth is very important, and it’s very important to do it in situations where it will destroy your popularity, but you can’t let yourself obsess on what is wrong or let it become an excuse for giving up too early.

It’s good to say, “I hear a noise coming from my front end, so I need to have my bearings checked.” It’s bad to say, “I hate this car. It’s always letting me down. Why can’t I ever have a car that works right? Other people have good cars. I can’t believe this is happening again. I’m so sick of this thing.”

You have to appreciate what you have and what happens to you.

Here is what God has shown me: you have to have what I call an immigrant/orphan/warrior attitude.

Consider immigrants who move the USA. I know many of them are curses to us. Many come filled with hostility toward us. Some perform acts of terrorism. Some expect us to mold ourselves to their toxic, backward cultures, which they themselves fled, instead of adapting themselves to our superior culture. Many come here out of pure selfishness. All those things are true, but I’m not suggesting we be like them in those ways. I’m suggesting we be like them in our appreciation of what we have.

I read an anecdote about a visitor from Russia. This person kept telling her hosts how wonderful the USSR was and how inferior America was. She could not shut up. Then there was a trip to an American supermarket in the winter. The critic looked around at the packed shelves and the fresh fruit and vegetables and started to cry.

That individual appreciated a blessing I have enjoyed every single day I’ve spent in America. I, on the other hand, feel deprived when my local store doesn’t have the exact cut of choice beef I want to buy or the right brand and variety of tomatoes for pizza.

Consider orphans. Many are hard to place, so they get stuck in orphanages for years, or they go from one foster family to another. They dream of having their own homes, with siblings and parents. The rest of us don’t feel much gratitude for situations older orphans pray for every night.

My family did me a lot of harm, but at least I had a family. My bills were paid, and we never had to live in a shelter or even an apartment. My mother was wonderful. I knew my grandparents. I knew my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Both of my parents left me inheritances. My family damaged me more than most white American families, but it also did me a great deal of good.

Think about warriors. When a warrior in a superior force goes into battle, and enemy soldiers start shooting at his position, he doesn’t say, “I am cursed. These people should have given up as soon as they saw us, but they’re trying to kill us anyway, and now I have to go through a miserable battle.” A warrior expects conflict. It’s what he trains for. He sees it as a normal obstacle he has to pass in order to get to victory.

The other day I bought a new stove. My old primitive stove was very hard to clean, and it only had 4 burners. I was reluctant to cook because it was so difficult to get the stove back in order afterward. I found a great induction cooktop at Home Depot for something like 45% off. I measured the existing stove, and while I couldn’t get at the cutout in the stone counter to measure it, I made a reasonable assumption: because appliances are standardized, a 36″ induction cooktop would fit in a cutout made for a 36″ conventional cooktop.

I got the old cooktop out, and I found that the cutout was 3/8″ too short. I had expected the switch to take about 30 minutes. Now I was looking at hiring someone or buying unfamiliar tools, making the new cuts myself, and enduring a long, messy job. I also learned that the manufacturer had not included some brackets for supporting the new stove in a stone counter. I’m talking about two small pieces of steel plus a tube of glue. Should cost about 10 bucks. In fact, these things should be included in the package with a stove that retails for $1800. I looked online, and the price for the “kit” was about $135.

I felt defeated, and that’s ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous. I apologized to God even while I was feeling defeated. I rejected the feeling.

I said I knew the stove was going to fit. Victory was already mine. No doubt about it. I wasn’t experiencing defeat. I was just having a setback. I was blessed with an $1800 stove for which I paid about $1000, I didn’t have to use cash to get it, I got free delivery, I didn’t need help removing the old stove, I was sufficiently handy to know I was going to be able to get the cutout enlarged, I was putting it in a beautiful kitchen in a magnificent house in an extremely pleasant county in the United States of America…what possible excuse was there for feeling cursed and defeated?

I didn’t have a warrior attitude. I had a snowflake attitude. An Antifa/BLM attitude. I knew it. I hated it. I refused to continue in it. I asked God to help me.

I knew that on the other side of the work and the mess, a fantastic new stove was waiting. The new stove has a top which is a continuous sheet of glass. Cleaning it after a messy cooking session takes less than 5 minutes. It has 5 burners, one of which is gigantic, which is a nice feature. It’s much, much faster than gas, conventional, or radiant cooking. It won’t work with certain cookware, but I can get new things, and I have additional portable burners anyway. When I’m not cooking, the surface functions as temporary counter space.

God was blessing me like crazy. Feeling defeated and wronged was not just incorrect; it was offensive.

I made a terrible mess when I installed the cooktop, but a tradesman would have made the exact same mess. Instead of getting a new stove for $1800 plus maybe $500 in installation costs, I got it for $1000, no cash left my bank account, and I learned a lot.

Along the way, I found out I didn’t need the expensive tube of glue and sheet metal brackets.

The Bible promises us victory over and over. It doesn’t say we’ll never have to fight or that things will go exactly the way we want. Victory is not the same thing as lack of conflict. When we win wars decisively, we still have to fight, and we still lose people. No one with any common sense says that makes us losers.

Sometimes God has shown me what it’s like to deal with me and my bad attitude. I have been in situations where I’ve been in charge of people who were doing various things. If you have employees, or if you have hired people temporarily, you’ve been there. I have dealt with people who whined and complained. I have dealt with people who stood around conversing instead of working, while I, the one who was paying them, worked. I’ve dealt with people who were so slow and lazy, they were literally much slower than I would have been had I done things alone. I’ve experienced resentment from people I was paying. I felt I was being punished for giving them money.

When I was slaving away as an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, I worked a couple of Richie Wilkerson’s Rendezvous meetings at the Fillmore Theater on Miami Beach. People volunteered to help the armorbearers. We were there mostly to manage crowds. I had a lot of experience, and I was in a position of authority. A young black man was part of my team.

I set things up the way they were supposed to be, in cooperation with the other armorbearers. Then this young man decided he was in charge. He started moving cordons and changing the way traffic flowed. He started telling me how things were going to be set up, as though I had volunteered to work for him!

His ideas were inept and would have caused problems. I immediately moved things back, and I told him I was running the team. I said if he wanted to help us, he had to follow orders.

He got so mad, he walked off and quit. He could not understand that he we were not equals on the team. It was impossible to explain this concept, which 98% of human beings chosen at random would have understood without being told. No one on the team could figure him out.

I never interacted with him after that. I forgot his face. I don’t know what happened to him. Another young man from the same area had also volunteered, and he could not have been more helpful. He kept making sure he was doing what the team wanted him to do. He never complained. After the conference was over, we would always wave at each other in church and converse a little.

