Monday, June 23, 2014

Country Magic


Thanks to Global Warming Climate Change (GWCC) it was cold and wet this morning, so I drove to West in search of "Valu Paks" of .22LR and a haircut. The barber was closed, along with most of the town, but the rumored .22 was there. Good result.

Downtown West

I took some time to wander around because I like West and its interesting Czech history. I understand some people still speak the language but regardless, the town's seen better days.

West Has Seen Better Days

Maybe the place will find a new source of income and prosperity, then again, maybe it'll simply continue its slow slide into decay and ruin. Like Detroit, but in rural Texas. Struck by that, I headed back along I35 and stopped at my town's Outlet Mall. 

Dead and Dying Outlet Mall

This was opened in the 1980s, promising wealth and jobs. Today it's mostly empty; here's a review, off of Yelp:

What I have to say about this place is probably the same that I can say about Afghanistan: bombed out and depleted. Like another reviewer mentioned, the only thing that makes this location complete is tumbleweeds blowing across the parking lot.

I took some pictures because I like to record the fall of what passes for our civilization, and was stopped by "Security." 

Mall Security Guarding the Empty Shops

Our conversation went like this:

"You can't take pictures here! No."
"Why not?"

"Well... I'm not rightly sure, sir, but no pictures allowed."
"Look, they're not even real pictures, they're digital."
"Maybe they'll hurt the buildings, sir. I been working here ten years."
"That's a very long time! And it's been a real pleasure to meet you. God bless."
"You too, sir!"

I liked the old man and off he went in his blue golf cart into the empty car park of the empty mall. I didn't ask why or how the pictures would hurt the buildings. 

That was obviously magic, country magic.

God bless,

LSP

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Equinox in Austin



Some time ago I challenged LL to write a short which included what he likes to call the "cheap red wine brigade," the Hog Farm, the Whole Earth Catalogue and their Clown. Or something like that. He swiftly wrote Solstice in Austin, which features a young woman who is picked up by the nefarious Carlos on the way to Austin and then dies, impaled on the Horned God's antlers(!) after getting herself in trouble on Beezer's bus. You can read it here. LL wasted no time suggesting I write a sequel, Equinox in Austin, and here it is. If you dislike tales of counter-cultural criminality and vice don't read on. All characters are, of course, entirely fictional.

Equinox in Austin

Or

Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live.

    Hazey stumbled out of the bathroom of the cheap motel and looked at Starhawk, lying big and bloated on the bed, like a dirty whale. “Wake up!” he half-barked, half-slurred, giving the grey haired woman what he figured was a playful tap on the head with a jug of wine. He was drunk. Again. Starhawk groaned and cast a bloodshot eye at the wine. “Bastard,” she said, snatching the jug and drinking deep. She’d been beautiful once, years ago, back when Grace Slick was like a young Goddess and Hunter Thompson could still write.
   But Hunter had blown his head off in Aspen a year or two ago and Grace was weird; fat and demented. Starhawk didn’t look so hot either, that was for damn sure. An hour later Hazey was in his stained clown outfit and Starhawk was driving, all the way to the Lone Star State’s famous replica Stone Henge and their next gig, Equinox in Austin, laid on by the Hog Farm and Whole Earth Catalogue Plc.
    Starhawk’s wide ass filled the seat, as she sat in a haze of smoke in the Yukon, getting high. They’d pulled over to get something to eat at one of Austin’s many alternative high-end food trailers; not cheap, but Hazey didn’t care, he’d ripped-off a wallet the night before in some bar he’d gone to with Starhawk, plenty of cash. He passed her a $12 Gaia Burger, took a chug of wine and before long they were back on the road. They couldn’t speak but they didn’t have to, there was nothing to say. An old witch and a drunken old clown, running on fumes.


