2300 Words to Help You Pass the Time

I got up late today. A couple of months back, I fired my alarm clock. I hate alarm clocks. It doesn’t matter how nice the wake-up sound is. After a week, it will feel like someone shoving hot needles into your ear. I quit using the alarm, so sometimes I get up later than I want to. Daylight Saving Time just started (or ended; I never can remember how it works), so I suppose that makes my body think it’s early.

I’m a morning person now, which is all the miracle anyone needs in order to believe in God. I used to loathe mornings. My natural tendency was to wake up at noon, and when my clock went off at seven or whatever, I always felt like the world had ended. I couldn’t move. I felt like a magnet was sucking me down into the mattress. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I haven’t had that feeling in years. Mornings are just like any other time of day now. But the alarm sound…that, I still hate.

Today I woke up not long after eight, which is acceptable given my current lifestyle, but when I started to pray and get the day going, I conked out without realizing it, and I woke up at 9:45. Big disruption to my prayer life. I have to sit and pray now instead of doing other things.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I had overslept. I thought I was in my favorite bedroom at my grandfather’s house, and I was trying to see what time it was. I was trying to read the alarm clock, but I couldn’t see clearly. For some reason, I was looking into it from the back. I could see the back of the display, but I couldn’t read anything.

Imagine dreaming you overslept, while you’re oversleeping. But it could be worse. The dream I really hate is the one where I dream I can’t sleep.

My dreams are so realistic, when I look back on them, I have a hard time distinguishing them from reality. Sometimes I think about a place I’ve been, and then I realize that place doesn’t exist. I dreamed I was there, and then the dream was stored in my memory. Sometimes I have to think for a while to determine conclusively whether a place in my memory is real or imaginary.

I have another weird thing that happens when I’m in bed. It generally happens during prayer, because if I’m lying in bed, I’m either praying or sleeping. I’ll fall asleep for an instant, and then I’ll wake up. During that instant, I’ll think about a person I just imagined. I’ll think that nonexistent person is real. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that in the blink of an eye, I’ll create a complete history of that person. I may think of him or her as having a career and relatives and so on, and it will all seem real. When I wake up, I realize it’s imaginary, but I can’t understand how my mind can come up with all that background in a second or less.

Thank God I forget it. I would hate to have a head full of imaginary buddies, like fake names in Google Contacts.

I guess for a brief instant, my mind turns into Twitter. That’s a place inhabited by imaginary individuals. “Right on, Chrissy Teigen. Women should breastfeed EVERYWHERE, stark naked! And I’m not just saying that because your publicist pays me.”

I have issues with my imaginary people. I don’t just create them with no context. Maybe the person will owe me money, and I’m trying to get it back. Maybe I’m supposed to help the person paint his house. There will always be some kind of story that evaporates along with the character.

I wonder if the oversleeping dream came from God. Maybe looking into a clock from the back means I’m wasting time, trying to get too much detail from God about the supernatural and the way the world works. I’m not supposed to know everything. I can’t carry that.

Or maybe it’s just a stupid dream.

Now that I think about it, I believe the dream is about the natural world. I think I focus way too much on understanding and responding to events with my unaided mind. That makes a lot more sense. God would never tell us to stop trying to learn about him.

We can never understand all that much about what happens around us. We have the illusion that we know a lot and see a lot, but each one of us sees the world through a tiny pinhole. Anyone who tells you different is on a pathetic ego trip and will eventually be humbled pretty badly. People like that are destined to have Zaphod Beeblebrox Total Perspective Vortex moments, only without the hack that saved Zaphod.

Douglas Adams died an atheist, and he was younger than I am now. Terrible to think about. At this moment, he is having a Total Perspective Vortex experience that will never end.

It’s sad to see people you can relate to deny God. The director Joss Whedon is another one. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his work, but he uses the borrowed term “Sky Bully” to describe God. Not only does he reject God; he thinks doing so is a crucial part of maturation. Of the nonexistence of God, he said, “That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.”

It’s hard to imagine how anything can be important or necessary in a universe where people simply go out, like the glow from a firefly’s tail (or the run of a canceled TV series). If nothing lasts, nothing has any importance. The greatest evil you can do won’t affect anyone for more than 120 or so years. That’s the upper limit of the human lifespan, and in a universe that lasts forever, it’s mathematically indistinguishable from nothing.

Maybe he means believing God doesn’t exist is important if you want to set yourself free to do all the fun things God is against. That’s probably it. It’s suitably trite, like all atheist platitudes.

It doesn’t take much to impress an atheist. No matter how tired their arguments are, they always think they’re fresh and ingenious.

These days, homosexuality tops the list of fun things God won’t let us embrace. We used to think homosexuality was a problem. Now we think God and Christians who are against homosexuality are the problem. It’s just like the notion that Israel, the only civilized nation in the Middle East, is the problem in that part of the world. Muslims (who torture and execute homosexuals, by the way) will love each other and live in joy once we let them kill the Jews. We know this because Muslims have always been so nice to each other. Yep.

Get rid of one set of combatants, and the war will end. That’s what the people who hate us think. Satan’s children don’t realize there will always be conflict. Kill all the Christians, and Satan’s children will eat each other in our absence. They will find reasons. Look how many atheists they murdered in the USSR and China.

Atheists and other unsaved people are the real fireflies. They may entertain us for while, but very, very soon their names will be blotted out forever, and their infantile works will disappear. They will be removed from our presence, and some say our thoughts, for eternity. There won’t be any gay pride marches or BLM or Antifa riots where we’re going. Everyone will be pro-life. Everyone will be pro-Israel. Everyone will love the God of the Jews.

I can’t imagine a world without conflict. I wish I could conceive of the sensation, so I could enjoy it in advance.

Living in Marion County is a little bit like moving to heaven. In Miami, everyone hates each other. Rudeness is normal. Cubans hate blacks. Blacks hate Cubans. White people are unwelcome, and we know it, so we sell our houses and leave.

Up here, people are so nice I still can’t get used to it. Doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is.

Heaven will be nicer yet.

I feel like I’m ascending. This, oddly, is a very Jewish idea. The real name of the Jordan River (“Yarden”) means “descend” in Hebrew, and Jews who leave Israel are “yardim,” or, “those who descend.” When you move to Israel, you make “aliyah,” which means you go up. When I applied to be a kibbutz volunteer, I went through an annoying agency called Kibbutz Aliyah.

Jerusalem is pretty high up, and the Bible describes Jews who went to Jerusalem to worship in God’s presence as “going up.”

Ocala is a monstrous step up from Miami. It’s like moving from the gutters of Calcutta to Beverly Hills, in spiritual terms. Miami is a rotting hole of carnality and ignorance. Ocala is wonderful, but I feel I have another upward step to take before I leave the earth. I seriously believe I’ll be in Tennessee soon. I hope so, because hunting has made me miss Appalachia like crazy.

Last night I went to Gander Outdoors (a sporting goods store) to buy more tools for hunting, and when I got to the register, the lady who rang me up joked with me like I was her cousin. I am not an extroverted person. In Miami, I have to repeat myself all the time because no one understands English, and I’m used to people being cold or hostile. I don’t automatically kid around with strangers. It’s strange to have cashiers and waitresses show me warmth and familiarity.

There is a way southerners talk to each other, and if you’re not a southerner, I can’t explain it, but it’s very welcoming and inclusive. Here, I can fall into it. In Miami, I might as well be talking to porcupines with inflamed hemorrhoids.

Puercoespins con hemorrhoides grandes.

I still have so much healing to do! It’s very hard to let people be nice to me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to live in Miami. I was blind to what people were doing to me. I tried to make it work. I was descending, the whole time!

Funny thing; I’m from Eastern Kentucky, which is part of a southern state, and I can tell you, people there are not that nice. There is a streak of Celtic blackheartedness in them. Many people in the mountain areas ridicule their kids and spouses. They spit out little barbs all the time. They can’t say nice things to people. They have to find roundabout ways to do it. Up there, a person will say something nasty to you, facetiously, hoping you will see through it and understand they mean something nice. They’re afraid to say things like, “You look very pretty today,” or, “I’m very proud of you.” I have had this problem myself. These days, I feel very liberated when I say something nice to someone without putting a little hook in it.

There is a lot of Celtic blood in the mountains, and Celts are mean. Their tongues are like whips. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Everyone knows the Scots are mean, but the Irish are mean, too. They may hide it better, but there is a lot of hardness in them. They didn’t become the biggest terrorists in Europe because they’re warm and forgiving.

In this country, the Irish have great PR. You watch movies, and you see gentle, half-drunk people who smoke clay pipes and say poetic things. Totally unrealistic. The Irish are angry as hell!

Call me prejudiced. I don’t care. I’m old, and I’m going to die soon. I can say whatever I want. Go ahead and ban me from Aer Lingus. That will teach me.

Miami poisoned me, but when my family moved there, we brought ethnic poison of our own. I never thought about that until now. At least I don’t think so.

Mountain people in Kentucky and other states have problems, but people are nicer in other areas of the South.

I continue watching healing videos on Youtube. They make me wonder what purpose I serve here on earth. I see Christians going out and healing total strangers. What do I do? I blog and manage real estate. I have a strong prayer life, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s nice to see Christians getting out there and demonstrating God’s love.

I’ve been watching a guy named Tom Fischer. Through his videos, I found someone else. A young man named Troy. He only has a few videos. He heals people, too.

When he talks to people, his face shines. It makes you sense God’s love. That’s impressive. I’ll embed a video.

I can’t do this kind of thing. I have not been called or empowered to do it. Evangelists are salesmen, and as I often say, I couldn’t sell poop to flies. If you know a Christian you want to turn away from God, give me a call, and I’ll talk to him. He’ll be worshiping the devil in a week.

There are things you just shouldn’t try to do until God gives you power.

That’s what anointing is all about. “Anointing,” figuratively, means “authority.” A person with an anointing has a commission–an assignment–from God, and God will help him get it done. If you have an anointing, God will part the Red Sea for you. If not, you may lose your church and be imprisoned for something like fraud or pedophilia.

Tom Fischer goes up to Jews in yarmulkes and gets them to let him heal them in the name of Jesus. If you don’t know Jews, you don’t understand how crazy that is. It’s like selling pork in Mecca. But God helps him get away with it.

I can relate to the prophets, because no one listens to me. If I said something obvious which was so brilliant it could end all of the world’s problems in 5 minutes, people would chase me with pitchforks. My old pastors think I’m an idiot. My relatives think I’m an idiot. Many people I’ve gone to church with think I’m an idiot, and I’m talking about people who, in some cases, are nearly illiterate. People who can barely read and who know how educated I am feel completely entitled to lecture me. It’s something to see.

My dad started telling people I was smart…after he lost his mind. I have no words to discuss that! When I was winning the Miami spelling bee, getting crazy test scores, and doing graduate work in physics, I was still an idiot. But now I’m smart. If he goes into a coma, I’ll be a genius.

He says I’m smart, but he doesn’t think I’m bright enough to decide what to throw out. He takes things out of the garbage. When I really want to be sure I’m rid of something, I have to destroy it before I throw it out. Sometimes I’ll pour dishwashing liquid all over it. He says I’m smart, but people’s actions show what they really think.

Never pay any attention to what people say. Always look at their actions.

Don’t count on me being right about the people in the videos I watch. For all I know, they could be axe murderers. I only know what I see.

One Day Closer to Coyote Bath Mats

I’m trying to figure out whether I qualify to be called an outdoorsman yet.

I’ve done a ton of fishing. You could put me on a 60′ fishing yacht in Boston Harbor and tell me to take it to Eleuthera and catch marlin or yellowfin, and I would need no advice whatsoever, except for a pilot’s help getting across the Devil’s Backbone off Harbour Island. I would just need a credit card and some grunts to do the peon work. I’m not the greatest fisherman on earth, nor am I an expert captain, but I can do it. I can also bleed and clean the fish.

Maybe that counts for something.

I have shot a few rabbits. This is not exactly big game hunting. You walk around, look for rabbits, and plug them. But it is a form of hunting.

I nailed a few squirrels this year.

Today I set my portable blind up in order to see how it worked. I was quite pleased. It sets up fast, and it appears to function. I learned a few things, and I think the bugs are mostly out of my blind-hunting system. I realized I needed a monopod to support my rifle, so I’ll be buying one shortly.

You can spend $200 on a special chair for blinds, and I probably should, but the plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot is really comfortable.

I set it up near a known choke point: a hole under one of my fences. Coyotes, coons, and foxes use it, so I know that if I sit there long enough, I’ll see something I can kill.

I read up on coons. They love marshmallows. This is supposed to be one of the best baits. I think I may dump a tin of sardines and some marshmallows by the fence, sit in the blind, and see what happens.

I am very sorely tempted to get a night vision scope. I have to think about it. They work great when you know where the game is, but it occurs to me that scopes have small fields of view, so how do you know where to look? Do you have to get a second night vision device with a wider field of view to tell you when the coons show up?

Man, it’s tempting. Shooting animals with a light seems sloppy and crude. Sitting in the dark and blasting them when they have no idea you exist…that’s hunting. If you can do that AND cover your infrared signature so the government can’t see you in the dark, you’re basically Rambo. You are a Carlos Hathcock starter kit.

I’m not much of a hunter, but I feel like I can say I’m a hunter without feeling like I’m totally full of it.

I left the blind set up. It seems to me that animals will be less freaked out by something they’ve seen sitting around for a while. I want to see how it holds up, too.

It’s marshmallow and monopod time. I’m going to run out and see what’s available.

More

I went to Gander Outdoors and got me a monopod and a cool spinning rimfire target that will save me a ton on paper targets and reduce aggravation.

While I was there I saw this dummy, which reminds me why I don’t do tactical. If the Village People knew about 5.11 gear, they would have another member.

Romans 8:15

I feel like I should expound on the things I wrote yesterday.

I wrote about an extraordinarily vile cyst that appeared on my back. All physical ailments come from sin, whether it’s the sin of the person afflicted or the general curse on the world that comes from sin. There is no possibility of illness in heaven, because everyone there is forgiven and purified. I don’t consider it self-condemnation when I say I believe my physical problems are often related to my sins, and that the nature of the problems may tell me about the type of sin that led to their appearance.

A cyst has certain characteristics. It’s a container made of tissue. It’s walled off from the rest of the body. Cysts are full of things that need to be extracted. A cyst may be very stubborn. It may have a sort of opening with a layer of tissue over it that acts as a barrier that prevents the crap inside from being removed. Cysts protect their disgusting contents.

I know demons work in me. We are surrounded by demons in this world, and they whisper to us and prod us, just as God does. They work to modify our acts, thoughts, and emotions.

From past experience, I know that a demon can occupy space inside a person. I had some things cast out of me, and I can tell you I felt them in my abdomen, below the rib cage. I felt their presence there when they became afraid. They became cold. My hands turned cold.

Remember the scene in the first Alien movie, where the creature burst John Hurt’s chest wall and ran off? That’s what it’s like when a demon gets upset. I suppose you could compare it to feeling a baby kicking.

Night before last, I woke up while it was still dark, and I felt a lot of tension inside me. I had been battling anger and cruelty, to get rid of them, and when I woke up, I felt like a battle was going on in and around me.