I’ve dealt with a lot of people who could not submit, honor, or appreciate. I have often shown similar attitudes toward God.

If someone is willing to pay you and advise you when he has other options, and you make him miserable, he’s going to limit what he does for you. It’s just not worth it when you have to be treated like you’re imposing. On the other hand, when people have a good attitude, it makes you grateful. It makes you want to do more for them and to be more closely involved with them.

Surely we punish God when we aren’t grateful and respectful, and surely he responds by holding back our blessings. Surely he must increase our blessings when we have better attitudes. I believe there are things I wanted which God kept from me, and now I believe he will provide those things because I will reward him instead of making him wish he had a better son to work with.

Here is something Jesus said:

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?

And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:

And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

When you’re push-starting a car, you don’t push forever. If it doesn’t start to run eventually, you quit pushing.

Every day, I need to see my blessings as though they were new. When I get in my car, I should feel as though I were driving a new car off a dealer’s lot. When I sit in my air-conditioned house, I should feel as though I had been living in a tent in insufferable heat all my life. When I eat and drink, I should feel as though I had just been rescued from a month in a lifeboat. I live in a world where billions of people don’t have the good things I have. I could easily be replaced with someone more grateful.

That’s what happened to the Jews. I’m not talking about replacement theology. They are still God’s chosen. But if you read the Bible, you will see that they got in trouble over and over for taking God’s blessings for granted, and in the end, most didn’t appreciate the greatest blessing of all: their messiah. So most of what he offered went to Gentiles. Now, of course, most Christians take God and his blessings for granted, so we’re in the same boat.

I believe this revelation is extremely powerful and that it will bring me things I couldn’t get before. I pray, and I have faith, but faith isn’t everything. How effective can faith for a result be if God knows you’re going to make him wish he had never granted your request?

I’m astounded when I look back and think of all the blessings I’ve spat on and ruined. My education is an example. I barely did anything in high school, but one of the world’s best universities sent me a letter, asking me to apply. When I was accepted and my parents paid my tuition and expenses without hesitation, I didn’t appreciate it at all. I behaved like a character from the movie Animal House. I thought the administration was my enemy. I thought drunkenness was cool. I made trouble.

I wish I could go through high school again. I went to the best school in Florida. I could have focused on math and science. I could have gone to MIT or Caltech. Even Columbia, the school that accepted me, was a top-notch STEM school.

I know I couldn’t have done much better as things were. I didn’t know God, and I truly was cursed. My family was a constant source of discouragement and pain. Things didn’t go well even when I did things right. But if I had known God and had a better attitude, I would have excelled.

I know people who were thrilled to be able to go to community college. I know people who were thrilled to go to state universities. I know people who have student loans. I had a full ride at one of the best Ivy League schools, and I resented it!

I can’t complain about mowing the yard. Most people don’t have a yard. I can’t complain about doing bookkeeping and taxes. Most people have no money to manage. It’s amazing to me that I ever complained about cleaning up after my pets. Who chose to buy them? How many people are there who would love to have two beautiful exotic birds who love them?

I have to remember that regardless of what happens while I’m here on Earth, I have victory. Under the worst circumstances imaginable, which are nothing like my actual circumstances, I would still be saved when I died. The rejection and problems I face here are like the heckling and reviling Cubans used to experience when they chose to move to America. People would spit on them and call them worms. The speed bumps I deal with are temporary and unimportant, and they precede blessings that will make me forget them.

I think my new outlook will improve my life tremendously, so I want to tell other people who make the same mistakes I did. I hope someone else can make the change earlier and have a better life than the one I’ve had.

Psalm 37:19

Today I talked to my friend Tina about a dream she had.

She found herself at a beautiful house. Outside, the sky was richly colored in shades of blue and pink that resembled cotton candy. The house was situated in an a mountainous area. She didn’t need a key to get inside the house. Once she entered, she saw beautiful furniture, just as she would have wanted it.

She said she hadn’t earned any of it. Someone had prepared it for her as a gift.

This weekend, a couple of friends I call Abe and Sarah on my blog visited with their family, and they told me how wonderful the coronavirus weeks had been to them. They were able to work and make money the whole time. They got stimulus money. They paid off their vehicles. They gained weight. They had peace. They lacked nothing.

Tina told me her experience had been very similar. She lost her job at the beginning of the lockdown, and she had to take a job that paid less. Things worked out so she did better financially with the new job. All her bills were paid on time. She was able to save money. She felt peace. She felt God was looking out for her.

My friends and I have been sheltered and pampered while many other people have contended with lack and fear.

How does the dream connect with the protection and provision God gave Tina?

She thought it might be a vision of heaven. I suppose that could be true. It may mean something else, though. It may be God’s way of showing her he will keep protecting and providing, in excellent style.

It may mean God will move her physically to protect her from the turmoil that’s coming to areas where the ungodly live in large numbers or are able to visit without much effort.

I believe hills and mountains usually represent barriers in the Bible. Strongholds. Maybe the hills in the dream are God’s barriers to Tina’s enemies.

We talked about our mutual friend Travis who died on Mother’s Day. We speculated on why he had not been healed.

Today is Travis’s 30th birthday.

I’m beginning to think God was not willing to leave him here for the George Floyd riots. Travis had some problems with anger in the area of race relations, and as of the time he was shot, he had not been able to let it go completely. He thought Colin Kaepernick was a hero, and sometimes he sounded off on social media for the benefit of his Facebook friends. To be completely honest, it was a little bit hypocritical. The Facebook Travis and the private Travis were different. He hadn’t gotten over his desire to be accepted and admired as a champion of the black race.

Privately, Travis Quinn supported Donald Trump very strongly. He once texted me out of the blue to say, “Trump must be reelected.” He always felt he had to qualify things he said about Trump. He would lay out his criticisms and then say, “but…”

It may well be that had Travis lived, he would have been drawn into the hatred we are seeing from rioters all across the country. Satan attacks people through the doors they haven’t closed yet, and Travis was vulnerable in the area of race.

We don’t know how things are going to pan out. It may be that events black and far-left activists will find infuriating are just over the horizon. Maybe things will happen that will motivate people who are presently calm to become radicalized. Maybe Travis would not have been able to resist this temptation, and maybe he would have cut me off.

I suppose a major provocation has to happen eventually. We know the Beast’s hordes will be more murderous than they are now, and in order for that to happen, there have to be excuses. Things have to happen to set them off.

Maybe President Trump will do something that will flood their emotions.

