OK, younguns, if your America has gone batshit crazy and you wonder if you matter, what’s the point...

    OK, younguns, I know, because I been there, that you don’t think and go about things the way I do, and that’s okay, but a time will come, I won’t be around, but hopefully you will, even though the way America is going right now, with an addle-minded Gaza genocide president who won’t let border states defend themselves from the southern invasion, and his want to be king and get revenge pussy grabber opponent who says God sent him and thinks his wife’s name is Mercedes and the president is Obama, you might have moved to Tortola, Jamaica, Great Britain, South Africa, New Zealand or Australia, all of which I have visited, where English is spoken, so you can BREATHE, so you can TALK, so you can LIVE, so you can be YOU, without worrying about DEATH THREATS from American NAZIS singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. You will need a passport.

    Ok, younguns- I wrote this description below for a book coming out of me, Grandfossil’s Tales to His Grandchildren. The book is like a last will and testament disposing not my worldly belongings, but some of my musings and experiences. The chapters can be read at grandfossil.blogspot.com. When the book is completed, it will be a free read at archive.org, which already carries a number of my non-fiction books and three of my novels, all of which might be viewed as stranger than fiction by some people :-).

Ok, younguns. Confession time. I went back to 1994 to hijack the title of this unfolding book from the husband of my oldest daughter, who called me after their first child was born and asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me? I said, “Grandfossil,” and that stuck. 

 

Confession time again. I hijacked the title of this book from the Eurasian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s 2nd book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandchildren, in which Gurdjieff is Beelzebub recounting for members of his spiritual movement how he matured from being not so smart and wise and what he learned along the way and what they might wish to take from it and use for themselves. 

 

One of my best college friends went to work for the New York Environmental Agency in Albany, New York and his first assignment was to clean up the Love Canal, which was a chemical waste dump. After some years, he was running that agency. After 20 years, he retired and went to work for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. 

 

One day, he told me that he was the guy who decided what chemicals farmers put on the foods I ate. He retired from that job and went to work for a company that was trying to raise awareness for the environment in America. He told me they had concluded that most adults were impossible to reach, so they were going into lower, middle and high schools, hoping to reach children. 

 

So, yes, I hijacked his environmental company, too, because the spiritual food every person has to deal with, one way or another, consciously or consciously, is the social, religious and political pollution of themselves and the human species, which process Gurdujieff called “The Work”, which I came to be involved in during my 45th year, not because I was smart or devout, but because I was totally desperate, out of bright ideas, and felt I had failed in every way a man could fail.  

 

In that wretched state, I prayed one morning in early January 1987, “Dear God, I do not wish to die like this, failed. I offer my life to human service.” About ten days passed. I woke in the wee hours, maybe 2 a.m., and saw two white, shift-shaped beings hovering above me in the darkness. I figured they were angels. I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you.” I remembered the prayer I had made and saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical. That happened two more times. The beings faded out. The time elapsed was about 10 seconds. My body was shaking and sweating. 

 

Slowly, in phases, I was turned upside down and inside out and every which-a-way but loose. I was stood before endless mirrors looking at myself. Some of it was wonderful, sublime. A lot of it was horrible. My way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving myself and people and the world around me completely changed. If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone. It helps to know it happened to others. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

March 2, 2024

Birmingham, Alabama, USA 

    Ok, younguns, if you don’t want to worry about what already happened, or what lies ahead, which the Jew Jesus certainly advised in the Gospels, because each day has enough trouble of its own; if you just want to get up each morning and deal with what is dead in front of you as best as you can, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, through the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, the flag is still there, although a bit tattered, upside down even; if you wonder if what you think, say, hope, dream or do matters, consider this Beauty that landed in my email account yesterday, and my comment under it. 

Let this Darkness be a Bell Tower

By: Rainer Maria Rilke

POETIC OUTLAWS

MAR 3, 2024

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes 

more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Amen.

Without mystery, it would be pretty darn boring, and what would be the point? 

Everything said, written or even thought ends up in some kind of record, somewhere, like a giant library. 

Spider Woman is a tad larger than the internet web. 

Looking hard in the mirror is quite different from looking elsewhere.

The fearless searching moral inventory is not a best seller most places, but moves adventuresome souls faster than the speed of light.

The second fastest way to move backward is to become a programmed robot, and the first fastest way is to then join a herd..

Decartes finally figured out that he existed by saying, I think, therefore I am.

A broken heart proved many times that I existed, as did get hitting with a line drive in the balls when I was 11, and my infant son dying of crib death, and quite a few other emotional things.

I don’t need to think, to know I exist, but darn if thinking hasn’t caused me a lot more problems than feeling.

I think I’m gonna have me a good cry some day about why my soul wanted to have so many painful experiences this time around, but then, there were lots of wonderful moments, too.

But every time I planned, God seemed to laugh.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com