Juice of life

Most human languages have a word or phrase for alcoholic beverages that translates into “water of life.” In Latin it’s aqua vitae, in French eau de vie, in Swahili maji ya uzima, in Italian l’a acqua della vita, in Norwegian livits vann, in Korean saengmyeong-ui mul, in Yiddish vaser fun lebn, in Gaelic uisce (whisky).

In the American Naval Language there are approximately six thousand words for alcohol, and pretty much each one of them translate as “water of life” or “water of liberty.” It’s (or it was, once upon a time) a navy thing.

But this isn’t about alcohol. This is about the juice, or essence, of life.

On Monday morning I felt awful, like five hundred miles of bad road. Doesn’t really matter why, and no, it had nothing to do with alcohol, which I no longer consume, and have not consumed for many years.

I felt weak and tired and dispirited. My head ached and my stomach churned. My muscles felt like mush and my mind was moving like molasses.

I really, really needed to blow the cobs out, but I wasn’t sure I had enough get up and go in the tank.

I finished checking cattle and parked up on top of a ridge near the northwest corner of the south unit. I dragged myself out of the pickup, pulled out my trusty camera, and started taking pictures. I let my eye pick out the shots and made my feet take me to where the camera needed to be.

Slowly, ever so slowly, my mind and my soul began to perk up. It was a lovely morning, still cool at 7:30 a.m., with the promise of heat in the photons cast down from the infant sun. All around me the grass was lush and tall and vibrantly green, perhaps one of the most unusual sights you will ever see in early August in this part of the country.

The smell of the morning was amazing. Warm, moist soil, the green smell of growing plants, the heavy damp smell of evaporation and transpiration, the sharp smell of fresh cow manure, the chalky, astringent smell of baking, lichen encrusted siltstone. And wafting among all the other August prairie odors was the sharp, resinous scent of gumweed, skunkbush sumac, stinkgrass, and fencepost creosote. Those last four take me directly to happy places.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories include those scents. They play like a kaleidoscope as I move along, flashes of sunshiney moments seemingly hardwired into my DNA. The decades between now and then vanish, and it seems I’m stepping effortlessly back and forth through forty and fifty years of time.

“All of these moments,” said the fictional character Roy Batty, “will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”

He may be right. But they’re not lost yet, and will not be, so long as I live and breathe and experience.

And that is the essence, the juice, of life. Experience. At least it is for me.

After an hour or so I take a break from snapping pictures and look around. I see, then, what my feet have done for me.

They’ve led me across a broad valley and up onto a piece of high ground along the north perimeter of the unit. I’m at a familiar and perfect starting point for a vigorous hike. I look back toward my pickup, parked about a mile away. I can slink back and drive away, letting the weariness and malaise take me. Or I can suck it up and drive on. I turn my back on the pickup and forge ahead.

From where I begin a great circle route around the perimeter of this 1,400 acre unit will add up to about seven miles by the time I return to the pickup.

As I hike the sun shines down and the air warms up. Air flows in and out of my lungs, meeting a lot of resistance at first, but soon it smooths into the rhythm of a proper hiking cadence. In, out, in, out, in, out. Stride, stride, stride, stride.

The ground is uneven, the way nature made it. In this part of the world siltstone is overlain by decomposing gravel and sand and a thin skin of rich, organic topsoil. The grasses and forbs that flourish here are not those of a park or golf course. They blanket the uneven ground and introduce their own unevenness. It takes practice and experience and toughened muscles and joints and good boots to navigate the shortgrass prairie afoot without succumbing to injury.

As I march up and down broad and varied slopes the sweat begins to flow in earnest and the main circulatory pump shifts from low range to high range. The pump sends blood coursing through every bit of my ageing carcass; first to the lungs to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, then on to all the organs and muscles and tissue, where the oxygen powers cellular combustion of glucose. Deep inside my body raging microscopic fires make the energy that drives me along, stride after stride after stride.

That glucose comes from the food I eat, meat and plants. The energy that comes from the meat -- that once animated the meat -- came from plants. And the energy that gave the plants life came from the sun. Those tiny cellular fires burning throughout my body as I hike and sweat and breathe and experience are miniscule suns in their own right. I am, the meat and cattle and grasses and forbs are, concentrated sunshine.