I felt like a cyst that didn’t want to pop. Like there was only a thin wall between me and a breakthrough followed by peace.

Eventually, I felt some things leave me.

There are also barriers between us and good things. The flesh is a barrier between us and God. The veil in the Temple symbolized the flesh.

Here’s what happens when a spirit leaves me. Suddenly, my mind grows quiet. Usually, I have a nonstop flow of thoughts and words in my head. When something leaves me, it shuts down instantly, and I literally don’t know what to think. I sit and wait for the next thought.

Naturally, this brings peace, because peace is destroyed by thoughts. When you stop thinking, it’s like a fire has gone out.

I told God I had no idea who I was. If I ever get subsantially purified, I will be a person I don’t recognize from the inside. I don’t know what my personality would be like without the corruption and supernatural chatter. I think of the things that go on inside me as parts of me, but many of them are not, so what am I really like?

Secular thinkers tell us to embrace all the garbage inside us. Whatever it is, own it, say it’s natural, and refuse to condemn it. Homosexuality, lust…whatever it is, accept it. That’s not realism or healing. It’s defeat. It’s capitulation. It reminds me of the cessationist doctrine that poisons the body of Christ. “We can’t get miracles or prophecy, so we conclude they don’t exist any more.” Secular people can’t rid themselves of inner problems, so they tell us to love them.

That’s not for me. I’ve had divine deliverance, so I will never stop trying to get more of it. It’s extremely unfortunate that so many people can’t get help, but I’ve received it, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t happen. I’m not capitulating, ever. I will never stop trying to get free, because I know God is willing to make it happen.

Why doesn’t God do it right now, completely? That’s what people will ask. God isn’t my butler. He’s not my slave. His chief purpose in the universe isn’t to rush to my side whenever I suffer a little and take the problem away regardless of my attitude and my past. Sometimes he permits suffering to last a while, for reasons of his own. Usually, though, my own iniquity delays his help.

God isn’t a genie. The word “genie” comes from the Arabic “djinn,” which means “demon.” If you want a spirit that gives you whatever you want, whether or not you’re ready, get yourself a demon. You could be the next Tom Cruise.

I’m not going to blame God for anything. That’s a poisonous attitude. Anything he does for me is a gift. He’s not paying a debt or earning a wage. He doesn’t owe me. If he had put me in hell instead of saving me, no one in the universe could say it wasn’t fair and good.

A lot of people refuse to believe in God because he won’t be their slave. “If God is so good, why didn’t I make the cheerleading squad?” “If God is so good, why is my neighbor’s BMW better than mine?” I know a lot of people complain about more serious problems, like death and illness, but many of us are angry at God because he doesn’t fix our petty, disgraceful first-world gripes. We’re not grateful for anything. There are healthy young people who wake up in big houses in the United States of America and feel angry at God because things aren’t even nicer.

I used to be that way. These days I thank God when I get in the car. Have you ever thought about what a blessing it is to have a car? A little over a hundred years ago, you were very lucky to have an open carriage and a horse. That’s how it was for centuries. I can get into a car whenever I want, drive at 100 miles per hour if I don’t get caught, listen to a huge selection of the greatest musicians of the last century, and enjoy whatever air temperature suits me. I can flick a switch and heat or cool the seats. In 1875, this would have been beyond the dreams of sorcerers.

Cars are fantastic. Even crummy ones. Air conditioning is fantastic. Good food is fantastic. Hot water is fantastic. I have machines that wash clothes and dishes while I watch TV (which is fantastic). Have you ever washed a shirt by hand? It’s a nightmare. Think how many shirts you use in a week.

I can see. My back is straight and strong. My feet don’t hurt. I’m not bald. I live in the greatest country the world has ever known. I live in one of the best areas of that country. I know God personally. I don’t have to look at prices when I go to the grocery store. I can buy blueberries in the winter. I have a personal library that would have made Plato faint. By historical standards, I live better than most emperors. Croesus would cry if he could see how I live.

Anyway, the fact that God hasn’t fixed me instantly is the dumbest conceivable argument for atheism and cessationism. His own book doesn’t say he’ll make our lives perfect in a heartbeat.

I believe I’m the focus of a battle right now, more than ever. The things that have run me know their final eviction is close, so they’re raging and fussing. I just have to keep confessing and repenting. They have no chance of success.

I’m so glad I’ve cut back on reading the news. I need to cut back more. My need to know what’s going on is nothing compared to my need to be close to God. The news is a source of temptation. It tempts me to anger and even lust. These days, when you look at a news site, there’s a good chance you’ll see at least one semi-pornographic photo with a link below it. “Kim Kardashian was naked again today.” Wow. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, “JOURNALISTS.”

Bad things are happening in the world. Got it. But I don’t run the world all by myself. I’m not actually required to obsess on the news and pray about every article. God told me I’m “one of many.” I’m busy with something important, so if Christians have to read the news, let the others handle it for a while.

They can keep track of all the important updates from the Kardashians and Chrissy Teigen.

I can’t wait to live in a world where there are no people like that.

To change course, I got another revelation today. God showed me how I differ from most men. I have never, ever known what it was like to want a father.

When I was a kid, I was scared of my dad. When he entered a room, my sister and I tried to leave before trouble started. When he talked to us, we tried to say whatever would 1) prevent him from blowing up and 2) get us excused from his presence. I was always looking for ways to avoid being around him.

When he wasn’t around, my mother, my sister and I would talk about divorce. It’s terrible to say it, but we talked about how great our lives would be if she divorced him. My sister and I encouraged her. Once, when my sister was about three, she held a gun to my dad’s side and told my mother, “We don’t need him.” She wanted permission to shoot.

I’m not writing this to pick on my dad. I’m just sharing what has been going through my mind.

I think I had a bad attitude toward male authority figures, because I was scared of them. I remember two men who didn’t fit the pattern, though. Mr. Hubert, my fifth-grade science teacher, and Mr. Stallings, my eighth-grade English teacher.

I had never had a male teacher before Mr. Hubert. He made me prefer male teachers. He was great. He had all sorts of science stuff going on in the room. He rigged up a desk microphone and PA system to talk to us, even though he was five feet away. He had fish. He had live guinea pigs (donated by me) in a tank. He was gentle and fun to be around.

Oliver “Butch” Stallings. He hated that nickname, so of course, people used it behind his back all the time. Stallings was a 6’4″ blond Aryan who looked like a Calvin Klein model. He was a tyrant. We always had homework. If you didn’t do your homework, you had to write a note to your parents, make them sign it, and bring it back. He didn’t take any crap from anyone. He worked us. People said they hated him, but I don’t think they did. I thought he was great. He made us succeed. Female teachers never did that. They used guilt trips and cajoling, but they didn’t provide order.

Sometimes we loved our female teachers, but they accomplished very little compared to the men. It’s that simple.

Stallings could be a little jerky, but all of his demands served a purpose, and that purpose was to improve us.

Not all of my male teachers were positive role models. My seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Bubrick, told me he was going to break my arm if I reached under my desk for a piece of paper. I think it was paper. Might have been a pencil. He said, “I don’t care who your father is.” He said he was completely serious. Not sure what that was about. And I believed him, so I don’t understand why he kept trying to convince me.

It wasn’t really necessary to threaten to cripple me. He could have said, “Don’t reach for that,” and I would have complied. I guess he was mentally ill.

We were supposed to write something down. Maybe he was giving us a quiz. I don’t recall, but I assume I failed, because you have to have a pencil and paper in order to write.

On the whole, Mr. Bubrick was not a very good teacher. I’m not sure which careers are best for sadists who threaten to break other people’s children’s bones.

Whatever my positive experiences with men were, I never had any desire for a father figure in my life. I wanted father figures to leave me alone. I didn’t like being cursed at. I didn’t like watching violence that couldn’t be defended against. I didn’t like the burden of racking my brain, trying to think of the right things to say to turn off the rage.

It’s tough dealing with abusive people. Sometimes you can postpone the abuse by saying or doing the right thing, but sometimes they’re determined to abuse, and nothing you can do will stop it, so you end up feeling helpless and unable to control your circumstances. It breeds passivity. You quit trying to fix things you can’t fix, and you focus on learning how to endure them. “Is it over now? No, he’s still going. I’ll hold on a little longer.”

It makes you feel like your face is a pair of wooden shutters you can lock up while a hurricane rages outside. It’s very strange. You lock them up and hope the wind doesn’t blow a tree into them. It’s the best you can do. You can’t control anything outside of you, so you retreat and control a reduced perimeter: your face.

I was talking to God today, and I told him I really wanted a father. At my advanced age, I was asking for one. I have never had a father. The lack of a father wrecked my life. I didn’t have a father to correct me, guide me, supply me adequately, or protect me, and I am damaged. Now I want a father to come in and undo the damage. I want the evil in my heart to be fixed. The fatherless tend to be insolent punks. I don’t want to be an embarrassing middle-aged punk, like Jimmy Kimmel or Sean Penn. I want to be told what to do, by someone who has my best interest at heart.

Churches have tried to teach me God primarily wants me to obey rules. Some churches have taught me God just wants me to give preachers money. It’s unusual for a church to teach people the truth: God wants children. A father knows his children personally, unless he’s a deadbeat dad. He works to raise them. He gives them advice and corrects them. He fights their enemies. He gives them wealth and the ability to get more wealth. He doesn’t sit on a cloud a trillion miles away and ignore them.

The Bible orders us to love God. How can you love someone who is completely uninvolved with you? It’s like telling you to love Prince Charles or Vladimir Putin. Strangers you’ve never been anywhere near.

It’s not enough for God to help me and correct me. I need him to be personally involved, out of love. I need him to exert authority over me very directly.

I can’t tell you how strange it is to want to be adopted and to have a father. It’s like waking up one day and wanting to eat liver (which I hate). I have never really wanted these things before. I have been 100% devoid of empathy for kids who wanted fathers. I could feel sorry for them, but I could not feel what they felt, because I had never felt it.

Sympathy isn’t empathy.

In my heart, I have never had the feeling that anyone wanted me as a son. Not men, I mean. My mother was crazy about me.

This experience makes me wonder just how damaged and abnormal I am. Like Yossarian said, you can’t see the flies in your eyes if you have flies in your eyes.

The natural male response to problems is to say, “I’m okay. Everything is fine.” This is why it’s better to rely on men than women in a crisis. Most women like crying, becoming hysterical, and magnifying their problems. They tend to make a crisis much worse. It’s manipulation. It’s their way of getting other people to take care of them. Men stop thinking about their problems so they can function and get things done.

It’s a carnal approach. It’s something we do because we don’t know how to get God’s help. It eventually shuts off our awareness of our problems. We become numb to them. I wonder how many crippling injuries I have that I’m unaware of. I know God now, so I can get help. I don’t have to shut down the alarms and go to backup systems.

I felt I should write about these things. Preachers have done their best to poison me and keep me ignorant, and they have done the same things to everyone else, so if I benefit from knowing the truth, presumably other people will benefit, too.

I am starting to hate churches. I don’t mean I want to go shoot them up, so please don’t come and take my guns just yet. I mean I have lost patience with them, and I find the idea of being overly attached to one distasteful. It would be like marrying an annoying, hysterical woman who runs her mouth all the time and doesn’t listen. That’s how it was before, now that I think about it. A lot of good things happened at my churches, but stubbornness, pride, and emotionalism stunted everyone. I know a lot of spiritual midgets.

My churches were matriarchal. Trinity was 80% black, and New Dawn was mostly Puerto Rican. Blacks and Latins have matriarchal societies. It’s unhealthy. Matriarchy fosters denial, emotionalism, and immaturity.

I’ll keep you updated on future developments. Hope you’re not too bored.

Too Heavy, and it Smells

This entry will contain what may well be TMI (Too Much Information) concerning a very disgusting physical issue, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

For years, I’ve known our iniquities (our evil inclinations, also known as habits) come between us and the power and love of God. I was talking about it in 2009 at Trinity Church in Miami, in my microscopic, illusory authority as an armorbearer. No one wanted to hear it, because Trinity is built around making people feel good just as they are, without improving them, in order to get them to give the greedy, crooked pastors irresponsibly large donations of money.

I knew about the problem of iniquity, and I worked on it personally, but somehow, there are different levels of knowing you have problems, and the level I was on at the beginning was not that deep.

Think of it this way. You know you’re fat. You don’t do much about it. Then one day–I will assume you’re a woman, here–you see yourself on video in a bikini, and you have to go in your bedroom and close the door and cry. You wish you could find every picture of you at your current weight and burn it. Then you don’t eat for 10 days. That’s a great example of different levels of knowing you have a problem.

I won’t say I didn’t work to change. I certainly did. I never stopped praying about it. But somehow my knowledge and motivation weren’t at the forefront in my heart and mind. I struggled to put them there, but results were slow in coming.

I didn’t feel an immediate need to avert catastrophe.

I think a Christian who turns away from God can get himself sentenced to years of wandering in the wilderness. You spend years filling yourself with filth, and then you turn around, and it takes time to get rid of it, even if you try.

I had a problem with anger and cruelty. When I turned back to God, I didn’t think of myself as a particularly angry or cruel person. I disliked angry and cruel people, and in my heart, I equated that feeling with not being angry or cruel. But I have learned that hating an iniquity is not the same thing as not having it. You may have an iniquity you resist successfully and never act on. It’s still there. You can’t say you don’t have it just because it never wins.

Generally, I was not cruel, but cruelty did leak out of the box from time to time, especially in ways that I thought were acceptable. I made mean jokes and told myself it was okay because I wasn’t serious. Usually I wasn’t serious, but why would I want to say those things, regardless? Why would I be comfortable with them, given that they were part of the realm of cruelty? How did they help the world?

One night several years ago, I drove to church to run security for the evening service, and I felt love descend on me. I felt God’s love for people. I loved everybody. It was great. I was very relieved. I hoped it would stay. It didn’t, however. It was a momentary thing. I didn’t know how to hold on.

I didn’t realize I lived in a way that kept love away.

I was working to get God’s improvement all the time, but I lacked knowledge, and you know what Hosea said about people who lack knowledge. They perish.

There was no one to teach me. There still isn’t, quite honestly. There are all sorts of preachers out there who will give you obvious, powerless advice. “Stop being bad.” “Don’t do that any more.” “Change.” But they are simpletons who don’t acknowledge the supernatural power of habit. They are useless guides who give people burdens they can’t carry. You can’t just change because you want to.

Being good and doing right involve more than choice. We put very real chains on ourselves. Tell a crack addict to knock it off, and see what happens. Even if he would rather kill himself than smoke again, he’s not going to quit just because he knows he should. Iniquities are strongholds. Before you build an iniquity, you have a choice. Anyone can put down his first cigarette and walk away from it. Once you have a habit, you are literally a slave to sin.

Drug rehab has a success rate of something like 2% or 10%, depending on whom you believe. That’s probably lower than the success rate of people who quit on their own. It’s very bad. Almost no one loses weight and stays thing. Anger management classes don’t work. Habits are stronger than the people who possess them. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, self-righteous, or unfeeling.

Anger is a habit. Depression is a habit. Anything you can’t quit is a habit.

