Saturday, December 30, 2023

When are we ever not in church, Eve?

 

    After reading the Apocalypse: the destruction of humanity’s South Pole, Eve post, a dear, old, devoted-to-her-church friend emailed me:

Linda

Did you happen  to listen to Lessons and Carols from King's on Christmas Eve morning?  The first lesson is read by a chorister, as you probably know, and the young boy readers are delightful to hear.  Last year and now this year, especially, the readers have pronounced the words in perfect poetic diction, telling the story of the temptation of Eve and God's discovery of his humans skulking around in the Gah-den.  The perfect spitting out of "The Woman . . ..  ) seemed to me to be a powerful encapsulation of what's still wrong with the world:  It's Eve's fault.   

 

Things become clearer, don't  they? 

 

Later, L. 

 

Sloan

Sorry, Linda, all of that is Greek to me, it’s been decades since I attended church, perhaps never on Christmas Day. I feel no affinity with the church paradigm, but do wonder when I’m ever not in church? What’s wrong with the world, indeed, if you don’t consider the demons, is the feminine is hardly even breathing, and, in the main, that’s in women, as well as in men. 

 

Linda

Don'a apologize, I know you don't attend church services, but the King's College service is loved around the world so I thought you might have encountered it on public radio.  What struck me particularly this time was the energetic diction of "The woman gave [the apple] to me, and I did eat."  He practically spat it out--  "woman" I mean.   

 

I'm not sure I followed your meaning after "if you don't consider the demons . . ."   

 

And yes, the world is the church, or could be, and I must say that I see a lot of theological and mystical writing about that these days.  In the main line, to be sure.  But that has to overcome the paper-thin understanding of God that dominates so many people's lives.  Am I a stuck-up snob? 

 

Sloan

My ignorance exposed, or my memory, I don’t recall ever hearing of the King’s College service. 

 

Very few care to consider demons influence people, which is where you and I disagreed about your minister initially, and you disagreed recently. 

 

I had a Jewish friend once, deep into the New Age and Eastern spirituality. Non-practicing, Jew, therefore, but extremely reactive against anything he perceived as anti-semitic, and I had to be very careful with what I said to him about Jews and Judaism. After I came out of the black night of the soul in 1998, I was told in my sleep to pay him a visit. He lived in California, and I called him and told him about the dream, and he said to come on, he would pick me up at the Los Angeles airport and I could ride with him up to Stinson Beach, where a woman he was dating lived. I said, Stinson Beach was where I thought I might be headed eventually, because I had spent a night there during a long road trip I had taken when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. 

 

After reaching Stinson Beach, which is up the Old US 1 from San Francisco,, we visited some friends of his girlfriend in their home. As he walked across the living room before me, I saw in his right side profile, I saw the countenance of Evil, jagged, black, sinister feeling, and it freaked me out and I said nothing. After he returned to Los Angeles, I stayed in the same motel I had stayed in before. We were talking every evening on the phone. I was using a pay phone near the motel, and an ATT phone credit card. He started hearing direct communications from what he was told were angels, which he shared with me verbatim. That went on about a week.  

 

Finally, I understood I was supposed to tell him what I had seen, but I didn’t know how to. go about it. A discussion of Evil and Lucifer came up, and he adamantly said there was no such thing! I told him about the Jesuit Priest’s Malachi Martin’s book, Hostage to the Devil, which, along with an experience I’d had with my wife in Boulder, convinced me that Evil and Lucifer indeed exist. In the introduction, Father Martin wrote that Lucifer had penetrated the Vatican at a very high level.  

 

My friend reacted. I let it go. 

 

The next night when we talked, he told me that he had gone to a bookstore in L.A. and bought the book, and he was really angry. I said I had not told him to do that, but had only told him about the book. He cooled down. The next night when we talked, he said he’d had a dream the night before, in which his favorite Jewish grandmother came walking toward him smiling, holding Hostage to the Devil out to him, for him to take it. He was seriously subdued on the phone with me.  

 

He started reading the book, and a couple of nights later when we talked, he asked me, “I have a problem, don’t I?” I said, yes. He asked how did I know? I told him what I had seen in his profile. He asked why I didn’t say something then? I said I didn’t think he would hear it, and didn’t know how to go about it. I asked if he realized his problem when he read the chapter about the well-intentioned fellow who had gotten involved in all sorts of esoteric spirituality? He said, yes. Then, he said he was seeing something very dark and sinister, a cape, coming toward him, and he was terrified, and for me to please stay on the phone with him, which I did. He had that experience quite a few more times when I was on the phone with him, when I was at Stinson Beach, and after I returned to Birmingham.  

