Put Down the World and Take a Break

I said I would write about the little phrases God gives me, and I got one today, so here I am.

I was watching a Marvel movie: Captain America: Civil War. Unlike the clumsy and intelligence-insulting Wonder Woman, this is actually a well-written, entertaining film. The idea is that the Avengers get in trouble for running around the world and getting into destructive battles that kill a lot of extras, so they do what no intelligent person would ever do: they agree to be overseen and commanded by an international body. Yeah, that’ll work. You want to replace 6 or 8 smart people with relatively good judgment (neglecting Tony Stark) and replace them with a bunch of idiots from Botswana and Pakistan. Good luck with that.

Anyway, superhero movies draw us because superheroes are false messiahs. Jesus was an extremely special person with extraordinary powers and a unique and vital mission. We don’t like Jesus all that much, so we create little carnal messiahs who have power and special status without the annoying, unglamorous humility and obedience.

Superheroes are proud and full of what my dad calls…okay, I will paraphrase…urine and vinegar. They are energetic people who feel great senses of purpose. They get all sorts of admiration because they’re special. We watch them and experience their strange, special lives vicariously.

People who are anointed by God can get superhero complexes. The word “messiah” means “anointed.” If God works through you, you may start to feel a little too special. You may not even want it. You may realize it’s ridiculous, wrong, and something to be embarrassed about. That doesn’t mean you can shake it.

Elijah appears to have had an issue with the superhero complex. He told God this:

I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

God responded as follows:

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.

Depending on your mindset, you could take this as a rebuke if God said it to you, but to me, it would be a comfort. Nobody who has any understanding of the importance of humility wants to feel too special. It’s good to sit down and hand the ball off to someone else. It reminds you of your real place in the world. It shows you you’re not alone.

I was watching this movie full of fictional special people (played by professional pretenders running around in silly costumes), and I thought about the things God had been doing for me lately. I have had times of real supernatural joy because of the things God has been showing me about the power and deliverance that are coming to me. Sometimes I feel a little special; it’s a delusion. Today I heard a new phrase from God, and it came back to me during the movie: “One of many.”

It will probably be impossible for people to understand, but that made me feel great. IF God is doing big things in me, it doesn’t mean I have to carry a unique burden that sets me apart. I am one of many. I don’t have to be weighed down with pride, which is always heavy. If I’m just one of many, then I’m fine the way I am. I don’t have to carry too much. I have limited responsibility. I have all sorts of allies out there, working around the clock, each in his turn.

I can’t explain it any better than that.

I can relax and join the crowd of God’s children. I don’t have to be conspicuous.

The devil is “special,” and he hasn’t had a vacation in 6,000 years. He’s the father of all snowflakes. He picked up the crown. Now let him carry it in misery.

Every time I think, “one of many,” I feel like weight is falling off my shoulders.

We have a lot of preachers who feel “just a little bit superior,” as the Church Lady used to put it. The late Eddie Long let a nut named Ralph Messer wrap him in a Torah scroll, put him on a throne, and have him carried around while proclaiming him king. Denny Duron, the preacher I wrote about earlier this week, wrote a whole book saying the rest of us were just Abishais.

We should be content to be unrewarded redshirts, like the short-lived ensigns on old Star Trek episodes, while mighty, holy, rich characters like his lordship the messiah Duron and his exceedingly ordinary kids get the attention and cash.

It was clearly his attempt at excusing his money-centered, attention-centered ministry of foolishness.

Jewish sages are probably the most “special” people outside of Christian TV. You should see how young Orthodox Jews speak about them. So brilliant. So righteous. God should be grateful they’re willing to talk to him.

Isaiah said man’s righteousness is like used menstrual rags. He was right.

If you have problems fighting pride, remember this: “one of many.” It will make you feel much better.

Knife Lost in Fog of Cybercommerce

I am quite frustrated. My hunting knife has not arrived yet.

I know everyone wants to read about this. No need to thank me.

I went to Amazon and ordered an Entrek Javalina from Knife Center. I like Knife Center. I have bought stuff from them before. The knife didn’t ship, so I contacted them. They said they didn’t know when they would receive it. What? This would have been good information to have when I placed the order. I thought the website said it was in stock, but they didn’t have it. I canceled and ordered from a different outfit. I elected to pay $7 extra for faster shipping. Squirrel season is nearly over. I can’t let the squirrels down.

I placed my order on the 23rd. I kept getting tracking updates saying the knife was in “pre-shipping,” meaning a label had been printed but the Post Office didn’t have the package yet.

This is 2018. An Amazon “seller” can be a fat guy who never gets out of bed except to go to the Post Office. “Pre-shipping” could mean he put the knife in a box and dumped it in a pile in his bedroom next to a mountain of dirty Star Wars underwear. I contacted the seller to get the facts. All I got back was the shipping date, order date, and tracking number, which is information I already had. I didn’t even get a note. “Sorry; we mailed it yesterday.” Whew! It would be exhausting to type something like that. I guess.

Long boring story short and still boring: I have no sheath knife. The squirrels are mocking me.

On the up side, I have a game camera on the way. I have to find out what’s roaming around in my yard. I thought a coyote dug up my blackberry plant and deposited a coyote stool in its place, but as I spend more time examining poop on the web (not on German websites; don’t worry), I am beginning to think it may be bobcat poo. My friend Mike says cats bury their poo==>bobcats are cats==>do the math.

Should I shoot the bobcat, if it exists? Interesting question.

I never really thought about shooting a bobcat. They don’t sound appetizing. I am not Chinese, after all. Also, I assumed they were protected and sacred on account of being semi-big cats. Turns out they’re not. You can shoot the bejeezus out of them. There is a season, but there is no bag limit.

This is a cut and paste of the bobcat rules:

Dec. 1 – March 31

By all legal rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows, pistols and air guns.

Those with a hunting license may possess no more than 1 bobcat pelt between April 1 and Nov. 30, unless pelt has CITES tag. Also, bobcat pelts may not be taken out of Florida unless tagged. Bobcats may be chased with dogs year round.

Bag Limit: No Limits

Explain that if you can. If I can shoot 3,000 bobcats during the season, Florida will have no problem with it, but I can only keep one skin.

I don’t want a bobcat skin. Cats smell, and bobcat pelts probably smell, too. And what would I do with it? But it makes me angry that I can’t keep them. What am I supposed to do with them if I can’t keep them? Make a big cat-smelling pile of pelts in the pasture? Is it better for bobcat hides to rot than to adorn my tractor seat or whatever? I guess it is.

Why is there no bag limit? What does Florida have against bobcats? Why is there no explanation? Why are we tagging animals we want to get rid of? Once you have it tranquilized in the back of the van, why not put a pillow over its face and get it over with?

I will never understand hunting laws.

I don’t really plan to shoot a bobcat, although maybe I should, because I suppose it’s possible that a time will come when the ability to kill troublesome predators will be important. When Oprah wins the presidency, the economy tanks, and BLM starts sending reparations squads into the suburbs to confiscate groceries.

It would certainly improve my hunting skills.

If only I had a knife to skin bobcats with.

I found a bobcat recipe online. Come on. Seriously?

I remember cutting up a dead cat in college. Let me stress: this was for a course. I didn’t find it on the sidewalk. Anyway, the meat looked pretty good, and through the formaldehyde, there was a smell that could conceivably have been inviting, but there was also a catty sort of musky stankness in there. I would expect bobcat meat to be fragrant, and not in a good way. I can’t help wondering, though.

I did a couple of bad things with that cat. For one, I used its tail to decorate an elevator. One of the elevators in my dorm was missing a button. I uninstalled the cat’s tail and inserted it in the hole. It looked like a cat had somehow shoved itself through a 1″ aperture and gotten stuck inside the panel. It was hilarious. To me, anyway. Also, there was an occasion when I wanted to do some dissection at home, so I checked my cat out and walked across campus with it. I had the option of covering it up, but, well…

They gave us those cats in clear plastic bags. They were stiff, spreadeagled, with startled expressions on their faces. “I thought I was going to be adopted!”

I wonder what people thought.

Final thing: I had a buddy who went to that class with me. He could be squeamish about certain things, including cat whiskers. Every so often, I would yell, “HEY!”, and then when he looked, I would pull out one of the cat’s whiskers with a hemostat.

Good times.

It was not alive. I want to make that very clear.

My knife may not get here for a coon’s squirrel’s age, but the game camera will help keep me amused while I wait. I should call it a trail camera. That’s what Amazon calls it. It will turn on automatically when it sees movement, even at night. I’ll probably get a bunch of videos of squirrels mooning me and giving me the finger.

I’m thinking of getting surveillance cameras for the house. If we ever have to travel and leave the house empty, I would like to have video of any “dreamers” who show up to celebrate the American dream (or Cinco de Mayo) by stealing it. Is that not a PC thing to say? Sorry, but 92% of foreign-born federal prisoners are illegal aliens, so the facts are on my side. For a few hundred bucks you can get wifi cameras and a special router. The cameras will send video wherever you want. You can upload it to the cloud (i.e. Uncle Sam’s secret 4th-Amendment-destruction server farm).

I don’t know if I want video of my property in the cloud. I am completely aware that the government has ways of looking at stuff it has no right to look at, and I shouldn’t help them. I’m not doing anything illegal, but what if that changes? What if the government and I have a falling out and I decide to do something which is moral and correct but illegal? I guarantee you, they’ll be able to subpoena my security footage. Let me check.

Yes, I am correct. My two minutes of research indicate that there are two ways for prosecutors to get your home surveillance footage. They can get a warrant, which takes a little effort, or they can use a subpoena, which is about as hard as placing an order at Denny’s. And if they use a subpoena, they may not have to tell you. Nice.

What if I decide I want TWO bobcat pelts for some compelling reason, such as my truck needs seat covers? I better not tan them in front of my surveillance system.

I think a good alternative would be to store the data on a laptop hidden in the house. Burglars would be too stupid to look for it, the fuzz wouldn’t know about it, and if they found out, they would have to get a full-blown warrant to come get it. And I might not have what they wanted when they asked for it. You don’t have to preserve your home surveillance videos for all eternity. Mainly you want them for the immediate past, so you can nail thieves.

I’m sitting here trying to foil a government grab for bobcat-related data I will never possess, and the actual people who will end up using my plan will most likely be drug dealers and terrorists. Oh well. I’ll be in the cloud, being lazy, hoping for the best and trying to get by with one bobcat pelt. Uncle Sam will get whatever he wants, and eventually I’ll start eating Soylent Green and hating Goldstein every morning.

Did you know there might be cameras on your property right now? Uncle Sam doesn’t really need warrants for yard cameras that are sufficiently far from your house. The law on cameras is extremely oppressive. The government can put cameras in your trees and bushes without consulting you, for no good reason at all. Putting them in your house takes some legal maneuvering, but if you have a pasture or some woods, forget it. They can watch you swimming in your creek naked all day, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” a few hundred feet from your front door, on a remote property in the middle of the woods, where you are not suspected of doing anything illegal. How about that?

How about this: a bobcat jacket and matching pants?

Just spitballing.

Liberty is drying up and dying, so maybe there is no point in brainstorming about ways to preserve it. At least if I’m on a big spread in the woods, I’ll have the comforting false impression that I’m free.

I hate to quit when I’m making such a great contribution to western thought, but I have to go to the dump now. I hope my knife gets here while squirrels are still legal.

Maybe They do, but I Don’t

It finally happened. A neighbor spoke to me about shooting guns on my own property.

Today I got the .17 HMR out. I decided to go look for squirrels. I took the .17 HMR even though I knew it would limit the types of shots I could take.

I like the .17 HMR.

I went behind the house and set up a board at squirrel distance, and I shot five rounds into it. I was using FMJ ammo instead of the rodent-exploding kind, and the scope was set for 100 yards and plastic bullets, so I wanted to adjust the elevation. I shot. I walked to the board. I shot. I walked to the board. Et cetera.

I have very little respect for the micrometers. I turned the top one 16 clicks this way, shot, turned it 6 the other way, and so on, and after the last shot, I turned it 4 clicks and didn’t bother checking whether I was right. I knew I was just about on the money. At 25 yards or so, you don’t have to be Werner von Braun to know where the bullets will go.

Maybe 10 minutes later, I took off for the woods. I heard a noise to my right. It was a lady on another farm, calling to me. There is my fence, then there is a strip of land maybe 25 feet wide (half of which I own), and then there is her fence. She wanted to chat.

She asked if I was shooting. I said yes. She asked which direction I was shooting in. No, I was not shooting over her farm, into her barn, at her horses. That’s not exactly what she asked, but she implied that she thought I could be shooting over her farm, and she was very inquisitive. She pressed for details. She should have asked, “Is anything you shoot going over someone else’s land?”, and let it go. That’s all she can complain about, under the law.

She said her horses were going crazy, and that she had had to put them in the barn. This I very much doubt. They were a hundred yards away, with their view of me blocked, and I was shooting a pretty quiet rifle with about 90 seconds between shots. And like I said, five rounds.

Someone else on another property was also shooting. Lots of rounds. No idea where. It didn’t occur to me to ask if that was the shooting she was asking about. But no horse is going to flip out over someone shooting a 30.06 a thousand feet away. That’s not credible. Any horse that acts like that has a mental problem and needs to be medicated or put down. You don’t change your way of life over a defective animal.

I didn’t apologize. You bought a farm, you live in the country, and you WILL have to put up with the lifestyle. In Miami I had to deal with obnoxious salsa parties at 1 a.m. Things can’t always go your way.

I told her I was shooting to sight in the pea shooter for squirrels, and that I didn’t want to cause any one any trouble.

She seemed okay with that. Off I went, to kill squirrels. I didn’t see any, which was okay, because I just wanted to get out and walk around.

After I “hunted,” meaning after I wandered around and then sat on the ground under a tree looking at my phone, someone to the north fired a high-powered rifle three times, rapidly. I wondered if the horse lady thought it was me.

I am going to keep shooting and hunting on my land, because Florida law says I can. There is no such thing as a local gun ordinance in this state. An official who passes one can be fined $5000 and removed from office, which is pretty cool. I can’t be forced to stop. Still, I do not want to be aggravated by ignorant flower children who want to control their neighbors’ farms as well as their own. I do not want to have to talk to this woman every week. I don’t know if she’s an ignorant flower child with a leftist control problem. Maybe she’s a wonderful Republican who prays in tongues. I hope so, because having to bicker with a provincial, intolerant, supercilious flake would ruin this place for me.

If this lady tried to cause a problem, she would be SOL. A rabid liberal named Dziak sued a neighbor over gun-spooked horses in 2014 and got nowhere. Her lawyer fumes about it on his website. Sorry, bud. Welcome to Not New York.

I feel like it’s a message. Tennessee is in my future. If not Tennessee, some place in Appalachia where I can have 300 acres and tell everyone around me to kiss off.

Maybe it would be worth it to move to Eastern Kentucky and put up with the racism. Land is cheaper there than in Tennessee. I put up with complete idiots in Miami, and I survived. I don’t have to hang out with the racists.