I had no one to teach me, because Christianity, like Judaism, is about separating people from God. God raises up witnesses and prophets (and one great messiah), and they teach us useful things. Then the fable-writers and bureaucrats take over. They build big buildings for us to sit in. They put on absolutely ridiculous costumes. Have you seen the pope’s hat? It’s beyond comical. Can you imagine wearing that hat to the store?

They create pompous names for their offices. They tell us they’re holier than we are. They make up doctrine, or, like Augustine, they steal it from Satanic religions. Forget Astarte. Now you can pray to Mary!

Want to please God? Eat fish on Friday. Go to church on Saturday. Worship statues. Pray to dead people. Give all your money to a grinning white trash idiot who says he needs a jet. Don’t eat chicken with cheese on it. Shun technology and wear black clothes. Castrate yourself. Live in a monastery and never speak. Work really hard and quote Vince Lombardi, the noted man of God.

First thing you know, they’ve convinced us God doesn’t do miracles any more, and that we aren’t going to hear from him in our daily lives. No tongues. No prophecy. No healing. No help. Lots of duty, but not much love. And love is the reason God created the universe!

Satan? Oh, he’ll be with you all the time. He’s not as lazy as God. He’ll give you diseases, wreck your marriage, ruin your career, make you insane…he’s a hustler. But God won’t talk to you or do anything for you until you die. If he doesn’t talk to Father Garcia, who does such wonderful work with the boys’ dance team, why would he talk to you?

We are raised on other people’s excrement instead of the word of God.

God told me all sorts of stuff. He saved me from preachers. But he didn’t tell me everything at once. It unfolds, day by day. This is unfortunate, because I am mortal. It’s too late for me to have a good life as a young man. The bread is gone, so all I have to work with is the crust. I can forget about a normal family and grandchildren and so on. But I’m glad I’m getting what I’m getting. It’s better to have one good year before you die than to recant as a disgraceful coward on your deathbed.

What I’m getting is certainly preferable to what I deserve.

Lately, the knowledge that I have to get free of anger is pushing to the front of the auditorium. I am acutely aware of it.

The Bible says our righteousness is like filthy menstrual rags to God. If it says that, then it’s true. It is literally true. God isn’t exaggerating to make a point. He is saying we stink in his nostrils, and that the sight of us disgusts him. This is why Jesus had to be crucified in order for God to have a relationship with us. There had to be something put between God and our stink, so God could tolerate our presence.

For a long time, I’ve felt that I stank before God. I know what houses are like when filthy people live in them. In some cases, you can smell the feces, urine, mold, and rot from thirty feet out in the yard. In others, you may walk in the door and be hit instantly with the sharp smell of fermented urine, from bathrooms where no one ever lifts the seat or closes the door. You may smell rotten garbage because the bag in the kitchen is always full. I’ve felt like God was telling me, “I live in you, and I won’t leave you, but you have to stop making yourself stink.”

In the Bible, a body is a house. Things that happen to houses tell us about things that happen to bodies. In the Old Testament, a person who constantly spoke ill of others could develop a type of leprosy that infected the walls of his house. God didn’t do this to people because he had something against houses. He was telling them what they were like, to him.

If you think people can’t stink to God, think about this: prayers and sacrifices smell good to him. The Bible says so. Our prayers rise to heaven and perfume it. If that’s true, what do you think our iniquities and sins do? Look at part of Psalm 38.

For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness.
I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh.

That’s not about an unbeliever. It’s about one of God’s servants.

People think accepting salvation makes us perfect and clean in God’s eyes, forever. Really? Does salvation make God stupid or blind? You can sin after you’re saved, and God does not like it. You can even go to hell. You can renounce salvation if you feel like it.

There are naked Christian women on stripper poles right now. Does God see them as perfect?

God gets angry with believers. I used to think he didn’t, but I was misled.

In the book of Acts, a believer named Simon tried to buy supernatural gifts from the apostles. This was a man who believed and was baptized. Look what Peter said:

Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

Peter wasn’t even sure Simon, a baptized believer, was forgiven.

At Trinity Church, Simon wouldn’t have been scolded at all. If he had come and donated a lot of money, they would have assigned armorbearers to park his car, follow him around, and usher him to a good seat, possibly next to Kim Kardashian or Luther Campbell. They would have said salvation lasts forever, and that God could not be angry at him, because he was saved.

The fact that God chooses to cover your faults does not mean he is no longer aware of them, or that they don’t make him angry. Not if the story of Simon is true.

I felt that my iniquities made me stink to God. They certainly make me stink to myself. I had to deal with my dad and my sister, who made houses stink, and I felt that God was telling me, “This is what it’s like for me to live in you.” I felt God was using my relatives as teaching tools.

Recently I got a disgusting cyst on my back. It became inflamed and swelled. I have had several of these during my life, probably because of a peculiarity of my skin. Anyway, these things are known for having contents that don’t smell great. But this one…it smelled so bad, I noticed it not just when it was being poked or examined, but at random times throughout the day.

This thing contained a substance that literally smelled like a pile of dead bums rotting in the sun. If you’ve ever been close to a hardcore bum, you know the smell I’m talking about. Fermented excretions and rotten meat. I hope you never have to be exposed to a cyst that expels anything like this, because it makes rotten fish smell like a flower shop. A spray that smelled like this would be effective in wars or in breaking up riots.

I’m physically clean, so this is not something you would ordinarily expect to deal with around me.

I prayed and so forth, and eventually the cyst yielded a huge quantity of seemingly radioactive contents and subsided. Finally, I could stop checking myself and changing shirts all the time.

TMI, I know, but there is a point. It made me think about the things inside me that needed to be cleared up. God will stay with me and keep helping me even if I don’t improve, but I will always have limited power and peace. Certain things won’t be healed. Certain situations won’t work out the way they should. I won’t receive certain good things God wants me to have.

The cyst was on my back, where I couldn’t see it. It was like the iniquities I hide from myself. It was hard to reach. It was hard to work on. It was like the inner issues I deny.

I make God live in a house full of poop and garbage. It’s like he has to go around wearing a bum’s pants. And he’s God! He should never have to deal with any type of filth.

No one ever gets really clean, as far as I know, but I should be doing better than this.

The other day I saw a helpful video related to my issues. Tom Fischer, the street healer, met a young woman who had a problem with one eye. She had accidentally poked herself at work. This girl had been a Christian all her life. He tried to heal her, and nothing happened. Then he asked her if she was angry at her employer. She said she was. She was also complacent in her walk with God.

If you’re complacent, you won’t try to get yourself improved. You won’t examine yourself and take your iniquities before God and get rid of them. Rot will grow in you, and demonic activity will increase in the house which is your body. That’s just common sense.

He talked to her about her spiritual issues, and she repented. Then he was able to heal her.

The video contains a long segment in which he says it’s harder to heal Christians than unbelievers. We are more accountable, because we know when we’re in the wrong.

It’s interesting that it was her eye that had the problem. Jesus said we should take the splinters out of our own eyes–we should confront and get rid of our own iniquities–before helping others with their iniquities.

I’ll embed the video here.

I am not promoting this man as the answer to your prayers. You need to hear from God, one on one. No man can be trusted, and besides, God wants contact with his children. But Tom Fischer can be helpful.

I’m going to keep working on confession and change. People will tell me I’m condemning myself. Well, Peter rebuked Jesus for predicting the crucifixion. We’re supposed to crucify the flesh. If I criticize myself before God, it’s not an execution. It’s a way to get more life. It’s like lancing a cyst. I don’t feel condemned at all. I feel more free.

Anger has weight. It makes me feel like Satan gave me heavy armor to wear, after taking it off a bum. Blech.

It’s true that people do bad things to provoke me, but if I use that to justify anger, I give them control of my heart. I put a valve in their hands, and they can turn it to shut off the flow of God’s help. That’s a double victory for them.

I would stay away from the feel-good preachers if I were you. They’re just putting dirty bandages on your sores, to make the infection increase. Eventually, these things come to crisis.

New Rifle Underwhelms

Today I took my new Marlin 60 .22 rifle out, scoped it, and tried to get it sighted in. It was a nightmare. It was so inaccurate, it actually scared me.

I have a cheap BugBuster scope. This is an amazing Chinese toy that gives 3-9x magnification with a lighted reticle. It’s very neat. I’ve been using it on an air rifle, and it works.

I was going to put my old Bushnell rimfire scope on the .22, but I lost part of a ring clamp. I ordered a scope mount for it. Then I decided I wanted to use the BugBuster instead. The new mount turned out to be too long for the BugBuster, so I had to move the air rifle mount to the Marlin.

Annoying.

I got everything set up, and I put a chair in the pasture about 50 feet from a target. Plenty close enough for sighting in. I shot, and I wasn’t on the paper. That scared me. I don’t want to send bullets over a road or another farm. I moved WAY up and started over. Even at 30 feet or so, I couldn’t do a thing with the rifle. It was spraying bullets into an area 4″ wide, and it was so inaccurate, I couldn’t figure out which way to turn the scope knobs.

I took the scope off and shot offhand at very close range, and I was still all over the place. I went and got a table, and I shot from a rest. Still bad. I switched from cheap Remington ammo to CCI Stingers. No help.

Finally, I went in the house and got my old Nylon 66 rifle. I was wondering if I had forgotten how to shoot. It was already full of cheap ammo. I blasted away offhand, and I shot into a very small area. The ammo worked.

You can imagine how frustrating this was. Nobody wants to go back to a store and say, “This rifle won’t hit the target.” You can imagine the response. “SURE it won’t. It’s a BAD BAD rifle. Maybe you should exchange it for a cast net.”

I threw some more rounds into the Marlin, and it shot just fine. I put more rounds in. Again, it shot well. I didn’t know what to think. It was getting dark, so it was too late to put the scope back on and try everything a second time.

I am perplexed. I know guns like to be broken in, but this is crazy.

At times like this, you start to wonder if you’re really a good shot.

I started trying to find Internet information on problems with new rifles. I found an irrelevant article by Chuck Hawks. This is a noted gun curmudgeon. I’m not sure he has any idea what he’s talking about. He says Smith & Wesson makes garbage, which is pretty much the opposite of my experience. Anyway, he wrote an interesting screed about accuracy.

He seems to think sub-MOA accuracy is mythical. Can that be true?

I have a .17 HMR rifle. The last time I shot it at 100 yards, I got either 1 MOA accuracy or so close to it, it’s virtually 1 MOA. I didn’t get the calipers out. It could conceivably be 1.1 MOA, but it’s not 1.2. It might be 0.95 for all I know. I know what an inch looks like, but I’m not a ruler.

I shot 5 consecutive rounds into a space an inch across. If you measured from the outsides of the holes, you would get a figure of an inch, +/-10%. If we’re going to split hairs, 1 MOA is actually more like 1.05″ than 1″.

Here is something Chuck Hawks said:

I have written it before and I will write it again: these groups are achieved on a word processor, not in the field. At best what the writer means is that once, when the stars were momentarily aligned in the sky, he shot a 1″ group with the test rifle. He will never admit in print that he shot nine other groups ranging in size from 2″ to 4″ with the same rifle.

However, the inexperienced and the gullible take these “test reports” to heart. The most absurd exaggeration is accepted without question, and endlessly repeated (and embellished) online. The boldest liars become authorities on marksmanship and rifle performance. It would be depressing if it were not so absurd!

I’ll tell you right now, I can shoot the .17 HMR in calm conditions and get 1 MOA accuracy or something so close to it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t practice much, I have no training, and I don’t try that hard, so I should be able to do somewhat better if I work at it. This is with a $200 rifle shooting store ammunition. Granted, it’s only 100 yards, but I can do it. I feel sure that if I can do it, a whole lot of other people can do it.

Can I do it while tromping around out of breath in the woods, without a rest? No way. My best guess is that I could shoot 2 MOA consistently if I had trees to lean on, but I don’t think I could do any better. I don’t know, because I don’t have any opportunities to do that kind of shooting. I suppose I could tape targets to trees, walk around, and shoot at them. Even then, it’s not like shooting an animal. Some animals will hold still and pose, making shooting them nearly as easy as shooting paper. Others aren’t cooperative.

Can I do it at longer ranges? I don’t know. The farther you get from targets, the more you have to know about shooting.

The caliber of the gun doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that shooting big guns with lots of recoil is just as easy as shooting little guns. The recoil comes AFTER you shoot, so it doesn’t affect your accuracy. If you can shoot a .17 HMR well, you should be able to shoot a scoped Ma Deuce well.

Hawks says hunters shooting animals with 8″ kill zones at 150 yards or less should be perfectly happy with 4-MOA guns. That sounds awful to me. Are there really guns that shoot that badly? I mean, do they shoot that badly with good ammunition, when held in a sled? To me, that’s how you define a rifle’s capabilities. A person holding a rifle will always shoot imperfectly, so it’s not fair to judge a gun by what it does when a person holds it. The sled should provide the best measure of a gun’s true capabilities.

If I were shooting a 4-MOA gun at 100 yards to sight it in, I wouldn’t know how to do it. If you have bullets splattering all over a 4″ circle, how do you know which way to turn the scope knobs? Do you fire 25 rounds to get some idea where the center of the 4″ circle is and then try to move that to the center of the target?

Hawks says 3 MOA is good enough for 200-yard kills. He also says no hunter should ever take a shot over 400 yards. The idea is that it’s cruel to the animal to risk wounding it without killing it cleanly.

I read this stuff, and then I think about the average shooter. Most people who shoot regularly would be lucky to hit the ground consistently if they tried. That’s my claim, based on what I’ve seen. I’ll bet 95% of hunters can’t shoot 3 MOA at the range, using a rest, with the best equipment in existence. I wonder what interesting stories guides have to tell. They must get a lot of clients whose marksmanship makes for good entertainment.

I think there are a lot of people out there who shouldn’t shoot at game over 75 feet away. Many people shouldn’t shoot at animals at all, except out of necessity.

I want to feel confident when I hunt. I want to know that there is very little chance an animal I shoot will run off and suffer because I didn’t kill it quickly. This makes me wonder about my dream of going out west and shooting prairie dogs at long distances. Maybe it’s a bad idea, or maybe if I do it, I should make a very serious study of accuracy and distance and limit my shots accordingly.

It’s probably a bad thing for hunters to brag about long shots. If a shot was lucky, you shouldn’t have taken it. If you’re really good, I suppose it’s another matter.

I don’t know how good 1 MOA at 100 yards is. Maybe it’s common. But it does sound like it’s good enough to get me in the door. I should be able to hunt competently and responsibly. If I can shoot 2-3 MOA in the field, I ought to be above reproach.

In the movies, people pull of insane shots. It’s all nonsense. In real life, shooting his hard, and even if you do everything right, you can’t shoot like Quigley or James Bond. Chris Kyle couldn’t do it, for that matter. James Bond is a fictional character. Daniel Craig and the rest of the boys never shot anything but blanks. In reality, now that I think of it, they probably couldn’t have hit a watermelon at ten feet. I doubt any of them ever had any training.

Tomorrow I’ll try the Marlin again. Maybe there was some kind of manufacturing crud stuck in the barrel, and I’ve blown it out. If it still shoots badly, I’ll return it.

The trigger is atrocious. It’s as if there are little rocks in the receiver, and you have to break them before the gun goes off. The Nylon 66 has a magnificent trigger. Truly exceptional. I wonder if the Marlin can be enhanced. I hate bad triggers. They say a good shot can overcome one, but I notice serious shooters insist on smooth triggers. If it really didn’t matter, would they do that?

