Crap Shots 3 (2021)

A strange year. A year of realization and struggle but also never had I more personally noticed and was conscious of God's grace in everyday life. 

The mistakes made brought forth clarity and focus on sin in my life. God making known his intentions to mature and not always pursuing that but that is where He shown the brightest and for that I am grateful. 

"Be sure of your call to every business you go about. Though it is the least business, be sure of your call to it; then, whatever you meet with, you may quiet your heart with this: I know I am where God would have me. Nothing in the world will quiet the heart so much as this: when I meet with any cross, I know I am where God would have me, in my place and calling; I am about the work that God has set me"

- Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (1648)

"Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed “Tutuist” Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa). They’ll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen Di’s"

- P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell (1988)

" 'Call on Me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.' The whole life of a Christian is a praying, waiting life"

- Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot (1737)

"Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human"

- Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

"Lord Jesus, make Thyself to me A living, bright reality; More present to faith’s vision keen Than any outward object seen; More dear, more intimately nigh Than e’en the sweetest earthly tie"

- Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret (1932)

"Dear Mother,
I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and..."

- Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

"Reality poisons the spring of fantasy, whereas fantasy, when it erupts into the real world, brings destruction in its wake"

- Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993)

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools"

- William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury (1929)

"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again"

- Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)

"Feeling God’s hatred is incomparably more terrible than dying. Thus ends the power of those who defy God, Our Lord" 

- Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, The agony and death of Stalin (1975)

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"

- Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977)

"Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the most minute peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, “God, Your law is not good. My judgement is better than Yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do"

- R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (1984)

"Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all"

- Andrew Murray, Humility (1895)

"When the Scripture relates redemption to the law of God, the terms it uses are to be carefully marked. It does not say we are redeemed from the law. That would not be an accurate description and the Scripture refrains from such an expression. We are not redeemed from the obligation to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and our neighbour as ourselves.

The law is comprehended in these two commandments (Matt. 22:40) and love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:10)... It would contradict the very nature of God to think that any person can ever be relieved of the necessity to love God with the whole heart and to obey his commandments.

When Scripture relates redemption to the law of God it uses terms that are more specific"

- John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (1954)

"Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor's mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question"

- Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)

"Even on the cross He did not hide Himself from sight; rather, He made all creation witness to the presence of its Maker" 

- St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (318 AD)

"Facing the 'irreparable outrage of time' a man with Faith says: 'I am marching toward my resurrection.' " - Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira The agony and death of Stalin (1975)

"The crowd is not us. It never is"

- Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (1990)

"Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn't see journalism as "morally indefensible" was either "too stupid" or "too full of himself," she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door on the possibility that I was both stupid and full of myself, I'd never bought into the seduction and betrayal conceit. At most, journalism - particularly when writing about media-hungry public figures - was like the seduction of a prostitute. The relationship was transactional. They weren't talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone"

- Michael Hastings, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2011)

"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself"

- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

"I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more"

- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (324 AD)

"Gratitude quenches the fire of lust. A thankful spirit destroys the driving passion for sex because it creates contentment within the man’s heart. It soothes the beast, smothers the flames, and medicates the itch. The message behind lust is, “I want! I want! I want!” The feeling lodged within the grateful heart is, “Look at all I have! Thank You Lord, for all that You have done for me and given me. I don’t need anything else.” A grateful heart is a full heart"

- Steve Gallagher, At The Altar of Sexual Idolatry (2000)

"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men"

- W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

"But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind"

- Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (1997)

"Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934)

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life"

- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)

"it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself"

- Ernest Hemingway, By-Line꞉ Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (1967)

"God's thoughts of you are many, let not yours be few in return"

- Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David (1869)

"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another"

- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

"The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not changed. It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-towards rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column"

- Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953)

The Town That Disappeared (The Big Nothing Part 9)

''We did tell them...the small...whatever...small....watch the smalls be like that'' Said The Jaffer as he tried to laugh off the traumatic experience which had just unfolded as I sat stuttering in disbelief. 

In one hundred miles, we hadn't seen one restaurant. There was nothing either around or in Aredale so obviously that was not possible, and even better, it had seemed that we had been doing circles around a gas station with an Arbys.

