A different view of the war in Gaza

Gaza

    Okay young’ns...

    According to what my mother and other family members told me, my great grandfather Leopold Bashinsky was a Polish Jew who came to America in the latter 1800s. Later, one of his brothers came over. They settled in Troy, Alabama.

    Leopold married a Southern Baptist woman, and they raised their children in the Baptist church in Troy, which Leopold attended, but he did not convert. During World War II, Leopold's family in Poland were killed by the Nazis.

    Among other things my mother and other family members told me about Leopold, the townspeople of Troy brought their disputes to him, for him to resolve, instead of to the town lawyers, because they trusted Leopold to decide what was fair. His wife had engraved on this gravestone, “God’s noblest creation is an honest man."

    I reported what I was told by my mother and other family members about Leopold in the “He Was a Nobel Creation” chapter of A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN, which now is a free read at the internet library, archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210

    My mother’s parents were Southern Baptists, and that’s how I became a Southern Baptist until my mother became an Episcopalian and took her children with her to that church. Eventually, I stopped attending church. Her Episcopal minister is described in the “He was a parish priest” chapter of that book. My mother told me that when Lee's vestrymen decided to hire off duty Mountain Brook police officers to block blacks from worshipping at St. Luke’s, he told them, if blacks could not worship in the church, he would close it.

    My college sweetheart, your grandmother, and I did not raise your mothers in churches, but let them decide how to find their own way in life. One of your mothers married a Jewish man she had known since childhood, and she converted to Judaism and I was fine with it. I dreamed last night about her and me doing something, which was not going to be pretty, then later in the night I dreamed of her wearing a beautiful white pearl necklace.

    When I lived in Key West, my lawyer, who was a good friend, was a younger Jewish man, who now is a city commissioner. He told me one day in his office that it didn’t bother him that I talk about my dreams, because Jewish people believe dreams come from God.

    Although I had Jewish friends in childhood and later, I am not very familiar with the Jewish religion as it is practiced today. Nor am I particularly familiar with Israel, other than some things I see on television and read online. 

    I have long felt it was a shame that Western Europe and America did not give sanctuary to the European Jews after World War II, and I have long felt there will be strife in Palestine for so long as the State of Israel exists.

    After Hamas launched a raid into Israel on October 7, 2023, my 81st birthday, the mystic in me figured the odds were 100 percent that I would get involved.

    I saw an article by retired American international war correspondent Chris Hedges and paid to subscribe to his Substack newsletter with a very large following, and I began commenting under his posts. 

    I then received a subscription to my Substack newsletter from the Australian political commentator Caitlin Johnstone, who invited me to subscribe to her Substack newsletter, which was free or pay, and I subscribed for free, and began commenting under her posts.

    At both places, I received a lot of criticism for saying Hamas realized it could not beat Israel and its benefactor America in a land war, and the October 7 raid was clever bait, which Hamas hoped would cause Israel to respond as it did, so that the entire world would turn against Israel and America. I blamed Hamas, as well as Israel and America, for the obliteration of Gaza.

    I finally decided to quit participating at the Hedges and Johnstone forums, and to ensure that I would stick to my decision, I blocked both of them from my email account. But today something from Johnstone got through.

Caitlin Johnstone’s Newsletter

Aaron Bushnell wasn't addressing the Israeli government with his soul-jarring message. He wasn't even addressing his own government. He was addressing you. Each of us. His goal was to get us all to open our eyes to the horror of what's happening, and spur us to action to end it. 

    Here is what that is about:

Published: 02.27.2024

Extremism, Terrorism & Bigotry

From: Center on Extremism

On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, approached the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and set himself on fire to protest the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, saying he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His act of protest has garnered praise from anti-Israel groups and foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). 

Bushnell is the second person to self-immolate in front of a U.S.-based Israeli government building in protest of the war: in December 2023, an unidentified woman was critically injured after setting herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. 

Bushnell livestreamed his protest on Twitch; his account has since been removed. As he walked towards the embassy, Bushnell said to the camera, "I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”  

Once outside the embassy, Bushnell placed his camera on the ground and poured gasoline over himself. As he burned, Bushnell repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine!” until he collapsed to the ground. Bushnell was transported to a local hospital and later died from his injuries. 

    Below are some reader comments under Johnstone’s post, followed by my comment, which is typical of how I engaged in online political discussions since just after 9/11.