    It wasn’t easy but they finally found Barton Park as the sun was setting over the Henge, and were waved on to the “Crone’s Tent” by a couple of tie-dyed freaks. “Weirdos,” muttered Hazey; he was starting to come to. Starhawk snorted, she remembered Hazey from the old days, when Kesey was around and everything was cool. Not anymore, no Ma’am. “Get out of the damn car,” she snapped, and that’s what they did, walking right out of the truck and into the tent. The air inside might as well have been skunked and Hazey didn’t say no when an owl-faced man passed him a pipe.
“Welcome back to Texas, Hazey,” uttered the Owl. Hazey exhaled, “Let’s not have a double-take on that freaking Solstice. What was her name, Cindy, Candy?” The Owl didn't seem to know, “Maybe it was Candy. But what happened to Beezer, and where’s Carlos?”
   Hazey wasn't sure. Carlos had split after Cindy, or was it Candy? had been found dead at the Austin Solstice, skewered on the Horned God’s antlers. The cops had written it off as an “accidental death” but everyone knew better. Word was that Beezer had gotten all weird when the girl woke up in his bus and tried to make a getaway. Nobody blamed her, Beezer was a two-bit skagg-head and Carlos was part of it too, somehow. They’d both disappeared when the cops arrived. No one seemed to know where to.
“Yeah. Where’s Carlos. He left me with all these Whole Earth Catalogues to sell, what a deadbeat.” The Owl agreed. Sure, Carlos, what a loser. “So where’s Beezer?”
“Who knows, man, he’s probably gone blue in someone’s toilet.”
     A few hundred yards away, Carlos and Beezer were sitting across from the Equinox sound-stage in the middle of the famous Texan Henge, while a DJ played endless Orbital covers, Halcyon and on and on. But they didn’t hear the music, they were intent on one thing, as much as they could be intent on anything. Getting their money back. They’d panicked and ran when the cops arrived at the Solstice, and didn’t have a chance to grab the bricks-full-of-cash rucksack from Beezer’s bus. 



    But Carlos had caught a glimpse of Starhawk lifting the ruck over her shoulder as the squad cars arrived. Too late, it was gone with the witch and the Yukon. He nervously played with his Glock 17 while Beezer stared at the stage. Both were wired all to hell. “Where’s the freaking witch?” Beezer sucked on his teeth, “Soon, man, soon.”
   Back in the Crone’s Tent, Starhawk shouldered her way past Hazey. She found him repellent. He’d always been a freak, oh yeah, for sure, but now he was just this degenerate old clown. And drunk, always drunk. Starhawk kicked an empty jug of Burgundy out of the way and moved into the inner-circle of the tent. 
  “Staaarhaaawk!” gushed a middle-aged woman in a priest’s collar. She was an Episcopalian who went by “Mo”, which was short for Mother. They hugged, the priestess wincing like the WASP she was at the unwashed smell of the overweight old hippy. She moved thankfully apart and brightly explained the night’s ritual to Starhawk.
   Starhawk looked through lidded eyes at Mo the beaming priestess, as she gushed about Mabon, and realized that she hated her almost as much as she hated being the Crone at these dumbass festivals. But she didn’t hate the rucksack full of cash which sat on the back seat of the Yukon. That was her ticket out of the whole mess. Tonight would be her last Croning, and then she was gone. For good. Bye-Bye Hog Farm, Bye-Bye Hazey, Bye-Bye all of it, the whole low-rent deal, done and gone. 
    Starhawk smiled at the thought and grabbed a big plastic cup full of cheap red wine from a table where Hazey was making a fool of himself in front of a quiet owlish looking guy. She followed Mo behind a partition in the tent to get changed into her Hecate outfit.