The hiking feels good and I drive myself hard. I still don’t feel great, but the exertion and the increased circulation and respiration and perspiration relentlessly attack the feelings of not good and drive them back, back, back.

I hike across mixed shortgrass prairie. The grasses are broadly divided in two main groups, cool season and warm season. The cool season grasses are first to green up in the spring and do the bulk of their annual growing during rapid growth windows which coincide neatly with springtime rains and springtime air temperatures.

Green needlegrass, needleandthread, western wheatgrass, prairie junegrass, smooth brome, slender wheatgrass. If there’s moisture in the soil when the springtime thaw occurs, these grasses green up and begin to photosynthesize. As air temperatures climb into the 60’s, and provided there’s enough moisture, they take off. On a warm spring day with plenty of sunshine and abundant moisture in the ground you can lay down, close your eyes, and actually hear the grass growing. Some of these grasses, including the ubiquitous but non-native crested wheatgrass, are bunch grasses. They grow in clumps or bunches and contribute to the uneven nature of the prairie.

Later in the summer, when air temperatures venture into the 80’s and above, and again so long as there’s adequate moisture in the ground, warm season grasses hit their stride. On the EJE ranch these are primarily blue grama, sideoats grama, hairy grama, and buffalo grass. Here and there a few clumps of little bluestem join the party, but there’s not a lot of Nebraska’s state grass in this part of the Panhandle.

There are plenty of forbs and shrubs present as well. As I hike along I pass the late-summer examples mentioned above, gumweed and skunkbush sumac. Here and there, mostly along fencelines and ditches, the summer annual stinkgrass shows up. These plants are highly aromatic, and the pounding photons of the summer sun drive their scents into the hot, close air.

The scent of gumweed is one of my earliest memories and I remember being repeatedly chastised as a very young lad for coming home covered with the sticky, aromatic sap. It wasn’t my fault the dog kept knocking me down in the gummy, smelly stuff!

The smell of stinkgrass rings a memory bell from my high school days, when we mighty Longhorns gathered twice a day on the practice field to prepare for the coming football season. That smell always calls up the recollection of sweat and exertion and running and exhaustion and fun.

The odor of skunkbush sumac and the smell of hot creosote-impregnated fenceposts takes me back to countless hot, exhausting days of building and mending fence. We have a lot of fence on the ranch and there is no fencepost and no strand of wire that I have not personally manipulated.

All those memories wash together and mingle, playing snippets of sensory recollection in and about me as I trudge across my prairie home. Yes. My prairie home. This is that place, and these are those memories that signify the very essence -- the juice -- of my life.

I turn a corner and pound along a fenceline in the home stretch of my hike. I’ve come about six miles and have two to go. I’m moving easily now, heart and lungs working at good capacity and keeping time with my swinging stride. I increase my pace, searching for that elusive surge of endorphins. I spy a couple of abandoned fence posts along my path and snatch them up to add a bit of mass to my workout. Each post is eight feet long, four inches in diameter, and weighs in at about thirty pounds. I balance each post on an opposing shoulder and press my pace harder.

With sweat stinging my eyes, hot breath rasping in and out, and leg muscles beginning to burn I finally hit overdrive. It’s a strange juxtaposition of agonizing exertion and overwhelming serenity. The effort is enormous and painful, yet at the same time I seem to float along on a cloud of effortless wellbeing. I’m at once within my body and without. I feel the extreme exertion, the pounding of my heart and the straining labor as my diaphragm struggles to provide adequate respiration. My fingertips begin to tingle as my lungs blow off great draughts of carbon dioxide and the chemistry of my coursing blood flirts with hypocapnia and alkalosis. At the same time I seem to float alongside myself on a wave of euphoria.

The last quarter mile is agony and ecstasy. It seems to take forever and no time at all. When I arrive at my pickup and fling down the dead weight of two creosote soaked cedar posts my legs keep moving. I want to stop and rest but at the same time I want to keep driving as hard and as long as I can. I slow my pace and walk several hundred cool-down yards in a big loop around the truck. Finally, I stop.

I lean back against the sun-warmed flank of my pickup and look around. I’m standing in the midst of lush shortgrass prairie in early August. Above me towers a deep blue sky, dominated by the blazing sun and garnished with a few fleecy white clouds. The air is warm and close, inching toward the mid-90’s, and suffused with those wondrous scents. My skin cools as sweat evaporates. Slowly my breathing returns to normal and my heart rate falls below 100, then 90, then 80, then 70, and finally settles out around 60 beats per minute. My muscles luxuriate in the glow of recent hard use and peak oxygenation.  The tingling leaves my fingertips.  I’m in a state of bliss.