Acreage is addictive, at least to me. Some people thought I would miss human beings when I got away from them, but exactly the opposite happened. I wish I had gone farther out and farther north. I would give a kidney to live on 5,000 acres.

No, not a kidney. But I would really like it. If I could get Internet access.

I might give an earlobe.

My family still has 752 acres to get rid of, 15 years after my grandmother’s death. I think the biggest piece is 300 acres. It’s up on a hill next to a national park. I want to go up there, lie on my face, and dig my fingers into the ground.

Perhaps this desire is excessive. I realize that.

Christians are supposed to love people, and you can’t interact with them and serve God if you never see them. On the other hand, you don’t have to have them in your face every day.

Jewish legend says Enoch got to where he only saw people once a year. I wonder if that’s true. Elijah was apparently solitary. John the Baptist lived in the desert. Maybe I’m not completely crazy.

Jesus didn’t spend his whole life in crowds, letting people spit on him and tell him off. He went off by himself and left them to fend for themselves. He left areas where people got on his nerves or threatened him. He eventually got out of here completely, apart from occasional visitations in spirit form. He only had to spend 33 years with this taxing species.

I can see how God might want me to move farther out and see less of humanity. People drag me backward in my walk with him. The vast majority of people I interact with are not positive influences. Let me put it this way: compared to being alone with God, almost no one is a positive influence. That’s a high standard to meet. I’m not strong enough or rooted enough to be immune to temptation and provocation. Maybe more isolation is what I need. I certainly want it. I love my friends, and I want to see them from time to time, but even good Christian friends take my attention off God.

It’s great when good friends visit, and it’s also great when they leave, as long as the visit isn’t too short.

I can tell this is a done deal. I can feel it in my heart. It may be three years from now, but I will be moving on.

I’m going to sit around and look at property, just like I used to do before we moved up here. It will be fun. It will give me something to dream about. This area is wonderful. I thank God for it every day. But something even better may be coming up.

Prosperity Preachers are Demented Wrecks

Interesting stuff is happening in my relationship with God.

I watch a lot of Youtube now. I have to have something to do during meals. Eating with a demented person is something you can only do so often, so I usually eat alone. I also need something to amuse me while I take the birds out. Finally, I am too lazy to go through the ordeal of picking up a book, opening it, and reading. I need to work on that.

I also watch old movies on the Turner channel, plus one TV show, but this doesn’t amount to much in terms of time. I’m very out of touch with current celebrities, and I thank God for that. I read that Ryan Seacrest is in trouble for groping somebody, and it was nice to realize I didn’t know who he was. I knew his name and that he was on TV, but if he walked in here right now, I wouldn’t recognize him or be able to say anything about his work.

When you fall behind on celebrity worship, celebrities start to look funny to you. You’ll see a hysterical news article with a breathless headline about how Kim Zolciak has a problem, and it will be like reading about a random person out of the phone book. “Herbert Loomis Suffers Major Swimsuit Malfunction at Elks Picnic!” “Edna Fanucci SHUTS DOWN Trump’s Latest Tweet!” Who? What?

I don’t know who Kim Zolciak is. I deliberately poked through celebrity names on the web and picked one that sounded utterly obscure.

I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on the One for Israel channel. The link goes to their website, not Youtube. I have not read the site. They’re Messianic Jews. They post all sorts of videos featuring Jews who have accepted Yeshua (not “Yeshu,” which means, “May his name be blotted out forever”). I highly recoomend their videos. They also post videos of Muslim converts.

One message I took from the Muslim videos is that I have let myself get way too angry at Muslims. Islam is a Satanic cult, and the hate it has managed to create in Muslims the world over is remarkable. Many of us think the hate only comes from a few extremists, but ordinary Muslims who convert will tell you different. They will talk about their former hatred of Jews and Christians, and they will even say they enjoyed hearing about terrorism and persecution.

Islam is bad. Much worse than most of us realize. But I had hostile feelings about Arabs and Muslims, generally. I had forgotten that many could be reached, and that many had the potential to be spectacular people. For that matter, there are millions of bad Muslims–the backsliders of Islam–who are not hateful at all.

I watched a video (not from One for Israel) about a Muslim girl named Chaima. She became a Christian. She was a real sweetheart. After God fixed her, I mean. She had been planning to join ISIS and kill Jews and/or Christians, but something changed her. Her mother gave her a bunch of used books, and Chaima found a Bible among them. She started reading it, hoping to prove Christianity was wrong, and instead, the love that fills the New Testament touched her heart, and she became a Christian. Her family rejected her, of course, and now she has no home. She runs around with Christian missionaries, praying for people and participating in healings. She comes across as a sweet-natured girl anyone would want to know. Even someone like me who is fed up with terrorism and the persecution of Christians and Jews.

To digress, I have to say I’m amazed to learn how many Jews know nothing about the New Testament. They say they thought it was about Catholics. They say they were amazed to find out it’s all about Jews, and that it was written by Jews. How can they not know that? Don’t the rabbis tell them anything? Some of them say they didn’t know Jesus was Jewish. I don’t know what to say about that. How can anyone not know?

You can see Chaima’s baptism online. They put her in a kiddie pool, and even though she was all for it, she began screaming and trying to get out. The people baptizing her held her down and prayed in tongues. She says the anger and screaming weren’t hers. It was something else. Makes you wonder how many terrorists could be cured by baptism and casting out demons. But 90% of Christians don’t believe in demons, so I guess the demons are safe.

I should have remembered this: God shops at the dump. That’s where he found me. He doesn’t go to yeshivas and monasteries and look for perfect people who have proven themselves worthy. He goes to the landfill which is the earth and picks out broken, decomposing people who can be repaired. That’s the best he can do, because we are all severely damaged. The super-holy people in the religious institutions are sometimes the worst of all, because their conviction that they’re righteous makes them immune to criticism and improvement.

One for Israel has a neat video featuring a former Muslim in something resembling a burqa. It shows her eyes, so I guess it’s not the full-blown burqa, which comes with a windshield. Anyway, she talked about her hate-filled past. She lived in Kuwait, and she was taught not just that Jews were bad, but that their existence was bad. She was taught that Jews should not exist. This is a commonly held belief among the world’s Muslims, and it’s something American liberals never acknowledge. Leftists (who hate every demanding religion except Islam) say Jews and Christians are just like Muslims; just as bad. But we’re not interested in genocide. Muslims are. This is the difference leftists try to hide. Anyway, she didn’t know any Jews, but she hated them just the same.

She visited a church. She accepted Jesus. How does she feel about Jews and Christians now? Completely different. The nonsense she was taught in Islam is gone.

She seems like she would be a wonderful person to know. I have to remember God can reach into any country and any segment of society, take a person out, and turn that person into my brother or sister.

Jewish testimonies are wonderful, but testimonies from former Muslims can be even more impressive. God does sensational things to reach them. Jesus appears to them. He gives them miracles. I suppose it’s because the barriers between them and him are so high. Often, converts from Islam live under death sentences, even here in the US. We have honor killings right here, under the noses of our quiet liberal press. If they can do it here, imagine what it’s like for converts in Iran, Kuwait, Gaza, and so on.

The covered convert in the Youtube video lives in America, yet she doesn’t show her face. That should disturb people.

We always argue about the solution to Israel’s problems. Most people believe in the “two-state solution,” i.e. the “cut Israel in half and wait for the Jews to be exterminated” solution. Boy, when those Jews are killed, things will be great. The crisis will finally be over. The Muslims will finally be happy, and they won’t bother the rest of us at all, because Islam is the Religion of Peace, and Muslims have no interest in conquering the world and establishing a global caliphate.

Yeah.

We argue all the time about political answers, but the only thing that really works is Christianity. When Israeli Jews and Muslims convert, they start going to church together. They intermarry. Suddenly “us” means followers of Yeshua, not Jews or Muslims. I’ve seen this here in the US, with people from different races. You go to church with black people, and suddenly everyone is on the same team, more or less. It depends on how much the church yields to the Holy Spirit. Anyway, worshiping together destroys boundaries. Everyone in the world is supposed to worship Jesus and be guided by the Holy Spirit, and all of our discord results from rejecting Jesus.

The notion that different religions can coexist in peace is facially absurd. Islam teaches genocide and forced conversion. Christianity says everyone who is not for Jesus is against God, and it teaches that proselytizing is mandatory. Religious Jews absolutely hate Jesus and Christianity, many equating it with Nazism, and they treat converts very, very badly. As long as we have religious division, the best we can hope for is a cold war, and cold wars are like dormant volcanoes. They eventually heat up.

I think the thing that strikes me most about the conversion testimonies is the huge difference between religions in which God is distant (and even cruel) and a religion in which God is very close to you and very concerned about your problems. I feel God’s presence many times every day, and I am no saint. I think nothing of asking God to tell me which restaurant to go to for lunch or which item to take off the shelf at Home Depot. What matters to me matters to him. God is not a far-off intergalactic warlord who is too limited, cold, and busy to talk to me. That’s Satan. He is small, overworked, busy, weak, and cruel, because he is not a god. Satan is Allah, not Yahweh. God is a father to me, with the ability and desire to spend time with me as though I were the only son he had. Testimonies from Jews and former Muslims commonly talk about the amazement people feel when they finally sense God within and around them.

The people who presented Chaima’s story have other videos. They go around praying for people and healing them. They’re charismatics. Their brand of Christianity is very different from the Joyce Meyer/Benny Hinn/Joel Osteen/T.D. Jakes/Kenneth Copeland hogwash we love here in America. They don’t talk about money all the time, the way we do. They go up to people, ask if they can pray for them, heal them, tell them God did the work, and help them accept Jesus. How original! Where did they come up with that? Someone should get a Nobel Prize.

Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. Mainstream American charismatic Christianity has syphilis. It is rotten and demented. How did we jump the gulf and leave the land of love and faith and alight in the region of greed and white trash ostentation?

I say “white trash” because that’s what it makes me think of. Give a white trash family a fortune, and the first thing you know, there’s a helipad in the yard and a gold-plated pickup truck with sable seats, painted in Clemson’s team colors even though no one in the family can get into college. But black preachers are just as bad.

When did Christianity become so expensive? The Apostles got up in the morning, walked outside, and introduced people to God, without light shows, jets, or megachurches the size of airports. Now you have to get dressed up, go to church, be scolded into handing over a minimum of 10% of your income, and listen to a complete fool who seriously maintains you’re obligated to fund his personal 727.

One of the Jewish testimonies I watched contained a story about healing. A family asked a rabbi to come pray for a sick person. The rabbi refused to come unless he was paid a huge amount of money. Thousands of dollars. Apparently, his god charges ransom. “Pay up, or the kid gets it.”

Christians prayed free of charge, and the sick person was healed. I was disgusted with the rabbi, but how are we any better? Yes, Christians prayed for this particular person without being paid, but here in America, thousands of people go to Steve Munsey’s ridiculous church/personal zoo, where he tells them God sells blessings for huge cash offerings. And Munsey is one of many.

My pastor at Trinity Church in Miami was Rich Wilkerson. His son Richie is the hipster who married Kanye West. Richie’s wife Dawnchere is the daughter of Denny Duron, a prosperity preacher who teaches some truly disturbing nonsense. Duron says you have to “manage blessings” by giving donations.

Let’s say you get a raise at work. God will want his cut. Duron believes you are obligated to reward God with a large donation. Better give God a grand before he sends his boys to lean on you.

Of course, if you’re in Duron’s church, Duron, not God himself, will collect the money. The prosperity gospel won’t work for you, but it has worked wonders for Duron and his daughter. It’s amazing how well it works for pastors, in view of the fact that it makes everyone else poor.

Duron also published The Abishai Anointing, a pamphlet which I burned in my backyard. The idea is that God sets special people, like Denny and Dawnchere, apart to be rich and admired, and the rest of us are supposed to be happy as obscure servants who do all the grunt work.

Funny how that pamphlet was written by one of the haves, not a have-not.

Duron is a rabid football fanatic, and he loves using football as a model when he teaches about Christianity. That should tell you how ignorant he is.

What if we were to shut up about money and focus on prayer and love? The prosperity gospel doesn’t work, anyway. We would have more money to spend, and we would have a huge increase in salvations. Our country would be better off. There would be more of us, aligned in God’s will, and the people who are against God would be weakened and stifled, as they used to be.

There is no point in hoping for a healed America, because that bus has left the terminal, but we can certainly hope to help more people and find more power and peace in our own lives. While America’s walls are down and the barbarians are running amok, God can still build a little wall around every child he has.

I don’t know when I’m going back to church. I have almost no desire to return. When I do, I will flatly tell them they can forget about getting a tithe from me, and I will also refuse to serve in any capacity whatsoever. I will give them $25 per week and sit in the back, and my only goal will be to be around other Christians. I don’t want to be part of another misguided volunteer ministry run by someone whose only qualification is that he is more aggressive than I am or that he or she is related to the pastor. I don’t want to hear about how God needs my silly, insignificant talents and skills.

When you show up to serve God, human beings run up to put chains on you.

Instead of “pastor,” American charismatics should say “master.”

The overbearing wife of my last master made the mistake of setting me free, and now that I’m on the lam, when the patrols come by looking for me, I am not going to raise my head out of the bushes and ask to be recaptured. Remember what happened to Dred Scott.

I think the worst thing about slavery is belonging to another human being. Human beings are unfit to rule each other. It’s a wonder God allows us to raise children.

I have to have a better attitude about Arabs and Muslims, and charismatic Christianity is still a very good thing, when you take the money out of it. I suppose that’s the synopsis here. It would be nice to show up and say God told me I was doing everything right, but it looks like that won’t be happening this week.

What Could be Worse Than Gossiping About God?

I had a funny experience last night, if “funny” means “inconvenient and extremely aggravating.”

I was going to sit down and blog again. I had already blogged once, but I felt like doing it again. God is giving me great breakthroughs, and I felt stupendous, so I was going to write about it. But I had to give my dad his pills first.

I went in his bedroom to make the delivery, and then I smelled it. Smoke. I knew right away what it was. The enormous quantity of leaves I had dumped on our burn pile had caught fire. And it was after 9 p.m. For some reason I could smell it from the bedroom.

I looked out a window and saw an infuriating orange glow about 500 feet away. I had to get in the golf cart and ride to the pile to fix it. I must have sprayed 200 gallons of water on it. In the middle of the performance, I went back and got a hoe so I could turn the leaves over and spray the hot stuff under them.

You would not believe how hard it is to put burning leaves out. For some reason, they burn from underneath, not from the top. The top of the pile looks swell, but under it, there’s an inferno going on. You can jam a hose into a pile of burning leaves and let it go for 5 minutes and accomplish almost nothing.

I hadn’t lit the leaves. I burned on Thursday, and I put stuff on the pile on Saturday. Somewhere in there, something was still burning, and it got the leaves going again.

I haven’t looked, but I’ll bet the leaves are gone. They were completely soaked when I left, but knowing leaves, I’ll bet they burned up anyway.

Needless to say, blogging was postponed.