If I can’t get it to work, I’ll probably get a Ruger 10/22. I should be able to get one to shoot accurately. If necessary, I could have the crown worked on. That should be a cheap job.

Time to Get Rid of the Revolving Door

There are certain sins I still fall into, and it’s really annoying. God gives me tools that work to keep me out of trouble, but every so often I slip. Humility is great, but nobody wants to have it forced on them by repeated failures.

I don’t worry too much, because God says, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand.”

I don’t think “good,” as used in this passage, means “perfect.” I think it applies to anyone who is seriously on the path.

Hope that’s correct, because no one is good.

I feel like God is telling me I have to get away from the spirit of murder.

A few years back I was in church, and the Holy Spirit was working. I realized I had a spirit of murder, and I got it cast out. I was surprised. Imagine having God tell you you have a spirit of murder. I would have been shocked if it had been shoplifting. Murder is another level.

It doesn’t mean I was in danger of murdering people. In my case, it meant I stabbed at people with words. I have been mistreated a lot in life, which hardly makes me unique and does not excuse anything. One of the ways I responded to mistreatment was to develop the ability to use words with cruelty.

There are some benefits to a murderous tongue. Bullies will be repelled by it, just as they are repelled by physical force. The don’t like being humiliated in front of other people, especially when they don’t have the tools to fight back in kind. I drove a number of vicious people away with words. But it’s not God’s way. It’s necessary to say very harsh things sometimes, but to lash people and take pleasure in their pain and embarrassment is not good.

For a long time, I’ve felt that God wants me to abstain from ridicule. It’s hard to do, though. When you’re good at using a weapon, it’s not easy to make yourself put it down.

Your enemies won’t all stop just because you do. That’s for sure. When you stop ridiculing people, you disarm unilaterally.

There is some hope, I suppose. The Bible says that when a man’s ways please God, even his enemies will be at peace with him. It doesn’t mean no one will ever bother you again, but our sins call enemies who pop up suddenly from beneath the horizon, and reducing sin reduces the number of enemies you yourself attract proactively.

The spirit was cast out, but spirits come back in when you leave the door open and put a refrigerator full of snacks and beer beside it.

I have always been a fatherless person. This morning I was thinking about all the brilliant things I tell kids, and a realization stabbed me in the gut. This stuff is easy, and it’s extremely helpful, but I had no one to do it for me when I was young.

Forgive me for saying I say brilliant things to kids, but it’s true. Every adult who learns from experience and the Holy Spirit has brilliant things to say to kids. I didn’t say the ideas I pass on are unique to me or that I deserve credit for them, but they’re still brilliant. If I tell a young person he has to pray in tongues every day in order to grow, that’s brilliant, but no one will ever call me a sage because I said it. Lots of people say it.

I have been fatherless. No one gave me any wisdom to speak of. My dad was a coarse, scary person who came home every night and watched TV in his underwear in front of the whole family and whoever else came by. He had two kids and an IQ in the 140’s, but that was his life, apart from golf on the weekends. My mother didn’t know all that much, and she was stifled by my dad anyway. I grew like a weed, not a crop plant. I figured things out on my own, and I reached the wrong conclusions. I didn’t know anything of value.

I failed all the time, as a lifestyle. No wonder! I didn’t know anything at all about success. I went to school with people whose parents checked their homework, told them how to get ahead, told them how to deal with dating and marriage, and taught them about money. A lot of other students thought I was the smartest person in a class full of very bright people, but kids with much less ability sailed right past me. I didn’t know they had these advantages over me. How could I have known? I didn’t know why I couldn’t succeed.

Nobody taught me about the Holy Spirit, sanctification, prayer in tongues, hostile spirits, or the kingdom of God. I didn’t grow. I rotted. It’s very easy to tell people their sins sow a harvest of opposition and defeat, but no one around me knew it, and no one told me.

I’m telling you now, for what it’s worth. Maybe you’re fatherless, too. If you cast a spirit out through one door and then hold another door open through habitual sin, the spirit will come back, bringing your old shackles with it. Jesus said a spirit could bring seven worse spirits with it.

Dogs go back to their vomit, and pigs that are washed go back and lie down in feces.

Man, I wish I hadn’t been raised in the dark. I feel like a bonsai tree. What would I have been, with the proper management?

I was also fatherless at church. The pastors above me were all about cash and having their butts kissed. They were little men and women who served their egos, not their flocks.

No wonder the Bible says, “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven,” and, “Stop relying on man, in whose nostrils is a mere breath — after all, he doesn’t count for much, does he?”

I remember watching the first Superman movie when I was a kid. Lex Luthor surprised me by saying something my mother always said, and with which the Bible agrees: “People are no damn good.” That saying is attributed to a cartoonist named William Steig, but I have a feeling it’s ancient.

Today I was watching a Tom Fischer video. He’s the guy I wrote about the other day. He does street ministry. He heals people on the spot. He started talking about healings that go away.

Anti-Christian activists love to “debunk” faith healing, pointing to individuals who thought they were healed and were later found to be ill. They don’t realize that even a carnival barker and disgraceful scoundrel like Benny Hinn may get people healed. The problem is that selfish preachers don’t teach people how to stay healed. They just want to use believers to promote themselves and bring money in.

Fischer said a spirit can return more than once, and that this is especially true if you keep sinning. He quoted Jesus, who healed a man and told him to straighten up or else something worse might come to him. I have had that experience. I wouldn’t say worse things have come to me, but things that have been driven off have returned.

One of the most famous exorcisms was performed by Lester Sumrall, in the Philippines. An occultist prostitute named Clarita Villanueva manifested bite marks all over her body. Sumrall cast her demons out and astounded the nation. But he had to do it more than once. The demons tried to undo the exorcism. I’ve heard preachers talk a lot about exorcism, but not many talk about the need for repeat engagements or post-exorcism repentance and sanctification.

This makes me think of Trinity Church and the other church I belonged to. They were extremely weak on repentance. The Wilkersons, who run Trinity, only care about money and getting their faces on TV. They were happy to teach about the things God does for people, but they worked in the ghetto, where sin and denial are gigantic strongholds, and they were afraid that if they taught repentance people would leave. They were probably right. Ghetto people love to scream and roll on the floor in church, but they will still work as strippers, whores, and drug dealers the rest of the week, and they do not like talking about hypocrisy.

Rich Wilkerson allowed Luther “Luke Skyywalker” Campbell to speak at the church. He made my armorbearer team give him a special seat and escort him around as a VIP. Wilkerson bragged on social media about the church’s relationship with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian is one of the world’s most famous and powerful unrepentant sluts! If you haven’t seen Kim Kardashian naked, you must live in an abandoned mine shaft.

Whores stick together, I suppose.

What good does it do you to cast something out and start rebuilding your life when you know your guest is coming back?

No pastor at any church taught these things to me, and I went to church faithfully for 7 years. I was a deacon when the pastor’s wife drove me out of my last church, and I had never seen a sermon about these ideas. Thankfully, God showed them to me without help from pastors.

Denouncing the feel-good gospel is what got me in trouble at church. Rich Wilkerson called me a divider because I criticized Steve Munsey’s money-raising fables, which Wilkerson knows to be untrue. At New Dawn Ministries, the pastor was lazy and emasculated, and his wife, who loved signs and goodies, wore the pants and did his PR. She got fed up with me and blocked me on social media.

The Bible says God is a father to the fatherless. How true that is, if (and only if) you have a strong habit of spending time with him.

Nearly any human being will let you down. You have to have someone you can depend on. You can’t put your complete trust in people who are close to you, and you have to be especially wary of Christian celebrities. You don’t need a megachurch. You need a microchurch, consisting of you and God. That’s the holy of holies. Everything outside of that is inferior and less clean.

I’m going to go back and watch a few more videos. I love watching God work in small groups. The world needs more micro churches. Once you get past 4 members, you need to split up.

The Vogons Were Amateurs

Leftists get very upset when you criticize the government, because when you do, you criticize their god. They know how important it is to their agenda that everyone think the government does a great job. But what happens when you actually deal with the government? They screw up and screw up and screw up, and just as conservatives say, they don’t care, because it’s almost impossible to get government workers in trouble.

Seems like the cops and our precious military personnel are the only government agents they hate.

I am here to criticize the god of the left. I had a horrible experience (again) with the Post Office. No, I am not referring to Shakir the Angry Muslim Mailman, who had the nerve to put tip-soliciting cards in my box on a Christian holiday and who got furious because I used to stamp “DELIVERED TO WRONG ADDRESS!” on the multiple pieces of other people’s mail he gave me each week. No, I am not referring to his successor, the crazy lady with the wrist cast who got the Post Office to force me to move my mailbox 20 feet closer to the driveway (until 10 minutes after she was replaced, at which time it was moved back). I am referring to the problem I had with a knife I ordered.

I picked out a knife on Ebay, and because the price was so low, I splurged on express delivery. I was supposed to receive it yesterday. I signed up for email delivery updates.

By the way, do you have an ex-wife or maybe and ex-boyfriend you want to stalk and murder? The Post Office has a handy service that will help. You can sign up to have photographs of all of their mail emailed to you. You don’t have to provide an ID. The government photographs all of our mail (not in order to gather information on us; oh, no), and they decided to make the pictures available to us so they can pretend it’s a feature, not a grotesque threat to our privacy and liberty. If you’re planning to slit someone’s throat, and you want to know if someone else has been sending them love letters, now you know what to do.

Anyhow, I gave the Postal Service my phone number and received updates on my phone. I wrote about this already.

Yesterday, I received a very nice update. It said the driver had taken the package back to the Post Office.

It did not say, “We are at your gate; please let us in.” It did not say, “We are on the way with your package.” I did not hear a horn honk. They had my number. They were too inept to use it to call me.

Today I gave up and drove to the Post Office.

There aren’t many unpleasant drives in Marion County, but today I found one. I had to drive about 9 miles to get the package, and it took about 25 minutes. That’s urban Miami speed. The roads were torn up. I got stuck behind a country trailer loaded with someone’s personal furniture (I’m sure that was kosher), and he turned at every turn I had to take. I thought I would never get there. I went in and picked up the knife. I talked to an employee just long enough to confirm that they didn’t give a crap about my problem. I went home. Very slowly.

God bless Federal Express. Think how much worse the Postal Service would be if they didn’t have Fred Smith showing them up every day.

I contacted the Ebay seller and told them negative feedback was on the way. We’ll see if they care. You don’t send a small package and demand a signature without informing the recipient.

I can’t believe I finally got my knife. I wasted 10 days trying to get one from an incompetend Amazon seller, and then I thought the Ebay knife was the answer to my prayers. Then they tortured me as much as possible until I got it home.

It looks very serviceable. The blade is very heavy. The edge is great, if the job it did on my junk mail is any indication. The sheath is not elegant, but it ought to function very well. It’s Kydex with a few rivets.

I don’t wear a belt, and the sheath is made for a belt, so I guess I’ll have to come up with a different solution. I’m not defiling my ensemble with a belt. I think people look insane when they combine belts with suspenders. It’s the Lumbergh look from Office Space. Maybe I can get some Kydex and some Internet know-how and make a sheath that hooks over my waistband.

I love micarta handles. Whenever I watch Forged in Fire, I always scream, “USE THE MICARTA, YOU IDIOT!”, because smiths are always choosing nutty handle materials that shatter. As far as I know, micarta is the adamantium of knife handle materials. It’s basically fiberglass made with ordinary fabric.

I learned some surprising stuff about knife steels. I think I have been too hard on 420HC, the metal used in my disappointing Gerber Gator II’s.

The alloy 420HC is cheap compared to 440C and a lot of other metals, and generally, knives made from it are not great. It appears that one company is an exception to this rule: Buck. They take 420HC and harden the edge to something like Rockwell 58. That’s acceptable. I had read that Buck had special heat treating skills, but I assumed it was marketing BS intended to cover yet another great company’s descent into the toilet. It looks like that was wrong.

If what I’m reading about Buck is right, they may be providing very good 420HC knives at very good prices. I am still suspicious, because Buck itself uses the phrase “medium edge-holding” to describe the knives, but maybe they’re okay. This metal has some advantages. It’s very tough, so it can take a beating, and when you get it sharp, you can get it very, very sharp. Some metals are hard to put a serious edge on.

Some day I may try a Buck folder just to see what it’s like. I would not be shocked if I were disappointed, but maybe I wouldn’t be.

I hate a knife that gets dull fast. Sharpening twice a month is okay. Sharpening three times a day is not. There is some very impressive steel out there, and it’s not unreasonable at all to expect stellar performance, so I prefer not to fool around with junk. In the kitchen, cheap steel can be useful, because you can always keep a diamond hone handy, but elsewhere, you want a knife that doesn’t have to be suckled and coddled.

I wish the Post Office had a face so I could punch it. I will pray about that.

Time to go check the game camera. I hope it actually did something last night.

Stay Away From Choke Points

As much fun as it is writing about my new fort and game camera, I feel like writing about God today. If I end up having a topic, it will probably be the upcoming decentralization of the church by the Holy Spirit.

A few days back I wrote about a man named Ken Peters. He had some long dreams about the future. He had these dreams in 1980. He was a “practicing Catholic” (his term) at the time, and he says that because he was a practicing Catholic, he didn’t know anything about prophecy or the Bible. His dreams line up well with what’s happening today and with what many Spirit-filled Christians expect to happen in the near future.

Here’s something I’ve been harping on for years: I believe God has been telling me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. Is “pus-filled” harsh? I guess it is. Anyway, I think he has told me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. I expect to see a true grassroots church rise up, connected and taught by the Holy Spirit, with no tithes or church-mandated offerings.

Everyone loves to say, “I hate organized religion.” I think God was the first to say it.

Ken Peters saw post-rapture grassroots revival in his dream. Here’s something he said:

It was almost like everybody was like Jesus walking around doing these works. You did not have to have a pulpit to stand behind to do this in this part of the dream. As a matter of fact I never saw anyone standing behind a pulpit. I think they finally understood the purpose of the ministry is equipping and releasing you to go out and be God’s superstars.

BAM! Am I too old to say that? I want to be cool so the “kids” will “dig” me. I want them to take photos with me with selfie sticks made from recycled materials. I want to wear skinny jeans and grow a beard that looks like Chaz Bono’s. Anyway, BAM!

I don’t really want any of that stuff. I’m just riffing on hip preachers. That includes anyone who inserts “dude” in a Bible verse.

I’m so sick of churches and denominations. I hate being told I have to give money to rich white trash. I’m tired of the idea that gasbag denomination bigwigs have to give God permission to do things. “Sorry, Father. We’re cessationists. Take your miracles outside.”

It just hit me…isn’t this exactly what the rabbinic Jews did to Jesus? He healed people on the Sabbath repeatedly, just to infuriate them, and it worked. Look at John 9:

They took the man who had been blind to the P’rushim. Now the day on which Yeshua had made the mud and opened his eyes was Shabbat. So the P’rushim asked him again how he had become able to see; and he told them, “He put mud on my eyes, then I washed, and now I can see.” At this, some of the P’rushim said, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep Shabbat.” But others said, “How could a man who is a sinner do miracles like these?” And there was a split among them. So once more they spoke to the blind man: “Since you’re the one whose eyes he opened, what do you say about him?” He replied: “He is a prophet.”