Roger

Or, like the Son of Sam, he was addressing voices in his head. Perhaps it is best to wait to learn more about this young man before you rush to martyr him. Either way, may he rest in peace.

miggety

He stated his reasoning very clearly, there is no mistaking why he did what he did. Additionally, as a person with military clearance on the level with which he had, he would have been subject to rigorous mental evaluations, so his mental health was fine. Honor his memory by avoiding making unnecessary and presumptuous comments online and fight for the liberation of our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

dikran’s Newsletter

Yes. I wonder if the effort of the rather Christian project of justifying the extraordinary Western genocides as the will of God, does make psychopaths of all monotheists? They have all done it, though Judaism and Islam are but young in deed, eager to catch up. Netanyahu’s enthusiasm is revolting. And the reliability of the pretext: Oct 7th. See Jefferson on Native Americans west of the Appalachians. It’s in our dna. Using the Terrorism Card, over and over. 

After the messy back and forths with most of my friends about Joe Biden, I conclude every time by saying I am stunned by his behavior. Trump I’d expect it, even Obama, definitely Clinton, both of them, but I thought Joe too primal, too base too unslick. Cunning them christians.

AJMIII21h

U must have just now heard of Joe Biden because he has been this way since he came into Senate

Margaret McGowan

That’s why the media have blanked him out. No front page news or top TV item … either silence or character assassination that he was an anarchist & crazy religious nutter. The usual response when someone discloses the stark truth.

Porfirio

Mishima. Venner. Bushnell. He is in the company of Samurai.

spingerah

There is a lot of criticism of this kid because apparently he was in contact with antifa and had some fairly pedestrian tweets in the past.

While he may have been a leftist his action undeniably has and will cause many people to look closer at what is happening to the people in Gaza. It's too bad we live in a world of spin & the spin I have seen so far is revolting. If you have a friend and that friend is doing something that will cause them great harm & possibly end with their death, in my opinion if you are really a friend you must try to get them to stop. The genocide that is happening may be obfuscated for now but that may change. Lies usually do not work out well in the long run, a simple lesson childern are usually taught. What is happening in this instance will probably not be good for Isreal,

Sloan Bashinsky

Looks to me Bushnell acutely addressed the Israel and American governments in the most graphic way possible, and to say it was for you or me entirely misses his point. As does someone here questioning Bushnell’s sanity.
Bushnell knew exactly what he was doing. He did what you, I and nobody else were prepared to do. He got off his internet connection to do it. But did that impress Netanyahu or Biden? I doubt it. Did it impress God? I don’t know. But it certainly was more impressive than a jihadist suicide bomber killing a lot more civilians than his own selfish self, certain it was God’s will.
On CNN this morning, so it must be Zion- America propaganda?:-), IDF troops opened fire and killed and wounded many people in a food line in Gaza and IDF is investigating. Such horror will continue, unless Israel and Hamas get over themselves and choose peace over war.
Joe Biden has been a hawk for a very long time. He is a devout Catholic, who does not know the Jew Jesus in the Gospels. Biden’s skewed religious programing and his dislike of jihad Islam forces him to side with Israel, and his growing criticism of Israel is ridiculous in the face of his continuing to give Israel dollars and munitions.
Donald Trump told Israel he is their best friend, so where does that leave Gaza, Palestine and The Middle East if Hamas and Israel do not get over themselves and choose peace over war?
It’s on Hamas and Israel to end the obliteration of Gaza, and from all I have seen in the news and at your and Chris Hedges’s Substacks, neither side wants peace in Gaza. The American religious right want Israel to obliterate islam in Palestine and the Middle East.
You live in Australia, Caitlin, and while you have a large following, you have no sway over American politics. Nor does it look to me that you understand American politics. Nor does it look to me that you understand Israel, Hamas and jihad Islam.
The war in Palestine is biblical, rooted in the three Abrahamic religions’ scriptures. For so long as the state of Israel exists in Palestine, there will be strife there. There is nothing you can do about that. There is nothing I can do about it. There is nothing anyone but Israel and Hamas and Islam can do about it.

God has nothing to do with any of it. Anyone who claims otherwise is delusional.

    So far, no one replied to my comment, which never happened before at Johnstone’s forum.

    I cannot imagine any mother in Palestine not wanting the war in Gaza to end. Nor can I imagine any mother in Palestine starting that war. Men, well history has proven they seem to really like war.