What, I wonder, in all my nearly 21,000 days of life, have I ever done to deserve this? Nothing. Not one single thing.

One day it will be gone. Perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly. But that day is not yet come. It still resides in that far, undiscovered country. For now it is enough -- far more than enough -- to be supremely blessed.

Blue moon

Something Brighid said in comments popped this notion into my head.

Thanks, Brighid, the notion of watching the Blue Moon rise from a Kayak, surrounded by friends and fortified with BMB puts a huge smile on my face. Life is for living in the real world, and the real world is a place many of our fellows will never know.

Anyway, love this commercial:


Love this band, song and video:


And these two, dredged up as a result of quick, dirty and spastic interweb searching, aren't bad:

Blue moon.

Stuff

The phone rang in the middle of the night.

Sorry, Sorry! Couldn't hep m'sef.

I hate it when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It’s never good news. It’s almost always less than good news, except for those rare occasions when it’s a wrong number. Wrong numbers are kind of neutral. Very occasionally (knock wood) it’s terrible news.

The middle-of-the-night telephone ring always surprises me, always sends my heart into my throat, always makes the blood pound in my ears. Because it’s just never good news. I mean, seriously, who’s gonna call me at zero-dark with good news? The Nobel Prize Committee?

Funny I should mention that. When Dick Feynman won the 1965 Physics prize (shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga) for his work in Quantum Electrodynamics, the Nobel Committee woke him with the news in a post-midnight long distance phone call.

S

But I am not Richard Feynman, nor a physicist, nor in the running for any award at all, let alone the Nobel Prize.

So jangling phone, heart in throat, pounding blood -- not gonna be good news.

“Shaun Evertson,” I say. That’s how I answer the phone. Bad habit I picked up in the service.

“This is the Sheriff’s Office. Do you have cattle x miles south along Highway x? We got a lady hit one and totaled her car.”

Groan. Quick mental calculation. My cattle aren’t anywhere near that location, but could they be? Probably not, it would be a five-mile hike, but you never know. The Sheriff’s Office isn’t always accurate when reporting locations, either. Sigh.

“My cattle are west of there. If I understand where you’re talking about, the cows on that section along the highway belong to Mr. QRS and the land belongs to Mrs. XYZ.”

“Oh. Thank you, that’s very helpful. Click.”

My eyes focus on the alarm clock. 12:43 a.m.. Zero-zero-forty-three. I’m sure it’s not one of my cows. But I’m not certain.

I snap on the light and crawl out of bed. I used to be able to jump out of bed. Probably still can in an emergency. But if there’s no incoming, no smoke or flames, and no flooding, it’s gonna be slow and accompanied by a bit of groaning.

Think Nick Nolte in the opening scene of North Dallas Forty.

Without the pills, booze and marijuana, of course.

Of course?

Yes. Of course.

No, I’m not a former NFL player. I did, however, suffer a couple or three major traumas during my years of naviating. A shoulder and an ankle are as much metal and scar tissue as anything else. I no longer have a complete “as issued” set of, well, stuff. And my lumbar spine didn’t emerge unscathed from that exceptionally hard landing in a Dare county swamp.

Parts of me don’t like to get out of bed.

The groans are spiced with a bit of rather sharply pointed grumbling.

“Stupid blankety-blank women drivers from Colorado...probably goin’ like a dingbat outa’ hell with a trunk full of medicinal reefer…”

I know, I know. The reefer shot is a cheap shot. Still, it’s the Rocky Mountain Zeitgeist, baby.

In my mind’s eye I picture a distraught woman weeping alongside a silverish SUV, runnels of tear-melted mascara dripping from her chin as she surveys the smashed front of her vehicle. From the inky darkness of the roadside ditch comes the sound of labored, bloody breathing and vocalized bovine pain.

Does that kind of early morning grumbling make me a horrible person? Certainly by today’s standards of robust professional victimhood it does. Ah well.

I roll south down an unpaved county road just after the clock strikes one. Zero-one-hundred. It’s after midnight and as the old saying goes, nothing good ever happens after midnight.