Admitting defeat, we drove through, took our orders off the value menu, and waited for the price. My eyes almost popped out of their sockets, like gag gift glasses, when I heard the woman squawk out the price ($34.19); these nazis were obviously out here, in the middle of nowhere, in their bunker, for a good time. 

''Yea, it better taste good, Inch...oh, it will...better go down good...it will...34.19''. I shuddered. ''He hates hearing that'' said The Jaffer. The food was dealt, five chicken sandwiches, three shakes, and three large fries; ''I already feel so defeated'' I said. The bag deteriorated in my hand as I tried passing everything.

The day wore on, endless driving; feeling yourself conform into the seat you'd been sitting in. There is a point, in driving like this, that you sit in silence. Zone out. Your thinking about the next place to go. Watching the road warp below the tires. You daydream, letting your thoughts get ahead of you, forgetting where your at. Disassociating from yourself out of boredom. 

It's difficult to tell when you start paying attention again because you don't really care what was happening until then. It's exactly then when you sit up and pay attention again.   

''So what is this town?..Carollton...or just Caroll?..looks like..Carollton...is...nonexistent....it's...a green sign in the middle of a corn field...and it points you out here and you find a couple of roads....that tell you a weight limit for a truck....aaannnd..speed limits and that's it...and there is nothing out here...'' said The Jaffer and I, as we sped past a farm of angry cannibals; the town nowhere to be found. ''Yea, I think something happened to it, I really do'' said The Jaffer as we drove out of the plot of cornfields.

That night, just past the highway, another town, Beaver, looking like an alternate version of Aredale; just that you couldn't see anything this time. 

Dirt alleyways were mostly the streets of the town, shats prowled up and down in packs of ten; another grain mill overlooked the town, train tracks behind it, as the Christmas star on top fizzled out in the night. 

I tried getting into a house but the weeds were taller than me and I could hear (and see) the grass coming alive with snakes and trash pandas. I walked down the road, past the house, and found an old gas station that had the same problem. The Jaffer pulled up in The Inchmobile saying ''There's a car waiting down here, I went down this road, (driving past the gas station) there's nothing on it. This next road I went down? It's filled with water''. 

I couldn't find the abandoned schoolhouse, I'd been looking for all this time, in this complete darkness.

In the main road of the town, the grain mill and railroad (now alive with the sound of a passing train) behind it, lay a tiny post office and a few abandoned business buildings. With the train behind me, chugging softly in the dark, the business buildings were dilapidated; windows smashed out, one had it's entire floor caving in. The air was cold by now and all I could hear was the sound of the highway.

''You could feel their spirits touching you and **** while you're there, apparently...where's that?...when it existed...yea, they were saying something about....um...Carroll, I think....no, that was the town we were in, Carrollton...yea, I could tell when I drove into that ****** cornfield. Just somethin'...somethin' just didn't feel right...it just felt off...as soon as I saw the flowers, and then after that, just everything not existing past that, I was like, this is a pretty clear, like, indicator...respect for the lost, don't **** with em...like if you're here, you're here for a reason.''

Dishonorable Discharge: K-9 Units Snorting Coke (The Big Nothing Part 8)

The sun blazed high into the sky, the highway looking more and more like an image burned into the back of the retinas, and the cornfields slowly turned brown and cooked into popcorn. I don't know just how long I had been looking out into the small intersection by the main highway, standing in the middle of an abandoned gas station, wiping the sweat out of my eyes; slowly canvassing the area for any signs of life.

It was called The Pitlane Travel Plaza or Met Chim's Subway; either way, the place was abandoned, but not enough to have three or four cars still parked in the driveway to get a healthy meth sandwich. There were three gas pumps, one had fallen over and had it's pipes ripped out from beneath it, and the others were either nonexistent or in disrepair. The trash cans in between each pump were jammed full of roadside trash; you could see inside the gas reservoir.