  Carlos and Beezer watched in the darkness of the Henge’s massive stones, twitching with nerves and speed while Hazey swerved onto the stage in his clown getup; red nose, goofy hat and a one-stringed instrument, which he banged on to punctuate his lame old jokes. “Nobody for President! HAR, HAR!” all the while gesturing big and swaying drunkenly to polite applause from the few Austin hippies who bothered to listen. Before long Hazey was in grand clown mode, “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you... Mabon!” 
   The lighting rig dimmed to purple and orange as unseen drummers struck up a beat. Then Mo was on-stage in a brown Fall cloak, to Call the Quarters:
  “On this sacred night, as the veil between the worlds draws thin, let us invoke the spirits of the directions.
“From the East, I call the wind! Blow from beyond the veil. Blessed be! From the South I call Fire! Spirit-filled rapture! Blessed be! From the West the Dead call. I call Water! Blessed be! From the North I call the Earth! Into her we descend, blessed be!
 “Demeter, Inanna, Kali, Tiamet, Hecate, Nemesis, Morrighan.
Bringers of destruction and darkness,
I embrace you tonight.
Without rage, we cannot feel love,
Without pain, we cannot feel happiness,
Without the night, there is no day,
Without death, there is no life.
Great goddesses of the night, I thank you!”
    And Starhawk emerged, masked, wearing black robes, Crone Hecate in person. As if on cue, Carlos and Beezer began to move, pushing their way through the hot Texan night and the Austin hippies. They reached the shadows to the right of the stage and there was Security, a lanky Occupy Austin dreadlock with a walkie-talkie, blocking their way. “Hey, guys!” he started, and was cut short by Beezer’s baseball bat. Crack. Bat on bone. No more security and no more Croning, that had finished, to be replaced by pounding dance music. The Equinox crowd were getting it on, right there at the stones of the Henge.


    Backstage, behind the stones in an open-faced tent, Rev. Mo was congratulating Starhawk, who was smoking something while trying not to look at Hazey. He was getting sloshed on a box of Franzia and didn’t see Carlos and Beezer cut round the corner. Neither did the women. If they had, they’d have seen Carlos’ Glock and Beezer’s bat, coming at them fast and furious. Carlos was first, and before you could say Hippy died at Altamont, he was on Starhawk, pistol racked and yelling, “Where’s the money, bitch!”
   Beezer batted Mo to the ground for effect. She dropped. Hazey choked on his wine. Carlos was screaming, he had lost it long ago, “So maybe you didn’t hear me? Where’s the fuckin’ money!” Starhawk froze, mouth open, she couldn’t speak, and Carlos raised his Glock. He was going to hit her and hit her good. Beezer grinned, “Yeah! Hit her, hit the witch.”
    From out of nowhere, an owl-faced man appeared at the tent’s entrance and drew his .460 S&W Magnum. He put the Hi-Viz fiber optic foresight on Carlos’ head and squeezed the trigger, which sent a 200 grain bullet, about the width of your thumbnail, speeding towards its target at 2,300 feet per second, like a supersonic bomb. Carlos’ head exploded. A second shot tore out Beezer’s gut, knocking him back to the wall of the tent in a spray of blood.
“That’s for Candy,” said the Owl, as he put a round through Starhawk, “Or is it Cindy? And by the way, she was my daughter.”
    The Owl stepped over Mo, pistol ready and aimed at Hazey. The clown puked and the Owl considered, for an instant, maybe Hazey wasn’t worth the bullet. “Clown, you get a pass,” he said as he lowered the big X-Frame revolver and shot Mo. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” he informed the clown, and walked calmly out of the tent towards the Yukon and his money. He had business to attend to.


    Hazey stood in the tent, shaking, as sirens cut the night and the Equinox danced on.


Saturday, June 21, 2014

Solstice Hippy Witch


June 13 marks the summer solstice and with it the chance for roving gangs of hippies to get together, do a little thieving, goof-off, maybe dance around, get all pagan and trash someone's land. Pretty harmless, right? Like what went on at America's replica Stonehenge today.

Hippies

According to the Sacramento Bee, 12 hippies managed to get up in time to worship the sun as it rose above Washington State's Columbia Gorge at 5.30 am. Elise Mesnard called the site a "beautiful, meditative area." Another sun worshiper, Egypt Rose, was more proactive. She lit a fire and dropped wax figurines in a cauldron, where they presumably melted.