Some Jews believe Enoch never sinned and that God removed him from the earth because he knew that he would sin if he stayed longer.

If Travis is gone because of his weakness for identifying with an earthly race instead of the family of God, it doesn’t answer the biggest question I have about his death. I still don’t know why I thought God said he would be healed. I will have to wait for the answer.

You have to be a hundred percent behind God. Jesus said you can’t wait because you have to bury your father or because you want to say goodbye to your family. You have to get up and go, without looking back. This racial mess is going to cause a lot of weak people to take their hands off the plow.

Satan Can’t Take Away as Much as God can Give

If things went according to plan, my friend Travis Quinn was buried yesterday. I am told the funeral was set for two p.m. I was not there. Instead, I spent the weekend here at the house, hosting a family that knew Travis.

I don’t know if they want their names on the Internet. I will call them Abe and Sarah. I met Abe when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami. He was also on the team. We used to have breakfast meetings at the Denny’s on Hallandale Boulevard. Sometimes I said a few things about the importance of prayer in tongues and the need to be freed from iniquities. Abe was very quiet. I didn’t think he was paying attention. Later, I found out he was absorbing everything. We became very close.

Abe and I got tired of the way Trinity Church used people and taught lies in order to get money. Things came to a head when his son was burned in the church nursery. He had a large blister on his face, covering a substantial area. We thought he might be scarred for life.

When Abe and Sarah asked for answers, no one in the church would talk. The head pastor, Rich Wilkerson, ran away, which was S.O.P. for him. My impression was that a lawyer told him to keep quiet. When Abe and Sarah took their son to the E.R., they became the focus of attention. They were asked a lot of questions. The obvious reason: the doctors and nurses wanted to get them charged with child abuse. Had someone at the church called and admitted fault, everything would have been cleared up. That didn’t happen.

When someone associated with Trinity has a problem, Trinity discards that person, like a tire which has had a blowout. They put on a new tire and keep moving. They know new tires will keep coming in the door. They adhere to the teachings of P.T. Barnum.

Abe and Sarah left Trinity before I did, and we ended up at the same new church, where the head pastor showed an inordinate interest in their young daughter and was later imprisoned for having a sexual relationship with a little girl.

We have been through a lot together. I watched them move from home to home, generally upgrading. They moved to Orlando while I was still stuck in Miami. Now they’re in Sanford. They don’t go to a prosperity church. Things keep getting better for them.

Abe once noted that his financial situation seemed to improve during times when he didn’t give Trinity his tithes.

Abe’s dad was not around when he was a kid, and he was raised by his grandmother. Somehow, he came out of that with an extraordinary determination to be a perfect father. He watches over his family like a sheepdog watching a flock. No one makes a move he doesn’t notice. Sarah is right there with him, presenting a unified front so the kids will have stability.

Abe was like a patient older brother to Travis. Sometimes he needled him a little. He didn’t let Travis pull anything over on him. He caught things I let Travis get away with. I held Travis accountable on many occasions, but Abe had a lot of experience in the area of correcting young people early, so Travis never got away with anything around him.

There are 5 kids in the family. The youngest, Gabby, is my goddaughter. She turned out to be a real firecracker. Always saying or doing something unexpected. She used to run up to people with no warning and wrap her arms around them as tightly as possible. At one point, she became obsessed with a line from the movie The Incredibles. She would put her hands on her hips and announce, “NO CAPES!” for no apparent reason.

Abe and I have often discussed the many sorry individuals Travis associated with, as well as his sorry hometown. Travis was from Miami Gardens, and Abe was from Liberty City. Both are ghetto areas. Abe got his family out of South Florida early, and, like me, he hated the area so much he was highly disturbed when he had to make occasional visits. He wanted South Florida behind him and his family, period. No looking back. Travis wanted out, but he felt trapped by his father’s problems, and he hated to leave people behind. He had many, many music students, and he wanted them to escape Miami’s ghettos. Travis didn’t move quickly enough. Abe and I both believe this is why he died.

Travis spent his last month alone in a hospital room, with few visits and no communication with friends. I asked to be put on the contact list, but it didn’t happen. I was part of a small group of people who tried to look after his interests. We felt helpless because we were shut out. We still can’t understand why it was so hard to get things done. There are things people automatically do for you when you go to intensive care, unless you’re a serial killer or a pedophile. Those things didn’t seem to happen for Travis, and there is no excuse for anyone who should have been involved.

Abe called me a few days before the viewing. He had been planning to go, even though he hates Miami. Sarah had advised him against it. I could tell his heart was no longer in the trip. We discussed the ways in which we felt Travis had been let down, and Abe said he had decided not to go.

People say you go to wakes and funerals for the dead, not the people they leave behind. That’s not necessarily true. The dead have no idea who goes to their funerals, and they have other things on their minds. They don’t make lists and tape them to their refrigerators so they can think about the people who really loved them. We go to wakes and funerals for ourselves and for others. We need to see the bodies so we can feel the reality of what has happened. We need to grieve with people we care about. We want to support other people who need help.

In Travis’s case, there wasn’t much point in attending. We knew he was really dead. We wouldn’t have been surrounded by people who shared our feelings or who would have looked to us for comfort. We wouldn’t have been able to help anyone.

The viewing was set up so only 10 people could go in at a time, with masks. The funeral was closed to everyone except his family. It wouldn’t have been anything like a typical set of death rituals. When my grandfather died, people came from all over three counties and brought food to my grandmother’s house. Guests were everywhere. Many people attended the funeral. There was a big lunch right afterward, at the church. We were inundated with food. My dad had a fifth of Gentleman Jack in the car trunk, and we socialized over that. Afterward, the same night, the socializing continued. People told funny stories. Old relationships were rekindled, if briefly.

The events following my grandfather’s death were curative and uplifting. If we had gone to Miami for Travis, it would have been different. We would have been reminded why we left. We would have experienced much of the rejection all over again.

It would have been like a date with an ex-girlfriend. All the reasons for the breakup would have flooded back to the forefront.

Travis should have had a cortege. He should have had a band made up of his students and people he knew from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. There should have been a meal afterward. There should have been conversation. Abe and I knew those things were not going to happen. Part of it was due to the epidemic, and part was due to other people’s choices.

With Travis gone, neither of us has any social connection to Miami.

We didn’t want to have to sit and listen to hypocrites who talked about how they loved Travis even though they were never around when he needed help.

I know who Travis went to when he needed a hand moving. I know who he went to when he needed a place to live. I know who didn’t show up when it was time to carry furniture. No one can lie to me.