I’m exaggerating the annoyance. I wasn’t happy the leaves were burning, but it wasn’t a major crisis. Just a fine lesson in farm management.

At the moment, nothing important is on fire, so I can write. I just wanted to say this has been a great weekend. Things are going very well. Prayers are being answered. Barriers are being shattered.

At some point during the week, I started feeling a new level of faith, and the message I got was that I was now officially one with God. This is something I’ve been praying for. It doesn’t mean my feet don’t smell or that I’m suddenly a great person. It certainly doesn’t mean I’m God. Somehow I am more closely identified with him now, and that means more authority and relief. Authority and accomplishment come from God alone. Anything you get without his authority is worthless, illusory, or temporary.

If I ran Christianity, people would be transformed instantly when they accepted Jesus. Some people say this happens to them. Hooray for them, but it didn’t work that way for me. It has been a very slow process. I turned back to God decisively in 2007, about 11 years ago.

A long time ago, I had a dream in which I traveled up a filthy canal in Miami. Blind canals collect garbage, grass, and dead and sick fish. This one was no exception. It was full of floating junk. The message I got was that I had spent a long time traveling up a blind canal in my life, and that I had collected a lot of garbage and problems. I was going to have to pass all of them again on the way back out. That’s what happened after the dream, so I think it came from God. I didn’t move instantly into a life of joy and success. I revisited my faults and failures and kept moving past them, in God’s direction.

God’s way of running things is better than the way I would choose, because it’s God’s. I can’t run Christianity. I have bad ideas God doesn’t have, because I lack his knowledge, power, and virtue. My thoughts are below his thoughts, as the earth is below the clouds!

I haven’t always felt joy or peace, even after being given a very strong and consistent prayer life. I have had to fight worry. I have been tormented my people who should have been under my feet. Things haven’t been perfect. But they improve in steps, and I just moved up a notch.

The other day I said I was going to publish phrases God had given me. I will post one now. I can’t recall if I’ve posted it before, but the message will be familiar: “I know the secret.”

Broken record that I am, I will provide an explanation that reiterates that which I continually reiterate: life will eventually work properly if you pray in tongues. That’s the secret. It’s not meditation. It’s not volunteering at church. It’s not yoga or “eating clean,” whatever that is. It’s not garcinia cambogia, St. John’s wort, weed, kratom, kale, Prozac, or coffee enemas. It’s not the false messiah of Marxism or the fake godliness of following rules and hard work. The secret is praying in tongues.

Preachers love to offer us solutions that do not work, usually in exchange for attendance and/or money. It’s like clickbait. Wondering how to get our kids off drugs? Say three “Our Fathers” every morning and throw salt over your left shoulder. Want to end your money problems? Give your mortgage payments to Benny Hinn, so he can get an even bigger yacht, and watch the money roll in. Pray this prayer. Pray that prayer. Wear this or that saint’s medal. One guy says you have to visualize yourself as an unborn baby and forgive yourself in the womb. What?

The man-made gimmicks usually disappoint. They’re like rabbit’s feet and santeria charms.

Prayer in tongues works. Count on it. It may take time, but it works. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

You need authority, because it makes things work. Pardon my language, but authority is what kicks asses and takes names. “Authority comes from time spent in the presence of God.” I put that in quotation marks because it’s another phrase I received. When you pray in tongues, God within you is praying, so of course you are in the presence of God. He does what a person in authority does. He explains. He corrects. He aligns. He defends. You’re like Moses, up on the mountain with God. When Moses came down, he had fresh authority. It wasn’t until after he spent time with God that he had the power and knowledge to rule.

In two cases, that authority was given physical form, in tablets bearing God’s laws. If he had stayed with the people, he would have had a different experience. He would have been soaked in idolatry and whining. The false prophets Israel honored and enriched didn’t have God’s presence. They weren’t the head; they were the tail. They were led by the blind instead of leading them. They were led by human beings. Moses knew God personally, and God himself led him. That’s why Moses had authority and power. He didn’t get his strength from sitting around reading the Torah and the Talmud. The Torah and the Talmud didn’t exist! He didn’t get it by reading the prophets. The Jewish prophets (excluding patriarchs) hadn’t been born yet.

I heard a funny testimony from a Messianic Jew. He said he went to the synagogue and could not find God’s presence to save his life. He had never felt it. He decided to fast on Yom Kippur, and he went to the synagogue to do whatever Jews do on that day. He felt nothing. He asked a rabbi what was wrong. The rabbi said it was his shoes. He was wearing leather shoes, which was against the Yom Kippur rules. The man later accepted Jesus and felt God’s presence. In his testimony, he said, “Really? This is what knowing God is about? You gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. You gotta wear the right shoes. That’s what God is concerned about?”

We Christians think we’re better than Jews. We think we don’t make the mistakes they make, but we do all the same things. We make up all sorts of dumb strategies to get God to help us, and of course they don’t work, because they didn’t come from God. God had a lot of strange rules under the old covenant, and they mattered, but things are different now, and your shoes (and wrongheaded Christian rituals and superstitions) aren’t that big a deal.

I am not a good person, but I feel God’s presence every day, many times. It’s available. You can have it. You don’t have to be scholar or an ascetic, either. Those lifestyles are generally for egomaniacs.

Christian and Jewish scholars are like people who write tourism books without going anywhere. “I hear Venice is like this. I hear the subways in Paris are like that.” If you haven’t been there, shut up. Your ridiculous fables are not helping. Who do you think puts them in your heads? Not God. Someone who wants to keep you and God apart.

I’m not making things up. I’ve been there, and you can go, too. Right now. Wear any shoes you like.

If you’re not feeling God’s presence, you’re doing something wrong. We’re not supposed to require signs or chase them, but God’s presence is not a sign, in that sense. It just means he’s there. You should feel it from time to time. It’s not reserved for imaginary “saints” and super-rabbis.

You’re special. You’re as special as Paul and Maimonides.

You can render tongues powerless if you want. You can pray in tongues and then refuse to listen to God. But if you have any desire at all to cooperate, it will work. It will never not work. God told me, “Prayer in tongues never doesn’t work.” I love that.

Think of the thin lines sailors have used to pass heavy objects between ships. If you want to move a refrigerator between two ships, you can’t throw it, and you can’t throw a line heavy enough to carry it. You throw a thin line with a bigger line tied to the end, and the people on the other ship pull it in. They use the thin line to bring them the big line. You can keep doing this to bring larger and larger lines across until you have a line big enough to move the fridge. Tongues work sort of like that. The tongues themselves aren’t everything you need, but they will bring you what you need to get the things you need.

Praying in tongues got me here, and it will get me to much better places in the future. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it worked. The Bible says God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him, so obviously, we should not be surprised if some changes take time. The word “diligence” makes no sense if you apply it to something that happens in an instant. Diligence means repeated application.

It’s kind of unfortunate that English Bibles use the word “rewarder,” because it makes it sound like we earn what we get. Obviously, we do not. We earn death, failure, and terrible suffering. But God does respond to diligent prayer, whether you call it a reward or not.

Human language is imprecise and ambiguous, even at its very best. The Bible is ambiguous. It can’t be perfect as long as it’s an earthly document. It was never meant to be our primary guidance. It was meant to be a guidepost; a temporary help to get us into God’s presence. Once you know God, the Bible has to be interpreted in light of what he tells you directly. When that happens, you can resolve the ambiguities and fill in the blanks.

The law said not to eat the showbread in the temple, but David ate it and didn’t sin. Why? Because he was a prophet. He heard God tell him to eat it, and God’s authority was above the law. Googling, I see that Jesus mentioned that. No surprise.

Now people will say I’m attacking the Bible or adding to the gospel. No. Not at all. But trying to defend myself will make it worse, so I’ll leave it there.

It was a good week. This year will be better than last year. The year after will be better still. As long as God chooses to not to cut me loose, I am all set. I don’t give any money at all to preachers. I don’t pray to “saints.” I wear the leather shoes every day. I eat as much pork as humanly possible. I have never visualized myself as an unborn baby. I get healings. I get victories. I get correction. I get faith and joy. If it works for me, it will work for you.

Shoo, Squirrels

Every time I hunt, I learn something new. Today I learned that you don’t always want to bag anything.

I have live oak trees, and they never stop dropping leaves. I bought a lawn sweeper to remove them. Live oak leaves are highly resistant to lawn sweepers because they are heavy and flat. They suck on the ground when the brushes of the sweeper pass over them. Also, for some reason my yard contains a lot of Spanish moss. I mean the grass itself, not the trees, contains Spanish moss. It winds around the sweeper’s axle and stops the wheels, and every so often I have to stop the garden tractor and hack at the moss with a knife. I tried removing it with a torch, but it bursts into flame.

Anyway, it takes about three minutes to fill the sweeper with leaves. This removes about 0.001% of the leaves in the yard. I then have to drive to the burn pile in the pasture, dump the leaves, and return. Today I made about eight trips, and I would say I dumped 400 pounds of leaves.

When it was over, I was tired, but it was mostly from aggravation, not exertion. The tractor does most of the work. I wanted to get some exercise, so I picked up the shotgun and headed out.

I kept thinking about the stench and effort of cleaning squirrels, and I realized I would probably be happier if I didn’t kill any. I needed a shower. I had some butchered squirrels I needed to cook later, to keep them from spoiling. I wasn’t all that eager to spend half an hour pulling out squirrel guts.

At first, things went the way they usually do. I saw two squirrels very close to the neighboring house which is three millimeters from my land. I don’t want to be the guy who shoots a shotgun outside their house every day, so I kept walking.

After I had looped back toward the house, I heard a bark, so I started toward it. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. I had taken my ear plugs out so I could hear squirrel activity. The barking squirrel wised up and shut his piehole, so I turned to continue toward home. There in front of me, three feet off the ground, 20 yards away, staring at me, was an enormous squirrel.

I had two choices: shoot without hearing protection or take a chance on losing him while I fumbled with ear plugs. I chose the latter course, and he ran up the tree as soon as I was ready to shoot.

I know how to deal with squirrels hiding in trees, so I sat down to wait him out. I didn’t see him again, but a bunch of new squirrels started leaping their way toward me like the Flying Wallendas trying to make a dramatic entrance. They ended up nearly overhead. I could have shot one without getting up. But the angle was such that it was conceivable that some of the pellets would have ended up on someone else’s land, so I let them go. Man, I hate a squirrel.

Up side: no butchering. No funky squirrel smell on my hands and cutting board.

I went in the house and fried the squirrels that were waiting in the fridge. I think I know how to do it now. I put together a likely mixture of flour, salt, pepper, chipotle, sage, and garlic powder. I wet the squirrels down with buttermilk. I coat them with the mixture and fry them in half an inch of fat. It seems to work.

Treating them with baking soda (my prescription for gamy meat) must work, because now they taste exactly like a chicken leg. They’re not quite as tender as chicken, but they’re okay.

The frustration I have with shooting angles makes me feel like I will need more land in the future. I keep thinking about Tennessee. Ocala is wonderful. Compared to Miami, it’s like heaven. But I can see a neighbor’s house from my front porch, and I can’t hunt without worrying about where the projectiles go. If I could find 300 acres in Appalachia, I would be in business.

I could live here the rest of my life and be very happy, but now that I’m hunting, I know I’d be missing out on a few things.

First, the trees here are all live oaks. Literally 90% are either live oaks or some other kind of trashy oak which is even worse. They’re rotten inside and full of huge roaches. The wood is worthless. They don’t produce nuts. I remember the neat trees in Appalachia. White oaks, red oaks, black oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, locusts, black walnuts, dogwoods, redbuds, cedars, poplars, plums, maples…you name it. If you have your own woods up there, you can cut trees and dry the wood for woodworking. You can eat walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and cherries. And you don’t have to worry about every fourth tree on your property falling over if the wind blows.

Second, the dirt up there is real dirt. Here, it’s grey sand. In some places it’s white, like the beach. It’s not very productive. The grass in my yard and pastures is Bahia, which is very long and thin. I thought I would be able to have it baled and sell it, but I found out it’s not worth baling. My grandfather had a farm in Kentucky that produced beautiful bales of hay so heavy it was tough to throw them up onto a wagon. A guy I know entered one in the state fair and won a prize. I don’t think you can grow anything like that here.

Third, it’s hotter than I expected. It was in the high 80’s today, in February. In Tennessee, it was in the 60’s.

Fourth, and this is related to the heat: this area has a major mosquito problem, and any day now, three months before I expected it, they will be back in full force. When you go outside in bug season here, you have to wear repellant all the time. I don’t mean when you go to the mall, but on my property, you will get eaten alive. We also have tons of spiders in Marion County, and they build gigantic webs in the woods. You can’t walk 50 feet without getting wrapped in a web containing a spider the size of a grape. In Appalachia, they have ticks, yellowjackets, and hornets. That’s about it.

Fifth, people…keep…moving…to…Florida. Yankees, as always, and since Irma, Puerto Ricans. Florida is now considered a purple state. Our conservatism is fading. I can hear traffic noises when I walk in my woods. I expect it to get worse, and I’m afraid a lot of the new traffic will be cars full of people who vote for socialism, perversion, and authoritarianism.

Sixth, the game here is not that great. If I really tried, I could bring home 20 squirrels a week, but they’re smaller than squirrels up north. You have to be very determined in order to eat them. I haven’t seen a single deer or hog. I heard one turkey call, but I’m afraid it was a neighbor getting ready for the season. We have bears, but the freaks and hippies won’t let us hunt them, because they’re cute.

I sound like I’m knocking this place. I love it here. But I might love it more somewhere else.

I am starting to miss Appalachia badly. I have learned I can live in the sticks and be happy. I don’t miss people or cities at all. I don’t have to have the Guggenheim Museum or the Helen Hayes Theatre five minutes away. I could enjoy Appalachia. I miss the scenery. I miss the waterfalls and creeks, which are things you can’t have in Florida. I mean, yes, we have creeks, but they’re actually sluggish warm streams. Not like the beautiful creeks in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky.

I almost wish I had my grandfather’s old farm near Rogers, Kentucky. It was big enough to get lost in, and the back side was high cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. But I could never live in Eastern Kentucky again, because of the Defcon 1 racism and the widespread aversion to self-improvement. When I think about that, I always remember my cousin Byrd, who was a judge and an erudite individual. He said, “Just once I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

Also, people would know me there. They know my family. For that matter, I still have relatives there. My family has never respected me at all, for reason I can’t fathom. I’m the most educated person in my family, by far, and I’m the closest thing my family has produced to a sophisticated person. Nonetheless, they never pay any attention to anything I say. I’ve changed a lot; I’m not the same person they used to know, with the same willingness to put up with nonsense. When you change, and then you go back to people who knew you before you changed, they pressure you to accept the treatment they used to give you, and you may give in and revert. I’m not doing that.

Here’s a story. My family owned a piece of land, by inheritance. We owned it in common. We sold it to another family. Political friends of my late grandfather. They found a problem with it, and they wanted to rescind the sale. I’m an attorney, and I don’t mean an attorney who practiced in the woods in Eastern Kentucky, against people who charge $75 an hour. I practiced with some of the sharpest people in a major market. I practiced intellectual property law, which is the most difficult field. I don’t have any lawyer relatives who are qualified to do that. I told my relatives to take the property back.