Just a Few Totally Harmless Wax Figurines

She lit a fire and dropped wax figurines in a cauldron. Well that's as harmless as witchcraft itself, isn't it.

To the best of my knowledge, Egypt Rose is not yet an Episcopal priestess.

LSP

Friday, June 20, 2014

Alright There, Ye Guns


In a big effort to cheat the stereotype, I went for a shoot; nothing fancy, just an AR, a sporter Lee and a .45. I was curious to see if I was still able to use a gun and hit anything smaller than a barn door, like the silhouette of a green terrorist.

Typical Texas Range

Sure enough, the green "terr" took a beating, mostly with the AR, and I was pleased to see decent off-hand groups at 30, 50 and 75 yards. Not so good at 100, annoyingly, and I had to compensate a bit for an ironic tendency to shoot left. Some sort of trigger issue, probably -- don't pull left, LSP! The Lee shot well for an ancient rifle that I'd porch project 'smithed; it was especially good to note that the $50 2nd hand Burris Fullfield scope hadn't drifted. Well done Burris, well done Lee.

Shoot straight,

LSP


Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Way To Go, Welby


The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has been in Rome recently, where he met with Pope Francis to talk about slavery and church unity. Famous for his negotiating skills, Welby brought a couple of priestesses to his meeting with the Holy Father. Smooth move, Justin.

The Pope spoke movingly about the need to end what he referred to as the "scandal" of a divided church. "Beneath his merciful gaze, we cannot claim that our division is anything less than a scandal and an obstacle to our proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the world," stated Francis to Welby.

Canon Mann

The Roman Catholic Church does not allow women to be priests, unlike the Church of England which enthusiastically does. Some of these priestesses were men who became women, like Rachel Mann, who is now a Canon of Manchester Cathedral. 

Rock On, Rachel

The curiously named Mann apparently describes herself as "a trans woman, a lesbian, a priest in the Church of England and a feminist."

Perhaps you think I've just made that up, you know, for fun. You would be wrong in thinking that.

Carry on,

LSP

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Hillary Clinton Book Flop


For some reason no one seems to be buying Hillary Clinton's awesome book, Hard Choices, in which she details her husband's randy romps through the Oval Office of the most powerful country in the world. Despite that, Hard Choices is tanking and can be found in sale bins across America at a whopping 40% discount off sticker price. 

No Money

Hillary, who is popularly known as The Witch, claims that she was "dead broke" when she left the White House with her polyamorous husband, Bill. Maybe that's why the Clintons made an $855,000 cash downpayment on a $1.995 million mortgage a few weeks before they left power.

No Money At All

The Witch is paid somewhere in the region of $200,000 for her numerous speaking engagements and wants to become President so that she can make enough money to cover her catastrophic book losses.

Dead Broke

Go on, give her your vote, she needs the cash!

LSP

Happy Father's Day!


I hope you've all had a great Father's Day and a blessed Feast of the Holy Trinity. I have a good mind to fire up the grill in honor of both.

Baptized a baby this morning. Beautiful.

LSP

Saturday, June 14, 2014

St. Michael's Conference Southwest


One of the best things I get to do is help staff the St. Michael's Conference Southwest, which is a week long Anglo-Catholic event for young people held at Camp Crucis, in the Diocese of Fort Worth. 

Say the Mass the Right Way 'Round

Our primary focus is worship, and not the useless kind either, with goofy clowns, dancers and a sappy crew of frustrated pop musicians banging their amplified way through the "Yewkrist." No, none of that, just the power of the ancient Western Rite, as seen through the lens of Anglicanism. To help us do that, we have to fix up the chapel a bit, from this:

Before

To this:

And After

A marked improvement. We have incense too and it's strange to see that no one's weirdly allergic to it; odd, eh?

Kindly Old LSP

I was MC this year, which meant I had to coordinate the worship, and I enjoyed that. Quite hard work though, as there's a Solemn High Mass every day, along with the Offices (Morning Prayer, Solemn Evensong, Compline) and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and Exposition on Wednesday and Thursday. You can see photos on Facebook here.