  

Hours later, with The Inchmobile II having less than half a tank of gas, we stopped inside a small campground just before a small town to let The Inch whiz. The campground was sleepy, the forest around the site was thick, and the roads were tight. It was at this point, and at this speed (as the average was mostly 90mph), that the automatic steering started crapping out. The Jaffer was driving at this point and didn't hesitate to jerk it around mercilessly to make The Inchmobile submit; it basically floated down the gravel and to the end of the site with the bathroom in front of us and the river flowing strong to our right.

Overlooking the river, an old man sat on the edge of a parking block, watching the river in the parking lot beside us, he avoided eye contact and kept to himself; wondering just where his long dead wife had gone. 

We had all just started walking out of the tetanus ridden, tin roofed, bathroom when we noticed there were good ol boys circling the campground in street bikes. They were out for the old man. He didn't seem to care about the speeding hornets nest buzzing around him with the tire smoke and the desperate craving for chew. He was ready to return to the elements which bore him. He stood with his back to them and continued to stare deep into the river. We left before the beatings got brutal. 

The town we had been looking for, Aredale, town of less than seventy people, was just five blocks long. The local restaurant was closed due to lack of staff, the houses displayed half of their contents of their lawns, and the town grain mill towered over it all; the burnt grass swayed in the summer wind around the whole town.

An abandoned house, by fire, laid right on the main road that led in and out to the highway. The grass around it had taken over, almost completely, the whole front; the fire damage made the upper left side of the house slant inwards with melted shingle, and burnt wood, the windows blasted out and door knocked sideways inside the frame. I tried walking in the backdoor but, after looking in the side window to see overturned couches and blankets around the broken glass of the window, I quietly observed what was left of it; which included a broken window in the back and an empty gas canister laying on the very small back porch. The wind began to pick up, causing the grass to crescendo into a progressive sway; the heat being alleviated for just a moment.  

 

Devil's Country (The Big Nothing Part 7)

The sky was completely filled with stars, they exploded out in the night, and were sprawled across the universe. We were entombed in a stretch of rock and trees on the sides of the highway; a clearing opened and we saw some type of yoga ritual and I openly rebuked their pagan gods out of the passenger window. It was a sleepy campground with lazy dogs and good ol' boys watching the fire with their wives. 

Later on, out in Monmouth (just before Illinois), one half of the entire town was closed off as we backtracked around the complete other side. The gravel slid The Inchmobile around but we got in. The town was quiet but still stirring. 

We passed the local schoolhouse up on a hill; red lights from a local power transformer blinked through the trees as we came into the small main stretch of town. The scene was eerie. ''I don't think it's a good idea, man. I really don't. It's closed, like, this is somebody's house...yea, it looks like a met shack...I don't ****** know this methole..okay, somebody's gonna wanna shoot us anyway with how loud this ****** car is''.

'Looks like something Indiana Jones would of crawled inside of...to avoid a nuuuke...but if it's lined with lead, you'll survive'' said The Inch as he peered down the strip of abandoned buildings in the middle of the town; trees growing outside some of the windows. ''You won't get incinerated but you'll grow a ****** third and forth arm''. Junkies screamed out in the darkness.

I hadn't had enough. I sat outside The Houndog Food and Drinks bar, in the middle of the small town square, and smoked a cigarette on the plastic bench that had two glass ashtrays on it. 

Down the road, in front of the bar, was a scene of headlights and people; looked like some type of drug deal. People scurried in and out of apartment buildings, getting in and out of cars parked in the middle of the road with their lights still on, others stood around flicking cigarettes' butts on the ground. It seemed like 80% of the population was out in this small street that more resembled a bizarre flea market stocked with drugs, cheap cigarettes, and depression. 

As I waited for Met Jim to come out of the bar and fry up some steak for me, I didn't even realize the place was still open; I peered inside the window and only saw the blue glow of the booze lights inside. It was too strange. In the alley, behind the bar, about ten different cats looked out at us with glowing eyes as they appeared from trees and underneath the bar. They had started to surround us when I decided this was the time to leave.

As we left town, we followed a car that had left the drug deal. We were bumper to bumper with the drug car out of town; two beagle dogs chased the car until we got back on gravel.

Trash Pandas (The Big Nothing Part 6)

The country night is a mysterious experience. The right and left side of the endless fields, zooming besides you, becomes an ominous abyss that slowly envelops around your car. 