We had sold it for $40,000, which is not much money, and it would have been relatively inexpensive to take it back and auction it again. I thought our defense was weak. We would have kept our friends, and we would have moved on. They wanted to hire a lawyer and go to court. Over what probably amounted to $4000!

Guess what they did? They hired the lawyer, and we ended up paying him. My relatives kept quiet about the final result. When I finally got them to tell me what happened, they said we lost the case. Of course we did! Hello? Who predicted that? So we paid the lawyer’s fee, we gave back the money, and we wasted a ton of time. We also alienated people who had always been in our corner. This is an example of how my advice goes over up there.

It’s fine that they disagreed with me, but they didn’t even consider my advice. I was 100% correct, and they could not have been more wrong, and they didn’t have the background I had. They could at least have thought my advice over.

Here’s another story. Kentucky condemned part of a piece of property that belonged to us, to build a highway ramp. When this happens, you need an attorney to negotiate. At the time, my dad was a top-notch lawyer. He was sharp enough to be on the Supreme Court. He told the family he would handle the job for nothing. I said I would work with him for nothing. They turned us down and hired my cousin. He charged a 33% contingency fee. Contingency fees are for poor people, not people who can pay. Anyway, I forget the figure, but I believe he got over $100,000 for an easy job. It’s almost as if they thought it was worth paying six figures in order to avoid trusting my judgment.

I will never understand that.

Anyway, you can tell I am greatly respected.

I suppose there is a good chance I’ll run into racism in a place like Tennessee or Georgia, but I would hope it wouldn’t be as bad as it was in Eastern Kentucky, where it seemed like every tenth word was “nigger.” Even if it was, at least I would be around fresh people. I love my relatives. Don’t get me wrong. But I had a dysfunctional upbringing, my relatives were peripherally involved, if only as witnesses. There is a certain stubborn dynamic among us, and I am not going back.

Visiting? Fine. I hope I eventually get to visit them again, and I like talking to them on the phone. But living in the area where my mother grew up and dealing with certain expectations people have of me and my family…I’m not doing it. I’ll tell you something else. My family has enemies up there, and I don’t even know who they are. For all I know, some of them hate us for good reason. Now that I think about it, the ones my sister alienated have plenty of reason to dislike us. I’d rather go somewhere new and make my own enemies.

I was talking to a friend about this last night, and I put it this way: when you work for a company and get a promotion, they don’t let you stay where you are and boss your old friends around. They move you across the state to boss new people around. Why? Because of the existing dynamic between you and your pals. Your buddies won’t respect you or produce for you, and you won’t assert yourself. If you do assert yourself, they’ll tear you down. People function best where they’re respected and appreciated. I can’t imagine being respected or appreciated in Wolfe County or Powell County Kentucky.

It sounds nuts to talk about moving, right after leaving Miami, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I don’t want to be morbid, but my dad is 86, and he has a condition which has a certain expected end, within a period of time doctors say is short. It won’t be long until it’s just me here, and when that happens, my life will be very different. I won’t be a caregiver any more. I won’t need hot winters or a city geared to the care of old people. I won’t have to hire a sitter if I decide to travel and look at land. If I move, I’ll just hire movers, watch them pack, and drive to the new place. I won’t have to do all that while looking after someone who can’t drive, take his pills correctly, shop for food, or be left alone.

It would be nice if I had a wife to move with me, because moving is a chore, but I haven’t made any friends here or met much of anyone. No prospects whatsoever. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe someone will fall from the sky next week.

I haven’t written about it, but God has made real changes in my life over the last week. This will sound weird, but I feel he is telling me I’m finally one with him. It doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a good person. I just feel that I am more closely identified with him now. I am getting faith like nothing I’ve had before. Before I developed supernatural faith, I would try to believe, quit, and fail. After I got faith through prayer in tongues, I felt something in me pushing and holding my faith up, and I believed pretty well. Now I feel insistent faith that doesn’t come from me, and I feel like responding, “ALL RIGHT! I GIVE UP! YOU’RE RIGHT! YOU’RE RIGHT!”

I believe things that weren’t possible before are going to start happening now, so I’m not afraid to think about a final destination north of here.

This farm is great, but I now think I would be better off with less cleared land and more woods. Cleared land requires maintenance. I would love to have 300 acres, including 10 acres or less of pasture, without fancy fencing. Just barbed wire.

Here, the woods require maintenance, but this is a special situation. I’m in a hurricane zone (another issue I would like to leave behind). A rare storm came through and knocked over dozens of big trees. I think they’re still falling. My memory isn’t good enough to recall every tree, but it sure seems like I find more horizontal trees every month. Maybe Irma weakened them, and I’m still seeing the effects. I have the world’s only self-clearing agricultural tract.

Anyway, GENERALLY, woods require no maintenance at all. You just walk in once in a while, shoot some things, and walk out.

A little place in the Blue Ridge region would be really sweet, if I could just find an area where the people were okay.

I’m going to make the best of it here. When my dad’s situation changes, I’ll sell and leave. Then I’ll stay wherever I am until I die and leave this wretched world behind. At the moment, this is my plan.

Life here is really good, so I can’t complain while I’m waiting.

Wish me luck with turkey season. It’s right around the corner, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

Plus Thoughts on Hunting

Hunting was challenging today.

I went out at 4:15, carrying the shotgun. I have received the scope for my air rifle, but I found that the gun is so heavy, the crosshairs jump around a lot at 25 yards. I can’t be sure of getting a clean shot. I am researching ways to fix this. Slings, better ways of holding the gun, and so on. In the meantime, I am using the shotgun. It’s the best combination of humanity and lethality.

Unfortunately, the humanity angle did not play out very well.

I walked around the property. I saw two squirrels on a tree a hundred yards from the house, but by the time I got to them, they were up the tree and out of sight. I could not shoot at them before they went up, because the tree was between me and a neighboring property. Too bad.

I walked down past the way-too-close neighbor’s house I’ve written about before, and of course, two squirrels were jumping around within easy reach. In the direction of the house. Nothing to do but keep walking.

I saw a couple more squirrels and chased them. I chased the first one from tree to tree. He would not stop moving, so I tried shooting when he slowed down. No luck. He eventually went into hiding, so I kept going. The next squirrel I saw was far away when I spotted him, and he had plenty of time to hide while I walked to his area.

On the way back to the house, I saw what may have been the first two squirrels, in the area where I saw squirrels on the way out. I walked to their tree, and of course, they went up and hid. I decided to try some of the tricks I had read about.

I threw a branch to the other side of the tree to scare them around to my side. It worked, but they went back to the other side before I could shoot. I scratched the side of the tree with a branch to make them think a predator was climbing after them, but they didn’t buy it.

Some guy on the web said it was smarter to sit under a tree and wait for squirrels to come out than to give up on them and hope to see new ones. I decided to do it his way. I sat under a tree 20 feet from the one with the squirrels, and I waited.

Eventually, they started climbing down, and I shot one. Hooray. It came down by the base, and I tried to shoot the other one, but it would not present itself. I saw the first one flop around a little, and I thought it was kicking its last. Then I realized it was just wounded. It was trying to climb to safety, but it couldn’t do it. I had to walk after it and shoot it in the head.

I should have finished the squirrel off sooner. I don’t feel good about what happened to it. Lesson learned. Unfortunately, the squirrel, not I, had to suffer in order for the knowledge to pass.

I am taking pains to be humane, but I suppose events like this are inevitable. I don’t like it, but you can’t hunt and expect everything to work perfectly. This is something hunters have to deal with. If you’re going to hunt, you have to accept the possibility that you will occasionally cause suffering.

When I cleaned the squirrel, I noticed it only had three feet. I thought I had shot its foot off, which was even more disturbing than leaving it wounded. I was wrong, though. The stump had healed. This squirrel had been shot before, or something had bitten its foot off. This was one hard luck squirrel. It climbed perfectly well, though.

I think a lot about the ethics of hunting, and I am developing some beliefs. I have realized hunting is important, and that a man should know how to hunt. It’s easy to rely on the grocery store and preach when life is good, but there are such things as hard times and catastrophes. You should be able to provide protein when the stores have been looted and burned. Also, hunting teaches you valuable skills which are useful in self-defense situations. A man should have some ability to defend himself and others. He should be able to defend his land. There may come times when it will be necessary to stop criminals yards away from our houses instead of waiting for them to enter.

During the LA riots, people had to stand on the roofs of their businesses holding guns. Here’s something disturbing a black friend told me: on Martin Luther King’s birthday, his dad guarded his house with a gun. People roam around on MLK Day in gangs, doing whatever they want, and the cops sit by and watch because they’re outnumbered. The newspapers ignore it, so white people don’t hear about it. Sometimes defending your property with firearms is necessary.

They say Southerners had one big advantage in the Civil War: they were hunters. Shooting Union soldiers was not that different from shooting deer and rabbits, so they moved smoothly and quickly into their roles as killers of men. They knew how to hide, stalk, shoot, and care for weapons. Yankees had to be told which end of the gun the bullets came out of. If things get weird in the future, people like me will be a step ahead of vegans and fruitarians from California and Boston.

People who live around me have great weapons. They even have camo, blinds, infrared cameras, and a lot of other stuff that can be used against human beings as easily as turkeys. They have gotten over their squeamishness about shooting living things. This is not an area where gangs of disgruntled Hillary voters can get out of cars, walk into houses, and rape, kill, and steal.

Some of the tasks associated with hunting are unpleasant and gruesome. Pulling the warm, smelly organs out of an innocent squirrel is a very nasty experience. But aren’t such things part of life as a human being? If I’m willing to pay Perdue and KFC to slice chickens open, tear out the guts, and give me the meat, shouldn’t I be honest enough to do these things for myself?

I don’t like killing other creatures, per se, and I don’t want to make them suffer, but this is what I am. I have to man up and accept my role in the world. I am a predator, from a race of predators. I live in a cursed world, and predation is part of it. I am not exempt, any more than God is. God kills and punishes all the time, and I believe he put us in a position where we sometimes have to kill or punish, so we would understand what he goes through. A person who is nice all the time can’t be a good Christian. If you never ruffle any feathers or cause any suffering, you’re shirking. Even Jesus beat people with a whip.

I have no patience with mushy, touchy-feely Christians who reject their obligation to be hard, and who criticize gun owners, the military, hunters, parents who spank, meat eaters, and so on. Their posture is not love. It’s self-righteousness. When you refuse to offend or harm, even when doing so is required, you make yourself out to be better than God, who burned people he loved with hot pitch and drowned the entire human race.

Repeatedly, the Bible says God is a god of love AND JUSTICE. It mentions mercy and justice together, to make a point. God has killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, combined, and he will kill more in the future. He’s not going to let us sit back sucking our thumbs, saying we’re glad we’re not like him. Sometimes we have to do hard things to other creatures. We are not better than God.

God is love, according to the Bible. At the same time, the flames of hell are his anger at work. He created hell, and he puts people in it all day, every day.

Absalom was cursed, and he died in disgrace. He undermined his father, David, who had a hard job ruling Israel. He stood in the gate where business was transacted, and he sucked up to the people. He was nicer than David. He took up their causes to spare them dealing with David. Then he declared himself king, and then he had to be hunted like a pig and killed with darts.

He wasn’t better than David. He was morally inferior. He was conceited and manipulative.

When I think of the self-aggrandizing, praise-sucking, warm, fuzzy Christians out there criticizing the rest of us, I think of Absalom. They’re like divorced dads who curry favor with their kids by spoiling them with presents. You know the type. They steal their children’s hearts and make Mom out to be a witch, and then they dump the kids on Sunday and leave Mom to deal with rules and spankings.

Hunting has its ugly side, but on the whole, it’s very pleasant. You get to go outdoors. You turn off your phone. You forget the insane, doomed mess the world has become. When I hunt, I think about two things: hunting, and God. No business. No worries. Every time a squirrel falls, I feel great satisfaction. I’m doing something my grandfather tried to teach me to do, forty years ago, with his shotgun. I love succeeding at it.

There are certain things every American man wishes he could do. Welding, machining, and hunting and/or shooting well are probably the top three or four items. A big percentage of us never learn how to do these things. I already weld and machine, I am shooting rifles well for the first time in my life, and it looks like I’m a reasonably good squirrel hunter. Coyotes, turkeys, and deer are on the way. Nice.

It’s funny, but since I’ve been hunting, I’ve had strange experiences. You know the funny little patterns you see on the insides of your eyelids when you close your eyes at night? For most of my life, I’ve generally seen golden geometrical shapes, like mazes. Now I see trees against the sky. It’s like I’m looking for squirrels.

I really see trees. I don’t mean I see shapes that remind me of trees. I see actual trees, through a glowing golden fog. And if I fall asleep while I’m looking at the trees, they turn into full-blown dream trees against a blue sky.

That has to be supernatural.

God wants me to hunt. I don’t know why, but he does.

I don’t know if I can get the air rifle to work for squirrels, but I’m going to improve my standing rifle shooting. I will continue working on killing squirrels humanely, with precision. I’m going to look into turkey hunting and see what I can do here on the farm. After that, I’ll try to get pigs and coyotes until the fall game seasons start up.

I’ll have to get camo. Unlike squirrels, turkeys see in full color. Squirrels couldn’t give a crap.

No squirrel photo this time. This one was too gross to post. when I fry it, I may post a shot. Thanks, everyone who has given me hunting or shooting tips.

The Strongest Chains are Imaginary

Every so often God gives me a phrase or a sentence. These words turn out to be extremely useful to me. They serve as guidance, but they also have supernatural power. When I sit and repeat them to myself, I feel God’s presence and peace rise up in and around me. It’s actually a problem, because I tend to fall asleep, which interferes with prayer. Sometimes I’ll go down the list and repeat each phrase at least three times.

I save these phrases in digital form. Today it occurred to me that if they’re worth saving for myself, they are worth publishing for other people. Henceforth, I’ll make an effort to post them as they arrive.

Here is one from a few hours ago: “My parents abandoned me.”

That one disturbed me. I don’t feel any qualms about saying my dad abandoned me, because he was never around, and he took no interest in me or my sister. But my mom? She adored me, and she certainly made an effort to straighten me out. I didn’t listen to her as well as I should, and I’m sure I discouraged her.

Still, I realize it’s right to say my mother abandoned me. One reason I learned to cook is that she got up later than I did. I had to feed myself. She didn’t make a consistent effort to take me to church (or to go on her own). She didn’t teach me order or responsibility. I had no set homework hours, for example. She didn’t check to see if I was doing what I should. When I was in high school, I did almost all of my homework after I arrived on campus.

My mother didn’t teach me to bathe correctly! I didn’t know I had a problem. I was dirty, but I didn’t suffer because of it. Kids smell a lot less than adults, and they secrete less grease, so when you’re a kid, being dirty isn’t as unpleasant.