 

That’s when the angels, through him, invited us to enter “Paradise Mating,” in which we would be given Eve candidates and we Adams would be given a chance to walk hand in hand with our Eves back into Eden, and it would be rough and if we turned away, we would experience the original fall from Paradise, which is unfathomable. My friend said the angels told him a modified version of Paradise mating is available for people who are not heterosexual. 

 

That’s when the angels started healing me of many things, including being molested many times by my mother in my crib. Healing sessions were terrifying, and my friend was on the phone with me every session, sharing with me what the angels were telling him about what they were doing and for what. I then was with my Eve candidate, about whom I wrote some in previous blog posts, who eventually was told in her sleep, “You are not the one,” for Sloan. 

 

During that time, the angels told my friend many things, including, the Jewish diaspora was karma for the Jews rejecting the Christ. He was blown away after he heard that. 

 

His first wife and mother of their girl child died horribly of cancer, and he was put to minister to all of her and his freaked out New Age friends, as well as take care of and minister their daughter, as well as help me. He was put through living hell, and he was doing remarkably well until he had a dream in which he was in the ocean all a horde of black, nasty, large, moray eel like creatures with evil eyes and rows of big sharp white teeth were coming right at him. He was not ready to accept they were parts of himself, and we had to take a break. 

 

I now was with my 2nd Eve candidate, who had been put through the same healing I was put through. Her major wound was being molested for a long time by her father. She was the model for Willas Sue Jenkins in my novel HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale, about which I wrote a little in my MRSA Key West blog post today, which I shared with you and other people. She was the muse for the novel. But I get ahead of myself. 

 

We were sent out of America and had some really interesting and remarkable experiences in Costa Rica, South Africa, Mauritius and India, before arriving on Maui, broke, and then homeless, until an evangelical Christian family took us in and bought us a tent and we did chores around their home, which also was a small inn. We did pretty well until I was told to ask her at what point in time did she become old enough to be complicit with her father, and she came unhinged, and she wanted to separate, and the people who had taken us in told me I had to leave. 

 

The return to Eden is much more difficult for Eve, because of the deep prejudice against her, and women generally, on this planet. That’s why my 1st Eve candidate was told, after it had not worked out, that Adam must anchor into God for both Adam and Eve, and let God discipline Eve.

 

Waking one morning, I was told by Michael, “Go to Big Pine Key.” Later that morning, I got an email from my friend in Los Angeles, who paid for my airfare to Los Angeles, and I stayed in his home and we had a number of really deep discussions, and I got to know his daughter and his Eve candidate, whom the angels had provided. She and I took a long walk and I told her some things, which I felt she needed to know, because she really had no clue what lay in store for her, which I had learned from the angels when came out of the black night in 1998, and was put with the woman I above, who attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Mountain Book and believed she would die and burn in hell, if she did not attend church every Sunday. 

 

Anyway, it came time for me to leave Los Angeles, and my friend gave me $75 dollars, all he could afford, and he put me on a Greyhound bus with a ticket to Key West. After reaching Key West, where I slep at nights on sidewalks and beaches, I found the local county library, which had free internet computers and a pay phone outside. My friend was putting money on my ATT credit card, so we could keep talking on the phone. 

 

He was having a lot of. trouble with his Eve candidate. I asked him if he wanted me to try to get what it was about? Like, a shaman, or someone like a shaman might do. He said, yes. I ended the call, and before I got back into the library, I was told she had been Adolph Hitler in a prior life. I didn’t feel up to telling him that on the phone, so I told him in an email, and he sent an email back ripping me to shreds, and I was stranded in Key West, all alone. 

 

That’s when the three women before the woman I left on Maui came to me in a dream and told me they had been checking around and they thought the best Eve for me was the one on Maui. Later that day, I received an email from her, saying God had told her that she did not need to file for divorce, which I had told her she needed to do, because we were common law married, which is legal in Alabama. Her email pissed me off, and I wrote back something unpleasant, and blew off the dream I had, to prepare me for her email, telling me, even if she did not realize it, that she and I were still in a paradise mating relationship. Stupid man, me. 