The Last Gospel

Almost all faculty and students make their Confession and Christ moves with great converting power during the week. It gives a huge boost to my vocation and the faith of all who go; a testament to catholic Christianity practiced unashamedly and without compromise. 



More of that, please.

God bless,

LSP

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Lavinia Byrne, Devil's Disciple?

Devil's Disciple

Lavinia Byrne is a former nun who was kicked out of the religious life by the Vatican for obstinate, persistent heresy, notably advocating for priestesses. She used to be a panentheist, maybe she still is. 

Church Builder

Panentheism is a Hindu doctrine that says God evolves with the universe but is somehow beyond it. It was big in the '80s and '90s, making for good academic book fodder: Oh! you're a Professor who teaches philosophy of religion and you're a Christian, but you're also a Hindu! Whoa. Here, sign this publishing contract. 

Whatever, Lavinia was into it. I know, she told me.

She also argued, like they always do, that unless the church ordains women, it'll shrink and die, because no one will go to church. She champions the Anglican experiment. George Weigel has this to say, via Let Nothing You Dismay:

Hard experience should have taught us by now that there is an iron law built into the relationship between Christianity and modernity. Christian communities that know and defend their doctrinal and moral boundaries (while extending the compassion of Christ when we fail to live within those boundaries, as we all do) survive in modernity; some actually flourish and become robustly evangelical. Conversely, Christian communities whose doctrinal and moral boundaries are eroded by the new orthodoxy of political correctness, and become so porous that it becomes impossible to know if one is “in” or “out,” wither and die.

But Where Are The Women?

That is the sad state of Anglicanism in the North Atlantic world today: even splendid liturgical smells-and-bells can’t save an Anglicanism hollowed out by the shibboleths of secular modernity. Why British Catholics like Lavinia Byrne can’t see this is one of the mysteries of the 21st-century Church."


Mystery? I don't think so. They see what they're proposing perfectly well and it isn't the advance of Christianity, or anything like it. Empty pews are precisely part of the plan; they're after an entirely new religion and the destruction of the church. They've nearly got it too, with Anglicanism.


Just. Say. No.


So what does that make Lavinia Byrne? The Devil's Disciple.

Just in case you wondered what I really think,

LSP

Just a Bit of Berdyaev


Sometimes, please don't laugh, I get to read books. I'm especially enjoying Berdyaev's The End Of Our Time. He was writing after World War I:
European man strode into modern history full of confidence in himself and his creative powers, in this dawn all seemed to depend on his own power of making, to which he put neither frontiers nor limits; today he leaves it to pass into an unknown epoch, discouraged, his faith in shreds - that faith which he had in his own powers and the strength of his own skill - threatened with the loss for ever of the core of his personality. No, this man does not shine.
And again:
In the present century, the apex of the humanist era, European man stands amid a frightening emptiness. He no longer knows where the key-stone of his life may be found, beneath his feet he feels no depth of solidity. He gives himself up to a surface existence and lives in two dimensions as if he occupied exactly the surface of the earth, ignorant of what is above him and what below. 

Prescient words, unless you think everything's fine with the collapsing modern age. Interestingly, Belloc, and perhaps Berdyaev too, argue that the end of the secularist experiment leads inevitably and paradoxically to slavery.



I stand against that and for the Faith.

LSP


Friday, June 6, 2014

Mass on the Beach


A catholic Chaplain administering the Sacrament of the Altar on Omaha Beach, D Day. The real thing.

Respect.

LSP 


D Day


I once, more than a bit stupidly, asked a retired Wing Commander "what was it like?" We were having a pint in a pub in London at the time and he'd flown Mosquitos during the war, as a pathfinder. After a longish silence he replied, "We had to do things no one should ever have to do," though he added that he "enjoyed the tracer."

tracer

We must thank God for the success of the D Day landings and pray for those who gave their lives.

God bless,

LSP