Kids don’t automatically figure out when and how to bathe, and they may not pick it up by having you do it for them when they’re very small. You have to say, “Turn on the water. Get a wet washcloth. Soap it up. Scrub your ENTIRE body. Rinse it off. Go back over anything that still feels oily or gritty. Use the shampoo.” You have to teach them how to tie their shoes. You have to sit them down and make them practice.

My mother didn’t teach me how to tie my shoes until I was in elementary school! She only taught me because she was tired of doing it herself. I should have known when I was four.

When I was old enough to be ashamed of being filthy, and to be responsible for cleaning myself, a Jewish lady in a department store gave me a much-needed clue. My mother had taken me to get pants, and I firmly believe this kind woman took notice of my filth and decided to try to help. Somehow she found a way to work a hygiene lesson into the conversation.

I can’t even remember what the excuse was. There was something we needed to finish. Maybe I objected to buying shirts and socks as well as pants. I hated shopping. The saleslady said, “What do you do when you bathe? You don’t just stand under the water. You go on and soap yourself off and get clean.”

Soap? Washcloths? Really? Every time?

This amazing information changed my life.

Standing under the water was pretty much what I was doing back then! Get in, let the water run over you, and get out. And shampoo…I’m not sure I ever used it without prompting until I was in my teens. Every once in a while, my mother would grab me and make me lie on the counter with my head in the sink, and she would shampoo the dirt out and let me go. For a kid way up in elementary school, it was a disgrace. But I didn’t know. Who was going to tell me?

My mother did a very bad job. I hate to say it. If I had a son with the kind of habits I had when I was a kid, I would be all over it. I would wear a switch out on his sorry behind every day, out of terror for his future. I would feel like the worst parent on earth for letting him slide. I would pray I got him fixed before other people found out.

I know a lady who has a huge, belligerent son. The pediatrician thinks he’s going to be six feet ten inches tall. When he was 5 or 6 years old, he didn’t know how to wipe his rear end. Someone always had to do it for him. You can’t expect kids to be civilized without instruction. That kid is going to be a monster if she doesn’t get him under control.

It’s bad to be too hard on your parents, but it’s just as bad to put them on pedestals and pretend they’re perfect.

Why did God tell me both parents had abandoned me? To make me blame my mother for my faults? No. I’m responsible for my faults. But the truth is important, and I have to know it in order to draw proper conclusions and make proper decisions. Besides, knowing my parents’ shortcomings helps me advise other people (especially kids). Also, the knowledge that both parents abandoned me helps me appreciate God, because as stubborn, uncooperative, and dismissive as I am, he is still working to change me every day. He is 100% consistent. He has perfect attendance. He is better than my parents. He is better than the best parents who ever lived.

Here’s something he told me a few minutes ago: “There is usually a barking dog outside a stronghold.”

That one really hit me. When I heard it, I was watching the testimony of a Jew who accepted Jesus. He quoted his mother’s reaction: “I will never believe in Jesus! I was born a Jew; I will die a Jew! How can you expect me to believe in a God in whose name my people have been killed? I don’t care if it’s true! I will never believe in Jesus!”

That’s some serious barking!

Strongholds aren’t complete without intimidation. They are composed of intimidation plus actual barriers. Let me think of an example.

Think of Brother Andrew, the famous Bible smuggler. He carried Bibles into leftist countries that would have imprisoned or killed him had be been caught. Those countries were strongholds. They had physical barriers in the form of gates, walls, fences, and armed soldiers. They also had barriers of intimidation. They publicized the way they intended to treat missionaries. They did their best to put fear into them so they wouldn’t ever get to the physical barriers. They would be so scared, they wouldn’t even try.

Disinformation is a powerful thing, because it makes your enemies do your work for you. Don’t tell people they’re going to be gassed. They’ll fight and run. You’ll have to kill them and carry them to the ovens, and stripping dead people is hard. Tell them they’re going to get showers. Then they’ll walk to the showers, strip naked in front of total strangers, and put their belongings in neat piles for you.

The talk about prison and execution was the barking of guard dogs. Fortunately, Andrew ignored it, and God blinded his enemies. He ended up driving through checkpoints with uncovered Bibles stacked in the passenger seat next to him. Guards looked right past them, saw nothing, and let him pass. Too funny. When it comes to making fools of people, God has no equal.

The mother of the convert in the Youtube video was barking. The enemy knew someone would come to her eventually and try to open her eyes, so he filled her with irrational rage in order to intimidate. The most obvious proof that her rage was irrational is this: “I don’t care if it’s true!” There is no possible way to rationalize that.

She ended up accepting Jesus at the age of 86. I suppose I should add that, because the question will naturally arise in people’s minds. God knows how to tame a guard dog.

There are some strongholds you should leave alone. God has told me to quit praying for some people. But you can’t assume a barking dog means anything. God has the authority to command you. A dog does not.

Completing my Ensemble

I finally decided on a new hunting (sheath) knife.

When I was a kid, my mom would not let me cross the street without a police escort (perhaps I exaggerate), but I was allowed to have all the knives I wanted, and when I stayed with my grandparents, I was allowed to shoot anything in my grandfather’s gun cabinet. I’ve had a few hunting knives.

My first hunting knife wasn’t really mine. My dad had a Case sheath knife with a stacked leather handle. I started carrying it around, and it disappeared. My best friend Clayton stole things from me all the time, and I’m pretty sure he has it. He was a terrible friend. He was the kind of friend you end up with when God isn’t part of your life.

My second cousin Byrd was a circuit judge in Kentucky, so he got dibs on a lot of confiscated weapons. A man got drunk and shot his best friend to death while playing with guns, and Byrd got his Browning hunting knife. He gave it to me. He was always very good to me. Unfortunately, it eventually disappeared. It was also a bad knife.

My mom got me some kind of weird bone-handled knife for my birthday when I was in high school. It’s gone, too.

I never had a use for a sheath knife, so losing these items wasn’t exactly crippling. Now I need one. I have to clean and skin game, and I don’t want to gum up a folding knife and then stick the filthy thing in my pocket. I want something I can wear on my belt and clean thoroughly with dishwashing liquid.

Today I Googled around, looking for something good, and the results were depressing. Seems like everyone uses 420HC steel. This stuff is garbage. It’s the steel in my Gerber Gator II folder, for which I paid something like $15. It sharpens fast, and it’s tough and corrosion-resistant. It also gets dull in a hurry. Forget that. There is no such thing as a quality knife that doesn’t hold an edge.

I saw other knives that used other steels which are comparable to AUS-6. Not for me. I have an AUS-8 knife, and I like it a lot, but it’s my understanding that the little number after AUS means a lot. There is AUS-10, and then there are AUS-8 and AUS-6. I am told AUS-8 is comparable to 440C, which I love, but AUS-6 is not as good. I’m not risking it.

I found a company called Entrek, and they specialize in fairly ugly knives made with 440C. They use micarta for their scales. I love micarta. It’s ugly and boring, but it’s indestructible. It’s plastic reinforced with cloth. Perfect for a hunting knife. I love stag handles and other fancy types of scales, but I don’t need something that has to be petted and coddled. Micarta is IT.

I liked what Entrek’s copy said about steel: “With 36 years experience we just aren’t that impressed with the glamour steels.” If that’s how they feel about steel, they probably have a low tolerance for BS.

I decided to try an Entrek Javalina. This is a very plain sheath knife with a thick blade and a Kydex sheath. It’s on the way. Tremble, squirrels, tremble.

I also need something to carry game in. Yesterday I was jogging through briars with my customary squirrel-filled tall kitchen garbage bag, and the plastic kept snagging on thorns. I’ve had it. I’m also not thrilled about all the shotgun shells bouncing around in my left pocket. The other day I ran about 6 .17 HMR shells through the washing machine. I posted a forum comment asking what I should do. Looking forward to the answers.

Skinning the last pair of squirrels was difficult. I think small squirrels are harder to skin. I found a video by a kid who uses catfish pliers. I plan to get some. They grip the skin very well while you’re yanking it off. It was great to see a kid whose voice hadn’t changed, giving adults great tips on skinning game. Take that, feminizing forces of leftist idiocy.

My new scope arrived today. I know that because I heard the UPS truck roll up. I plan to mount and try it ASAP. If things go well, I should be perforating squirrels relatively quietly with .22 pellets later in the day. I can’t wait.

I’ve decided to get a trail camera. This is a sort of action camera for filming wild animals automatically. They’re very cheap. They have sensors that turn them on when critters walk by. They shoot video and/or photos, and they use IR LED’s to generate light for night shooting. I want to find out what (or who) has been pooping in my yard, and maybe I can find out whether there are any turkeys wandering on my property. I heard some a couple of days ago. I hope it wasn’t some neighbor, practicing his turkey calls.

I looked into turkey blinds. The season is approaching. Worst blind of all time: a giant turkey costume. What were they thinking? As the website says, with this blind, safety continues to be a primary issue. I think if you dress up like a turkey and walk outdoors in hunting season, people should be allowed to shoot you without repercussions.

Imagine how exciting it is when people see that thing. It looks like a turkey the size of a Saint Bernard. They think they’re going to be in the record books. Then they fill the guys wearing them with shotgun pellets. What a disappointment that must be.

I don’t know what I’d do with a wild turkey. People say they taste good.

The other day I read that crows taste good. Like ducks. No lie. People disagree, but evidently, the only people who put crow meat down are those who have not eaten it. I have no plans to shoot crows. Yet. The more game resembles parrots, the less I want to shoot it. But it’s interesting to know that they’re tasty.

If I ever get over the psychological barrier and shoot crows, I’ll have meat on the table all the time. They are not scarce here.

People say crows can’t taste good because they eat carrion. Hello, what do chickens eat? Insects and worms. Is that better? It’s not like the food an animal eats goes straight from its mouth into its body. It’s broken down by acid and enzymes, and it passes through the intestine wall in liquid form. Then the cells of the body turn it into new things. If a crow eats a dead cat, by the time the cat gets processed, it’s something totally different.

Anyway, crows don’t just eat carrion. They hunt. They eat little critters, just as bears do. People say bears taste great. What’s the difference?

I don’t think I can talk myself into this, but I’m trying.

I will review the knife when I get it. I’m really looking forward to it. I hate bad knives, and I love good ones. I’ll make my next one myself.

I hope Clayton doesn’t find out I have it.

Squirrel Hunting Success

I had a wonderful squirrel outing today. I chased a number of squirrels, fired on two, and dropped two. Excellent. I think I can now say I’m an okay squirrel hunter, and since hunting squirrels is as hard as hunting deer, I must be an okay hunter, period.

That’s my position.

I’ve decided that hunting squirrels is not hard. It may be hard to do WELL, but doing an okay job is not tough. Here’s what you do: walk around in the woods. When you see a squirrel, shoot it.

The first squirrel was hanging onto the side of a downed tree. I have no idea why. He was just hanging there, doing nothing. He was in an area where I didn’t want to shoot. One neighbor has a house maybe 25 feet from the property line, which is ridiculous, and I want to be a big person and avoid shooting within 150 feet, but this squirrel was taunting me, so I walked up, got in a position where I was shooting onto my own property, and blew him to squirrel kingdom come.

I have spared other squirrels in that area, but if they insist on congregating there, I am not going to let them sit there and smirk at me.

I circled around the woods and came back, and wouldn’t you know it, I heard a squirrel barking near the house. It was farther away, but not too far. It was sitting on a downed tree, all curled up, so I went to my left until I had a safe angle, and I blew him off the trunk. Blammo!

There were a couple of other squirrels I could have annihilated, but I want to take safe shots that are highly unlikely to wound without killing, and I prefer not to be too close to other people, so I let them go. I also chased a few squirrels that vanished.

The second squirrel I blasted may have been responding to my squirrel caller. I took it with me today and used it a few times. For the most part, the results suggested that instead of “Squirrel Buster,” the device should have been named “Squirrel Offender” or “Squirrel Repeller,” but I heard the barks of the second squirrel while I was using the call. I tromped in the direction of the sound and saw him waiting for his ticket across the River Styx, and I obliged.

My best guess is that the caller is a sad hoax, but I will continue testing it.

I don’t wear camo or use a blind, and I am too impatient to sit for 45 minutes in one place, so I am probably not doing the best job possible. I don’t know what the general rules are, but I can tell you this: MANY squirrels don’t give a crap about your clothes or the fact that they can see your face. MANY will sit and stare at you while you walk up very noisily and point a shotgun at them. MANY are too stupid to hide properly when you get close. MANY will let you shoot them not long after you shot a friend of theirs a hundred feet away. Squirrels are not particle physicists. They are not that hard to outsmart.

I suppose the difference between an okay squirrel hunter and a good squirrel hunter is the ability to kill the 30% of squirrels who aren’t utterly stupid.

I feel good about my results. I can say I’m a hunter now, without too much concern about being exposed.

Tomorrow my BugBuster scope arrives, and hopefully, I will be able to use the air rifle on squirrels and increase my take.

I’ve been reading about the gun I’m using (Browning Sweet Sixteen semi-auto shotgun). Apparently, it’s a very nice gun. The Remington 16 gauge is built on a heavy 12 gauge frame (the 1100), so you get all the weight of a 12 gauge without the power. Sounds like a stupid gun to me. The Sweet Sixteen is light and pleasant to carry. I appreciate that after lugging it around for an hour. The air rifle is much heavier.

The 16 gauge shotgun has lost popularity in the US because of some dumb rules in competitive skeet shooting, but that won’t prevent me from hunting with it.

It works great with #6 shot. Squirrels plop right on the ground. I had to shoot one twice, but he came down instantly after the first shot and couldn’t run off.

I can’t wait to try the air rifle scope. I love scopes. With an accurate gun at the proper distance, you can literally see the exact point of impact, +/- 3/8″, while you’re in the act of shooting. With iron sights, you have to be right up against the target to do that. When I use iron sights from 100 feet, all I know is that I’ll be somewhere in a 2″ circle. That’s not good enough for shooting squirrels with an air gun.

I’ll post a shot of the squirrels. Cleaning them was horrible. I read that you’re supposed to cut them under the tail, stand on the tail, and pull on the hind feet, but these little squirrels are very attached to their coats. I had to fight like a tiger to get them skinned. The boot method didn’t work.

My squirrels are not big. I saw a Youtube squirrel-skinning video, and the squirrels the guy was skinning were like 1.5 of mine. Maybe smaller squirrels are harder to skin. Anyway, they’re in the fridge.

It’s funny, but anti-hunting journalists (there is no other kind) are saying mass murderer Nikolas Cruz demonstrated is propensity for killing by putting photos of dead squirrels online. What a ridiculous, narrow-minded thing to say. A murderer is probably more likely to hunt than other people, but hunting doesn’t make you more likely to murder. Why not go back over Jeffrey Dahmer’s history and post a photo of every trout he ever caught?

It occurred to me that I’m posting squirrel photos at a time when squirrel photos are in bad odor, but I don’t care. My people have been killing squirrels since firearms were invented. I can’t be responsible for the provincial notions of hypocritical, ignorant people who think barbecued ribs come from a rib factory.

