"Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the
most High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee,
neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For
he shall give his angels charge over thee,
to keep thee in all thy ways."
Psalm 91:9-11

When I was living in my car in L.A. in 2004, Sundays were my favorite day of the week.  I could park my car at First Baptist Church of Hollywood all day.  It was secure, I was welcome there, and nobody was going to tell me to leave.  The church was closed for a few hours in the mid-afternoon, between the morning and the evening services, but nobody cared that I left my car there.  The evening service was the best.  And walking around Hollywood during the afternoon, not worried about my car, talking to homeless people in my Chuck Taylors and hand-me-down orange leather coat from my tough-guy tweeker bouncer friend.  I loved that place.  FBCH was the only church I've ever attended where I felt compelled to become a member.  People think "church-hopping" is a sign of a wayward spirit, but as a would-be "wayward spirit," I see it as a sign that a place just doesn't align with God's will for my life.  At least not for the moment, or season.  But not FBCH.  Those people were my true family. 

The pastor at the time had to step down for personal reasons, but is the only "pastor" I've ever known who I felt comfortable calling "my pastor."  And not because he was a compromising teacher, and his apostasy appealed to my self-righteous lifestyle of degenerated wastery.  Quite the contrary.  In fact, he stepped down due to private, personal sin.  Gambling, if I recall.  He walked away from church leadership for life, considering himself unworthy to the call.  Which is why I considered him my pastor.  He wasn't going to make excuses for sin, including his own.  He was the real thing.

The reason I bring it up is because one Sunday, I was talking to a homeless guy at the entrance to the parking lot, who asked me for some money.  I don't remember if I had any or not, but when I told him I was living in the blue Ford Taurus parked over there, he changed his tune and told me to keep whatever I had.  He gestured in an all-encompassing way, including the entire civilized world in his next statement, which was something to the effect of, 

"When it gets weird, we're going to be teaching these people how to survive."

It wasn't what I wanted to hear, because I would much rather have played a bunch of concerts for legions of adoring fans, and had to deal with the (apparently irresistible) temptation to join the one-eye symbolism club with Bono and pretty much every other entertainment figure who hasn't been killed by their handler for refusing the offer, like Amy Winehouse.  But it didn't work out like that.

Thank God.

She was great.  The kind of chick you wouldn't hesitate to risk an eternity of hellfire for, just to get a laugh, or some batted eyelids, smiling butterflies flapping their wings over an empty drink.  If you're new to this blog, perhaps you haven't noticed, but I'm given to tangential rambling, and I am also the canary in the coal mine, signaling what your future will be once the world feels your labors aren't worthy of reasonable compensation.  Which is the purpose of this article.  To give you hope and assuage some of the natural fears you will have at the prospect of losing your entire livelihood.  I'm not going to tell you it's a party, but I can tell you without a doubt that YOU WILL BE OKAY, if you go with God.

Before I go there, though, I'm going to use the mention of Amy Winehouse and hellfire to make a point about songwriting and love, that many Christian content creators will dismiss as horrific and sinful, which is one of the reasons your culture sucks today.  As "Ring of Fire" by Johnny & June Carter Cash illustrates, infernal imagery can be used to describe the process of falling in love.  This is, of course, because falling in love is like going to hell, if going to hell was an ecstatic pleasure designed by God for the purpose of creating children and/or art.  "I fell into a burning ring of fire; I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher" is infernal, loving imagery of the highest order.  For this reason, among others, "Ring of Fire" is one of the best love songs ever written.

It is in this spirit, albeit unintentionally, that I sing "hey yo, hey yo, off to hell we'll probably go," in "The Heart I Know By Heart."  I wrote the song in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio, and the feeling I had for the girl I was into at the time was one of TOTAL WILLINGNESS to suffer the torments of hell, if love lay at the end of the eternity of flames.

A paradox, to be sure.  Love is a burning thing.

That's the reason for the tangents, y'know.  I've never gotten paid.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining that I've had a million jobs, everything from cab driver to movie extra to the caretaker of a farm, even if I have.  But my real trade isn't considered worthy of reasonable compensation by people living in the false economy of the "good people" culture bubble (Oliver Anthony is the exception that proves the rule), and as a result, I have no respect for what these haughty, blind deriders refer to as "the real world."  So, I am not particularly interested in their soft, comfortable, overpaid, indoor (and therefore amateur) opinions.

Anyway, if you're paying any attention to world events at all, and are accustomed to paying your own way with honest labor that you have been allowed (so far) to believe is a result of your inherent worth as a member of a doomed, ungrateful society, you may very well be freaking out.  "Holy smokes, I'm going to lose my job."  "Holy smokes, I'm going to be homeless."  "Holy smokes, I can't take care of my family."

While all of this is true (unless you take the poor man's one-eye oath, a.k.a. the mark of the beast), rest assured.  It isn't normality you're losing.

It's normality you're going into.

The hell encroaching on your horizon is no fluke of bad politics, twisted sexuality, or lack of morals.

It's normality.

The deriders have begun to see the storm at last.

Bienvenidos al infierno.  Welcome to hell.  This may be the only chance you ever have to save your soul.  Bienvenidos al infierno.  There are no artists here.  No writers, tradesmen, or productive members of anything remotely resembling a "society" of any kind.  Sanctimony is not possible in this crazy-person's camp of senseless instability.  There are no good men here.  There are only ghosts.  Zombies, idiots, cops, and crime.  Viruses and rules.