 

After I wrote HEAVY WAIT in north Georgia later that same year, I dreamed that my 2nd Eve candidate and I were in a theater in NY City watching the premier of the movie based on the novel. Sitting right being us was my friend from Los Angels, who wanted to read the manuscript. I emailed him about that, and suggested he contact a fellow he knew in L.A.,who made movies, who shared my friend’s a my fondness for the novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. My friend emailed back that his ‘guidance’ told him not to read the manuscript. He gave me his movie producer friend’s email address and I mailed him a floppy disc containing the manuscript. He read it and said he didn’t care for it. I told my friend to read the manuscript anyway, but he declined. We never communicated again. 

 

A few years later, my 3rd Eve candidate, whom I met in Helen, of whom I told you a little many years ago, said she was told in her sleep that my friend in Los Angeles had died. I had told him when i was with him and his daughter and his Eve candidate, before I came to Key West, that I thought he needed to put his daughter in a private boarding school, because she was really angry with him about her mother dying, and I thought she would kill him if they stayed together. There was a large trust set up for her by one of his set of grandparents. He could afford it, but he said he didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I did not mean she would stab him with a knife, but in a spirit way she would kill him physically, and whether or not that is why he died, I cannot say. 

 

As for man-made churches, I had a pretty good friend close to Helen, where I hung out a good bit during the warm months, starting 2001. He was a successful building contractor until he had a rough heart attack and retired and became the minister of a Protestant church near Helen. I attended his church a couple of summers. 

 

He was 100-percent convinced the Devil would get anyone who did not attend church, while several times I saw in his church, the Devil operating In plain view. He could not wrap his mind around when are we ever not in church? So, I asked him one day, how many churches made of mortar, stone and wood did Jesus build? And, where was Jesus’ church? And, when was Jesus ever not in church? And, the minister didn’t get any of it. So, I asked him where did he think the Devil might hide, where no one would ever think to look? He said he didn’t know. I said, a church. He didn’t seem to get it. 

 

Later, I was shown in a dream that he was at risk to another bad, probably fatal heart attack if he kept being the minister of that church. I figured there was no way he would believe my dream, so I wrote his wife a letter and told her about the dream. Not long after that, he asked me in a dream if something a little different would be okay, and I said, yes. I later heard he left that church and took a job with the his denomiation’s equivalent of an Episcopal diocese, and was traveling around visiting and counseling its churches.  

 

It was around that time my friend in Los Angeles and his first wife, who had died horribly of cancer, while I was being healed by angels after coming out of the black night, came to me in a dream. They were happy and smiling, and they said, “We love you, Sloan, and what we most like about you is the way you live!” That was shortly before l learned father had died I headed to Birmingham to live there a while, before returning to Key West for a long while. 

 

So, my dear old friend, perhaps what I have written to you today, and what I put on my blog recently, which I shared with you and with other people, explains why I don’t know when I am ever not in church, and why I simply feel no connection to man-made churches. 

 

Linda 
I do understand that Church is everywhere, and hope that I got that across in my last note.  This last from you is a remarkable story.  I only wish I had a tiny bit of your memory power.

I have another friend who can see and has seen evil.  She can walk into a room and feel it.  I don't think she's had an experience like that for a while, but I could only believe her when she'd describe some incidents.  She and her family are fierce believers in God--  it occurs to me that the Devil really is after Jenni because she's so good and has such spiritual gifts.

I won't belabor this because it makes you ill--  but you're obliging me to think about the possibilities of real trouble with our minister.  Many of us in the congregation think he's struggling with something that he can't shake.  Time will tell. 

Sloan 
It came to be that nearly every time I attended a church service, I felt the palpable presence of Evil.

Yes, people like your friend become very interesting to Lucifer/demons, and they need to be very careful, is how I was trained. Catholic exorcist priests are taught about that risk when they are in the rites of exorcism training, and perhaps even before that.

Perhaps your friend will attend a church service with you and observe your minister and tell you what she is picking up?

Two years ago, when you and I discussed your minister and I told you to make a ruckus about it in the church, I was attacked by a demon, which made me ill. As did absobing into me the trouble in your church and in you regarding the church.

That happens every time I engage something grubby humans are doing :-).  
 
Ciaosky, dearestsky  
 
P.S. I told about the 4th Eve candidate in this podcast.