I will report on the scope after I use it.

Can Anything Good Come Out of Youtube?

Youtube is either a poison or a medicine, depending on what you look for in it. I suppose that could be said of anything.

I found out about the many helpful Christian videos on Youtube, and I started watching. It’s a gigantic resource. The videos I like best are the testimonies. Most people who teach about religion don’t know anything, because they’re just passing on gossip they heard from rabbis or priests. People who testify know something. They talk about things they have witnessed.

The Bible was written by witnesses, not scholars.

A person who sits around reading about God all day, without encountering him, is ignorant and has very little useful information to pass on. They don’t know much which is useful, but they’re jam-packed with poisonous fairy tales and lies that can do me harm. Look at the pagan nonsense Augustine poured into the church. Devastating.

I know God. I can say that, even though I am not a good person or what Catholics would call a “saint.” It’s possible for a bad person to know God. If it were not, we would all be doomed. I know God because Jesus visited me twice, and because the Holy Spirit communicates with me every day, numerous times. However screwed up I still am, I am much better off knowing God than knowing ABOUT God. A proper relationship with God is closer than a marriage.

What kind of marriage would you have, if your husband or wife never talked to you?

Are we better than God? We insist on communicating on people we love. Doesn’t he want to communicate with us?

Many, many Christians know God personally.

I found a wonderful Youtube channel called One for Israel. The people who run it are Messianic Jews. They really have their work cut out for them, because they work in Israel. Israel is not America. You can’t build a church there and stand in front of it telling people Jesus is God and then expect things to go smoothly. Israel is full of two kinds of Jews: leftist atheists and religious Jews who absolutely hate Christianity. The resistance the One for Israel people encounter must be something to see.

One Israeli rabbi, in particular, has gone public with very negative remarks about Christianity and Messianics. He created a video in which he said Christianity would be exposed and destroyed, more or less, and that Jesus is in hell, boiling in feces. The latter pronouncement comes from the Talmud. I believe most religious Jews say the passage he refers to is not about Jesus. The angry rabbi is the first guy I’ve ever seen who openly states that Jesus is the subject.

A prominent anti-missionary group, Jews for Judaism, acknowledges that the person said to be boiling in excrement is “Yeshu,” which is an unflattering name many religious Jews insist on using for Jesus (instead of “Yeshua,” a form of “Yehoshua”), but they say it’s a different Yeshu.

The person who supposedly conjured “Yeshu” and found out about the excrement issue was the historical figure Onkelos, a Roman who converted to Judaism. He converted after summoning spirits of the dead to guide him, and “Yeshu” was one of them, along with Titus (destroyer of the temple) and Balaam. Onkelos was very respected, and it is believed he is responsible for one official translation of the Talmud.

I don’t know why a man who committed a great idolatrous sin in order to research Judaism would later be respected, but there is probably a rationale.

Onkelos lived just after the time of Jesus, so he would certainly have known who Jesus was, and he would have had a very negative opinion of him, consistent with the meaning of “Yeshu,” which means a person who led Jews into idolatry. During his time, Messianic Jews were running around the Mediterranean area, preaching in synagogues, trying to get other Jews to accept Jesus. He had to be aware of this, and he would not have been happy about it.

This is all I know. Nothing is certain.

The rabbi’s take is pretty impressive, as negativity goes. It sounds like something I would say about Satan. Hard to improve on it.

I don’t know what kind of reputation this man has in Israel. It may be that almost no one shares his views. Maybe Orthodox Jews think he’s a complete idiot. Judaism, like Christianity, is very fragmented and full of conflict among sects. In any case, it shows that Messianics have some heavy-duty detractors in Israel.

I love the One for Israel channel, for many reasons.

Christianity is largely about what Christians call “strongholds.” A stronghold is a sort of fortification, built to block and demoralize an enemy. A stronghold, from the viewpoint of someone outside it, is a structure which seems impossible to overcome.

There are all sorts of examples of strongholds. I’ll give you one. The Muslims used to believe that the Jewish Messiah, whom they hated, would enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate. In order to prevent it, they did two things. They filled the gate with stone, and they put a Muslim cemetery outside of it. Their rationale was that Elijah, presumably a priest, would have to preceded the Messiah when he entered. They believed a Jewish priest could not walk through the cemetery without becoming unclean.

This isn’t a very good stronghold. I’m not God, and I can think of all sorts of ways to get around it. Move the stones. Move the bodies. Enter on a hovercraft if you have to, so you don’t touch the ground. It’s not a great stronghold, but it’s an example. The presence of a mosque and a Muslim shrine on top of the Temple Mount, which rightly belongs to Jews, is a much better stronghold.

The purpose of obstructing the gate was to set up a barrier the Jews could not defeat. That’s the point.

Jericho is a great example of a Biblical stronghold. Its walls were considered invasion-proof. The Hebrews brought them down without lifting a finger. They marched around the walls over and over, and one day God leveled them and gave Jericho to them.

In our personal lives, there are a lot of strongholds. Drug addiction is a stronghold. It’s nearly impossible to beat. They say pedophilia is incurable. If so, that would be a stronghold. People who refuse to entertain the notion that Jesus is God live in strongholds. As strongholds go, the Jewish resistance to Jesus is one of the best. It is extremely discouraging.

God is a destroyer of Satan’s strongholds. Watching the One for Israel testimonies reminds me that no matter how tough a stronghold looks, God has the power to crush it.

Jews usually don’t draw attention to Jewish opinions about Jesus, but when one converts, look out! They can’t tell their stories without telling about the resistance they met from other Jews. One guy says his gentle old grandfather threw a dish at him the minute he came out, cutting his head open and leaving a scar. Another lady says her mom went into a church to get her, and she started beating her. She got home, and her dad joined in. Another person was told he was worse than Hitler. A family member asked if conversion meant the believer was going to become a Nazi.

The Nazism-Christianity connection in the mind of some Jews is extremely bizarre. Did some Christians join the Nazi party of fight for Hitler? Sure. Did many European Catholics, including priests, help Hitler kill Jews? Certainly. That doesn’t make Hitler a Christian, and it doesn’t make Nazism a Christian movement. Most American Catholics vote liberal. Does that make Christianity a leftist movement? Most Jews–something like 90%–vote liberal, and Karl Marx was Jewish. Is Marxism Jewish? Most American Jews are for the division of Israel. Is the division of Israel a Jewish cause? Of course not. You have to have some common sense in this world.

Catholicism has a rotten history. Catholics tortured Jews and American Indians and God knows who else, to persuade them to accept conversion. They raised armies and murdered unbelievers. Catholics are famous for bullying Jews, calling them “Christ-killers” and so on. An awful lot of the negative things Jews feel about Christianity come from their experiences with Catholics, and when Jews criticize Christianity, usually, they criticize things that apply mainly or solely to Catholicism. It’s as though they think all Christianity is Catholicism.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that every human being is a Christ-killer. If you don’t accept responsibility for his death, you’re not a Christian. And where would we be if he hadn’t been killed? The whole “Christ-killer” thing is beyond stupid. I am as responsible for the murder of Jesus as the soldiers who drove the nails.

One Jewish testimony I watched was almost funny. A rabbi converted, and he was rejected. He had to take a menial job, washing dishes for a Christian-hating Arab. He lived on a beach in Israel, in a tent. A bunch of rabbis, including one who is famous, came to visit him in his tent, imploring him to return to the fold. When he refused, they started cursing him and spitting all over him. With friends like that, who needs enemies? I have had people disagree with me, but they don’t make road trips to come to my house and spit on me. Yet.

It’s remarkable to see the things God does in order to reach Jews. For Americans of Christian background, receiving salvation is typically a little dull. You say the prayer, you feel peace, and you feel relieved because you’ve finally surrendered. For Jews, it is often more dramatic than that. They see visions. God works miracles in order to get their attention. They get delivered instantly from addictions. I almost feel envious. In comparision, to American gentiles, salvation seems almost boring.

Muslims and Arabs seem to get even wilder experiences. You can find their testimonies on other Youtube channels. Jesus appears to them. He comes to their bedrooms at night and lights them up. All sorts of things happen. Maybe the nature of Muslims and Arabs is such that they need a little more persuasion.

Speaking of Arabs, I saw an Arab testify on the One for Israel testimony. This guy came from a Christian family, yet he knew nearly nothing about God. He was violent. He killed a man in a fight. Even though he came from a Christian background, he had to encounter God and make a personal commitment in order to be changed. I think most American Christians are like that. They sit in church three times a year, but they don’t know God, they don’t make any effort to change, and they’re on the way to hell.

One of the funny things about Christianity is that it brings Jews and Arabs together in Israel. They worship side by side. They cut out the identity politics. I suppose their new attitude is that “us” is worshipers of Jesus, not Arabs, Muslims, or Jews. It’s an interesting thing. Human beings always talk about a solution to the conflict over Israel, and we discuss stupid ideas like the two-state solution. Christians who actually know God live in harmony with each other; people with conflicting religions do not. They are pitted against each other every day. The real answer to the Mideast problem is Christianity. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen.

Here is Psalm 133:

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;

As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.

This is not about the two-state solution. It’s about the one-state solution. People can only live in peace when all are ruled by the Holy Spirit. He tells everyone exactly the same thing. He never, ever makes his people disagree. After all, he’s the one who says a house divided against itself can’t stand, and he also said David’s house would last forever.

“Anointing,” the application of ointment, refers to pouring oil over a person as he is installed in an office and given authority. Oil runs DOWN. Authority runs downward from God (a single, undivided, unconflicted source) onto us. Authority can only exist when God commands us; without commands, authority means nothing. Psalm 133 says God’s commandments pour down over his children, from heaven, and that when we obey, we are in harmony, because we are all answering to the same commander.

Jesus calls himself the Prince of Peace. He really is. If we were listening to the Holy Sprit, we would be in alignment with each other, and we would have peace.

Right now we are having terrible racial discord in the US. Blacks and Latins are being pitted against white people. Minority churches have a real problem. They push Marxism and identity politics, and they reject the unity of the Holy Spirit. Most white churches reject the Holy Spirit altogether. If we listened to the Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t be hearing about BLM, La Raza, or the tiny groups of unsuccessful, resentful whites who agitate against minorities.

The answer to Israel’s problems is already available, but it’s going to stay on the shelf, because not enough people want it.

Here’s another thing that surprised me about the testimonies: many of the Jews who spoke said they originally believed ridiculous things about Jesus and the New Testament. For example, many thought Jesus was a Catholic god who had nothing to do with Yahweh. They also thought the New Testament was a Catholic book written by Catholic anti-Semites. Some thought it was a sort of instruction manual for “getting” Jews.

They were amazed to see that the entire New Testament was about Jews and Israel. They were shocked to learn that the disciples and apostles were Jews. Many were surprised to learn that Jesus was Jewish. How can anyone not know that Jesus was Jewish? His name was Yehoshua. I mean, come on. But I’m telling you what they say.

The church was originally Jewish. How can people not know that? The Jewish religious establishment sent people to find and murder early believers, hoping to stamp out the church. They couldn’t do that to gentiles. The Romans would have exterminated them. In the beginning, the conflict between the Jewish establishment and Christianity had nothing to do with gentiles. It was an intramural squabble between Jews who believed in Yahweh. Christianity didn’t become a gentile religion until after it spread among Jews, and the people who first spread it in Israel and abroad were Jewish. Any Jew who complains about Christianity is complaining about something his people started.

They also said they were shocked when they read Isaiah 53, because it seemed to them that Jesus was the only person it could apply to. It’s clearly about the Messiah, but it says he will be rejected and despised, not that he will be an honored king who leads Israel to victory. It says, “He was cut off from the land of the living.” That means the Messiah was killed.

They also talked about the emptiness of a religion that emphasizes rules and study, without the presence of God. Several of them talk about how strange it was to see Christians worship. The Christians they saw weren’t just talking about God or learning rules. They were talking to him directly and enjoying his presence.

I can relate to that, because most churches, especially the older ones like the Catholics and Episcopalians, run services in which smug, effeminate old men stand up front and lecture and perform rites, while the people in the pews grit their teeth and wait for it to be over. I hate church worse than just about anything, but for the presence of God.

We’re supposed to know God personally. The Bible calls his people “children.” What kind of father would let a child live 70 or 100 years without visiting? Come on. Think. Would you do that? You couldn’t. You would hate yourself. You would find it unbearable. You would be ostracized and reviled, even by atheists. Does that mean you’re a better parent than God? Is God a deadbeat dad? I don’t think so!

The Old Testament confirms that we are supposed to know God personally. Look at the Psalms. The writers pant and thirst for God. They beg him to show them his face. They say believers abide IN him. Intimacy, intimacy, intimacy; not rules and aloofness.

What does aloofness in a human parent mean? It means abandonment. It’s abuse, under the laws of every state. You can lose your children by refusing to spend time with them. Courts will literally remove them from your home and give them to other people. Refusing to spend time or be intimate with a spouse has always been considered grounds for divorce; it’s tantamount to adultery. Yet God is guilty of this? Come on. Wake up.

I remember Rich Wilkerson at Trinity Church in Miami, arguing with me, trying to tell me we don’t have to feel anything in our relationships with God. But then this is the same man who asked for an offering at a funeral.

I wonder if he knows what people said about him after that. I doubt it. He surrounds himself with sycophants who see him as a sort of milk cow that has to be managed and babied because it will one day give them money and success. They always smile and tell him what he wants to hear. They said plenty behind his back, however. I heard it!

It’s kind of neat when Jews accept Jesus, because they understand things we don’t. The New Testament is a Jewish book, and knowledge of Jewish culture and history are helpful in understanding it.

Remember Planet of the Apes? Taylor was walking around an archaeological site with the chimps Cornelius and Zira, and he was able to identify and explain artifacts the apes couldn’t understand. He had lived in the world of the people whose home became the site, so he recognized and understood things the apes had dug up. Messianic Jews are like that. Sometimes they understand things about Christianity which we have gotten wrong. For example, they know that baptism is really ritual immersion, which comes from Judaism. Sprinkling water on a baby’s head is not baptism.

I highly recommend the One for Israel channel. It will restore your hope. You will remember that God is still plucking people out of the flames, no matter how powerful Satan is getting.

Kill Pests Without Alerting Hillary Voters

I have decided to get me an air rifle.

My current squirrel weapons are a shotgun and two rimfires. The .22 is not suitable for a scope, and the long travel of the bullets limits the shots I can take. The .17 HMR is a joy in every way, but even those tiny rounds are of no use for any angle between zero and maybe 60 degrees from horizontal, unless a big tree trunk is behind the squirrel. I don’t think a 17-grain bullet fired in a woody area is very likely to damage anything or hurt anyone, but you never know. The shotgun is much safer than the rimfires, but I could still send pellets raining down on people. Not dangerous, but not a good way to greet the neighbors.

Air rifles are really complicated. They come in various types. At the lowest level, you can get a Crosman 760 pump BB gun, which is neither accurate nor powerful, although you should be able to hit squirrels within 50 feet. After that, you move up to expensive guns with rifled barrels. I wrote about this already.