    Three nights before 9/11, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke up and made the prayer. On 9/11, my concern was America would start another foreign war like the war in Vietnam. It not occur to me that America would attack both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

    A few days after 9/11, Michael told me as I was walking out of the U.S. Post Office in Key West, "America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether and let Islam and Israel work it out, or fight it out, and in that way learn, which, if either, are God’s chosen people."

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

C.S. Lewis wrote that God whispers and shouts to a deaf world, and I hope I have listened good enough - otherwise my illusions, delusions, collusions, conclusions, near misses and some direct hits are all I have left

 

    Once upon a time when I was hitchhiking near Helen, Georgia, where I spent the late spring and summer and Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale fell out of me about as fast as I could type on a desktop computer in the Helen public library, I was given a ride by a fellow who later read the Heavy Wait manuscript and did not decide I was batshit crazy. 

    When later I lived in the trailer on Little Torch Key and was running the first time for the county commission, John sent me a couple of hundred of these decals, which he’d had made many years before.

    The other day, John said he would send me a few more of the decals, and he texted me yesterday, the same day President Biden got 618,426 votes in the Michigan Democratic primary and Uncommitted got 101,100, and Donald Trump got 756,851 votes in the Republican primary, and Nikki Haley got ⁦294,884.

John

Enjoyed reading Tiny Kingdom Blacksheep on archive.org. Non-political stickers in Post Office. President’s Day indeed, it seems that presidents and Angels used to be more robust. I would be happy to share my copy of Heavy Wait with your new chubby buddy, if you want to let her hold it in her hand, instead of read it online.

Me

Thanks, but if she don’t have the gumption to read it online, maybe that’s a sign?

John

We are too old to share our illusions. All the best!

Me

😎 Shoot, I’m so old that my illusions, delusions, collusions, conclusions, near misses and some direct hits are all I have left.

John

Agreed. I am ready for your next book, Heaven Wait. By the way, who is Jake Carruthers? [author of Kundalina, Alabama]. Long ago abandoned nom de plume? Birdie’s last name was McClaine or similar. Just curious. [Birdie was the street performer in Helen who gave me the storyline for Heavy Wait, half of which I had lived the year before]. 

Me

Nom de plume, initials, J.C.😎

John

Oh yeah

Me

Maybe another novel is in me, time will tell.

The three novels at archive.org [Kundalina, Alabama; Heavy Wait; Return of the Strange] about heaven and other stuff on earth await meanwhile. 

 

Kundalina, Alabama
https://archive.org/details/kundalina 
(1992) 

Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale
https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212
(2001) 

Return of the Strange (sequel to Heavy Wait)
https://archive.org/details/retun-of-the-strange-v-20_202306
(2023)  

 

Last night, my best friend in the Florida Keys, who kept egging me on to run for public office down there, whom I doubt read even Heavy Wait, sent me a C.S. Lewis meme about God’s way of trying to wake up the dead, which I thought was both funny and depressing, and I told him it left me wondering why anyone should even try? Yet, C.S. Lewis kept trying to reach Christians.

I dreamed before dawn this morning of needing to loft a soft pass of a football to an old childhood friend, who was not Christian inclined until he married a devout Christian lassie. I was a groomsman in their wedding and told my wife after the ceremony that I had lost my best friend.

During a dark night of the soul, he went to work for her father and made a shift that I imagine pleased his soul, but I can’t imagine him crying to hold my novels, nor spending time chatting with me. In fact, I bumped into him twice recently at my eye doctor’s office and it was as if he didn’t recognize me.

 

Last time I saw him before that, he showed up at the front door of my trailer on Little Torch Key. His wife and another couple were in a rental car. The woman in the other couple was in my Birmingham city high school homeroom class. She had tried to recruit me to come to Birmingham for a class reunion, which morphed into a Birmingham Country Club event, even though I was the only kid in our homeroom whose parents belonged to BCC, which convinced me to decline to attend the reunion.

They declined my offer to join them for dinner that night in Marathon. I wondered how they had my street address to plug into the rental car GPS?

His older brother was calling me from time to time back then, and it seemed from the way he talked that he was in some kind of facility and his younger brother was trying to help him.  

 

The older brother and I became good friends when I practiced law in Birmingham, after I introduced him to his wife, who was a neighbor whose divorce from her 1st husband I had handled.