I'm not trying to scare you.  I'm trying to tell you not to be scared.  If you deny their existence, then yeah, facing their existence might be frightening.  Flames, termites, a moron insurgency, yeah well...  So what.  Yeah, they might consume everything.  The line ends back there, about 20 years.  Yeah, your faith in the goodness of your fellow man will be destroyed.  Undoubtedly.  However!  In spite of the constant circumstantial instability, absolute lack of funds of any kind, and rickety legal and emotional status, let me encourage you NOT TO LOSE HOPE.  God is with you.  Or will be, if you let Him in.  WILL BE.  Not might be, if you say all the right things, and wear the right hat.  WILL BE.  God is always at the door, standing, waiting, knocking.  But you have to let Him in.  It isn't difficult.  Just pour your guts out.  But you have to actually, actively do it.

Remember, the best love songs walk through the fire.  They don't prance around it, congratulating themselves on a job well done.  They don't declare their allegiance to their own co-dependent emotions.  True love songs burn, and move on.  Love risks death and damnation with every step it takes.  Love isn't a sensual pleasure, stroking itself on silken sheets.  It's not even an emotion.  Love is a harrowing descent into the depths of total loss, the all-consuming fires of potential despair and infinite perdition.  Don't hide from it.

Own it.

It's the only way out.  Or in.  Or through.

Whatever.

“If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”
Psalm 139:8

If, however, you choose to continue to worship at the altar of your S.O.L. (standard of living), and in the power of your untested virtue and would-be goodness, it's going to be a rocky ride for you.  Those sanctimonious chickens aren't coming home to roost, they're coming home to displace you and kick your ass out on the streets.  If you're not braced against the shock, and prepared to weather the storms of hellfire, your spirit vehicle will cough up the transmission of your formerly-civilized humanistic purpose when you hit the first bump in the road.  Important mechanical innards, things you need, will go flying into oncoming traffic like artillery shells.  Guts and bolts and blood will explode into the great and senseless cartoon of what the devil has planned for all the "good people," who mock and turn their noses up at sin, and the need for God, and mercy, and forgiveness. 

The deriders will not survive the storm.

“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear
my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him,
and will sup with him, and he with me.”
Revelation 3:20

It should be said that this article is really for the people who've already lost it all, and who need to be encouraged to hold on.  If you're still fighting for your life, you aren't there yet.  Good luck.  Truly.  But if circumstances take everything away in spite of your best efforts, don't throw yourself off the roof.

Just leave.  There's always an alien cave somewhere, waiting for a painter or a prophet to build a fire out of bat bones, underneath the stars.

That's the van in the lower right-hand corner of the thumbnail.  "Alien Valley" was my home for a few days.  There was only one other human life-form in sight for the duration of the time I was there, excepting the fighter jets playing Sky Pong with their tracer rounds at night.  What do you do out there, among the piles of sweatclothes, the human spines baking like the remains of a discarded alien buffet in the unforgiving sun?

Write, of course.  And say goodbye.  You stroll among the flames like supportive, loving families stroll through fields of ripened wheat.  You separate from "the real world."  To the free soul who has reached through the flames of loss, there's nothing real about the propped-up bubble of soulless S.O.L. in the community gulag.  The normie world is a mirage.  A nonexistent world of laws and valid legal documents.  A zombie zoo for cameras and rats.

It's insubstantial.  Like a town.

Did I say that the plates had to be legal?  I hope not.  I've lived for months on end in vans or cars with expired tags, driving basically in my rearview mirror, and turning off the road whenever any kind of legal authority was visible behind me.  Don't park in front of the police station, and watch your six, but don't live in fear either.

Did I say you had to have a bank account?  Cuz I never did.  Not for 20 years.  Fully 20 years, from 1999-2019, no rounding, no bank, no money, just birds.

Guitars and prayers and words.  Abandoned bookstores in the mountains, left to rust by winged librarians of fire.

I'm really not making the point.  I could post pictures and tell half-baked stories all night, but it will look like I'm trying to tell the story, rather than say, you can live NOWHERE, on NOTHING, and you will survive.  I'm not saying it will be easy, or that can bring your wife.  She probably won't want to come along.  Maybe she will; you are blessed indeed if she does.  This article is for after you lose her, and your kids, and your entire reason to exist.

God forbid.  But just in case.

Well, this is getting too long and I haven't said a tenth of what I wanted to say.  But it doesn't matter.  It was fun to write, while it was.  Mostly, I just don't want my last articles to be about Megadeth or Bono, in the event God calls me home today.  Remember the 3 rules from The Dangerous Person's Guide To Camping Alone, and you'll be alright.  Relative to the people who throw themselves off of rooftops for losing their savings, anyway.  Those people are all going to hell, unfortunately.  But I'm accustomed to not having anything, and while I'm certainly not looking forward to the storm rising on the horizon, I don't quite dread it either.  If the economy collapses and you end up walking to Tahiti, I'm here to tell you that you just might make it.  Whether you want to or not.  Just hold onto God.  You will be saved if you embrace the fire, not by running from it.  And remember the 3 rules.

1.  It's not camping if you're not going home

2.  Today is a good day to die

3.  Everything that makes a cool scene in a movie, sucks in real life

And don't forget Psalm 91.  And never park in a wash w/o a 4WD.

Anyway.  If you're down with the freeload, enjoy the free download.  Don't deride the dead musicians in the coal mine for being lazy bums.  They might not be lazy.  They might be dead.  It might be a warning.

“I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be,
with the possible exception of interior decoration.  The most positive
notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine
theory of the arts.  This theory argues that artists are useful to
society because they are so sensitive.  They are supersensitive.
They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas,
long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.”
Kurt Vonnegut

Don't be a hypocrite and deride the dead birds at your feet.

Your livelihood might be next.

Good luck.