As with most such comprehensive and authoritative sayings, there are, um, exceptions to the rule.

The night is pure magic. The evening air of the South Divide is cool and bracing, a perfect 57 degrees only a few short hours after the sweltering heat of the last day of July. I drive with the windows down and the air flowing through the pickup cab is sweet and pure as nectar. Ambrosia laden with the scent of summer grass and sweetclover and incipient dust and shortgrass prairie live and in person.

Framed near the center-top of the windshield is the second full moon of July, the elusive but not-so-rare Blue Moon. It’s huge and hard-white and seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. I can easily make out the Sea of Tranquility and the landing site of Apollo 11. Neil and Buzz walked there only a few short years ago in July, 1969. I remember it as if it was just last week.

With abundant moonshine present, I can see with great acuity. On a self made dare I switch off the headlights and notice only a little bit of difference. I charge lightless down the county road with the complete confidence of near-daylight vision. Behind me streams an expanding trail of county road dust glowing silver in the grace of the moon’s smile.

It’s an enchanting, intoxicating passage. I could sit here at the keyboard for days and never, ever come up with enough of the right words to do the magic justice. I’ve been extraordinarily blessed throughout my life to have seen and done the most breathtakingly majestic and wonderful things. This Blue Moon night is one of them, fully the equal of a Pacific sunrise or an Atlantic sunset, full-burner nighttime cat shots, water works from the back of a Sea King, baby calves and baby people and blissful “kiss the bride” moments.

Creaking pain washes away as if it had never been, pointed grumbling gives way to thankful appreciation. Good lord, this is what life’s all about! To exist and experience, to grab the world by the heart and let the essence of everything flow like a river through your soul, to play all the play from the day, leaving not a smidgen unused. “It ain’t dyin I’m talkin’ about,” said Gus McCrae, “It’s livin’!”

The price of admission is no price at all. Well, no price for me, anyway. The nice lady who made it all possible has paid a steep price, though (hope she’s okay!), and the cow has most likely paid out everything she had.

S

I near an intersection and turn east, toward the highway. I can see the pulsing glow of flashing emergency lights ahead. I flip my headlights back on and drive lawfully; there are lawpersons ahead.

As I near the highway I take in the scene. A silvery SUV is crumpled in the northbound lane in a puddle of coolant and shattered plastic. I spot bovine skid marks on the asphalt, I’ve seen ‘em before. They end in a puddle of blood dribbling off into the darkness of the ditch. There’s a flash and a bang down there and after a few moments a deputy emerges, having given the shattered animal her ease.

Alongside the SUV a young woman weeps. She’s no more than 21 or 22, and there’s no mascara marring her pretty face. She’s unhurt, thank goodness, and weeping, I’d judge, from the close call, the totalled vehicle, and yes, from the death of the cow. Life is, well, life, and her trail now includes this event. It’s nothing at all to most folks, and “just one of those things” to many, but it’s a very big something to her. She’s got lots of ups and downs ahead of her, and this thing will fade in time, probably sooner rather than later, but it’ll always be a part of her now. I silently wish her luck and well.

I wander over to the deputy who administered the coup de grâce. I know and like him, we’re fellow cold war vets. He confirms that the cow belongs to Mr. QRS.

“Thanks for coming out,” he says, “I appreciate it.”

I thank him and I mean it sincerely. “The girl’s okay?”

“Yeah, just shook up. Car’s totaled though. She’s lucky she was driving that thing and not a Prius.”

By 2 a.m. I’m home again and crawling back into bed. My day will start (for the second time) in three hours, and I need my beauty sleep to face a never-ending list of chores.

What a glorious night. Thank you Lord. My cup for darn sure runneth over.

Natural history

No, it ain't the pelepolonian war.

Stolen from the interwebs

Natural history is the observational study of nature. To “do” natural history is to observe and catalog what is. This is the part of science that comes first, before any hypothesis, experiment or theory.

A few of these pictures are worth (imho) clicking on to bignify.

REALITY. Annual sunflower, Helianthus annuus

These days most folks think -- or appear to think -- that science is all about certainty and absolutes and answers. I don’t want to get too bogged down here in detail and long-winded definitions, but science is none of those things. Science is simply the never ending journey of trying to understand what our universe is and how it works.

NOT REALITY. Not even close.