Not long before he died, Travis did an interview in which he talked about the importance of giving people flowers while they’re alive instead of waiting for their funerals. That says it all. The people who were good to him while he was alive didn’t have anything to prove after he died.

Abe and his family rolled in yesterday afternoon. I cleaned up the house and gave them the second floor. I went grocery shopping, and they arrived while I was gone. I forgot to leave a key. When I got back home, 4 kids were playing in the pool. The fifth starts a new job tomorrow, and she couldn’t make it.

We fired up the grill and made a tremendous amount of food. Burgers. Hot dogs. Smoked sausages. Grilled chicken. Before we ate, we prayed and thanked God for Travis and for the people who fill the hole he left behind. Abe’s kids made water balloons and took him on in a balloon war. Sarah and I sat in the shade and talked.

A lot of my conversation with Abe and Sarah was about coronavirus. I told them how I had noticed that the epidemic was completely different in godly and ungodly areas. I said I had lacked for nothing. I said that apart from what had happened to Travis, it had been a peaceful and plesant time. I said my biggest problem had been weight gain.

Abe and Sarah corroborated what I saw. There is very little disease where they live. They were able to continue working through the entire lockdown. They paid off their vehicles. They gained weight. They were approved for a home loan. They surprised me by telling me they were moving to Leesburg, much closer to me. It’s a definite step up. They’ll be farther from dangerous Orlando when persecution gets worse.

I always pray for God to move my friends away from the Beast’s hordes. I ask him to put them in houses in Christian areas. I even ask him to make other people pay for the houses.

While we were here having fun, my young friend Tina texted me. She said she had had a dream. She wasn’t sure what it meant. Either it was a vision of heaven or an indication that God was going to give her a big house. She said there was a house in the dream, and she could see hills from it. I told her it sounded like my actual life. I haven’t heard the details yet, but I will get them.

I learned some amazing things while my friends were here. They said Gabby had been very excited about visiting. She said she kept saying, “I’m going to see my god-daddy!” That was wonderful to hear. I don’t get to see the family often, so I always wonder if the kids really know who I am. I guess they do.

After swimming, Gabby and Zoey came out in matching outfits. I’ll have to post a photo. I don’t know where kids come up with these things. They wore multi-colored swim coverups and big clear glasses rimmed with rhinestones. So funny. Gabby is the one on the right.

The kids wanted to see the pasture, so they got in my utility cart, and I took them. The last time they were here, I didn’t have cattle. I told them to expect a lot of manure. They couldn’t stop talking. While I was driving, I kept hearing their comments. “Poop!” “Poop!” “Poop!” “Poop!”

The cattle are curious, so they started moving toward the cart. All the girls started yelling. The cattle scared them. They shouted for me to get away from the cattle. After we opened some distance, Gabby said, “Cows are my worst enemy!” Where do kids come up with this stuff? She also said, “Cows are disgusting.”

I kept reminding them they were full of cows at that very moment.

City kids.

The original plan was to leave them in the pasture and go get their parents. Sarah was excited about the pistol targets I had built, and she wanted to see them. Junior was the only kid willing to stay. The others thought the cattle would eat them. I dropped them all by the house and took Abe and Sarah for a tour.

In the meantime, homemade brownies were cooling in the kitchen.

Back at the house, I made whipped cream, and we had warm brownies with Haagen-Dazs vanilla, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce. Gabby insisted on having real maple syrup instead.

Abe and Sarah and I talked more about the polarization of America and the way God’s people are being sifted out.

The kids did something amazing. They cleaned up the house. They asked for brooms. They did the dishes. Before too long, I saw them mopping. Gabby, Zoey, and Cheyenne handled the kitchen. Junior took care of the trash. It was wonderful. They didn’t have to be asked. I couldn’t stop them.

They even swept up around the bird cages. They did a pretty good job of making friends with Marvin and Maynard.

By the time everyone was ready to go to bed, there was not much for me to do.

This morning, I made biscuits, gravy, and fried eggs. The cleaning continued. Gabby came over to me and hugged me and said she wanted to stay and keep cleaning.

They didn’t complain. They kept thanking me. I kept thanking them back. Abe and Sarah said they raised them to be functional kids, and they were going to be functional adults.

Sometimes having guests is hard. Having this crew is actually helpful. I will think about it the next time I’m a guest.

I took a photo of the ladies working in my somewhat cluttery kitchen. You can see Cheyenne in there to the right of her mom.

I’ve been told I have to have Thanksgiving dinner in their new home, and that I’m not allowed to do anything. I can’t imagine what that would be like.

I could have been in Miami, in a very different environment. I would have seen some people I like. On the other hand, I would have seen some people who don’t like me at all. I would also have been around racists. Some of Travis’s friends don’t like white people. Some have criticized me on the Internet in comments tinged with racism. Apparently, I can’t understand Travis because I’m white. These people weren’t around when Travis was being helped by whites and Hispanics. I guess they were busy being oppressed.

Travis passed on Mother’s Day. I suppose that will color that day in the future for some he knew. The day of his funeral, which should have been a down day for me, was a day of love and celebration. It was a day of very good news for me and others. From now on, when I think of the day of his funeral, I will think of redemption and comfort.

I thought about Job yesterday. He had 10 children, and they all died in one day. Then when his tribulation was over, God gave him 10 more. It didn’t erase what had happened to his first 10, but after the new children arrived, how much room could there have been for grief? The human consciousness is limited. You can’t entertain unlimited grief and unlimited joy simultaneously. Surely sufficient joy will displace grief.

I lost Travis for the time being, but yesterday I had 6 people here doing what he used to do, and I had Tina’s text. I also heard from another young lady I met at Trinity. She’s planning to visit along with her sister and my other godchild.

Part of me wants to say, “This is all wonderful, but I still don’t have Travis back.” It’s a very small part of me. It’s hard to hear it over the rest of me.

I hope Abe and Sarah move soon. Their visits give me life, and my floors will always need mopping.

Sorry, Rocket

They say no good deed goes unpunished, and while this expression is not quite Biblical, it is often proven true.

Last night, I walked into my bedroom, which has sliding glass doors. I looked out through the glass, and what did I see? A miserable, stinking raccoon in MY yard.

I guess it was 25 feet away. It must have seen me through the glass, but it didn’t seem disturbed. Maybe raccoons are too stupid to understand windows.

It was on the small side, and a weaker person might have described it as cute.