That’s another sad mere Christianity story I could best tell on my laptop...

On my laptop...

    I finally concluded the older brother’s wife was a black widow in disguise after she was done with him and he went into a 3-year black night of the soul, which consisted of him sitting on a couch in his living room every day and into the night until it lifted. He then engaged the world and seemed to be doing okay, until he wasn’t doing okay. 

    I think he, but perhaps not his younger brother, would have appreciated what John and I sometimes discussed: When are we ever not in church? 

    The longer I live, the more convinced I am that, in the main, what Jesus in the Gospels said and did went in one ear and right back out the same ear.

    From Poetic Outlaws today:

The Empty Boat

By: Chuang Tzu

POETIC OUTLAWS  
FEB 28    

To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders. 
- Chuang Tzu

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty.

He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.

The straight tree is the first to be cut down,

The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.

If you wish to improve your wisdom

And shame the ignorant,

To cultivate your character

And outshine others;

A light will shine around you

As if you had swallowed the sun and the moon:

You will not avoid calamity.

A wise man has said:

“He who is content with himself

Has done a worthless work.

Achievement is the beginning of failure.

Fame is beginning of disgrace.”

Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace. He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty.

Chuang Tzu was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States period of ancient China. He is considered one of the key figures in Daoism (Taoism), a philosophical and religious tradition that emphasizes living in harmony with the Dao, often translated as "the Way."

Thomas Merton once wrote about Chuang Tzu: “His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane … it is basically simple and direct. It seeks, as does all the greatest philosophical thought, to go immediately to the heart of things. Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself …”

Sloan Bashinsky
Well, I sure flat ass flunked the empty boat test :-) As did Buddha and Jesus. However, did Chuang Tzu become an empty boat, who achieved nothing and nobody recognized him? If so, how do we know about him today? :-)

The other day, someone who deals with lots of people where he works asked me why I keep tangling with messed up people online, and I said it gives 81-plus-years me something to do besides watch even more TV and read even more news online and talk even more to myself. It’s a job, for which I don’t get paid, whereas he gets paid to deal with idiots where he works.

For me, Poetic Outlaws is the place I visit online, where people seem to be swimming against the herd currents, seeking to be who they really are, which actually is a whole lot easier than trying to be someone else, which requires just about all of our energy to pull off.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

I moved from small open air insane asylum Key West back to multitudes flew over the cuckoo’s nest Alabama

 

    I mostly lived in Key West from 2001-2018. Locals called it The Conch Republic. Before I lived there, the city briefly seceded from the Union, until it realized it depended entirely on FEMA to resurrect it after being clobbered by a big hurricane. 

    Locals also called Key West, Key Weird, where the weird go pro. I viewed the city as an open air insane asylum, where you couldn’t get locked up for being different, and unlike Hotel California, you could leave any time you wanted.

    A small city, Key West had people from many ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, and I concluded it was a proxy for the rest of America, and as Key West went, so went America. 

    I was wrong.

    Although Key West had a lot of churches, about 1/5 of the adults living there were not heterosexual and the religious right had very little sway. A lesbian Democrat living in Key West was elected to the city's county commission seat. A lesbian Democrat was elected to the city commission. Now she is the city’s mayor.

    I was further wrong.

    Key West voted Democrat in every national and state election. Perhaps that dated back to the Civil War, when Key West was a Union port, but the locals sympathized with the Confederacy.

    I was further wrong.

    Even the professional weirdos in Key West thought I was weird.

    In the late fall of 2018, I moved back to my home state Alabama, which bills itself as The Heart of Dixie. 

    Montgomery was the Confederacy’s capital. 

    When I was growing up, Alabama voted Democrat in national and state elections, until the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress and President John F. Kennedy and the Alabama National Guard and President Lyndon Baines Johnson de-segregated Alabama, and Alabama morphed into a Republican stronghold.

    Today, Alabama is MAGA country. 

    Today, Alabama is right-wing religious freak country. 

    What the fuck am I doing here?! 

    In Al.com’s Down In Alabama today...

Embryos and an alleged fetus

It's good to see y'all back, and I hope your weekend was a good one.

It's no surprise we're going to pick right back up with Story No. 1 in the state right now -- the legal status of embryos and its effect on in vitro fertilization.

Thanks for being with us.

Ike Morgan

Embryo-gate raged on through the weekend, even taking up time on Saturday Night Live, for anyone who might've been watching.