Before scientists in lab coats can venture into the laboratory to make the smoke, fire, and breakthroughs which lead to publication in peer-reviewed journals, fame, glory and government funding, they have to start with the basics. They have to start with what is.

Scarlet phase prairie coneflower, Ratibida columnifera

Natural history is where you find the “what is.”

The “what is” is reality. It’s the stuff that actually exists. The stuff that really exists is often different than the stuff that is “supposed” to exist, or the stuff the “experts” tell you exists, or the stuff that you wish existed.

Real flower on a real ranch

Here’s  an example of what I mean. I recently looked into participating in a government conservation program. It looked like a good way to leverage some of my tax dollars back into conserving the land and ecosystem asset of the ranch. At the end of the day I chose not to participate because there was far too much risk and uncertainty wrapped up in the program. But that’s neither here nor there.

One element of the program was to plant pollinators to attract and sustain bees and other insects. Good idea. The requirement was to plant at least three species of plants which flowered in each of the three parts of the growing season, spring, summer, and fall. Good idea. I mentioned in passing that as as there were already abundant multi-season pollinators present all over the ranch, the challenge would be to find and introduce new, or at least underrepresented, pollinators.

At which point the expert advised me that I was wrong. A book was pulled out, proving that there were in fact no pollinators present on the ranch.

No real flowers, no real ranches. Experten mit Bücher auf den Regalen.

If you take my meaning here, you will get the point. The pollinators which actually do exist on the ranch are real, and represent the reality of “what is.” The book represents a fiction. A fantasy. The book is paper and ink and exists on a shelf in an office. It is not the “what is” that exists and lives every single day on the pastures and rangeland of the ranch.

Woolly Verbena, Verbena stricta

That’s the real point. Reality is what is. Natural history is the study of reality, the study of what is. Period.

Natural history is one of the things I do. That doesn’t make me a godlike scientist of letters. I’m just a fellow who observes and catalogs and applies rigorous reasoning to hypotheses. In some sense all of us are natural historians, or are at least equipped with the fundamental tools of the natural historian. We each have five senses which we constantly use to investigate our surroundings. We each have a brain, reasoning power and some level of curiosity. Add to these things a systematic and rigorous way of observing and cataloging our observations and, Voila! Natural historian!

Purple prairie clover, Dalea purpurea, with sweat bees, probably Augochloropsis metalica

Farmers and ranchers are accomplished natural historians.

They observe nature every single day. They keep records. They quickly learn that nature is ever changing, never the same.

They see how tiny changes in one part of nature affect the whole of nature.

They understand that there is often an enormous difference between what is and what is supposed to be or what is wished to be or what is demanded to be.

All real natural historians are okay with what is. They’re not terrified of what is, don’t descend into screaming fits of fear and rage when nature doesn’t behave as they wish.

Another way to describe natural historians, I suppose, is grown up.

That’s not to say that I, or farmers and ranchers as a cohort, or natural historians in general, are perfect, godlike creatures who see and interact with reality on a plane far above that inhabited by mere mortals.

Of course not. We’re just people, and like people everywhere have the capacity to be right and wrong, weak and strong, honest and dishonest. I think most of us try pretty hard to be rigorous and honest, though, and most of us are perhaps less susceptible to falling for false narratives. Not because we are better, in any sense, than our fellows. But because we’re fortunate to live in and experience reality every single day. In that sense we farmers and ranchers are simply blessed.

Why does any of this natural history business matter?

For one thing, finding stuff out is fun. For another, finding stuff out helps us survive and prosper and and guard ourselves against disaster.

Hmmm. Guard ourselves against disaster.

Let’s think about that.

If you pay attention to the common narrative, and if you have some small measure of sense, skepticism, and experience, you can’t help but notice that the world is not always the same as it is commonly reported to be.

There are a lot of swindlers out there who rely on fiction and invention to keep themselves in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. Farmers and ranchers know this because every day they stand accused by swindlers of horrendous crimes. Destroying the environment. Murdering innocent animals. Poisoning children. Causing a plague of pestilence and disease.

The swindlers point to fantastic -- that is to say, invented -- evidence. Farmers and ranchers know and understand that the evidence is invented. They know this because they live and exist in reality, not in ink and paper on a shelf somewhere, and not in weighted computer models or in the fevered fantasy world propounded by swindlers.

But what of the non-farmers and non-ranchers? How can they know the difference between reality and fantasy if they do not live on farms and ranches?