“P’rushim” means “Pharisees.”

While I was looking that up, I came across a neat passage from Mark, which preceded a story about a healing. Maybe it’s the same healing (Bartimaeus) mentioned above. James (Ya’akov) and John (Yochanan) had been trying to get Jesus to give them the best seats in heaven, and Jesus set them straight:

When the other ten heard about this, they became outraged at Ya‘akov and Yochanan. But Yeshua called them to him and said to them, “You know that among the Goyim, those who are supposed to rule them become tyrants, and their superiors become dictators. But among you, it must not be like that! On the contrary, whoever among you wants to be a leader must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first among you must become everyone’s slave! For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve — and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

How apt is that? As soon as you build a church and call a man pastor, you begin setting one believer above another. People start to think they’re supposed to kiss up to God’s special little secretaries instead of talking to their father directly. The whole system falls apart.

I can’t imagine having to live by the claptrap that comes from the mind of a grandstanding socialist pope or his homosexual employees. And the nonsense that comes from greedy charismatics is beneath spitting on.

Churches will come under legal regulation, right here in the USA. Anything resembling guidance from the Holy Spirit will be banned. You wait and see. This is what will happen, if churches are allowed to exist at all. When that time comes, going to church won’t be much better than going to a whorehouse. Satan will be able to control and/or ban churches, just as he does in China and Saudi Arabia. But he will never be able to control individuals. At least not to the point where you can’t pass the message on before being turned in by Siri or Alexa.

Satan is weak and small. He needs human organizations to propagate his authority. God can work through trillions of people simultaneously if he feels like it, with no physical communication between them at all.

The argument that Peters is a prophet is bolstered by his prediction that individuals will spread the gospel in the future. If he had said the pope would do it, I would have quit reading him, possibly after throwing up.

While I was looking at testimonies on Youtube the other day, I found a guy named Tom Fischer. He calls his outfit “Cardboard Box Church.” My best guess is that he and his wife ARE the ministry. He has a blog, and I don’t see any sign of a big building or TV cameras.

This couple walks around talking to people. They ask if they’re in pain. They ask about other health problems. Then they pray for people, or they command illnesses to go. They tell people Jesus loves them. Nothing controversial. Well, his work isn’t controversial unless you belong to “the only church founded by Jesus” or a religion that calls Jesus “May his name be blotted out forever.”

The people in the videos say they’re healed. BANG (I got tired of “BAM!”)! Are they really healed? You will have to ask them. I don’t know everything. Anyway, they do things like lifting crutches up and walking on feet that had been sore minutes earlier.

This is what Christianity is supposed to be. You tell people about God. You tell them he, not you, is the healer. You do what the Bible says Christians are supposed to do, i.e., you get people healed. You don’t beg for money. You don’t say, “Man, I need a jet.” You don’t stand in front of your church, like my last pastor, and tell members they have to give money to you on your birthday, along with cash to honor your dope-dealer son.

You can do individual ministry outdoors. You can do it at the mall. You can do it in your living room. It’s free. No equipment is required. You can even do it by yourself. Prayer, blessing, and cursing are ministry.

Fischer and his wife have videos where they heal people in Israel. That takes guts. The Orthodox are very hard on Christians and Jewish believers who talk to Jews in Israel. You can catch a beating. You may have rocks thrown at you. Being spat on is almost obligatory. And when you accost any Jewish person, anywhere, and mention Jesus, you’re likely to be cursed and called a Nazi. Somehow Christianity has become associated with an anti-Christian political faction, and no amount of logic can shatter the delusion.

It probably doesn’t help that the Hebrew word for Christians is “Notzrim,” which sounds like “Nazi” but is a reference to Nazareth.

I can’t imagine making headway with ANY Jewish person, let alone an Israeli inside Israel. I’ve known tons of Jewish believers, but no unbelieving Jew has ever shown the slightest interest in Jesus around me. I’ve had lots of Jewish friends who didn’t believe, and I went to school with hundreds of Jews, and not one has ever demonstrated any inclination to consider accepting Jesus. I don’t deal with Jews here in northern Florida, but back when I saw them from time to time, I didn’t bother trying to give them what I had. It’s astonishing to see the Fischers pull it off.

Forget Jews; I can’t even talk to Christians about God. They get angry. They become uncomfortable. They tell me they know everything already. I am the least effective evangelist on earth. I am singular. Talking to Jews about Jesus is something I consider impossible.

I’m getting off the topic. To return, I like the kind of ministry the Fischers have, and I know it’s the Christianity of the future. It’s unstoppable. Stopping a church is like forcing a bus to stop. Easy. Stopping billions of Christians is like trying to catch every raindrop before it hits the ground.

I love the way these healings take place. There is no fasting. No one cries or screams. People don’t walk around in circles, begging God to help. Fischer says things like, “Pain, go now, in the name of Jesus,” and that’s it. Very nice.

Imagine how different unbelievers and backsliders would feel if this is what they thought of when they thought of Christians. They’d see us as powerful, helpful people, not fat, crap-spewing leeches who make TV pulpits stink like gangrene. The characters who go on TV and pour vomit into our ears were put there by Satan, not God. They work for Satan. They drive intelligent people away.

I saw a video in which Fischer talks about President Trump. Fischer sounds like a yankee, and his wife has a Jewish first name, so one would not assume he was conservative. His video startled me, because he spoke in support of Trump. He has the same kind of concerns other serious Christians have. He sees censorship increasing. He’s against gun control. He talks about martial law. It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit invariably makes people more conservative.

Conservatism isn’t God’s answer to our problems. When separated from God, it’s carnal. But you can’t be led by the Holy Spirit and be anything but conservative. Liberalism is based on hatred of God combined with covetousness and pride. Leftism tries to make our stupid, cruel, unfair, greedy, incompetent government the messiah. It’s worse than a golden calf. A golden calf can’t take your money or force your kids to sit and listen to homosexual and anti-Christian indoctrination.

I feel like I’m burying myself when I write blog entries like this. I’m giving the devil’s people nails to drive into my coffin.

Imagine what would happen if I ran for office. Imagine me being offered any position of power. The freaks and witches would find my blog and republish excerpts all over the world. They would call it hate. The SPLC, a true hate group, would give me official recognition, simply for believing the Bible.

Right now, it’s legal to say the things I say. That won’t always be true, and there is no legal guarantee that I won’t be punished in the future, for future laws I’m breaking today. As of this minute, our system has a powerful bias against enacting laws that punish people for prior acts, but there is no reason that can’t change. Funny how no one ever talks about that. Our pundits are very obtuse about things that should be obvious. Remember the real estate crash? How many investing geniuses thought it would never come? And we still listen to them.

When the Soviets, who served Satan, went after the Christian Czar and his family, they didn’t give them a trial or think about the legality of the things they had done. They put them in a basement and fired pistols into their brains. When the leftists in Cambodia executed people for crimes such as reading and wearing glasses, no one was interested in prior laws. The statists in Nazi Germany and Austria punished and murdered people who had not committed crimes, and they even did it outside their own borders, to citizens of other countries.

Satan’s people are very efficient. They don’t believe in a God who punishes evil, and they think people are just smart monkeys without enduring spirits. They will kill us here, just as they have killed tens of millions overseas. They will kill us just as we run chickens through mechanized slaughterhouses. They’ve done it before.

The people who will do it are here already. They are your neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. A lot of parents will be turned in or even murdered by their children. Remember when Obama told kids to spy on their parents? That idea didn’t come from his own confused little mind. He didn’t build that. His master gave him a prompt.

Sometimes I think about all the religious and conservative personalities who tussle and quarrel openly with their Satanic counterparts. They feel safe, not because they think God looks out for them, but because they expect our laws to protect them. Big mistake. One day the Internet Wayback Machine, which preserves all sorts of material from the web, will be used to regurgitate evidence to be used at trials. Wait and see. Things people said that were legal in 2005 may get them hanged in 2025.

Fischer says something interesting, and I agree with it. He says the path is becoming narrower. Decades ago, Christians here could get by without real sanctification. As he notes, we like to say, “I am a work in progress,” instead of cleaning our lives up. That won’t fly in the future. You will have to know God personally in order to get protection. I know what it’s like, getting action from God. I’ve done it many times. I know how to lay the groundwork. It takes a long time. You can’t do it the minute the Climate Change Denier Einsatzgruppe pulls into your driveway in a stretch Prius.

Describing churches full of weak believers, Jesus said. “What a terrible time it will be for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” My old church, Trinity in Miami, taught people to stay in sin and worship money. Most of the people at Trinity will join Satan because they never belongd to God in the first place. They’re on Facebook now, promoting BLM, which is a Satanic movement. Most of those who won’t join Satan will be trampled and crushed, because they are corrupt, empty-headed, and feeble.

If you don’t know God personally and communicate with him throughout the day, you are running naked through an electrical storm, and you are not going to make it.

I keep watching Fischer’s videos. I hope I’m right about him. So far, he checks out, but I have made mistakes before.

Advance and be Ostracized

Now that I’m a game camera guy, I’m trying to improve my game camera game.

I started calling game cameras “trail cameras” because I saw other people using that term on the web, and then I found out “game camera” was right after all. Maybe smelly hippies are promoting “trail camera” because it has less of the scent of hunting, masculinity, whiteness, capitalism, and normal sexual orientation. I am not sure.

I went to Amazon and bought a cheap camera, and I got results with it. Then I found out I could have gotten considerably better video with a name brand. I feel like I need to upgrade already.

Here are some things you need to think about when you buy a game camera. They eat batteries, and batteries are not free, so look for one with good battery life. This varies so much, it may literally be worth it to pay three times as much for an efficient camera. Also, the illuminated area in infrared night shots may be small, so get a camera that gives you a whole frame to look at. Finally, ignore the 1080P claims and the megapixel claims. My camera has 1080P and a billion pixels, and it’s still grainy.

I’ll post some photos captured from video. I assume still photos would be much better.

This is a coon by my fence. This is not the whole frame. Only about half of the frame is illuminated.

This is a coyote by my fence. Pretty neat.

This is a fox that jumped on the fence. I didn’t know foxes were this coordinated. He jumped to the top of the fence with no problems, and then he stood there with no wobbling at all.

It looks like the big winners in the reasonably priced camera war are the Brownings. They make a couple of cameras called the Black Ops Pro and the Strike Force Pro, at around $150. They have great battery life. I put 8 new AA batteries in my camera, used it a couple of times, and then lost a night of video because the batteries were dead. The Brownings will go months on a set of batteries. I think you can see why I would be willing to pay more.

I don’t understand why game cameras don’t use wifi the way action cameras do. It would make checking them much easier. You can get full-blown cellular game cameras, but they cost a lot, and you have to have a good cell signal.

All of last night’s creature visits are lost because the camera’s batteries died. I found some old frozen pork in the fridge, so I put new batteries in the camera, put the pork by my fence, and turned the camera on. We’ll see what I get tonight. Whatever it is, it probably won’t be a herd of nocturnal Chassidic Jews.

I bought a portable blind. It’s an Ameristep Caretaker. What this really is, is a small tent made for hunting. It has openings you can shoot out of. It has room for two Adirondack chairs (you can see where I’m heading) and a cooler.

Cooler, scoped rifle, chairs, Christian music on the old Worktunes hearing protectors…I’ll have it made in the shade.

I told the cashier at the store it was too bad the blind didn’t work on people. She started telling me how great it was and how much she enjoyed hers. You have to love this town. Where else would a female cashier have her own blind?

Even if it doesn’t help me kill animals, I can set it up in my upstairs hideaway and have a cool fort, like the ones I made from couch cushions when I was a kid. There will be a secret password, and of course, no icky girls will be allowed, even if they threaten to tell on me. My sweet blind is a cooty-free zone.

You’re not cool enough to join my club, so don’t ask.

I still don’t have my hunting knife, and this strikes me as a good time to excoriate the Post Office. I ordered a knife and paid $15 for 2-day shipping. The Post Office had my phone number, and they were sending automatic texts, telling me about the status of the knife. This afternoon, they sent me a text saying they tried to deliver it and gave up because no one was here to sign for it. They didn’t say, “Help us get in.” They said, “We already left.”

Okay. You have my phone number. You’re at my gate. You have the intelligence to send me a text saying there’s a problem, but you’re too stupid to call me and ask me to come out and sign?

I think you see why I was upset.

They want me to drive 30 miles to pick it up. Nice. I called to see if they could relax the idiotic signature requirement. I couldn’t get through, so I told the computer to call me back. An extremely ghetto lady called and made it clear that she could do nothing at all for me and didn’t care at all whether I ever got the knife.

This is why the guy who founded FedEx is a billionaire. It also explains why postal employees have to wear bulletproof vests.

I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the knife, and I feel sure the $15 will never be refunded.

I had to deal with my dad’s medical chores today, so I didn’t get to shoot or do anything fun. Maybe tomorrow.

Goodbye. I will be in my fort, having a secret meeting. God help any animals that walk through the room.

Gearing up for Coon Armageddon

Here’s how it is.

Florida allows shooting coyotes, coons, possums, and a few other revolting creatures all year long. But there are rules (crazy!). You can shoot a coyote with just about anything, including a submachine gun, but if you want to shoot coons at night with a rifle, you have to use a .22. It can’t be a .22 WMR, either. A plain old .22.

I have a .22. Nice, dependable, accurate rifle. Problem: it won’t take a scope. It’s a Remington Nylon 66, and you pretty much have to take it apart and build a new one to make it hold a zero. The receiver cover flexes, and the scope mounts on it, so you can imagine the problems.

I need a .22 that will take a scope. Like, NOW.

I want a semiauto. Why? Because .22’s aren’t accurate, as firearms go. In better calibers, such as .270 or whatever, bolt action guns are more accurate than semiautos. In a .22, they probably aren’t. Guns are limited by ammunition, and .22 ammunition is not that great, so if you buy a well-made .22, you’re not going to get better performance. I think.

I can’t make .22 ammunition. Come to think of it, that’s one of its big limitations. Preppers think a .22 is the main thing a person will need when the world ends, but they won’t be able to get new ammunition after the apocalypse. Hmm.

I guess the same problem applies to other calibers. I can make my own .45 shells all day, and I can find a way to make bullets, but I still have to buy primers and powder, and eventually, I would need new brass.

Anyway, it’s not practical to create your own accurate .22 LR ammo.

The convenience and low cost of a semiauto outweigh whatever tiny increase in accuracy a bolt gun would provide. This is my opinion, and it could be wrong. I believe I would never be able to shoot at anything over 50 yards away (ethically) with a .22, regardless of how good the gun was, so might as well go semiauto.

I looked at .22’s, and I found three contenders stood out. The Ruger 10/22, the CZ something or other, and the Marlin 60. The CZ costs too much. The Ruger is super popular. It’s the AR15 of rimfires. There are a ton of accessories and so on for it. But the Marlin is supposedly a superior gun with a better barrel crown. The crown of a barrel determines how accurate a gun is. It’s the last thing a bullet sees on its way downrange.