Heading into the weekend in Alabama, Democrats introduced a bill in the House and Republicans in the Senate said they were preparing legislation to preserve in vitro fertilization in the wake of the state Supreme Court's ruling that interpreted a state law as giving human embryos the same rights as children.

Gov. Kay Ivey also said she was working with lawmakers to preserve IVF.

Within days of the court's ruling, some clinics stopped providing IVF services. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said on Friday that the AG's office had "no intention" of prosecuting anyone using the procedure. That prompted some, including Hoover Republican Rep. Susan DuBose, to lean on clinics to restart IVF treatments, reports AL.com's Sarah Whites-Koditschek.

Note that while the AG's promise may have eased concerns over criminal prosecution, this issue arose from a civil case over destroyed embryos. 

 

to fetuses (or a lack of, in this case)   

AL.com did a story last year on the extent to which Etowah County has arrested women who allegedly used drugs while pregnant. It's happened more there than anywhere else -- 250 over a 10-year period -- and led to some women spending much of their pregnancy in jail.

Now, reports AL.com's Amy Yurkanin, a woman recently settled a lawsuit against Etowah County Sheriff's Office employees over being jailed for endangering a fetus that didn't exist.

According to court documents, the woman spent 36 hours in jail and wasn't pregnant at all. Apparently, her young child -- who does exist -- told a case worker that the mom was pregnant.

Young'ns, man.

According to court documents, the woman offered to take a pregnancy test but it didn't happen. Terms of the settlement were not released.

I emailed Ike:     

Your IVF and imaginary pregnant woman in jail howlers today, and what I already knew about The Make Alabama Great IVF FUBAR, left me laughing my ass off and wondering when the Jesus never knew me freaks in the Alabama Legislature will pass legislation to reopen Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa to shelter themselves and their birds of cuckoo feather Supreme Court justices and like-minded dodo bird Alabamians from the bright sunlight, which would reveal the truth that would set them free, if their heads didn't permanently reside where the sun never shines.

    In another of my 81-year-old play pens, Poetic Outlaws:

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

81, with its physical aches and pains, waking up each morning wondering why I’m still here? Still hoping a miracle will cause my body to feel better, or the death angel will take me home, or somewhere new, to spare me what no beloved old, suffering pet has to endure. Living alone, a monk, all but a few months since late 2000, engulfed in metaphysics day and night, in all the way but not of this world, what woman could endure that regimen with no end? Lightly, what is that? Remember, I cannot. Perhaps it’s possible? I haven’t a clue. Is romance possible? Will viagra work? I haven’t a clue. Do I even want to try? I really don’t know. Back in the day, I would be all in.

Lasita

Lasita’s Substack

Sending love; sorry I cannot do it in person... but perhaps you can feel it.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Maybe in person, I might go into cardiac arrest and depart this plane and see what happens then? :-)

    I went to Lasita’s Substack to see what was there:

Openness and Love

LASITA

AUG 12, 2023

How do I live my basic principles? Also, how do I continue writing a post? Being a newbie in this practice, makes it difficult. I feel a need to share since so many people are feeling similar emotions these days and to know we have support is important. I met a friend today on my walk by the Santa Fe River: Rachamana, and she asked me; "how are you feeling hope in these times?" I acknowledged that it was very challenging, especially since the invasion of Ukraine.

Lasita

I will keep adding comments UNTIL I work out how to publish new posts.

Today I want to share a LESSON from one of my Spiritual Teachers: HERMAN REDNICK. 

This is from Volume 1 of EARTH JOURNEY, p. 629

BROTHERHOOD

To break the hypnosis and see with a clear eye, imagine for a moment that you love everyone here. There is no criticism or resentment. Your heart glows and you are grateful for the person sitting next to you. You have no fear of how anyone will react or of what they think of you. For a moment you let the divine fire within your heart glow. You feel a sense of joy and freedom you never felt before. The hypnosis that gripped you in the past and your resistance to people is gone. Now it is not your personality but your true self coming through the heart. You experience what it means to truly love your brother. You realize that in the past you were in a state of bondage through a state of hypnosis. You can now taste the pure joy and freedom that come from love without reservation.

mantra:

I love my neighbor.