What about those who do not live and deal directly with every other narrative crisis du jour propounded by the swindlers? Global warming. Population explosion. Terrorism. Racism. Gun violence. Federal spending. European debt crisis. Nuclear Iran.

As it turns out, there’s an app for that. It’s called the rigorous and honest pursuit of natural history.

Good luck.

High Flight

Shootin' 010

Yesterday I sent my farmer/rancher friend from Herefordshire* a couple of whatsapp videos featuring my trusty Colt M-4 (actually an LEC, the non-selective fire version, but it's my story and I'll tell it the way I wanna). The rifle was being fired by some fat guy.

I thought Elwyn and his friends and neighbors might enjoy seeing a genuine black rifle in all its legal and proper glory.

He wondered whether I needed to have a license and if so, whether it had to be periodically renewed. I responded with a bit about the 2nd amendment and the Constitution. He also wondered how much it cost to shoot.

The answer to that one is about 17 cents per round for the 5.56.

Most importantly, he asked why I didn't show him the target!  :)

Well, I'm just learning this video-graffy stuff. Today I shot the target getting shot, and did a nice little bumbling informational video. Since I'm pretty shy, I had the fat guy stand in for me in front of the camera.

And therefore without further adudes, voila!











Have a great day!












*if ya'll is a kounty kommissar or kounty klark, Herefordshire is in England, and no, that ain't out thar by boston

Dragon Fly Zed and hook a brother up

I was out doing July range and pasture photo monitoring this morning when I came across this fellow skimming above a stock tank.

He appears to be a Twelve-spotted skimmer, Libellula putchella. Very pretty and surprisingly patient with my efforts to photograph him.

What's that? Of course I had my camera with me. I'm never without my trusty new camera. Just like I'm never without my pistol.

Except for this morning, when I had my camera but did not have my trusty Smith & Wesson Shield. That's right, I was running around with a camera and an empty holster. I did have a rifle along though, so I wasn't completely nekkid.

Some of you may recall Chris Kennedy, who made a couple of gust posts here regarding terrorism and his navy career.

Chris is a writer of highly entertaining science fiction tales, and he offers readers an interesting opportunity to appear in one (or possibly more) of his stories.

Those interested can submit their name and subsequently appear as a "Red Shirt" in one of Chris' books. The term "Red Shirt" hearkens back to the old Star Trek television series, where a long list of red shirted crewmen met generally grisly ends at a rate of one per episode.

As you might imagine, Chris' Red Shirts face a similar fate. Which is pretty cool -- an opportunity to have your name immortalized in print and to have the character bearing that name slaughtered in some memorable fashion.

Except Chris has decided to let a few Red Shirts survive. My name finally made the cut for the next novel, and he recently sent me an email offering my Red Shirt character a slim chance at survival.

Who will die? Who will live?

Turns out that it's up to the folks who cast votes. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Will Shaun "Lucky" Evertson survive the experience? Or will he have his brain slurped out by aliens or succumb to some other nasty fate?

Turns out it's all up to ya'll. You can go here if you wish to participate.

It'll be fun either way.

And you might find some fun books to read.

Hustler

Interesting topic over at Sarge's Place, which I read as a discussion about why "gubmint" is off the rails.

Now interestingly, I just happen to be presently dealing with local gubmint that's gone completely off the rails.

Or, if you prefer (as I do):



Don't really want to get into the details now, though I guarantee I will in the near future. Suffice to say that after the meeting I had earlier today, face to face with openly unprincipled and dishonest politicians, bureaucrats and professional government victims, I needed to take a stinging hot shower, scrub down with lysol, and drink a quart of bleach.

As disgusting as the slime is, the problem facing our nation isn't slime. Slime is as slime does. The problem is the sheer number of sovereign American citizens who are perfectly content to let the slime exist and multiply.

Still, it's a bad feeling to look at those people and realize that they don't see you -- in fact cannot see you -- as a sovereign citizen. Nope, in the eyes of the slime you're just a thing, an object to be manipulated.

Need me another quart of bleach just now.

Anyway, on to the main attraction. The B-58 Hustler. Invented to irradiate slime with the MK53BA. Ahh, nostalgia.

S

S

And some pretty cool videos...







Have a great American Day, fellow Sovereigns! Stand by to go weps free on slimy scumbags!