on being an irreverent no good deed goes unpunished nature lover monk at Key West, Little Torch Key, Birmingham, Alabama, Poetic Outlaws and Rulu Free Radio, Nebraska

    After reading the To face life stone cold sober and let truth, beauty and love breathe, or not, that is this poetic outlaw’s question post, a neighbor lady friend told me that I should be a monk in Tibet. I said I am a monk in my apartment. In a dream last night, she said I should spread this cheer more often:

    The poet Robert Frost lived in Key West for a while and was viewed as Key West's Poet Laureate until the Key West Poetry Guild, to which I belonged and recited and read my own poetry at its monthly meetings, decided to name a new poet laureate every year from a list of local poets. Although I sometimes recited three poems that had just up and leaped out of me before I arrived in Key West, and poems that upped and leaped out of me after I got there, I was not selected. Boo hoo.

 

Only fools rush in
where angels fear to treat
but if there were no fools 
who’d lead the angels?

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Yes, please tell me, who, just who, invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn’t the makeer of the first stone- otherwise, there’d be no stones to break all those slaving rules!  

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.
the greatest sin of all
is to kill a mockingbird.

    Key West was covered with mockingbirds. 

    The Robert Frost poem below reminds me of my own meandering journey, except I didn’t wait for another lifetime to take the other path.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

    Thanks to Erik Rittenberry, I attend a poetry guild meeting every day in the living room of my apartment. In my email inbox this Sunday morning:

Into the Timeless Woods I Go 

By: Erik Rittenberry

POETIC OUTLAWS
MAR 10, 2024
The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness. 
--John Fowles  

 

Woke up this morning with an
agonizing urge
to be an absolute nobody
in a world gone mad
with everybody trying
to be a “somebody.”
To be unknown and unseen
like a distant star in an
undiscovered galaxy, a dandelion
loafing beneath the sun
in some deserted pasture,
to be an anonymous
breeze that rustles the
ferns of an ancient
forest at the edge
of the world.

Ah, yes...
To be far away, adrift and alone,
sauntering in a leafy alcove,
"where Nature moves, and
Rapture warms the Mind."
To get out there beyond the
perimeter
of this barbed wire civilization,
far removed from worldly
titles and deadlines and the
delusional drudgery and
pandemonium of endless
ambition.

To be barbarically alive, to savor
the pure lifeblood of our primitive
marrow, to cleanse myself
of the filth of steel-and-asphalt
reality, to resuscitate the inner
archaic spirit, to unite the conscious
with the shadow and allow
grace to devour what’s left
of my iridescent heart.
Into the timeless woods I go
where the moonlight illuminates
the infinite peace of things. 

I go to the woods to dance barefoot
like a demented shaman in the muck
of the meadows. I go to the woods
as an antidote to modernity,
to wander at ease among
the wild geraniums and thickets,
unearthing the primordial
savage within.

I go to the woods, in the words
of Thoreau, “to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what
it had to teach, and not, when
I came to die, discover that
I had not lived.” 

 

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter

Very nice, Erik. Kinda reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden, but I think his place was pretty close to a town, and I gather from what you have written here before that you are kinda removed from towns?