Problem: the Marlin 60 is hard to find right now. Luckily, a retailer near me has some, so I plan to get in the car and snap one up.

I looked around and found that there are some above-average .22 loads out there. Norma makes one. Big surprise. It’s probably two dollars a round. Checking. No, it’s reasonable, but it’s not for hunting. Wolf makes very accurate .22 ammo, but it’s not for hunting, either. CCI has the one I want to try. Hollow points with high velocity. The high velocity means it will cycle in a semiauto (I hope), and the hollow points are good for inflicting tissue damage. They call these bullets “Stingers,” And they cost about 13 cents each. I am hoping this will turn out to be a suitable coyote round. It would solve all my varmint problems.

Gander Outdoors (formerly Gander Mountain) sells the Marlin 60 for $169, and they reopened their store here. They sell Stingers, so I will drop by and see what I can get.

Once I have this thing, I can move my UTG BugBuster scope to it, and God help the coons after that. I won’t be much use for anything far away, but I should be able to crack coon skulls at 50 yards like shelling peanuts.

I really want a night scope. If I get an ATN scope with an infrared illuminator, I’ll be able to annihilate coons and coyotes at night, record video, and post it on Youtube.

I’m thinking I should get a portable blind and a lawn chair. I can sit a ways off from the place where critters cross my fence, and I can pop them in the head in comfort.

In other news, I learned that Florida law has changed. Up until 2016, it was legal to go out in your backyard and shoot at cans, even if you had a quarter of an acre in Miami Beach. I’m sure this made for some hilarious interactions between fun-loving gun enthusiasts and incontinent, shrieking leftists who KNEW they were witnessing felonies. There must have been a lot of unproductive narking to the cops. “Wait; we have to stop calling you pigs for a minute so we can squeal on our neighbors.”

Now the law has changed. If your house is in an area which is primarily residential AND AND AND (not OR) has a residential density of over one dwelling unit per acre, you can’t just walk outside and shoot. There is a release valve, though. You can still have a home gun lane if you take reasonable precautions.

I suppose that’s okay. It appears to be a largely toothless way of telling shooters, “Don’t be an idiot.” Take precautions, and you can still exercise a remarkable degree of freedom.

The FWC site discourages people from shooting anywhere except at gun ranges. Unacceptable and fatuous. Gun ranges are expensive. They have rules that make certain types of practice impossible. They usually don’t have facilities that let you go beyond 100 yards. I don’t know why they would cause problems by telling people to go to ranges. It’s not practical, and when the government isn’t practical in its guidance, it foments disobedience.

They discourage practicing on public land where hunting is allowed. I can’t begin to say how stupid that is.

I used to shoot at Trail Glades, near Miami. It was crowded. It was a long distance from my house. I could not shoot at over 100 yards. I had to pay almost 10 bucks every time. I could not practice rapid fire, which is essential for self-defense (one of the two primary reasons for the Second Amendment). I was around people who made scary safety errors because they were sans clue. Sometimes I had to wait in line for a station. It was bad, and I didn’t go often. It adversely affected my skills and discouraged me from improving myself and from participating in shooting, which benefits the economy and makes us stronger as a nation.

No, sorry. I will not be going to a range any time soon, unless I need facilities I can’t create in my backyard.

It won’t be long before I’m on a bigger piece of land, and after that, everyone can kiss my…can do as they please without worrying about my pleasant shooting exploits.

I learned something else about the law in Florida. It’s a felony to shoot from a vehicle within 1000 feet of any person. I’m really glad I’ve never done that here, as far as anyone will ever know. I don’t really understand it. If I want to shoot targets from the shade of my truck, I don’t see what the problem is. But I’m all about respect for the law, no matter how ill-conceived and silly it is, so I won’t be doing it. As far as anyone will ever know.

I am off to buy another firearm and add to America’s gun woes. Stop me before I plink again.

More

I had to change the name of this entry. I somehow got it into my head that the Marlin .22 people recommend is the Marlin 66, but it’s actually the Marlin 60. I picked one up today. The name of the entry had “66” in it, and that made no sense, so I changed it.

Wolf in Hog’s Clothing

I feel like there are forces out there that only want me to have crap knives.

I decided I needed a sheath knife for hunting. I looked around and settled on a semi-custom job made from 440C stainless: the Entrek Javalina. It’s a 4.25″ knife that comes with a Kydex sheath.

I ordered it on February 23, and I splurged on expedited shipping. I think I paid $7 extra. I kept waiting to be told that had shipped, but the seller, Knife Country, didn’t make a peep.

I finally contacted them to ask what was going on, and all I got in return was a crummy cut and paste of the tracking number and order date. I wouldn’t buy another knife from them if it cost $5 and was forged by Vulcan himself.

The knife finally arrived today, 10 days after I ordered it. Yes, 10. That’s expedited. It arrived the day after squirrel season ended. I took it out of the box…and it was the wrong knife. It was an Entrek Wolf, which is a slightly larger knife with a finger groove and a tanto-style blade.

Talk about annoyed.

I don’t want a tanto blade. I’m not even a Lone Ranger fan. I want a blade with a curve to it, so I can sharpen it easily and cut skin without a lot of effort. I’m sending it back, and in my little Amazon form, I gave Knife Country a piece of my mind. I have to start over. It looks like I’ll end up taking 15 days just to get a danged knife.

The up side of all this is that a look at the Wolf forced me to overcome my prejudices and admit that a finger groove, which makes a knife look kitcheny, is a good thing. It will help prevent my hand from sliding up to the blade.

“Groove” is a knife-nerd misnomer. It’s really a semicircular concave area, not a groove.

The Javalina is a neat, old-school-looking knife, but I now want a finger groove, so I’m ordering a Beaver. Yes, that’s the name of the knife. I went from a filthy hog that roots around in the forest to a fat, waddling rodent with a name that makes immature people titter.

Who comes up with these names? Mr. Entrek’s wife?

The Wolf looks very nice. The blade is around 3/8″ thick, so I don’t think I would have to worry about snapping it on a really tough squirrel pelvis. The edge grind is not perfect, but it’s hand-finished, so you have to deal with little variations.

The knife looked very short when I took it out of the box, so I Googled around, and I saw that 4″ is pretty much standard for hunting knives. I think this is the smallest hunting knife I’ve ever seen. I guess they were bigger in the past, and then people got real and went for practicality, not flash.

I found out Amazon is not the place to get knives. Ebay sells the Beaver for $123, which is a whole lot less than Amazon.

I could build this knife for $60, including heat treating. That hurts. But my belt grinder is in Miami. I don’t have the best tools to shape the blade. Also, there are supposedly tricks to heat treating, so maybe the folks at Entrek know more than whoever I would end up sending it to for treatment.

The blade on the Beaver is bead-blasted, which is not something I like. You can always polish a damaged smooth surface. Once bead-blasting is messed up, you’re done. And I will mess it up. Count on that.

I also have a new folder on the way. I used to carry a Gerber Gator II, which is a really fine knife for people who enjoy sharpening. It’s made from 420HC steel. You can only harden 420HC to about Rockwell 52. I think plastic forks are Rockwell 53. A good knife will be Rockwell 58+. The Gator had a great shape and a wonderful handle, but it got dull every time I used it. I want a knife of roughly the same size, except not junk.

Gerber used to make very, very nice knives. Now Gerber is the new Camillus. If you don’t know how insulting that is, try a Camillus knife. They used to sell them at drug stores. Gerber uses bad steel because it’s cheap.

I tried to find a nice folder in 440C, but it’s not that popular, because knife makers love trendy new steels. I learned that Cold Steel now has a steel called CTS-XHP. I don’t know what it is. I’ve had two little Cold Steel folders, and they were fantastic. I carried the first one for years, and then I lost it and replaced it. It always looked brand new. Weird.

Cold Steel used to use something called AUS8, which is supposed to be slightly less good than 440C, but similar to it. In 2015, they moved to CTS-XHP, which is an American-made wonder steel. AUS8 is Japanese, except for the Chinese version.

Cold Steel put out a crazy video to show why they switched. They took a folder made from AUS8 and used it to chop manila rope. They got it to cut over 1400 times before it got dull. Then they tried CTS-XHP, and they had to quit when they got past 6000 cuts. The guys who were testing the knives were getting sore.

I decided to order a Cold Steel CTS-XHP folder. Then I learned they’re moving to a different steel because CTS-XHP is hard to obtain. Great. I’ll fall in love with this knife, and then when I lose it and replace it, I won’t be able to get the same steel.

If you think you want to try this steel, this is the time to buy a Cold Steel knife, because old stock won’t last forever. The steel they’re using now isn’t as good. How do I know that? Because Cold Steel would still be using CTS-XHP if they could get it.

I hate, hate, hate bad steel. It’s okay for a cheap kitchen knife you can sharpen in 15 seconds, but not for a carry knife that cuts things tougher than tomatoes and celery. There is no excuse for bad steel, and there is no excuse for trying to make people think crap steel is good.

Knife makers are really sleazy about steel. Buck pimps 420HC like it’s a miracle metal, but they use it because they’re stingy, not because it’s good. I’ve seen companies brag about their 440A knives, hoping to make people think it’s like 440C. It’s not; 440A is soft garbage.

You are bored now. I understand that. I don’t care, though.

Entrek knives are probably very good. The one I’m sending back looks indestructible. I guess we’ll find out. I’ll also report on the Cold Steel I ordered.

Wonder what they’ll send me this time.

Fined and Dandy

I finished today’s first prayer session around an hour ago, the breakfast dishes are still with me, and I already have some testimony.

I’ll tell you about the problem I was facing down in Dade County.

I manage my dad’s properties. One is a warehouse. Years ago, someone who was in charge of it did some work. He submitted plans and got a permit, and then he did whatever he wanted. Last year, the fire inspector noticed this, and we were warned that we would eventually be cited. This problem applied to 6 units, so several other owners were on the hook.

I talked to the inspector, and I could not get straight answers out of her. She made it sound like she wasn’t even sure there would be a citation. I was told that the condo association was working on it, and that whoever was in charge of citations would issue a ruling some day.

This dragged on for a few months. That inspector left, and she was replaced with a lady who barely speaks English. I know that sounds incredible, but Dade Couny is like a foreign country. I really mean it’s like a foreign country. I’m not being cute or exaggerating.

I called her and spoke to her, and I didn’t understand her at all. I understood her to say a citation had been issued. We had received a confusing notice. She said to call a third inspector. I put that off for maybe three weeks because I was working with everyone to get the buildings fixed.

Last week the tenants flipped out because the third inspector told them they could have a problem with their occupational license. My realtor contacted me, and we went back and forth.

I had contacted the third inspector about paying the fine, and he had sent me a link to a site that allowed people to pay for inspections (not fines). I paid, and I didn’t see any fines listed. I assumed everything went through one site. I thought that was the end of it. Eventually, I learned that the fine had been multiplied by a large number, with no notice to me. And I had no idea how to pay it, even though I had been contacting the department and asking them.

This was not a catastrophic fine, but it was very, very high. I had received no notice that the fine was increasing, so I was very disturbed.

I believe the problem is that the department held the tenants responsible and sent them all the communications. I didn’t understand that until last week. Anyway, it seemed crazy for the department to pay for its new fleet and headquarters off of one minor violation, with no warning to the citizen being fined.

I should have paid immediately, but the misleading conversations I had with the inspectors led me to believe I could wait and settle up when the dust cleared. I didn’t realize the fine fell under the heading of code enforcement. I had a code issue a couple of years back, and the city threatened to fine my dad $150 per day over something. If I had understood that the fire people worked the same way, I would have kept them on the phone every day until I had gotten the fire fine fixed.

I sent the inspector a bunch of emails on Friday, and on my own, I found a second site where the fine was listed. I paid the original fine, minus the penalties, just to show good faith.

I was stressed out all weekend, in spite of the supernatural tools God has given me to fight worry. One of my shortcomings is that when God gives me weapons, I often won’t use them the way I should. I should have spent much more time in prayer this weekend. I did pretty well, but I should have done better. Every problem–I don’t care what it is–will eventually respond to prayer in tongues. I learned that a long time ago, but I still slack off.

While I was praying this weekend, I thanked God over and over for the ordeal I was going through. Things like this always improve me. I do not enjoy them, but they never fail to produce a harvest.

Last night my friend Amanda said she would pray about the problem. She didn’t know any details. I was glad to hear she was praying. She gets very good results. In particular, she keeps getting burns healed.

Today after prayer, I found I had a voicemail. The inspector, who had been so hard to get information out of in the past, had left me a message. He said I needed to pay the initial fine (he hadn’t checked), and that they would work with me on the penalty.

Case dismissed. Back to Defcon 5. Whatever they end up charging us won’t be anything like what they threatened us with.

God does what he says he will do, and he fixes problems we create and exacerbate.

I can’t tell you how many times things like this have happened to me. I should know better than to get upset. I do know better. That doesn’t always stop me.

God has given me several words concerning worry. They have come to me over the years. One is, “Worry is the voice of Satan.” Another is, “There is nothing good about worry.” A lot of people think worrying makes them righteous, but the Bible says faith is accounted unto us as righteousness, and we know faith kills worry, so how can worry make you righteous? It’s a sick idea.

Today I got another one: “Worry is not allowed in here.” The word “here” refers to my mind and heart. That was helpful.

To understand how these phrases work, you have to repeat them to yourself several times during prayer. They make supernatural energy well up in me. I can feel it. If you just read them on a screen, they look stupid. If they don’t impress you, it’s because you haven’t put them to work.

I got another interesting word today, and I’m sure it won’t impress: “I am a living thing.” What this means is that I am always changing. I never remain the same. I improve or I rot. I can’t stand still. This is a very Biblical idea. Think of manna. If you eat it the same day you receive it, it’s good. If you try to save it and eat it the next day, you find it’s full of worms. You’re not supposed to stay in the same place and cling to the same solutions all the time. You have to grow and increase and receive new things.

I can’t remember how this applies to the situation I’ve been dealing with. Sorry about that.

I wish I could offer a testimony about how I did everything right because God had made me a great person, instead of one about him fixing my screwups, but I am still not perfect yet. Check back with me in a month. Surely it won’t take any longer than that.

In other news, my hunting knife is supposed to arrive today. Squirrel season ended yesterday. I hear tiny high-pitched giggles coming from the front yard.

I found some nice squirrel feeders on Amazon, so the giggling should come to an abrupt stop when squirrel season starts in October. In the meantime I have to figure turkeys out.

Seven Months of Rest for Insolent Rodents

Today was the last day of squirrel season. Technically it’s still on. I can run outside and spend the next few minutes trying to kill one in the dark.

I didn’t really expect to get anything. I went out with 2 shells in my gun and a grocery bag in my pocket. My main objective was to check the trail camera to see if it had filmed whatever is crawling under my fence.

I wandered down the fence line, and when I got near the camera, I saw two squirrels playing grab-ass in a tree, maybe 10 feet from the tree the camera was strapped to. I was not all that game for squirrel butchering, but the season was ending, so I decided to look for a shot.

Here is what I THINK I’ve learned about squirrels. If you really want to kill them, put up a feeder and give the squirrels a few months to get used to it. Then get yourself a lawn chair and a cooler and have fun. I suspect that the second-best method is to get a portable blind or a ghillie suit and sit in the woods like a stone. They show up eventually. My method, which doesn’t work very well, is to walk around until I see a squirrel make a mistake. Then I plug him.

