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.
JohnEnjoyed 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.
MeThanks, but if she don’t have the gumption to read it online, maybe that’s a sign?JohnWe 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.JohnAgreed. 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].MeNom de plume, initials, J.C.😎JohnOh yeahMeMaybe 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
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