I looked at the bolt-action rifle in .204 Ruger lying on my bed (I have a good explanation), and I had the obvious thoughts. I could slip on some earmuffs, open the door a bit, turn on the scope (I have a good explanation), wait for it to boot, and send the coon to coon heaven. Alternatively, I could sneak around the side of the house.

I was tired. I didn’t know what to do with a dead coon. I felt funny about killing a little one. I waved my hand a few times, the coon realized I was not furniture, and he ran off.

This morning I got up and saw that he had disturbed some blackberry briars in pots. One of them is not looking too good now. This is how I am repaid for my mercy.

My new policy: death to all coons regardless of age, size, or how much they remind me of Disney films.

I had a pet coon for about a week when I was a kid. I had to feed it with a bottle. The person who sold it to me told me to rub its belly with a warm cloth to aid digestion. My mother took it to a vet while I was at school, for the usual raccoon checkup, and he told her to get rid of it ASAP. Coons can carry rabies without showing symptoms, and they get mean when they grow up.

That was the end of my coon-keeping days. By the time school let out, the coon had been returned for a refund.

He was very cute. He had little black hands that were cool to the touch and looked like expensive gloves. He waddled when he was full of milk. His distant relations here on the farm are cute, too, but they still have to die.

I haven’t thought much about disposing of coons, possums, armadillos, and coyotes. You can toss a squirrel a good distance from your house and forget about it, but bigger animals stink, and friends show up for the funeral and free meal. I went online and asked around, and the consensus seems to be that tossing is still the way to go. Just increase the distance. Because carcasses attract other varmints, they can lead to more kills and fewer varmint problems.

My grandmother ate coons. She fixed one for my dad and my grandfather, and my dad said that by the time he finished chewing a bite, it was as big as a lampshade. Apparently it just expanded without falling apart. He was not a fan.

She also ate possums and groundhogs. I’m trying to think of an animal she would not eat.

I don’t really see myself eating coons. Also, my understanding is that the pelts are no good this far south. I could see preserving a coon tail for the amusement value.

I’m going to come up with a coon game plan. I think I’ll just use my carry gun if I see one far from the house. If I see one in the yard, I’ll go for the .17 HMR. If I decide to set up a blind and shoot them, I’ll use the .204 Ruger and the computerized night scope with the built-in video camera. At the very least, I’ll keep the tail to freak out visitors, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll try to cook part of the beast.

There. Plan made.

I could use the 16-gauge with #6 shot or the Saiga-12 with law enforcement loads, but I really like rifled projectiles.

I just got a new stainless barrel for my carry 10mm. Midway USA had a sale. I could not resist. I paid $79, which is a steal. It should be better for shooting lead, and it provides better case support for hot rounds. The tradeoff is that it may be pickier about ammunition. Glock chambers are loose and relatively short, so cases feed easily. Not sure if I should use the new barrel when I carry. I want the gun to feed. That’s for sure. But all my defensive ammunition is test-chambered. I think. It ought to run.

I felt bad about shooting a youngster, but then when it ran off, I felt bad about not looking after my property. Coons are bad news, just like rats. I should have blasted it.

I’m too sweet for my own good. That’s my problem.

I apologize to all red-blooded American males who don’t wear Capri pants or skinny jeans. I have let all of you down.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord

I have bad news. This afternoon, someone sent me an Instagram photo indicating that my friend Travis has died.

To a person who looks with the natural eye only, this is not shocking. Travis had been in intensive care for weeks following an accidental shooting which led to complications. To people who have felt great faith that Travis was going to be healed, it’s a major blow.

A year or two back, I listened to Derek Prince as he taught people to prophesy. I decided to try it. Paul tells us to covet prophecy, and he says it’s a better gift than tongues in some ways. God clearly wants us to do it. I started doing it once in a while, and then I made a point of doing it a lot every day.

I heard positive things. “I will build you up.” “None of the things you worry about will happen to you.” “My love will pour through you.” I rarely heard anything negative. That concerned me, because I knew from prayer in tongues that it was possible to get in the way of the Holy Spirit and add your own material. I prayed repeatedly for guidance. I had other people pray. I did not want to be a false prophet.

The other day, I heard myself saying Travis would be healed. Yesterday, someone who is very, very honest said God told her the same thing.

Look, it can still happen. He can still recover. As I said before, Lazarus stank when he was healed. He was dead and rotting. But generally, the dead stay dead.

I knew before this happened that if Travis died, I would have a major problem apart from the grief. I knew I would have to question what I thought I heard from God. That’s a big deal. I have been relying very strongly on what I thought was God’s voice for years. How much am I wrong about? What do I have left to hold onto?

You can’t sweep problems like this under the rug. Pretending things didn’t happen is not acceptable. You have to hold yourself accountable.

It’s as though I built several rooms onto my house, and one or more have to be torn down. I can’t entertain guests in a house that isn’t habitable. How can I talk to other people about God right now?

What can I tell the world about Travis?

He had a bad start. He got in trouble a lot when he was a kid.

He excelled in music when he was in elementary school. By the time I met him, he played 11 instruments well.

His Dad tried to raise him and his siblings well. His mother and father split, and his father deteriorated. He was isolated from the family.

I met Travis at Trinity Church in Miami. I believe he was 17. We were on the security team. We became unlikely friends. In prayer sessions behind closed doors, we talked about things the pastors didn’t want to hear about: prayer in tongues, casting out demons, confession, and transformation through the Holy Spirit. Travis got hooked, and he started to change.

He kept growing, and our friendship grew. I started making pizza for the church’s cafe, and Travis became my sous chef.

We knew the church was a mess. We both left. He came to the new church I joined. We left that one, too. We started spending a lot of time praying at my house. During one session, Travis had a vision of a woman he believed would be his wife. He never saw her face.

Travis was a teacher. He worked at a government-funded center, teaching ghetto kids music. He wanted black children to be successful and appreciated. That desire burned in him. He could not accept the way black people in America were living.

He was hurt over and over by the things that happened to young people he knew. He was frustrated with their parents, who wouldn’t drive them to lessons. Kids had unwanted babies. They got shot. One friend from church got caught driving a stolen Mercedes, and after the police handcuffed him, he jumped into a canal and drowned.

Travis wanted to see black people rise up and do well, and over and over, he was slapped in the face by deaths, illegitimate births, and incarcerations. It caused him tremendous pain. He could not let go.

He wanted to be the first member of his family to get a degree. He had started college at FAMU in Tallahassee, but he got caught up in a marching band scandal and left. I encouraged him to go to the University of Miami and audition, and one day, he went without telling me and got a full ride, less room and board.