The squirrels I saw today made mistakes.

The first one fell out of the tree. That’s kind of pathetic. Squirrels are known for their agility and coordination, so watching one miss a jump, plummet 40 feet, and hit the ground like a ripe coconut was an odd experience.

It ran to another tree and positioned itself around three feet up, halfway concealed. I was not going to shoot at half a squirrel. I pictured three pellets going into it and leaving it thrashing and generally being upsetting on the forest floor. I moved around toward it to get it to move, and it disappeared. I found there was a big hole in the base of the tree, so I knew where the squirrel was. I wished him good day and went after the other one. I was not going to sit out there for an hour waiting for him to come out.

A real hunter would have plopped down and waited, but this is me we’re talking about.

The squirrel’s buddy was still upstairs, thinking I couldn’t see it hiding behind a skinny branch.

I kept thinking about the nervous lady with the neurotic horses. The one who called out to me and asked me annoying questions about shooting. I really, really did not want pellets landing anywhere near her farm. There would have been an international crisis. I kept walking around the tree, trying to make the squirrel show me more fur. Eventually I got a good angle and popped him. Down he came.

He flopped and kicked a bit. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering, but I also didn’t want to be bitten by an enraged squirrel with hot shotgun pellets in its butt, so I gave it a few seconds, and he stopped moving. When I looked him over, I saw that at least one pellet had gone through his eyeball. He probably died instantly. That was good news.

I truly need a .22 sidearm to help squirrels drift off to happy land. The 10mm would have left a gaping hole in the ground surrounded by fur.

I like hunting, but the lady next door has taken some of the shine off of it. I would have a whole lot more squirrels but for her. I think I work way too hard and give up too many opportunities to keep her quiet.

Today I realized there was good news. Squirrels live high in trees where shooting them without dropping rounds on the neighbors takes effort, but everything else I plan to shoot stands on the ground. That means this lady can blow it out…it means she will no longer have any reason to converse with me regarding ballistics.

I make her sound like Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched had a baby with Rosie O’Donnell, but she may be a nice person for all I know.

Too many granola-heads get involved with horses. My grandparents and their siblings rode horses and mules for transportation. They didn’t enter them in ridiculous shows or confuse them with unicorns.

Now that squirrel season is done I have more observations about hunting.

I am now aware that hunting season interferes with life. When it’s 7 a.m. and I have a choice between doing something responsible and killing a rodent in a tree, I will generally choose the latter. In this regard, I have sunk to the level of sports fans. I don’t want to be like the annoying men all over America who keep the TV blasting during every sports season and never talk to their wives or kids. But I may be headed that way.

I wonder how many lawns in my area will, tomorrow, be mowed for the first time in several weeks.

Also, I now look at just about every living creature I see as though I were trying to shoot it. I think about distance and whether I could make the shot. I wonder which weapon would work. AK-47 for a dwarf donkey, or just a .22 behind the ear?

I am not actually interested in shooting, say, a yippy little dog with pink toenails, standing next to a heavyset lady at Home Depot. Hmmm…maybe I am. No I’m not. But once you start looking at animals with the intention of shooting them, you develop a habit.

I guess this will be disturbing, but I can see how hunting would prepare someone to shoot people. When you aim at a squirrel, you have to get over a sympathy hump before you can pull the trigger, and presumably, the ability to get over that hump would carry over to people if you were in a situation where you had to shoot. Also, butchering warm mammals probably lowers your resistance to inflicting harm on people. I don’t mean these things make you heartless or cruel, but they would help you control yourself in certain difficult situations.

Today I shot a cute little animal through the eyeball, and then I made a big cut over his anus, grabbed his tail and feet, and pulled his fur and head off. After that, I slit him down the belly, split his sternum, reached in, grabbed his esophagus and windpipe, and pulled his heart, lungs, intestines, and whatever else out. Things like that are not easy to do the first time around. It’s not like preparing a nice, clean, gutted, hairless pig from the slaughterhouse.

I’ll tell you what. If society continues to get more polarized and city dwellers start oppressing the rest of us, they really REALLY don’t want to come out here and challenge us physically. Nothing short of full-blown military action could save them. People out here are ready for trouble. Concealment. Long-distance marksmanship. Tracking. Trapping. Silent weapons. Automatic surveillance that works at night. Night vision. Night scopes. There are a lot of people in the country whose skills are dangerously close to those required by guerrillas.

In reality, may of the skills are identical. And people are not as tough, elusive, or aware as game.

I am not the greatest marksman on earth, but I was thinking about it the other day, and I feel better about my skills. I am now capable of shooting rifles with roughly 1 MOA accuracy. I didn’t feel like it was a huge deal when I crossed that threshhold, but I’ve been considering it. It’s not bad!

Imagine you’re in the end zone at a football game, and someone draws a circle around a quarter in the other end zone, and you shoot 5 holes in it without missing. That’s what I did the other day. In the movies, you see make-believe-playing Hollywood fops shooting small targets hundreds of yards away in difficult conditions, but that’s all BS. Those things don’t actually happen. Shooting well is hard. In real life, hitting a quarter you can’t even see without a scope is decent marksmanship.

If you take 50 average guys out of a crowd and give them their choice of the finest rifles on earth, most would be lucky to hit a dinner plate one time out of 10 at that distance. I remember shooting next to a guy in Miami. at 100 yards. He was a good shot, and he had a high-dollar .308 with all the Magpul doodads and whatnot, and he was proud as he could be to shoot 2 MOA. He was bragging about it. I got that beat.

At the time, I thought he was great, but that was before I got it together and bought a gun that worked.

If I can shoot well at 100 yards, I can shoot well at 1000. I just need to find places to shoot and do my homework, so I can learn about wind and other problems. I may never make the Olympics, but with a little effort, I can become a very bad person to mess with. And rural areas are full of people who are way ahead of me.

I used to shoot at pistol ranges, and most people have a hard time keeping all their shots on a target two feet wide. Most people shoot rifles so badly, I seriously feel they should not be allowed to hunt at distances over 50 feet, in order to keep it humane. But that was Miami. A city full of people who came from countries where their grandparents didn’t know one end of a gun from another. People in rural America have been shooting well for hundreds of years.

Next time I get the .17 HMR out, I need to move back to 200 yards and get to work. I have nothing more to learn at 100 yards. If it were in a clamp, the rifle would only shoot slightly better than I shoot now. I need to move back until my groups open up so I’ll be able to see what needs to be fixed.

I almost wish I had used the shotgun all season long. It really brings the squirrels down. I have only missed with it once, and that was a long shot. I didn’t now how much the pellets would drop, and I guessed wrong. The .17 HMR will kill them at greater distance, but it tears them up, and the bullets travel too far. The air rifle is hard to shoot, so I’m not ready to use it full time.

I have a lot to learn, outside of the gun stuff. How to sneak up on game. When to hunt. Where to hunt. How to read poop and tracks. How to bait game. How to get a full cooler of beer into a tree stand.

Fun stuff. I look forward to it. I guess I need to start studying turkeys YESTERDAY and look into decoys or whatever else I need to fool them.

There are special seasons for bowhunters. Is that worth getting into? Sounds like an exercise in self-abuse, but it would be good to have longer seasons. I can’t believe there are people who kill squirrels with bows. I’m lucky to get within 50 feet of one, and they’re very small.

I’m glad I’m learning these skills.

My knife never arrived, so I had to dismantle today’s squirrel with a filet knife and Fiskars pruning shears. It should arrive tomorrow, exactly one day after the last day when I needed it for squirrels. I think it’s safe to say I will never buy anything from Knife Country again, unless I develop an irrational fear of receiving things quickly.

As of tomorrow, I will have to walk right by disrespectful squirrels and do nothing. As if they have some kind of right to exist. That will be tough. But I’ll be installing a squirrel feeder ASAP, so as Mr. Burns said to Homer Simpson, “We’ll see who eats WHOSE shorts.”

Enjoy the grub, boys. It’s going to end up feeding me, too.

Soon the HAL 9000 Will be Picking Out Your Ties

Lots to think about today. It’s generally God-related, so you can’t say you weren’t warned.

First off, I keep feeling a pressing need to confess and criticize myself. I keep having prayer sessions in which I struggle very hard to dig up the worst dirt on myself I can remember. It’s a little nauseating. It makes me wonder if other people are as bad as I am. Part of me hopes they are, which is perverse.

Every person has areas of sin in his life. It’s not hard to put names on them. Lust. Greed. Dishonesty. They’re all bad, but for me, some are harder to think about than others. I don’t know how other people see sin, but for me, sins of cowardice and cruelty are the most embarrassing. They are hard to discuss with God, even though I know he knows all about them before I speak, and they are hard for me to think about.

Between cowardice and cruelty, cruelty is harder to confront. I’m not a serial killer, but I have done some really evil things during my life. They stand out like beacons in the landscape of my past. Like arrest warrants with sirens and flashing lights.

I’ve always known that people, including me, were evil, but I tried not to dive into my personal muck too deeply, and I felt that I was okay, at least by human standards. When I have these sessions with God, though, I wonder how he can want to save me. If I saw someone else doing certain things I’ve done, I would be appalled.

I suppose I would not consider them unworthy of the effort it would take to change them. I know that’s true, because I know people who have done terrible things. I don’t marvel that God would want to save them. I would tell them it doesn’t matter what they’ve done. Murder, child molestation, animal cruelty…I would tell them God is ready to accept anyone who applies. That must be true for me, too.

I know Christians–even those baptized with the Holy Spirit–have demons. Living in a flesh body is a little like driving a school bus full of brats. You have to exercise authority while continuously being challenged and told what to do. When you accept the baptism with the Holy Spirit, he boards the bus, but he doesn’t necessarily ride alone.

I believe that when you refuse to confront your iniquities–your evil inclinations–and tell God about them, you give demons passes. They can say, “We’re allowed to be here. The driver says it’s okay.” I believe it’s important to go through the deworming process. Otherwise, the Holy Spirit sits in the back and lets you and your demons do what you want. I believe it limits his participation in your life.

I have less peace than I want. I think it’s because God showed me how to succeed, and I turned away. Thirty years ago, he told me I needed to pray in tongues a lot every day, and I let it go. I didn’t have the full understanding of it, but that doesn’t excuse me. You’re not supposed to base your obedience on consequences. You obey, whether you understand the consequences or not. If you know you’re supposed to do something, and you don’t do it, you’re guilty. God isn’t obligated to give you an explanatory brochure every time he gives you counsel.

I should have spent these years getting cleaned up, but I spent about 17 of them doing as I pleased. I rarely prayed in tongues. I went entire days without praying at all. I think I tried to be “good” by the world’s standards. I tried not to do things that made other people suffer. I didn’t do a great job. Living by the world’s rules doesn’t make you a moral, disciplined person.

My best guess is that during my time away, I was collecting spirits and feeding them. I was holding the shackles steady while they welded them shut. Now I’m going through a long regurgitation process which would have been much shorter and easier had I listened in the first place.

Some people say that God will eventually show every second of our lives to everyone who has ever existed. Could you stand that? I wonder if anyone would still want to speak with me if everyone knew everything I’ve done, thought, and felt.

Here is what Psalm 32 says:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

America is full of feel-good churches that teach people to ignore their iniquities. How can you be healed if you don’t let the doctor look at the pus? Why are we so afraid of accepting responsibility? We already know God will forgive us, so why not get it over with?

The answer is that preachers are terrified of losing their audience. They love money. Some want to impress their superiors and keep their jobs. Some measure themselves by attendance figures. They look for ways to rationalize flattery and denial. It’s not a mystery.

There is a martial art called aikido. One of the principles is that it’s good to use your opponent’s momentum against him. It can be difficult to stop a hostile person’s movements, but if you can find a way to direct those movements so they cause your opponent to fall or whatever, you can save a lot of energy and effort. The devil uses the same approach. If he can’t lure you to do something new, he can always find the bad things you’re already doing and remove the obstacles.

Flattery is poison. Look what happens to celebrities. Look at Elvis and Michael Jackson. They probably never heard the word “no” after they turned 20. They ended up dressing in costumes, like superheroes. They became completely disconnected from reality. They behaved like spoiled gods. Like Will Smith’s son.

Flattery destroyed them, and it can destroy you, too. The devil saw what these men wanted to do, and he gave them the power to do it. He took away wise counsel and surrounded them with yes-men. After that, he didn’t have to do much at all.

I wonder what my life will be like after I endure most of the major cleaning that has to be done. I assume there will be more peace. It’s hard to imagine that while you’re in the middle of the process.

Let’s change the topic. Here’s something else: I read a strange testimony from a guy named Ken Peters. I am not endorsing him. I don’t know enough about him to do that. In 1980, he had a couple of long, detailed dreams about the end of the world. You can read a transcript of his remarks about them. It’s sobering.

Before I get to the details of his dreams, I want to write about his background. He said he didn’t know the Bible very well, that he knew nothing about prophecy, and that he had not accepted Jesus personally…because he was a “practicing Catholic.” Is that really how it works? I know Catholicism is a mess, but he makes it sound worse than I thought.

Here’s an excerpt:

At the time I received this dream I was not even a believer in Jesus Christ. I was raised in the Catholic Church but had never personally invited the Lord Jesus to come into my heart to be my Lord. As a practicing Catholic, I had no knowledge of what the Bible said about the tribulation period or any of the events of the last days.

Chilling. The Catholic Church is very, very big.

He said his exposure to the Bible was mainly composed of little passages that were read aloud in church services. Apparently, no one shoved a Bible into his hands and told him to read it. Can that be true? Even the worst charismatic preacher will tell you to read the Bible. This is fundamental. The notion of a Christian who doesn’t read the Bible is unthinkable in charismatic churches. I would guess that most Protestants outside of the Episcopal church have the same attitude.

If you aren’t familiar with the Bible, you are a zero as a Christian. You don’t know what you believe. You don’t know whom you believe in. You don’t know where you came from. You have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You’re probably going to hell, because a valid decision to accept salvation is an informed decision. You can’t tell God you accepted Jesus because Mom said you had to.

Talking to Christians who don’t read the Bible is like talking to foreign spies pretending to be Americans. Imagine a spy who speaks English perfectly but doesn’t know our laws or our customs. When you mention Biblical ideas to such Christians, you get one blank look after another.

I hope Peters was exaggerating.

As for not knowing Jesus on any personal level, I don’t think it’s possible to be saved and not know him. How can you give your heart to him sincerely if you don’t feel he’s there?

Christianity is a relationship with a living God who communicates with you. If you don’t have that, you need to ask God for it, because you’re in trouble. He didn’t just dump us here, like unwanted toddlers in day care, and say he would send a Salvadoran nanny to pick us up. He is right here with us. He said he would never leave or forsake us. His presence is always available.

You can be baptized and go to hell. You can think you’re a Christian and go to hell. Look at the Mormons. You better be careful not to trust your church’s authorities too much. God won’t listen when you try to blame them for your lack of salvation.

A lot of people who say they’ve had visions of hell say it’s full of Christians. That is true. I know it’s true, because there are entire churches full of unrepentant homosexuals. There are gay churches. You can’t get salvation while deliberately building your life around a sin.