His (Her) soul and mine are one.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

I dunno, I just get up each morning and face the day and whatever it brings, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, and even the horrible sometimes, doing the best I can, being as real as I can, which Includes sometimes getting angry and wondering what’s the point? Because I am somewhat woke after 81 years and climbing, what I see, in the main, looks like SNAFU progressed to FUBAR and even past that to FIDO. But I keep waking up each day, so I’m still supposed to be here, and since I can’t do a lot of things I use to do, I do what I am able, which kinda reminds me of a line out of a Rolling Stones song, "You can’t always get what you want, but you always get what you need," which kinda reminds me of the title of a Gloria Steinem book, “The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off."

This came to me as I was moving into something new in 1995.

Love without Truth

is mush

Truth without Love

is harsh

They live together, 

or die

I then proceeded to forget all about that and ended up in a black night of the soul, which made an earlier dark night of the soul seem wonderful. But, if I had not experienced the back night, I might not have been able to cope with what came after it, which was, well, not exactly a bed of roses, but it was a lot easier than the black night. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

The Old Man and the Sea presents at a starving writers as a mystical experience conference

 

   In an American novels course my senior year at Vanderbilt, the professor seemed to admire Ernest Hemingway’s novels about maintaining grace under fire, and the professor said we knew when the bad guy showed up in a Hemingway novel, because he didn’t drink. Hemingway was well-known for drinking, writing and fishing in Key West, Cuba and Bimini.

    When I lived mostly in Key West, late 2000-2018, I sometimes was urged to enter the Hemingway contest, in which inebriated old white men with white Ernest Hemmingway-like beards, wearing Orvis fishing outfits, stood on a stage hoping to be chosen the winner. Sometimes I said I wouldn’t enter the contest, because I knew how to write and fish, and I didn't drink.

    Yesterday’s post about a tale of a Pleiadean colony in Kundalina, Alabama, whose hero didn’t want to practice law, and two tales about a chubby redneck gal with anger issues and her lover boy lawyer with angel issues, who didn’t want to be president, garnered a response from a fellow in nowhere Nebraska, who might have a bright future disturbing the status quo far beyond where the buffalo once were said to roam and the clouds were not cloudy all day.

Free Radio Rulo 

@bigjim777

100 subscribers

Free Radio Rulo

By Free Radio Rulo

Backwoods, vegetarian, off grid, eco-socialist, Big Jim operates a pirate radio station and publishes a newsletter from an old Wonder Bread Truck in rural Rulo, Nebraska.

Free Radio Rulo

God speaks in strange ways through art! Any other substances involved my dude? Sounds like a my kinda novel!   

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Naw, other than body fluids :-), of which there are plenty in parts of Kundalina and Heavy Wait, but not so much in Return of the Strange, which wriggled up out of me last year, after all the blooms had fallen off the roses, so to speak. 

 

Free Radio Rulo

When the divine works through you ya just gotta let it flow brother! I can't imagine ever writing a novel, that must be an experience! 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Based on what I have read of yours, your Muse is working on you pretty darn good, and that’s why I took a shine to you. There might be a novel or two or three in you, and if She shows up in that way, go with her wherever she takes you. 

 

A couple of years before Kundalina, Alabana started showing herself to me, I was invited to be a speaker at a writer’s conference at Birmingham Southern College. I then lived in Colorado, and by then was deep into my writings being steered by something much bigger and smarter than me. Out of the blue, it came to me use “writing as a mystical experience” for my topic, and then I was swamped with looking at Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the last novel he completed, as his unconscious suicide note. The boy left behind at the dock was young Hemingway whose father had no time for him. The great marlin was Hemingway’s manhood. The sharks were his feminine, come to take back what he had tried so hard to prove to himself, and the the cancer that would eat his brain until he manned up and killed himself.

That was my spiel during the first day of the writer’s conference in a small seminar room. There didn’t seem to be much interest. The 2nd day, I had the entire conference for my audience, and I tried again, and there didn’t seem to be much interest in writers writing about themselves unawares, and I was feeling stuck, when someone asked me what I did about writers block, and I said I didn’t get it. When there was something to write, I had to write it. When nothing was coming, I did something else. And that’s when it got interesting. 