He worked harder than any student I ever knew. He lived in rented rooms. He slept on people’s couches. He sometimes rode a bicycle 15 miles at night to get home from jobs. He was promised a car, but by the time he got it, it was in such bad shape it had to be scrapped. His cheap, wobbly secondhand bicycle was stolen by someone who must have been desperate as well as heartless. He had to scrounge up a new one. He never quit.

When I left Miami, I made him my house sitter until I sold the house. I told him he was the Fresh Prince of Coral Gables. He loved the peace and safety.

During his time there, I got baptized at a Last Reformation event. I told Travis about it, and he got so excited, he borrowed a car and drove to my house near Ocala to be baptized in my pool. He couldn’t submerge completely in my tub. It was 51 degrees out when he went into the pool. He drove up in a borrowed car, stayed one night, and drove back.

When the place finally sold, I was concerned about him, but he landed on his feet. He found a place near school. He struggled, but he didn’t live in the street.

When COVID-19 hit, he had a problem. He played gigs to make money, and the gigs were gone. We prayed over the phone. He said God would handle it.

He got a respiratory bug in March. He had a high fever and aches. I told him to get checked, but he stayed home. Some friends and I prayed, and his symptoms dropped off to nearly nothing overnight.

Travis got in contact with me a few times about a friend who wanted to get a firearm. He asked me for advice. I saw nothing odd about it. I suggested a Glock. A simple, reliable gun. I said I would consider .45 ACP if it were me. I probably mentioned .40 S&W.

On April 9, my phone rang. The caller ID named Travis, but the voice was someone else’s. The man on the other end said he was Travis’s friend. He said Travis had been shot accidentally. He stressed “accidentally.” I asked if they had called 911. Hoping for a break, I asked where Travis had been shot. The friend said, “in the chest region.” No break.

I could hear Travis in the background pleading with God. He wasn’t afraid to die. He just didn’t want to die that way, so soon. He said, “Not this way, God!” That was the last time I heard his voice. His friend hung up.

After that, the information dried up. No one answered his phone. I started accounts on Instagram and Facebook, hoping to alert his family. I found his brother and let him know. I thought the family would handle things.

I didn’t want to go online and say, “TRAVIS HAS BEEN SHOT.” I thought it would make his family panic. Now I wish I had done it. Maybe more people would have tried to help. I worked with some friends who tried to look after Travis’s affairs, and the family was not responsive. We didn’t hear from them for days. I assumed things were going well because the early report was that the injury was not life-threatening.

Travis lived out his final days in a remarkable state of isolation. There was no phone in his room. He was intubated at least part of the time. They didn’t give him a laptop so he could Skype. The hospital was so strict, they would not allow cards into the room. Recently, a nurse told Martha Travis had never had a visitor.

We knew very little about what was happening.

As far as I know, he didn’t die from a gunshot wound. He died from complications. He wasn’t getting oxygen. He had an infection. He was tested regularly for covid, but the tests were negative. Of course, the tests are not reliable. He may have had covid in March, and he may have relapsed after the shooting.

Would things have been different with better communication? I don’t know, but things were handled very badly.

I thought I could point to Travis as a success story. Someone whose life had successfully repaired, partly with my participation. I thought I would see his wife and children. I thought I would be at the wedding.

He’s in heaven. That’s for sure. If he had any issues with God, you can be sure he cleaned them up while he was alone in the hospital. You can say that makes him a success, but it’s not the kind of success I had in mind.

I thought God had given him to me as a sort of son, to make up for my failure to marry.

Now the crop is gone, and it’s late in the season.

Is it right to feel sorry for him? He has seen Jesus. He is perfect. He is happy. He is fulfilled. He is safe, forever. He’s with my dad. Surely they have talked today.

I suppose if I grieve, I’m really feeling sorry for myself, not Travis. He’s practically a god now.

Over the last few days, I’ve been telling God I would be happy to take Travis’s place. It didn’t matter to me. I enjoy life, but it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful irons in the fire (one less now), and I am not far from elderly.

Now I’m still here, he’s gone, his wife will have to marry someone else, and his kids will not be born. There will be no one to help his dad, who has MS and lives in a facility, unless God sends him a friend. His dad had been very bitter, but he had come around. He had started praying with Travis. He had started calling him often instead of shutting him out. Where does a 59-year-old man in a wheelchair go to replace a son like that?

Will anyone try to save Travis’s family now? Who else will care?

I spoke to my friend Freddly about the news. She’s a nurse in a management position, and she deals with dying people, including covid patients. She is very experienced. She says something is wrong. She says young men don’t just die suddenly, even when they’re intubated and connected to ECMO machines. She says that happens to the elderly. The nurses knew Martha had a special relationship with Travis. According to Freddly, they would have made sure Martha was informed had he taken a sudden turn for the worse. Even though she was not his wife, they would have seen to it that she had a chance to come to his bedside had they thought he was about to die. They didn’t do that. Two days running, they said there was no change, and there is no chance they were wrong. They told her he was in the same condition at 9:30 this morning. So what happened?

She said she wished she could look at his chart.

It’s good to have an expert to talk to, not that it does much good now.

I talked to a mutual friend today. He was on the Trinity Church security team with Travis and me. He wants to go to the funeral if there is one. My concern is that Trinity will be in charge. I don’t want to see people who used Travis using him as a tool to boost their profiles. I am also not excited about being among people he knew who let him down consistently. But on the other hand, it might be good to show up, welcome or not, and hold my head up and look them in the eye.

I don’t want to go to Miami. Not even for this. I don’t know how it will play out.

It was a great, great privilege to know Travis and to be of some assistance to him. I’m glad he’s out of harm’s reach now. He could not catch a break in this life. It seemed like it rained on him every day. He fought the curses of black life, and he still died like a black man who was still immersed in them. That’s all finished now. I will take the good with the bad.

I won’t get to see him stand at the altar, and I won’t get to hold his kids. I won’t have a third godchild or a boy named after me. That’s okay. We have a father who makes all things right, even if it has to wait until after the resurrection.

I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I will remember how blessed I was to know him in this life.

A friend who led the armorbearer team at Trinity Church just did a final roll call for Travis via text message. His call sign was Bass Clef.

So that’s it. Travis didn’t sound off here, but he was present at a better roll call today. It won’t be that long before I sound off as well, and then all our troubles here on earth will be forgotten.

Hope Your Morning was This Good

Some good things are happening today. First, “Martha” texted and said my friend Travis is still with us, and his condition has not changed. As always, I call that a win. Finding out that he’s alive is great. Learning that he hasn’t gotten worse is icing on the cake. Now we’re just waiting to hear that he’s improving. If you’ve been praying, thanks.