Ken Peters, who did not know what the rapture was or what the book of Revelation said, told a disturbing story.

First, he said a horn blew, certain graves flew open, and people ascended into the air and disappeared. That would be unnerving, especially for the people who witness it and realize they’ve made the wrong choices.

He also said there was a two-week period during which everything was disrupted. Broadcasting was disrupted, for example. He didn’t see living people rise into the air, but if all the strong Christians involved in broadcasting, transportation, and so on vanished, a hiatus of chaos is exactly what you would expect to see.

He said he saw an old man who was evangelizing. This man had screwed up as a Christian, but he had repented after the horn blew, and he was helping others. Peters accepted real salvation, not a fake version endorsed by a blind church, and started following him. Side note: Peters is a real Christian today, and he pastors a church.

A new global government formed under a mesmerizing leader. Eventually, the government captured Peters, his wife, the evangelist, and various Christians. At first, they used gentle persuasion to push them to renounce Jesus. When Peters and his wife refused, they were fastened to a table and beheaded with a sword. They preached until the end. The man with the sword put it down and said he was done killing Christians. That happened at the end of the dream.

If you know the Bible at all, you know the Revelation mentions Christians who have been beheaded for their testimony. It’s not something Ken Peters invented. He said the sword looked like the swords on Shriners fezzes. In other words, a sword like those used by Muslims. He dreamed this in 1980, when Islam was not the huge threat that it is today.

As I understand it, in the Bible, the end of the current age works like this:

1. The rapture occurs. Serious Christians are taken, and the rest are left here.
2. Suffering and catastrophe increase in the world.
3. Salvation will still be available, but if you receive it, you will be killed unless you renounce it.

Of course, there are a lot of other details. But as far as avoiding hell goes, that’s the important stuff. My understanding is that it’s much better to get on board now than to be left behind and face increased persecution.

My own dream of the rapture was shorter, and it was symbolic, not literal. I was sitting in my grandparents’ living room, on the floor with my legs crossed. In front of me on the floor was a small dish of poisoned rat bait pellets. My mother was sitting in a recliner in the corner. She was wearing jeans. Work clothing. As far as I know, she never owned clothes like that as an adult. No one else was there.

Our family no longer owns the house, and my grandparents and my mother are dead. This is why I say the dream was not literal. I believe what happened to us in the dream is what will happen to people during the rapture, but obviously, my mother and I won’t be in that room on that day.

I heard a horn. The pitch was low but well within the range of human hearing. It made the entire earth vibrate. I knew with certainty that it could be heard everywhere in the world. I knew the horn itself was thousands of miles away. I felt it was behind me. Given my position, that would have been to the northwest.

I wasn’t afraid, but I felt completely sobered. I knew what was happening was as serious as anything could be.

Three things started to rise: me, the dish of rat bait, and my mother. We were buoyed up toward the ceiling, and we were on our way through it when I woke up.

I was glad the world, in its current state, was over. I felt a great sense of adventure. I felt relief. I also felt that it was an event of global moment, and that there would be astounding consequences for mankind.

Peters mentioned some strange things in his dream.

He said televisions would watch people for the government. In 1980, that was impossible, but it’s happening today. Some TV’s are connected directly to the web. Some have cameras, which is ridiculous.

My TV has an LED screen. Your TV probably uses LED’s too. An LED is a light-emitting diode. Run current through one, and it lights up. Interesting thing: an LED also senses light. You can use them to detect it. I’m not great with electronics, but even I know that it should be easy to make a camera using a grid of LED’s and a lens. For all I know, that’s what’s inside a smartphone camera.

One wonders what kind of visual information an LED TV could gather if it were programmed the right way.

Peters said the government kept track of the locations of all vehicles in his dream. Light posts had cameras mounted on them. We already have that. The government puts some of them out there where we can see them, making no effort to hide them. Other sensors have been put in place quietly, with no explanation.

I think the government knows where most vehicles are, all the time. There are too many sensors and cameras, and there aren’t that many roads. You can’t make your own road. Wherever you go, you have to drive by equipment installed by the government. I think that when a crime occurs and the cops really need to find someone, government nerds know where that person is, and they look for ways to get the info to the cops without letting the public know the capability exists.

He said the government would be able to find us whenever it wanted. That day is almost here, and the technology is focusing on us even when we’re just walking around. You can put a few cameras in a mall or stadium, connect them to computers with facial-recognition software, and make lists of the people who show up.

The government is too stupid and cruel to have this much information.

I don’t know if Peters is a flake or a prophet, but I thought people might want to know about him and read what he said.

I believe the end is right around the corner. Technology is destroying free will. When you can’t do anything without being discovered, you have no free will. Without free will, there is no sin, and there is no righteousness. We will live under coercion.

That’s not God’s style. He needs free will in order for his system to work. Free will is so important, he prefers putting people in hell and roasting them to taking free will away. He could fix is so we never sin, but he doesn’t. The concept of sin makes no sense without free will. Measuring the righteousness of people who can’t sin is like putting an altimeter in a car.

When free will is gone, there will be no reason for the world to go on existing, so the end will come quickly.

I don’t see how it could take even 10 years. I see that as an outside limit. That’s not prophecy. That’s just me, not being totally obtuse.

It would be nice if it were true (from my standpoint), because I don’t like aging. I am not in a hurry to get cataracts, wear diapers, and be unable to carry my own groceries. I like having teeth, too.

Leftists want to do away with free will. They want to be free to take drugs, indulge in obscenity, and have whatever kind of sex they like, but other than that, they are happy to plug into the Matrix and be told what to do. Strange people.

How can anyone trust the government that much? I don’t know a single human being I would trust as much as leftists trust the government. They trust the government far more than Christians trust God.

Do you ever think about how awful the future could be, when you watch sci-fi shows? Think about TNG.

In TNG, there is no money. Okay; how do you get things you want? Obviously, you must have to ask for it. So everyone in the future is a beggar. Mommy, can we buy this cereal? Mommy, can I have these LED shoes? Yeah, that would feel great, for an adult.

Whom do you ask? What if they say no? What if some crooked person persuades them to give stuff to them instead of you?

What if you want to buy a house? What if you want to travel to another galaxy?

Are you allowed to buy and sell? How can you do that without money? What if you want to Craigslist a couch? What if you want to teach piano and charge for it? Do you have to barter? Would you require students to bring you groceries instead of money?

In TNG, it’s very hard for people to hide. They have scanners to find you. If you work for Star Fleet, you have to wear a doodad that broadcasts your location and acts as a phone. What if you’re fed up and you need a few hours by yourself? Do you have to ask permission? What if they say no?

In TNG, they used to beam people up and down without permission. Know what the law calls that? “Kidnapping.” It’s a major felony. In Florida, if you try to kidnap me, I’m allowed to blow your brains out. It’s bad. Imagine living in a world where the government can reach out and suck you out of your beach chair and into jury duty, while simultaneously extracting a fine from “your” bank account.

Gene Roddenberry was a feckless atheist leftist, so naturally, he never thought about the unintended consequences of creating his utopian society. He should have read Orwell.

When I was in grad school trying to become a physicist, I knew a guy whose students called him “Fridge.” He was a very serious guy, but likeable. A little weird. He had no furniture. He said he did his copious homework standing up with his back against a wall, holding a clipboard.

Fridge left the Navy to study physics. He had to struggle to get out. Evidently, the Navy doesn’t have to let you go just because you ask. If you do a good job, like Fridge, they will reward you by holding onto you with a death grip. I asked him how he did it. He said, “I enforced the rules.”

He was in a position sort of like a quartermaster. When things had to be obtained or shipped, papers landed on his desk. Before he decided to leave the Navy, he would work to get things through. The rules were idiotic and restrictive, so he had to bend them all the time in order to make the system work. When the Navy refused to let him go, he stopped bending the rules. He observed them to the point of madness. “This has to be in blue ballpoint. Send it back.” “This has to be in triplicate, not duplicate. Send it back. It’s 5:01. My shift ended one minute ago. Talk to me on Monday.” You can imagine.

The system crashed. Things didn’t go where they were needed. Everyone hated him. They wanted his guts on a stick. He got his discharge. It’s a hilarious story.

It shows what will happen when free will disappears entirely. If we couldn’t break the rules, the world would jam up like a lawnmower with 5-minute epoxy in the engine.

I know another guy, an electrical engineer, who got out of the Navy by pretending to be an alcoholic. Now he’s a lawyer. He told the Bar what he did, and they let him in anyway.

Not relevant, but interesting.

I think things are drawing to a close. It makes me wonder what I should do. Should I still think about moving farther north? Is there any point in ever talking to a woman again, given that we could be raptured the day after I propose? Should I invest?

I’ll put those things in God’s hands, because I have no idea what to do.

I love it here, but I would like to have a year in Appalachia before the curtain falls.

Final thing: God told me something interesting today. When people give you things voluntarily, there are only two explanations. They’re being generous, or they want something from you. Disturbing.

I had a lot to think about when I got up, and now that I’ve written about all of it, it’s your problem. Enjoy the rest of the day.

Overstuffed Preachers Exceed Their Authority

Yesterday I found out I made an error managing one of my dad’s properties, and it’s going to cost some money. Not happy about that. I felt tense about it when I went to bed, and I woke up early in the morning and started praying.

I used to pray for God to make me feel better at times like that, but these days, I ask him to let me feel what I need to feel, and I ask him to change me so I don’t have these problems in the future. It’s better to be housetrained than to wear a diaper.

As wonderful as prayer is when you feel God’s presence, sometimes you feel like doing something else for a spell. I got out my phone and looked around to see if there was anything uplifting to read. I came up against a brick wall.

I looked at a couple of websites run by preachers. I used to find them comforting and illuminating. This time, I could tell there was nothing there for me. I felt like I was looking at the locked doors of unfriendly houses.

One site was Perry Stone’s. He has received a vast amount of knowledge from God, and he shares it all the time. It’s good stuff for any Christian to listen to. For example, he does an exceptional job, connecting the Old Testament and the New Testament. I’m underselling him here. You would have to watch his videos and read his books to understand.

I’ve benefited a lot from Perry Stone’s teaching, but I don’t pay much attention to him now. He has some blind spots. He teamed up with Steve Munsey, my favorite seedy prosperity preacher. Munsey teaches all sorts of garbage in order to get people to give him money. Seeing Perry Stone promote his filth was saddening, because it exposed a big hole in Stone’s discernment.

I took a look at Andrew Wommack’s site. He has a lot of insights that seem to come from God. On the other hand, he says you can’t be blessed financially unless you support the teaching of the gospel with your money. That simply isn’t true. It’s self-serving prosperity preaching, and it comes from a source that has nothing to do with God.

I gave up. I have realized there is nobody out there I want to listen to any more.

Is this a bad thing? Does it mean I’ve turned into one of those nutty Christians who refuse to go to church because they think they alone have all the answers? Not really. I do not have all the answers. My problem with preachers comes from the fact that I’ve gotten used to learning straight from God. When you graduate from something pretty good to something excellent, you don’t have much enthusiasm for what you left behind.

It’s not that I have all the answers. It’s that I’m tired of swallowing wrong answers provided by other people.

It’s a good thing. I know it’s good, because the Bible says so. John told us we did not need men to teach us. James said God would give us wisdom if we asked for it. Paul learned directly from God. He went off into the wilderness for several years. He didn’t go back to his rabbis. God does teach people.

It’s a good thing, but it serves to underscore the poor condition of modern Christianity. Most churches teach complete nonsense, and even good churches aren’t very good.

Christians love Christian celebrities. We look here and there, and we find preachers who seem to have it all together. Then we make the mistake of depending on them. We start quoting them to other people, as though adding “Benny Hinn says” to a sentence gives it divine authority. We put them on pedestals, and then when they make mistakes, those mistakes are propagated downward and laterally through us, sometimes to hundreds of millions of people. We don’t have enough Christians dealing directly with God, to fact-check the rock stars.

Look what Paul said:

For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.

According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;

Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.

If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.

If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.

Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are your’s;

Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are your’s;

And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.

Satan uses celebrities like the Pope and Joyce Meyer as augers, to drill holes in people’s heads to pour hogwash through. If 10 million people listen to T.D. Jakes and believe him without reservation, in order to spread a toxic heresy, all Satan has to do is convince one man: Jakes himself. Celebrity is a big labor-saver for the devil.

You don’t have to be a big-time celebrity to be dangerous. It works with small groups, too. About 150 people attended my last church, and it was a bona fide cult.

It’s good to know God personally and to have no need of the rock stars, but I do miss learning from preachers.

I still benefit from hearing from other believers. I’ve watched dozens of testimonies this week. Testimonies and teaching are different. Testimony is more factual, and teaching contains more opinion and guesswork. Testimony tends to break down denominational errors of doctrine. It tends to unite people. I would rather hear from a random guy who met Jesus than a pinch-faced old rogue who has five degrees and scolds people for praying in tongues.

There is some nutty testimony out there, but I still prefer testimony to teaching.

I am going to make mistakes. Everyone but Jesus is going to make mistakes. Peter himself, who was supposedly the first infallible Pope, made mistakes and had to be corrected publicly by Paul. If you listen to me or anyone else too long, you are going to run into problems. You have to go to the horse’s mouth. I can tell a beginner a lot of useful things, but the proper function of a witness is to connect people with the perfect source. If you’re still following a preacher or even a friend five years after you started, that person has failed you. Teachers are supposed to be matchmakers, not husbands.

Nobody listens to God. Preachers think, “This is how I want things to be. Is that how they are, God? OF COURSE IT IS. Thanks. I’ll go tell everyone else.” This is how Creflo Dollar ended up believing he needed a jet.

Last night I spent a long time going over my numerous defects with God. It was like digging around in an abscess with a sharp stick. It was very unpleasant, but it was rewarding and important.

I know I’ll have more sessions like that. It’s a daunting prospect, but I have to be enthusiastic about it. A parent who loves you corrects you, and correction brings peace and power in the long run.

I don’t like thinking about what I am. I’m okay by earth standards, but earth standards are very low. Other people see the facade. I stand behind it, where I see what holds it up.

If I were still listening to preachers, I would be trying to apply remedies that actually make things worse. Denial tops the list. “God loves you as you are, so you don’t have to feel guilt. He sees you as perfect, so you don’t need to change.” What? Where does the Bible say that? Of course we have to change. We have to confess. God didn’t put us down here to fester and collapse.

Examining your faults isn’t counterproductive self-condemnation. It’s a diagnostic test, like an X-ray. Before a doctor heals, he examines. The idea that we shouldn’t feel shame or ask God to improve us is lethal. It’s like putting a used, pus-covered bandage on a carbuncle.

Equating self-examination with self-condemnation is immature. God’s purpose isn’t to cheer us up and tie balloon animals for us. He’s a healer, and one of the prices of healing is humility. Denial puts a protective wall around the projects Satan builds inside you, including tumors and God knows what else.

It’s funny; secular therapists understand the importance of honesty and catharsis, but charismatic Christians seem obsessed with covering things up.

As long as I’m here, I’ll mention a word God gave me today. It may not bowl you over. Here it is: “I believe.” My faith was being attacked, and I started repeating this. It turned out to have supernatural power.

I guess I’ll pray some more and check out more testimonies.