About a year later, Kundalina started showing up and I typed maybe 100 pages, and then seemed to dry up and I put her aside. I was playing golf at different public golf courses, picking up playing partners at the pro shop. One day, I was put with two men, one lived in Alaska. I asked him if he knew a fellow from Birmingham, who was a college fraternity brother of mine, and then he went to law school, and ended up making a whole lot of money suing auto manufacturers in Alaska, for defective products? The man said he knew the lawyer very well, they were good friends. I said my early childhood next door neighbor sweetheart and the lawyer became an item, and then it didn’t work out and it was rough for them both. The fellow said he had not heard of that and he would be sure to bring it up when he returned to Alaska. I advised be careful, it was a big owee for his friend.  

The next morning, I woke up feeling like an idiot. That little girl was the model for the heroine in Kundalina. I went back to work on the manuscript, and after completing a draft, shared it with the desktop publisher lady, who had gotten my book Prisons & Freedom ready for printing. She read the manuscript and said I had done a good job on the hero, Riley Strange, but not on Mary Lou Snow. I needed to bring her to life. So chastised, I brought her to life. 

A friend in Birmingham read Kundalina and asked my clinical social worker Sandplay therapist wife where in the hell did Sloan fiend Mary Lou, he was in love with her?! Betty told him, Mary Lou is a part of Sloan. 

About a year later, two novels showed up at the same time and I wrote on both of them each morning and finished both on the same day. Br’er Rabbit Meets the Devil and Krazy Justice were wild rides, too. But before they could be published by a vanity press, Betty said she wanted time apart and my world imploded and I left America for a while and those two novels eventually were lost. 

How something a lot bigger and smarter than me caused me to write Heavy Wait about as fast as I could type it is explained in the beginning of that strange tale about two very different Rileys and Mary Lous, and a redneck gal named Willa Sue Jenkins. I thought when it was done that there would have to be a sequel, but it didn’t come, and it didn't come, and finally it came last year. 

The Muse is different for each writer, poet, novelist, etc. I describe how the Muse is for me. 

A little while before the two lost novels were coming up out of me, this came:

He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow, she clings to him like fine silk, precious oil, she feels solid, compressed, like a black pearl growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life. 

 

Free Radio Rulo

Wild! I would have enjoyed the Hemingway analysis. So some of your characters often turn out to be parts of your subconscious? This all reminds me of James Joyce for some reason. Is he an influence of yours? Who else influences your style? 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

When I read Joyce several lifetimes back, so to speak, he was much too deep for me to grasp. If there is a writer who influenced my writing style, it was Tom Robbins, whose novels Just Another Roadside Attraction, Jitterbug Perfume and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues left me kinda jangled and enamored. But I think it was Hemingway sho perhaps planted a seed in me that caused me to fantasize being a writer someday. 

 

I wonder if my father had it to do over, he would have urged me to take a typing course during my first year in high school? He said he had found being able to touch type was valuable in his business life. Some things I wrote to him and about our family did not please him. But my goodness did being able to touch type make it so much easier to shoot off my mouth on paper and computer screens. 

 

My writing style evolved as time passed. Professional book editors and a creative writing class helped some in the beginning, Then angels helped some. That kind of editing wasn’t much fun for me, but I fortunately was able to accept it as constructive. 

 

That was before the poetry and novels came. They had their own style which I suppose was buried in me, asleep. 

My writings always were out of the box, disturbing the status quo. The first two poems, which I will fetch, set the tone.

I wrote maybe 50,000 pages of blog posts. Starting 2019, some of the blogs became books, but the novels were stand alones. I did not sit down and dream them up. They dreamed me up. Same with the poetry, and some prose that just up and came out of me.

"Living Poets” 

Dead poets are poets who never write
Who obey shoulds and oughts
Who live to please others
Who value money over God
Who die without ever having lived
Death is their mark 
Dead poets are remembered by the living.
Living poets are remembered by time
Dead poets never sing their song
Living poets never stop singing it 
The difference between the two is this:
One worships fear, the other life 
To be a dead poet is hard
It requires being someone else
To be a living poet is easy
It only means being myself 
One choice is hell, the other heaven
That is what is meant by free will 

(1991)

"The Mockingbird”

I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off –
I asked it how and why it sang?
But all it did was look ahead,
all it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
or asked if I liked its music,
or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
Thus did I learn
the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

(1992)

If you read the novels Kundalina, Heavy Wait and Return of the Strange, you will see and feel very different writing from what I post at my Substack and blogs. And you might wonder when it’s made up, and when it isn’t. But then, not a few times I have been accused of making up my non-fiction books and blogs, which often are stranger than fiction :-).

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com