I sent the news out today via text, and my friend Tina responded. I wrote about her the other day. She called me after reading about Travis on Instagram, and since then she has been part of the prayer team.

Today Tina received the news, and I also said I had been saying, “Travis is healed, and Jesus Christ is glorified.” She said this was confirmation of what the Lord had told her the day before. Naturally, I had to ask for more information, so she called.

I can’t recall everything she said, but I can hit the high points.

Yesterday, she spent time praying for Travis in the Spirit and with her understanding. She said the Lord told her her prayers were answered. She said he said Travis was going to be healed, and that he would be healed in such a way that the doctors and providers would know the healing didn’t come from their efforts.

She said God told her she didn’t have to ask for healing. She said he told her to command it and declare it done, so that’s what she has been doing.

I hadn’t told her what I was doing. Our choices were made independently.

She said God told her he was going to work on Travis’s family. That will be nice to see.

Tina is praying for God to help the providers do things they could never do without his help. I am agreeing.

Bonus: I put Tina in touch with Martha, and they hit it off. They are very similar. Two young black women of excellent character who are responsible and successful. Tina can help Martha get to know God. Martha and I texted for a very long time yesterday. I suppose God is drawing her to people who can give her a little guidance.

I had a real text storm today. My friends are really getting behind Travis.

In the midst of all this, I made myself biscuits and gravy. I forgot to halve the recipe, so I ate a little more than I should. The biscuits were wonderful. I keep tinkering with my recipe.

Here is what I did today:

INGREDIENTS

1-3/4 cups AP flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
2/3 cup milk
1-2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
2 tbsp. cold bacon grease
2 tbsp. hard butter
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. citric acid

I should increase the acid slightly, but these were wonderful.

Maybe I can wind down a little now. Who wants to clean my kitchen?

KNOCK IT OFF

I have decided to publish an edict. All inhabitants of earth must comply as of yesterday.

Stop hoarding bread flour.

I still can’t get bread flour in my county. I can get all-purpose, which, of course, isn’t good for all purposes. I can get self-rising. I can get White Lily. I can get all types of corn meal. I haven’t seen bread flour in weeks, and yeast is also unavailable.

Why on earth are people hoarding bread flour and yeast? Who are they fooling? They’re not baking.

Here are some facts no one seems to think about.

1. White flour goes bad in a relatively short time, so unless you can freeze it in an airtight container, hoarding it is likely to lead to substandard bread.

2. Bread is readily available. Stores are packed with it.

3. Bread freezes beautifully.

I don’t have a real problem, because when I saw how things were going, I bought a bag of gluten. I add it to all-purpose flour, and that pretty much turns it into bread flour. Still, I am issuing my edict. I am tired of the nonsense.

I don’t know why corn meal is still available. You can get all the Martha White cornbread mix with Hot Rize your trunk can hold. I had this in mind yesterday when I bought bacon. It’s technically possible to make cornbread without bacon grease, but I hope it never comes to that. It would be disgusting and demoralizing.

People should be thinking about biscuits more than bread. Biscuits are better than bread. Wait! Hold your venom! I will make my case.

It only takes 20 minutes to make biscuits. Furthermore, biscuit recipes tend to be smaller than bread recipes, so you are less likely to make way too much and eat all of it at one sitting.

Not that I know anything about that.

Okay, yes, homemade bread is one of the greatest things ever, but the truth is that it’s too good to keep in your house on a daily basis. If you bake your own bread regularly, you’ll eat 1500 bread calories every day.

Of course, I had yeast before the hype…I mean “pandemic”…started. In fact, I had one more jar than I needed.

I keep laughing when I see how God provides for me. Today I had to make up a batch of my no-scrub shower spray. One of the ingredients is 6 ounces of Dawn dishwashing liquid. In the current hysteria, Dawn is seen as a miracle cure, for reasons I have not been able to determine. Maybe Oprah and Dr. Oz drink it. Most of the time, even here, a trip to the store to get Dawn will be fruitless.

I had about 4 ounces left in the kitchen bottle. Was I concerned? No, because I had a couple of bottles for the upstairs bathrooms, plus one huge jug in the workshop for the pressure washer. But I wondered…had God done it again? Was there ANOTHER bottle under the kitchen sink? I had to look.

There it was. Full. Waiting.

Speaking of Oprah, I kind of wonder when we’re going to start hearing celebrity hoarding stories. They have to exist. Celebrities are generally venal and self-absorbed. They think they’re gods with special importance to humanity, because we can’t get by without their naked Instagram photos and self-righteous Tweets. How did we survive before Chrissy Teigen started telling us what to do? She’s a trained model! Remember Leo DiCaprio flying around on private jets to fight global warming? The stories will come. I’m sure of it.

I had a dream about celebrities last night. I dreamed I was in some venue where Whitney Houston was singing. She was made up beautifully, and she was wearing some sort of partially transparent catsuit. She wasn’t on a stage. She was on a table, on all fours, with her head down near the table top. She was completely engrossed in herself and her singing. Her behind was considerably higher than her face. Her knees were pretty far apart.

Fans weren’t separated from her the way they were during her life. They were walking around the table. Some were touching her. Some were putting their hands between her buttocks, practically committing rape. She was oblivious. She was caught up in her fame and in getting what she had always hoped for: attention and admiration. She felt like a success.

She didn’t look happy. Her expression was like that of an extremely thirsty person who was drinking water. She looked desperate.

I think the dream came from God. It wasn’t a sex dream. It wasn’t exciting for me. I think it was about people who debase themselves in order to become famous. They think they’re in control, but in reality, they are like whores for countless uncaring strangers. They think they’re leaders, but they’re really the worst type of followers. They have no freedom.

Many famous people serve the Beast. The Beast speaks through the mob, and in order to stay on top, celebrities have to obey the mob. We’re in a time when the Beast is training the mob to be more responsive. Celebrities are a big part of it.

Haven’t they always been?

Whitney Houston is one of Satan’s masterpieces. She had everything, and she died naked in a bathtub, in a filthy hotel bathroom, full of drugs, surrounded by takers. She was rich, but she was married to a man who beat her. The Bible says God lifts people up above “the waters.” Whitney Houston drowned in 10 inches of water, on dry land.

Is it me, or are degrading celebrity deaths becoming more common? Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Prince…seems like there is an increase, and on top of that, we are suddenly seeing male celebrities die naked from hanging, which suggests erotic asphyxiation. Not a flattering way to be remembered. Solo erotic asphyxiation is one of the most narcissistic, selfish, fleshly things a person can do in this life. When physical pleasure becomes that important to you, you have a problem.