Did you ever read James Galvin’s The Meadow, in which he depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border? If not, I think you might really like that book, which I read maybe in 1992, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. The Meadow is set on a remote farm and iis about the different people who lived there and what they experienced.
I once had a trailer on a wooded lot in an abandoned, barely developed subdivision in wetlands on Little Torch Key, which, along with the key deer, raccoons, possums, feral cats, wild rats and scorpions, centipedes, and other bugs, and ground and mourning doves, and seagulls and pelicans, and ospreys and bald eagles, and buzzards and man o' war birds, and hummingbirds and redbirds, and other birds, and fresh and saltwater mosquitoes, and various lizards and corn and indigo racer snakes, and the vegetables and fruits I and Mother Nature grew there, was my version of Walden.
But I had a car and did not stay home all the time, and in fact that car and my cable TV and the internet kept me well connected to a very busy world, with which I interacted daily in online forums and in restaurants, bars and city and county government meetings, and sometimes in churches and other people’s homes.
Living in the trailer with a half feral, half crazy, cross-eyed animal shelter rat cat, who kept the woods rats out of the trailer, got me used to living alone. No lady in my life, except one brief afternooner with a biker chick, and in that sense, the trailer was my monastery, where at night, when the wind was favorable, I could hear the passing road traffic on US 1 about a mile away, and music from a roadside honky tonk.
I think, at 81+, I’m probably too old now to try what you are doing, but I used to love to hunt and fish, and I lived many moons in tents, although not way out in the middle of nowhere, and I did spend a week on a lake in a tent with two friends, fishing in the Canadian wilderness boundary waters above Ely, Minnesota, and I know what truly wild nature looks like. I saw plenty of Her when I trekked two weeks around Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal, in 1995. 
But, alas, I was born a city boy, and it looks like that’s how I’m going to live out my days. 
Fortunately, the old 50s vintage apartment building, where I have lived three times in Birmingham after I quit running away from home, has a lovely park across the street, which has very large old trees, and the city has let the shrubs grow wild and brambly, and the park as an energy vortex in it, and sometimes I sit there and let whatever lives there, which is not recognized by science, nor by religion, take me on rides that cause me to feel like I have entered another, lovely reality, which people walking by me sitting on a park bench cannot fathom, nor why I am sitting there with my baseball cap pulled down to shield my closed eyes, and I know they are walking by me and I am somewhere else entirely.
Two large owls live in the park, and they attract a lot of attention from passersby. Lots of chipmunks and squirrels in the park for the owls to eat. I saw a peregrine falcon swoop in toward the momma owl's baby and then see the momma owl and hightail it elsewhere.
If I did not have the internet and spectrum TV, and friends I play chess with and a duplicate bridge club where I play several days a week with some pretty interesting and fun people, and other kinds of people, I might spend more time in that park. Or, I might go batshit crazier than I already am. 
But, it seems, my lot is to stay engaged with the world for a while longer, even as I go to bed most nights hoping the Lord or the Mother Ship with fetch me in my sleep, because I really do not cotton to the notion of living in an old folks home, unable to get into my car and escape for a while😎  

 

Poetic Outlaws

Appreciate it Sloan. I actually live in a small town but I do make a lot journeys into the wild. I have solo trip coming up hiking all throughout the Smokies. It's in nature where I find the necessary solace to exist in this mad world. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Good for you. I get up each morning wondering why I’m still here, then I crawl out of bed and deal with what today brings until I turn in at night. I never did nature retreats, as such, but I loved being on a stream, pond or lake, or at the sea, fishing, it was my passion and solace for a very long time, and then it wasn’t there any more. I got the same relief working in my garden and paddling white water rivers, which held me together as I was moving away form practicing law. After the spirit stuff started happening, there was no where to go to get away from that :-), but I often did drive a little ways to some remote place and sit on a rock or under a tree until I fell asleep or went into an altered state and stayed there some more. For sensitive people, much of what goes on is rough, and the more empathic a person is, the rougher it is, as such a person absorbs the surrounding vibes, energies. I have a friend a generation below me, who can barely stand to be around people, because she picks up inside herself what is going on with them. My G.I. tract picks up what I'm engaging that isn’t lovely, and as I work through it, the sewage treatment plant surrenders and I start feeling better until the next time, which is soon. There is a guy on Substack named Radio Free Rulu, whom you might like, if you haven’t found him already. Truth, Beauty, Love breathe pretty good there, too. 

 

    In my email inbox three days ago.

Best of All Possible Worlds

By: Arthur Schopenhauer
POETIC OUTLAWS

MAR 7

 “Life is deeply steeped in suffering, and cannot escape from it; our entrance into it takes place amid tears, at bottom its course is always tragic, and its end is even more so.” 

—Schopenhauer 

 

We have been investigating the primary, elementary characteristics of human life at the most universal level, with a view towards convincing ourselves a priori that human life is dispositionally incapable of true happiness, that it is essentially a multifaceted suffering and a thoroughly disastrous condition. 
Now we could arouse a much more vivid conviction in ourselves if we wanted to take a more a posteriori approach and deal with particular cases, evoking images and giving examples of the unspeakable misery that both history and experience show, wherever and however we look. 
But then there would be no end to this chapter, and we would be removed from the standpoint of universality that is essential to philosophy.
If, finally, we were to bring to the sight of everyone the terrible sufferings and afflictions to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror.
If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeon of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of a world is this "best of all possible worlds." 
For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours?
Still, I cannot hold back from declaring here that optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only an absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity. 