Under the hum of the engine, of the Inchmobile II, going almost ninety, Pink Floyd is blasted so loud that all you can hear is a mixture of screaming and guitars. I almost broke down in waves of PTSD induced hysteria as I screamed ''COLOT, COLOT, COLOT!!'' over the chaos.

Dogs coinked in unison as I stood outside to urinate by the rubble of an old grocery store. The town sounded as if it were watching us on all sides. Houses had lights on but no people inside; for all I knew they were perched up in the trees howling at us. ''Pretty ******* spooky, though, I think I'm going to get back in the car...oookayy, well, the last ******* thing we need is somebody to drive up on us but...apparently, he don't seem to care too much'' said The Inch and Jaffer.

The dark countryside seemed to wind and bend as the outlines of clouds got darker and darker. The light slowly disappeared behind us, time seemed to be left back as well, the grass in the ditches slowly swayed, and empty cans rattled around in the back seat; ''seat belt is janky as **** though'' said The Inch as he fumbled with a bus like seat belt.

''I looked up at the moon as I was pissing and there was this, like, graveyard and, like, church down the road and, it just gave you this ****** feeling that it's like, wow, I'm almost in a different dimension right now, like, it's so late that nobody else is around but I feel like I could be myself, who I wanted to be, like, it doesn't matter what I did or who I was, it was just me being who I am; and that's really, kinda the thing that makes me so happy about these types of trips because it's not the memories that you intend on making that are the good ones. It's the ones that don't mean to happen'' said The Jaffer, while shifting gear around a road riddled with scurrying trash pandas. This was devil's country.

I Put It In Paack (The Big Nothing Part Five)

Out in Kalona, another place on the long road, I stopped inside the gas station outside of town. This is a place known for it's Mennonite and Amish population. A quiet back page taken for granted as reliable physical labor and an unknown population of nobodies.  

Inside, the cashier, who wasn't Anabaptist, held an expression on his face that made him seem empty and used. He wore a faded uniform of red and black, he looked unshaven and distracted; smelling of stale nicotine. He told me that two months had passed where no one had covered the other two shifts that he wasn't supposed to be doing on top of his own, cursing a ''friend'' who claimed he would cover the supposed shift, he rubbed his eyes as he exhaled the remnants of his sanity all the while burning a hole into the ground with a thousand mile stare.

Outside, the sun slowly sunk into the distance of endless rows of farming field and road. I looked back inside the gas station and saw the attendant look out at the horizon from the window before sitting down with a gallon of gas and a rag behind the counter. He eyed the canister in the corner as he fiddled with his lighter and occasionally exchanged glances, across the ghostly parking lot, towards the nearby ''blackout bar'' and was confounded with the decision between drunkenness or arson.

Seventy Tuuk Miles (The Big Nothing Part Four)

 An hour and a half later, inside an outback bar and restaurant, we sat at the complete end of the place in case we needed to escape out the back door. 

Almost everyone in the restaurant stared up at us when we walked in, the old men adjusted their glasses, the old women scowled, and held onto their purses as two full families eyed us with almost open mouths; even the noisy kids stopped coinking. 

When we sat down, it quit quickly as the patrons snapped out of their homicidal trance, one man kept wiping an invisible moustache as he eyed us nervously; the main waitress missed all but three of her teeth. We kept our conversation under the veil of about four different fans blowing around the back area we were in. 

As we figured out our orders, I couldn't escape the glare of a young country woman eyeing me as she cradled her infant sister. She looked about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a dull red shirt and jeans, but her eyes were a dark brown like mine as she shyly exchanged glances with me. I couldn't look away, it was like her secret she'd never tell anybody about, I felt bad for her as she finally looked away with a distinct bleakness in her eyes.  

''Jhiwon..is it alive?'' said The Inch as he looked down at our order of fried mushrooms, curly fries, chicken wings, and homemade bar ranch; ''oh, that Jhiwon tastes great'' said The Jaffer as he bit into the curly fries. The food was a surprise, it may have been laced with something, but it was excellent bar food