I decided to get a Diana 54, also known as an Air King or an RWS 54. I don’t know why it has so many names. It’s a powerful gun that should kill anything I want to kill, within 50 yards.

The Air King has a weird barrel that slides to kill recoil, and unfortunately, this transmits recoil to the scope, if you have one. It will kill a scope if you aren’t careful to buy a model that can handle the shock. It looks like I’ll have to get a rifle scope, and that means $200-$300. Sounds insane, but that’s how it is.

Before I do that, I want to get a peep sight. I don’t like regular iron sights. I had a BB gun (don’t laugh) with a peep sight when I was a kid, and it was much more accurate than open sights, at the tiny distances over which BB guns work. A peep sight, also known as an aperture sight, requires you to look through a little hole, and…well, go look it up on Youtube. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, I like them, and I suspect a peep sight will be nearly as good as a scope, on a weapon that won’t shoot well past 75 yards.

If you’re wondering, there is a scope which is highly recommended for this gun. It’s the Vortex Optics Diamondback 4-12×40 AO Dead-Hold BDC Reticle, 1 Inch Tube (DBK-412B). A professional air rifle guy (seriously) named Hector Medina uses it with the Air King.

Surely I can get by with a 12-power scope. When it comes to squirrels, 4 is plenty.

The Air King is really expensive. I figured it was worth it. It should last a long time, and I will never have to upgrade. Living on a small farm, I have a legitimate need for a good air rifle. There are a lot of things here that will need killing, and I don’t want to have to buy a new gun every two years.

The pellets it fires weigh 18 grains, and they probably move at something like 800 fps. That will kill a squirrel as dead as Compuserve, and if it leaves my property, it will be much less dangerous than a rimfire round. I will still have to use common sense, but I won’t have to worry about shooting a car window out half a mile away.

The .17 HMR moves at well over 2000 fps, and a .22’s speed is something like 1300 fps. A .22 slug weighs around 40 grains, depending on which one you use.

The Air King should be much, much quieter than a rifle, so if it turns out I have self-righteous yankee neighbors who have stupid ideas about hunting, I will be able to shoot close to the property lines without them knowing about it.

I got a very good deal on the gun. I don’t know why. The price was too low to resist. I considered getting an RWS 34 in order to save money, but the price difference was not that great.

My squirrel call arrived yesterday. I can’t wait to see if it works. It makes the sound of a squirrel in trouble. Apparently, squirrels are like women, in that they love to see each other suffer. When you make a noise like a squirrel being torn up by a hawk, the other squirrels pop out to watch.

Can’t recall whether I mentioned this before, so I will say it: it looks like I have bears. I keep finding something that looks like cow manure, but it’s way too fresh to be from a cow. The last steer moved out of here in August. I looked at poop-ID sites, and it appears that the poo comes from bears.

Florida has lots of bears now, and they need to be hunted, but hippies and yankees keep protesting. They killed the 2016-2018 hunts. I don’t know why anyone listens to them. Bear attacks are surprisingly common here, and besides, bears are good to eat.

I had this idea that a bear wouldn’t cross a fence, but I am clearly wrong.

The bear and the air rifle are not related in any way. I am not likely to get a chance to shoot a bear here, and an air rifle would not be very useful for that task.

There is something disconcerting about having to use an air rifle in a rural area. In backward countries with limited firearm rights, air rifles are very popular. People think nothing of spending huge sums on them, and they’re very proud of them. I have rifles suitable for killing people 750 yards away, plus very nice semiautos with big magazines, and here I am, lowering myself to purchase a second-world weapon. I might as well start watching soccer and eating toad in the hole!

Due to my dad’s condition, I can’t go farther north than Marion County. At least I don’t think so. He needs a relatively warm place geared toward old people, and boy, is this it. But I keep thinking it would be neat to look for a place in Tennessee after he’s gone. A couple of hundred acres would be nice. The more woods, the better.

Georgia is way too liberal, and it keeps getting worse. Black people there will vote for anyone who tells them what they like to hear. South Carolina seems similar. North Carolina is too much like Eastern Kentucky, and it’s filling up with Miami Cubans. An undesirable culture is being augmented with a worse one. Maybe Tennessee is better.

The South is funny. There are many areas full of unsuccessful people who are trashy and can’t get it together, but there are also areas where people are more responsible and mature. If you look around, you can find places where the good parts of southern culture aren’t tainted by the bad.

I love the South, but we don’t have the most capable, smoothest-running culture in America. We are too emotional. I seriously believe people are more together in the center of the country. They seem to be less in touch with God, however.

This morning during prayer, I took a look at my cell phone. I took a notion to look up a Miami friend on Facebook. I looked at this person’s friends list, and I saw familiar faces from law school. I felt a little nauseated. I never want to see these people again. I’m so glad I have nothing to do with them. They didn’t treat me badly. They just live in a different world, and that world disgusts me. It’s a world with no future, full of cocky, grasping people who have no idea the iceberg underneath them is melting.

Supposedly, many people who have been in prison become obsessive about not going back, to the point where death seems preferable. That’s how I feel about Miami. Never, never, never, NEVER.

I don’t understand people who want to live in or near big cities. I usually have to drive 15-20 minutes to get to a decent restaurant, and I feel like I’m not far enough out. I don’t want to go to cocktail parties or meet “important” people; I want to stay out of the circle of butt-kissers and compromisers. I don’t want to drive a foreign car built by a company that made vehicles for the Nazis. I would rather hide in a tent than go to benefits and society events.

I will write about the Air King after I shoot it. Hope it works out. I plan to go out today and see how the squirrels like the squirrel call. Heh heh.

Victory is Sweet

My hunting adventures are proceeding well. Today I bagged a third squirrel, and later on, I fried her along with her friends.

The last time I had an opportunity to eat squirrel was probably in the late Seventies. My grandfather either shot some or received some as a gift, and my grandmother fried them. I thought they smelled funny, so I passed. Today I remedied that mistake.

I made a mixture of flour, salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The squirrels were all treated in a solution of baking soda and salt, and then I soaked them in buttermilk for a short time. I dredged them in the flour mix and fried them in olive oil (which is what I happened to have) and bacon grease.

I screwed up the first batch and had to re-bread them. The second ones came out much better. I made gravy with the grease, and I also made buttermilk biscuits with half butter and half bacon grease. Then I made gravy.

The squirrels were very nice but not much of a meal. I would say a grey squirrel contains about as much meat as a chicken breast. The meat tastes like the meat you find on a chicken breast alongside the backbone. It’s dark, but the flavor isn’t very strong. It was surprisingly tender.

I think you would need to have two squirrels to make a decent meal for a man.

I’m happy about the results. Squirrel meat is tasty, and it’s rewarding to eat something you killed.

I’m looking at air rifles now. One corner of my property is loaded with squirrels, but it’s close to neighboring houses, and for all I know, some of the neighbors are liberal yankee retirees. I don’t want to get into it with ignorant people who moved here from Long Island. It’s perfectly legal for me to shoot near their property, but northern retirees are idiots about firearms. They wouldn’t know the law, and they might think they were in their rights to waste my time and the time of the local LEO’s. An air rifle will avoid the whole question. No noise. They wouldn’t know what I was doing

It’s hard to choose a rifle. I want something with some power, but I don’t want to spend $700. And if it’s too powerful, it will be an awful lot like the .22 I’m trying to supplement.

The neatest rifles are PCP guns. I forget what PCP stands for, but it means the air is pre-compressed. You don’t have to pump them up every time you fire. You fill them before you go shooting, and you get a large number of shots before you have to pump again.

I don’t want a PCP rifle because it takes forever to pump them manually, and they fill up with moisture that eventually rusts them out. You can drive to a dive shop and get them to fill a scuba tank for you, and then you can use that to fill your gun with dry air, but the pressure in the scuba tank will drop each time you fill the gun, so every refill gives you a different velocity and trajectory. What a pain.

PCP guns are powerful and convenient to use, but who wants a product which is designed to rust out? And I don’t want to spend all day pumping a rifle with air.

You can get around the water problem with desiccants, but it sounds like a hassle.

It looks like the best choice is a spring-powered air rifle that shoots .22-caliber pellets. It will be powerful enough to kill squirrels and even coons, and I won’t have to fool with the Rube Goldberg pump business.

A company named Diana makes a nice .22 that gives a lot of velocity, but it is said that this particular gun ruins scopes. The recoil is too much. Apparently you have to be careful which scope you use with it.

–PAUSE–

I stopped writing last night, and now I’m back.

Yesterday’s squirrel came with an unpleasant lesson. I had learned that I should leave squirrels on the ground after shooting them, to draw out others. This is what I did yesterday. I walked around a bit and came back to get the squirrel. When I looked at it, I was surprised to see movement. It was still breathing.

New lesson: check your game as soon as you shoot it, to make sure it’s not suffering. This won’t prevent me from leaving a squirrel where it lies. I can check it and move on.

I wish I had understood this before I let a live squirrel lie on the ground for 5 minutes. I don’t think it was conscious, because it didn’t react to me, but there is no reason to take a chance. I had to blow its head off.

I have been trying to find out whether I can carry a .22 pistol for the purpose of finishing game off. Game laws can be stupid. In some states, it’s illegal to use a pistol to euthanize a wounded deer. Shooting a wounded deer with a rifle round doesn’t sound smart. It would mess up the carcass, and I don’t know how safe it is to fire a high-powered rifle at the ground at your feet. I also have to wonder if flying bone fragments would be an issue.

Again, air may be the answer. Or at least CO2. A CO2 pistol would finish a squirrel off just fine, and it would be quiet.

I am trying to obey the law, but I can think of 3 illegal things which would have been illegal had I done them. Not saying I did these things. Always the lawyer, and there are at least two people from my past who can’t get over rejection, and who probably read my blog every day and would be happy to try to have me cited. Some people never move on and get lives. I’m not saying I did the illegal things. But I did consider them.

I thought about putting some peanuts down to see if they would attract squirrels. I had done my best to research the law on baiting squirrels, and I had found nothing. I eventually turned up an applicable law. You can’t shoot animals near food (other than crops) unless the food was there 6 months before the season opened. What? I don’t understand it, either. Anyway, I will not be putting peanuts out in the future. At least until March 5, after the season closes. Then I’m putting up a permanent feeder!

I plan to put it at a nice distance from the back of the house so I can sit in my yard and make 75-yard shots with a scope. In Florida, it’s perfectly legal to shoot from your house. You can put a sandbag on your dining room table and shoot deer through the window.

There was an incident in which I could have fired some shotgun pellets over some woods belonging to a neighbor. In Florida, you can shoot in your front yard in the suburbs if you want, but you can’t send a projectile onto someone else’s property. I’m sure no one would care about a few spent pellets up here, but I don’t want to get in the habit of ignoring the hunting laws.

The third thing, well, why talk about it?

Game laws are often counterintuitive, so you almost have to be a lawyer to know what you’re doing. I am a lawyer, and I made mistakes, even after reading up.

The other day I shot at a squirrel and stunned it, and it came down and stared at me from maybe 10 feet up. I was out of rifle rounds, so I just stared back. I had a pistol in my pocket, and it would have been easy to draw and kill the squirrel, but I didn’t do it. For one thing, it didn’t occur to me. For another, the pistol holds 11 rounds. My understanding is that you are limited to 5 in Florida. But what if it held 5? Would it have been okay to shoot? I don’t know.

I am wondering if I should get camo or a blind. Sometimes the squirrels hide, and sometimes they pay no attention to me at all. Do they really know what I am, or is their behavior random? Hard to say. I thought about getting a ghillie suit just for fun. Easier to move than a blind.

No hunting yet today. If anything happens, I will update you.

Every Plant Does Better in the Right Soil

I just got back from having BBQ with my dad. I have been to Sonny’s BBQ about 9,000 times since moving to Marion County in August. My dad loves to have lunch in restaurants, and Sonny’s is convenient, so we visit a lot. Personally, I would rather eat out less.

People knock Sonny’s, but it’s actually very good. There’s something about chain restaurants that makes people want to criticize. Go figure. There are some shortcomings, such as the tomato-free salad bar and the dry chicken and turkey, but the ribs are about as good as ribs get.

We were driving home, and as I usually do in such situations, I marveled at the fact that I don’t live in Miami any more. I hate Miami! I hate Miami! I hate Miami! I can’t believe I’m free! I hate that place!

I hate Miami.

My only regret is that I didn’t move even farther north and deeper into the sticks. I have always hated city and suburban life. Now I’m on 34 acres, and it’s wonderful, but I wish it were 300, and I wish I could be at least 400 miles farther north. I don’t like sand, I don’t want to see palm trees, and I want the winter to last a little longer.

It’s weird how my style has changed since I moved. Down south, I wore the Miami uniform: a T-shirt, shorts with pockets on the legs, and sneakers. Sometimes I wore flip flops. Up here, I had to make changes in order to cope with the environment. I’m the Carhartt king now. Carhartt work jeans every day. I have 3 Carhartt jackets and 4 Carhartt work shirts. I wear a baseball cap almost everywhere. I have 3 pairs of waterproof work boots with safety toes, and I wear them with wool socks. I complete my ensembles with work suspenders. You can’t clear downed trees while wearing a belt. Not if you want to be comfortable.

I wonder what people who knew me in Miami would say if they could see me. Tonight I walked into Sonny’s wearing my Carhartt jeans, suspenders, a Cummins T-shirt, and boots. I had a Kershaw knife in one pocket and a 10mm in another. I think they would assume I was trying to prove something, but I’m not. I’m just basking in the joy of being a born-again Southerner.

Today I told a friend it’s beautiful not to be surrounded by idiots all the time.

I hate Miami.

I am doing much better here. I feel better. I’m even getting stronger. I have time and energy to lift weights. My chest is ballooning out again, and not just from biscuits.

If anything happens to my dad, and it isn’t too late in my life, I’m going to check out southern Tennessee. That would be perfect. Conservative state. Hills. Trees and plants I am familiar with from living in Kentucky. Might be even better than Ocala.

Killing squirrels has magnified my joy. It gives me one more reason to love the country. Shooting on my own property, any time I wanted, was thrill enough, but now I get to do it with a purpose.

You know what I’d like? Enough land to allow me to kill squirrels with a .17 HMR without thinking about the neighbors.

My grandfather had lots of land in eastern Kentucky. I loved his farms. Some were hundreds of acres. You could stand on our land and be unable to see anyone else’s. It was a magnificent sensation. Shooting rifles was not a problem. I could have hunted with artillery shells, and no one would have known.

My grandfather left no plan for his estate, so the family’s strategy has been to sell everything. Sad. We had 300 beautiful acres beside the Red River. We had 120 acres above the Red River gorge, full of blackberries, with cliffs and creeks and springs. We had a lot of nice stuff. I’ll never see it again.

I would not tell the other grandchildren, but I was his favorite. I guess they know it already.