Do not think for a moment that Christian doctrine is favourable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels, 'world' and 'evil' are used as almost synonymous expressions.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Maybe Dante found some of that hell in himself, as well? 

In one part of my life, the serious part, it looks to me that, in the main, humanity has proved Darwin got it backward, in that humans did did not descend from apes, but devolved from apes. In my “normal” life, I have several areas where there is a good bit of social interaction, which mostly is fun and I like a lot of the people. But mostly, I can't talk about anything serious with them. I feel fortunate to have one person I can discuss really serious shit, level of soul stuff, as well as human miseries and not of this world stuff he and I experience ongoing. Based on what he reports being told by angels known in the Bible, humanity is not doing very well. 

    Like I can’t see on television and in online news articles and forums and in conversations with people I know what is going on?

    Such is not usually the case a Poetic Outlaws, nor at Free Radio Rulu, Nebraska, which graced my email inbox with yet another priceless yarn yesterday. Click the link to be able to enjoy the accompanying music😎.

The Day the Music Died
Short Story by Jim

https://freeradiorulo.substack.com/p/the-day-the-music-died?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2162994&post_id=142438563&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8wjd3&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

FREE RADIO RULO
MAR 8, 2024

Flash W Peterson was a beloved local eccentric from my hometown of Rulo who had to navigate town on a lawn mower due to his poor vision preventing him from ever obtaining a proper driver's license. Out of work and facing tough times, Flash found himself in need of a place to stay. Fortunately, his good buddy Garland came to his aid, offering a lawn mowing job and a place to stay in his old the camper parked in his backyard. Garlan extended an electrical cord to the camper so Flash could have access to electricity for the basic necessities. 


Anyway, Flash had quite the setup in the camper. He was a vinyl collector and an audio enthusiast who loved to tinker with sound equipment. With a $10,000 stereo system and a priceless turntable, Flash created a haven for all night music lovers. He often invited friends over late at night to enjoy the high-quality sound of his stereo system and indulge in some recreational uppers in order to really feel the music.

Flash was a huge fan of club music, particularly the beats from the 1990’s UK scene. Every night he'd blast "Born Slippy" from the movie Trainspotting on repeat, transporting himself and his friends into a euphoric trance. They'd lose themselves in the music, waving glow sticks and embrace each other with good vibes and shared cosmic consciousness. Even on weeknights, they'd keep the energy high, dancing and chewing on pacifiers until the early hours of the morning in Garland's backyard camper. Flash even created his own “Extended Born Slippy Mix” he preformed on special occasions. 

Anyway, as you might have guessed, Garland, the owner of the camper, wasn't too thrilled about the constant noise and the soaring electric bill from Flash's late-night escapades. Garland ran his own mowing business and had to wake up early every morning for work. However, Flash often didn't emerge until noon, too hung-over to do any mowing or even run the weed whip. 

This increasingly irritated Garland. Not only was Flash not paying rent, but every night, the relentless pounding of his "Born Slippy Extended Mix" tested Garland's patience. He also felt somewhat resentful that Flash never extended an invitation for him to DJ the party. Garland would have loved to spin some Grateful Dead deep cuts, smoked some tiny little rolled marijuana doobs with the boys after a long day of mowing. Maybe he would have put on his boot leg of "Dark Star" from the Fillmore East on February 13, 1970.

Anyways, the invention never materialized, and one warm July evening, Garland reached his breaking point. In a fit of rage, only halfway through Flash's “Born Slippy Mega Mix”, Garland abruptly pulled the extension cords plug from the camper. From that moment onward, every night at 7 p.m. sharp, the power to Flash's camper was cut off, and every night Flash sat alone in the dark of the camper, a broken man, in silence. While ole Garland smoked tiny little weed filled doobies in his living room, vigilantly watching the camper in the backyard like a hawk very content with himself listening to the Dead.

Sloan Bashinsky

Liked by Free Radio Rulo
Fucking priceless, The Grateful Dead, indeed - No good deed goes unpunished revenge :-)

 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com