The other day I learned that many gays are now injecting their genitals with meth and a Viagra-like drug called Trimix. Former Tallahassee mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was found naked and unconscious at what appears to have been an injection party. Pleasure is nice, and a certain amount is harmless, but you shouldn’t trade your soul for it, especially in a subculture in which a man of 50 is considered too old to socialize with. Sooner or later, you will find yourself deprived of access to the things you built your life around.

I keep praying in tongues and trying to prophesy every day. I don’t want to be without guidance and correction. Look how crazy the world is getting. Without God, I will be as lost as anyone else.

I’ve been trying to figure T.B. Joshua out. He’s a Nigerian preacher I’ve written about. He prophesies a lot. It seems very clear that he is the real thing, but sometimes he and his ministry are disappointing. He said he saw “a woman winning” before the 2016 election, and when Clinton lost, he or his people took the video down. Then later he said he had actually seen the popular vote. Maybe his explanation was correct, but taking the video down was not.

Earlier this year, he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing the epidemic away. Sure enough, afterward, the numbers in China dried up abruptly. But later he claimed the epidemic would end by March 27, and he didn’t limit it to China. Obviously, the epidemic got worse. Then the video containing the prophesy disappeared. Now they have a video saying he predicted that “the noise” of the epidemic would end, and they’re supporting it with a Forbes article claiming March 28 is the day the acceleration of the contagion rate changed instantly.

I think he’s a real prophet who does not always understand his own prophesies, and I think he is covering up when he gets things wrong. That’s unacceptable.

If it’s true, it confirms what I believe, which is that we aren’t supposed to depend on prophets. We are supposed to BE prophets, as Moses indicated and Joel confirmed.

I am trying to prophesy every day, but I’m not transcribing it and putting it here. I want to see how things come out. If I start to feel secure enough to share things with other people, I will. If I’m not sure, I shouldn’t be saying things that could mislead. My purpose isn’t to tell other people the future, anyway. It’s to connect them with God so he can tell them the future and whatever else they need to hear.

My feeling is that even if you’re prophesying for real, if you’re not experienced, you can end up taking over from God and saying things that aren’t correct. I don’t think the gift is enough. I think a little experience is necessary. We’ll see if I’m right.

Living by prophecy is like climbing a mountain one foothold at a time. Every time you speak about what you should do, you have to establish a new foothold and then jump onto it, abandoning the security of the old one. You need to know the footholds are solid.

That’s all I have. I need to go out and test a few rounds of defensive 10mm. I’m hoping to put an end to my search for a good, solid recipe.

Pandemic Logic at Work

I have to ask: are we having a meat shortage or not?

Last week, they told us meat was going to become a problem, fast. Whether or not it was true, I felt I had to get out there and try to blunt the effects of hoarding by picking up a few pounds of meat. I have learned that when people think something is in short supply, they will generally hog it and make it hard to find, whether or not it’s scarce.

Today I went to the grocery. My local Winn-Dixie had lots of beef on sale. They also had bacon on sale. I picked up two pounds. I’ve been making biscuits, and I will need bacon grease in the future.

I went to Publix, which is another chain. I was hoping to find real bread flour and yeast. I had no luck in the baking aisle. I checked on bacon. They were somewhat low, and there were little signs telling people not to hog it.

At Winn-Dixie, they were selling bacon two for one. At Publix, the signs said you should only take one package.

One store was trying to get rid of pork, and a store two or three miles away was trying to prevent a run. This is the way the panic has been. What’s unobtainable on one block is abundant on the next.

Smithfield is a big pork producer, and they have been named among the likely plant-closers. Smithfield bacon was on sale here today. Okay. That certainly makes sense.

Complicating things, the situation varies from state to state. My cousin lives near Chicago. She says they can’t get meat. She says you have to park across the street to get into Walmart for anything, and her son told her it would take hours to get inside the building. Those nice, generous Chicagoans. You have to admire them.

What’s the story? Is there no shortage? Is there a slight shortage? Is the shortage still a week or so away? Did Trump abort the shortage when he pressured the meat packers and gave them special status?

Why is it you can’t get into a Chicago-area Walmart while the one closest to me is packed with nearly everything and not crowded? They even sell toilet paper. There is a lot of empty space in the paper aisle, but you can get toilet paper. In Chicago, you pretty much have to use leaves.

I’m wondering if this epidemic is completely different for Christians and unbelievers. Are they suffering more than we are? I live in an area where chain stores play Christian music, and things are not bad at all.

I guess reality is always different for the blessed and the cursed. It was certainly different when the flood started and when God burned Sodom and Gomorrah. It was different when he struck Egypt with plagues and killed Pharaoh and his army.

I don’t think the meat shortage will amount to much, because Trump is on the case. Still, if you live in a godless area where people don’t care about each other, a perceived shortage can be worse than an actual shortage.

Maybe when the election comes, they will marvel at us because we haven’t turned on Trump. Maybe because their experience has been worse, they will assume we went through the same thing.

I did something fun today. I bought paper towels. I bought 6 big rolls of Bounty. Real paper towels. Not an off brand. Did I need them? Not really, but I’ll need them in a few weeks, and I figured it was okay to buy them because they were sitting on the shelf in mid-afternoon. I wouldn’t have done it at nine. I just felt that if I bought them, I would stop thinking about paper towels.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them. Hard to say.

I am considering getting masks. I have no idea how I’ll do it, so maybe it won’t happen. I think they will do nearly nothing to protect me, but they might help other people if I get C19 and don’t know it. I wonder if they’re available anywhere.

Amazon has some dubious listings that look fraudulent. And they want over four bucks each for disposable masks. Surely that’s not the normal price. Forget that. I’m not paying $4 every time I get out of the car.

I checked, and the regular price is around $1.20 per mask, if you buy 10. It’s a wonder no one is shooting price gougers.

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

At first, they told us masks were pointless. Then they told us N95 masks could protect us if fitted very carefully and disposed of after use. Now they’re telling us to wear nearly anything.

Forget it. If cheap is all I can get, I have a camo thing I bought for hunting. It will be just as good as a surgical mask, and I can wash it.

I want to get tested to see if I really did have C19 in January. It would be great to find that out. It would mean I am immune and in all likelihood, not contagious. Testing is still reserved for sick people, however, and going into a place where they are testing seems like the only really good way to catch C19 in this county.

I’m going to chronograph some ammunition and forget the whole business. I think June will be a very nice month.