Some of the others got on his nerves. My mother was his favorite daughter, and I was her only son. I think my cousin Robert, who was younger than I was, would be number two. When I stayed with my grandparents, my grandfather never went to his farms without me. He would come home from court or whatever and say, “You want to go to the farm?” I always did. He was the closest thing I had to an involved dad. When my dad talks about him, he often slips and calls him “your father.”

He used to mow hay with me sitting on the fender of his Massey-Ferguson, and he taught me to drive it. Now that I think of it, he taught me how to drive cars. He always bought Chevy pickups. He showed me how to drive his 1968 truck with three on the tree. He was a circuit judge, so no one told him what to do. He let me drive all I wanted on the public roads near the farm.

That reminds me of something I did later, after I had my own car. I ran from a cop. I pulled out of a burger joint parking lot and squealed my tires. I was about half a mile from the house. A cop came out and chased me. I saw the lights, but he was too far back to be able to say I knew he was trying to pull me over. I drove up the hill into my grandfather’s driveway, turned the ignition off, and sat on the hood, waiting. The cop drove by the bottom of the hill with his lights on, and then he skulked back to the burger joint.

My mother and some relatives were eating there at the time. My mother got mad and came and got me. She made me go back and sit with the family. The cop was across the room. He sat and glared at me. Never said a word.

Gramps–I was too cool to keep calling him “Papaw” after a certain age–used to take me shooting. When he died, someone snatched the Colt Woodsman pistol we used to use. A number of things sort of vanished. He also had a Remington .22 someone ran off with. I shot rabbits with it. He would pull his car over when he saw one, and then he’d coach me while I shot it.

My grandmother gave my dad his Sweet Sixteen when he died. It’s downstairs right now. I used it on the squirrel I killed this morning.

My grandfather didn’t say “hunt.” He said “kill.” “Let’s go over there and kill some squirrels.” That’s more honest than “hunt” or “harvest.”

I remember one day he threw me in his brother’s pickup truck, and the three of us drove to the stockyard in Paintsville to buy ponies. We bought a black one and a palomino. I had no idea why. When my grandfather got an idea, he didn’t bother explaining it to anyone. I had no interest at all in horses. He brought the palomino to his house, and the kids took turns riding. I found out later that he told my mom, “It will be worth it if Steve rides it just once.” I didn’t know what to make of that. My sister was the one who screamed and cried whenever she saw a horse. I hadn’t been very grateful, because it hadn’t occurred to me that he was thinking of me when he bought the ponies.

He took me everywhere, the way you would take your favorite dog around. I didn’t always understand what was going on, and my presence usually served no purpose, but I know he enjoyed my company because I went so many places with him. Court. The farms. Cotton’s Restaurant in Stanton. Relatives’ houses. The drugstore. His car dealership.

Everywhere we went, people would gather around him. He was the Frank Sinatra of three counties. They would pull up chairs. If you went to a restaurant with him, and the table had four chairs, there was a good chance eight people would be sitting with him before you left. I thought he was the tentpole that held up the sky.

When it was time to buy the ponies, I was the one who got tossed into the pickup. I guess he could have taken one of the others, but it would have been weird.

Once he took me to his Tar Ridge farm, and we just walked, with no plan. He was about 70, and he walked me to death, up and down cliffs. He took me to the site of an old moonshine still, by a creek. He dug in the ground and pulled out old bottles the moonshiners had left. A moonshine operation is also a campsite, so they left medicine bottles and so on. I saved the bottles he gave me, but I don’t know where they are. My relatives may have them. They still have a few things I haven’t collected.

He and my grandmother taught me the names of all the trees and plants. It seemed like they knew every one. It was a strange thing to behold. They showed me things like sourwood, teaberries, various types of oaks, hemlocks (as contrasted with spruces), and huckleberries.

He used to slip me money all the time. I appreciated that. I didn’t understand how jealous people could be. One day I let a cousin know Gramps had given me fifty bucks for absolutely no reason. I thought he would think it was neat. He got so angry I thought fire was going to come out of his ears. He was furious at my grandfather.

My grandfather didn’t have the same feeling for my cousin, and I have to say that was understandable. He was my favorite cousin, but he drove adults up the wall. Serious brat issues. When it was time for his bath, he used to run through the house naked, cursing my aunt. He would hide under the bed while she jabbed him with a broom. He was the only grandchild my grandfather ever spanked. A bunch of us went to Canada in a station wagon, to fish at Jim’s Caviar Camp at Lake of the Woods, and my cousin made my grandfather so mad he pulled over and gave him a beating.

He was not always pleased with me, but he never said a really harsh word to me, and it’s impossible to imagine him putting his hands on me.

I have so many memories of him; they’re coming out now that I cast my mind back.

He took me squirrel hunting twice. He was an exceptional shot, and he expected the same of me. We only saw one squirrel between the two trips. It was a fat red squirrel by the river on his largest Powell County farm. We couldn’t get a shot at it. We gave up, and he pulled a buckeye from a nearby tree, cut the fruit off, and gave me the nut. He said I was supposed to carry it for luck. I still have it, plus one I found in his dresser drawer after he died.

I’ll tell you how good a shot he was. He was hunting deer with my dad, and he spotted a grouse in a tree. This is a fairly small bird. My grandfather was carrying a shotgun loaded with “punkin balls,” or rifled slugs. My grandfather shot from the hip and killed the grouse.

When people hunted with my grandfather, and they didn’t hit birds with every shot, he told them they were wasting shells.

I was a hell of a shot when I was a kid. One day he cut a postage-stamp-sized bit out of the bark of a tree and told me to shoot it with a .22 pistol. I shot and hit the edge of it. He walked up to it, looked at it distastefully, and said, “You missed.” On another occasion, he told me to shoot at a wire wrapped around a fence. I shot, and the hole I made was next to the wire, with no gap. Same response. I didn’t understand how well I had done. Here he was, telling me I had missed.

Maybe shooting well scored me some points with him. He never really said what he thought about my shooting. He was not a person who paid compliments. If I had snapped the wire in two, he probably would said I had shot it off center.

While he was alive, I didn’t realize I was his favorite or how much he loved me. I don’t think of myself as a person other people love. If I had understood, I would have reciprocated more. I knew he liked to take me places, but I didn’t see the significance of it.

He could not stand my sister, which means he reacted to her the way everyone else did, including other judges. She belittled him and called him by his first name. He threw her out of his house. He loved his grandchildren, but I think he had a little less interest in the girls. Maybe that was because he had four daughters and no sons. And what can you do with a girl? Not much good for hunting and fishing.

He turned my mother into a tomboy. She was the closest thing he had to a son until I showed up.

He used to “sell” his grandchildren cattle. He gave every one of us fifty dollars every Christmas, and sometimes he let us give it back to him for calves. One year I got calf number 32. On a visit to his farm at Tar Ridge, I realized 32 had died. “Oh, no,” he said, “Your calf is 42.” Number 42 was a fat, healthy Charolais/Angus cross. He was a funny grey color. My Gramps called it “blue.” I remember being disappointed when I found out blue calves were actually grey. I got paid when he sold.

My mother was crazy about him. The other three daughters didn’t seem to feel it. My mother was the oldest. He never did warm up to the second one. The third seemed to want to compete with him. The fourth was never able to hold his attention. I liked all of my aunts. At different times, each one was my favorite aunt.

He had spoiled my mother. She used to write checks on his account when she was in college. She bought clothes, sold them to her friends, and took the money. At the end of every month, he raised hell, but he never cut her off. When she got married, my grandparents bought my dad a suit, and my grandfather bought a new car for my parents. It was a grey DeSoto with an orange roof. Hideous. My grandfather realized it was ugly, so he had it painted. He had the roof painted red. Maybe not a great choice.

At the wedding, he got very emotional, which was not like him at all. He always carried a lot of money, and by the time the wedding was over, he had forced my dad to take all of it.

My parents met in law school. My dad was serious. He eventually graduated third. My mother was just there to get a car. While she was an undergraduate, my grandfather offered to get her a car if she would become a lawyer. She went and talked to the dean at the University of Kentucky, to get special permission to go to law school without a bachelor’s degree. The dean, who was not a complete fool, signed the paperwork and said, “Now go on over there and get married.” That’s exactly what she did. She got the car, married my dad, and dropped out. Unfortunately, she turned the car over in an accident involving a bus, and my grandfather sued the Greyhound bus company.

He got rich suing people. My dad was with him one day, riding in the car with an out of state guest, and the guest marveled at the poverty in Eastern Kentucky. He asked how people there made their living. My grandfather said, “Insurance companies.”

My mother was proud of him, and she probably loved him more than all of his other daughers, combined. I know she was happy he took to me so well.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things.

Rural life is great. People told me I would miss the city. They can’t understand why I would want to live here. It reminds me of the best times of my childhood. That’s one reason.

I wish I had been better to my grandfather. I didn’t understand him.

I guess it’s okay. I don’t think I ever offended him.

Rodent Genocide Continues

I nailed another squirrel today, right in my yard.

I went out at around 7:15 this morning. Yesterday, it was gloomy at that time. Today the sun was fairly bright. I think I should have been there before sunup. Anyway, I only saw one squirrel on my tour of the property, and it lost me.

I decided to try something a website suggested. I sat as still as possible for half an hour, hoping the squirrels would emerge from hiding. Absolutely nothing happened. There goes that idea.

On the way back to the house, I had a funny notion. I got out my phone and played squirrel noises on Youtube. No dice, but it was amusing.

When I got near the house, I heard a squirrel screaming at me. It was really giving me the business. There is something creepy about shooting animals 50 yards from home, but this thing was provoking me, and I had no bodies in my trash bag. I saw it about 10 feet up on a live oak. I walked around it to get an angle that would keep stray pellets away from the neighbors, and I blasted it from maybe 60 feet.

Taking a clue from a reader (and the same website that told me to sit still) I didn’t pick up the squirrel. I walked around, and sure enough, I heard another squirrel screaming from a nearby tree. That one refused to come out, so I picked up the dead one and headed for the house. I am getting blase about touching dead animals. As I was walking, I heard other squirrels yelling in the front yard. I wondered if the sight of their buddy hanging by her tail got them agitated.

I tried to locate the new noisemakers, but the only one I saw was across the fence on another property, so I went back in the house and cleaned the new squirrel.

I noticed a few things. I used #6 shot in the 16 gauge, and it didn’t mess the meat up much at all. I found a few pellets, but no major damage. Also, this squirrel really did not want to give up her fur coat. It was like it was glued on. I have to go watch some squirrel butchering videos.

I was less grossed out this time, although this squirrel smelled worse than the other one. I felt like shampooing it with dishwashing liquid, but I restrained myself. I skinned and halved it, and I put it in brine. Today I plan to fry 2 squirrels and make biscuits. We’ll see if they’re any good.

I think I should add baking soda to the brine from now on. It kills gaminess.

Sitting still does not impress the local squirrels. I think bait and getting up early will change things. I may get a bag of corn and start dumping it in the woods.

The shotgun is wonderful. I love the .17 HMR, but the results are not as good. It tears squirrels up, and it’s hard to get a good safe angle for shooting.

Should I feel bad about killing yard squirrels? In a word, no way Jose. It seems opportunistic and sort of mean, but the truth is, these are the squirrels I want to get rid of. They are not pets. I want to grow berries and things in my yard, and I don’t want squirrel vandalism in the buildings. If I leave the yard squirrels alone, I am responsible for whatever misery they cause in the future.

The squirrels out in the woods are not the ones I have to worry about. In truth, I should be killing the ones near the house first. The people who sold us the house put a bird feeder in out front, and it has a skirt on it for the purpose of keeping squirrels out. That tells you how intelligent people feel about squirrels in their yards.

Squirrels are cute and all that, but so are mice. Some rats are cute. They still have to go. Killing them takes some getting used to, but I have an obligation to do it. It’s the correct thing to do.

I plan to go out again tomorrow (every day I can, until the season ends on March 4), and I hope to dispatch more than one squirrel. I think I can do it, if I get up early.

What will I do when squirrel season ends? All is not lost. First of all, it’s legal to shoot nuisance animals all year on your own property, so if I have some berries and tomatoes growing in the yard, I will have every right to sit on the back porch and kill squirrels. I won’t be able to go out in the woods and shoot, but that just means I get to rest and keep a cooler beside me.

Second thing: squirrels aren’t the only targets.

As I mentioned, an animal dug up one of my blackberry plants and left a giant turd in its place. If my research is right, that animal was a coyote. Either that or someone collecting for Greenpeace. Guess what the restrictions on killing coyotes are? Basically, you’re not allowed to use nuclear weapons. That’s about it. You can kill them all day, every day, with no bag limit. You can use any weapon you like. Kill the puppies, too. Make interesting hats from the hides. Do as you please.

I am reading up on coyote hunting, and it should be doable. We will see.

A coyote serves no purpose here. They are not native. They cause all sorts of suffering. They tear up calves and kids, and they kill dogs.

There are also wild pigs in Florida. Again, no restrictions. Big ones. Little ones. Mommy pigs. Daddy pigs. They are all legal targets. I have not seen any pigs here, but I am told I will eventually run into them.

Coons are nuisance animals under the law, so you can kill them all year. Nothing is worse than a stinking coon. They throw garbage all over. They poop. They kill chickens. They spread rabies. I made the mistake of saving a little coon in the past, and I have even driven them to the Everglades and released them alive. No more. Like the comedian Robin Harris said in his routine about the death penalty, “Gotta go, gotta GO.”

Nuisance animals are bad news. They are extremely annoying. Anyone who kills them is doing the world a big favor. Relocating a nuisance animal just makes it someone else’s problem.

Coons are edible. Not sure I want to try that, but it could happen. My grandmother ate them. Coyotes, being related to dogs, probably taste good, but I am not hungry enough to try one.

Here’s a nice thing about killing nuisance animals: you don’t have to clean them. It’s perfectly okay to leave them for the buzzards. Coyote pelts and coon tails might be fun to take, but the carcasses can rot or go on the burn pile.

I pickled my squirrel tails in salt water. Why not? You never know when a squirrel tail will come in handy.

I have a very, very strong sense that God wants me to get good at hunting. Fine with me. Shooting targets is fun, but if you never take game or varmints, you never use guns for their proper purpose. Guns were not invented for shooting targets. Their purpose is to kill. A man should know how to kill pests and bring meat home, and it doesn’t hurt to have lethal skills that can be used against entitlement-minded looters who might want to visit rural Christians and conservatives if the economy tanks.

Times are good right now. We can’t predict the future. Your typical urban victimhood junkie knows nothing about firearms, except how to use them on weaker people at point-blank range. They would fare poorly against hunters. You should see the things people on Youtube are doing with night vision and scopes. I’ll post a video that will give you new respect for your rural friends.

Cleaning game may never become fun. I have a super-strong sense of smell, and dead animals are pretty fragrant. I washed thoroughly after cleaning today’s squirrel, and I cleaned the kitchen well. I still smell the squirrel on me. Luckily I haven’t showered yet. Soap and shampoo will kill the aroma.

I like hunting. A lot. Wish I had started sooner. I hope the squirrels fry up nice.

I have to go get this smell off me.