Ciaosky, dearestsky 
 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

if you go to Key West for a visit, you perhaps should know the waters around it and the Florida Keys contain MRSA flesh-eating bacteria and you need to take precautions before you dive in


Fort Zachary Taylor State Park

Key West

2017

    The day after Christmas, my younger daughter and her family flew to Key West for a vacation. She is a medical doctor. Before they left for Key West, I told her that the waters around Key West and all of the Florida Keys are full of MRSA, and she and her family should wait 24 hours after shaving, before going into the ocean. I told her to have hydrogen peroxide handy, to treat any nicks or scratches they got on the skin while diving, swimming or fishing in the ocean. I told her that doctors and divers in the Keys know the ocean is full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, which is fatal, if not properly treated.

    From Wikipedia:


Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a group of gram-positive bacteria that are genetically distinct from other strains of Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. It caused more than 100,000 deaths worldwide attributable to antimicrobial resistance.


    Representative photos of MRSA abscesses, I found among many more by google searching MRSA images online:

    For over a week, I have dreamed of being in Key West, doing something, but I could not figure out what, or how the dreams applied to me now, up here in Birmingham. Had yet another dream (last night) about me being in Key West. The rear tire on my bicyle was low on air. There were old familiar faces, including 5-time mayor Craig Cates. during his victory celebration party after he won the first time, without a runoff, in 2009, Craig thanked me for that outcome, as did his campaign manager. At candidate forums, I had told the audience, if they didn’t vote for me, then vote for Craig, who was born and raised and had lived his life in Key West.

    Ruminating on all of that this morning, my thoughts drifted to what I still think isthe most important issue facing Key West and the entire Florida Keys: the sea waters there are full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria. This is known to local divers, who carry hydrogen peroxide with them to dab on any nicks or cuts they get on their skin while diving. It is known to local physicians, who treat MRSA infections all the time.

    I learned of MRSA in 2003, when nasty abscesses erupted on either side of my penis and on my right buttock. I was sleeping nights in a tent in the wetlands near the city’s airport. At that time, the city had a free medical clinic, run by Dr. Ian Garriques, a retired infectious disease specialist. His clinic was in the local hospital on the next island above Key West, known as Stock Island. After seeing my abscesses, Dr. Garrizues got onto the hospital’s internal telephone and talked with a local surgeon, named Michael Klitenic, who came straight away to the free clinic and examined me. Dr. Klitenic called on the hospital phone and arranged emergency surgery that evening. I left on my bicycle and came back into town and went to the local Florida Key Outreach shelter, run by a non-profit, and was assigned a bed, for I could not sleep in a tent and safely recover from the surgery.

    That evening, I rode my bicycle back to the hospital and checked in and was assigned a room. The anesthesiologist came by and asked me if I was allergic to any anesthesia? I said don’t use a valium, unless he wanted me to sleep until the next day. He said he didn’t think it wise to use a spinal block, because if the MRSa had entered my blood and body fluids, the needle might transport the MRSA into my cerebral-spinal fluid. I tsaid had been a massage therapist and cranio-sacral practitioner, and I knew about that risk, and I agreed that he should use general anesthesia.

    After the surgery, I had three gaping holes in my flesh. Dr. Klitinek came by my room, examined the wounds, said I could do anything I wanted to do, except go into the ocean. I didn’t ask him why, but I figured he didn’t think the ocean was sanitary, as it was well known to be infected with bacteria found in human shit.

    I was put on a very powerful antibiotic, which tore me up internally. As those three surgery wounds slowly healed, I got a new huge MRSA boil between my anus and my testicles, and back to the hospital I went, to the ER, where I was attended by Dr. Garirques’ medical partner, whose name I do not now recall. He said he agreed with me that MRSAc can be passed by human contact. He lanced the new MRSA infection and injected it with an antibiotic and gave me a new prescription.

    The three surgery wounds slowly healed, and 4th infection subsided, but new MRSA infections kept appearing on my skin, and I went to see Dr. Garriques and he prescribed another round of antibiotics. The abscess healed, and a new abscess showed up, and back to Dr. Garriques I went. The newest MRSA abscess was on my right hand.

    I told Dr. Garriques that we both were professionals and he could level with me. Did medicine have an answer for MRSA? He said he had talked with doctors all over America, and medicine did not have an answer to MRSA. I said that must be really hard on him, who had devoted his life to healing people. He looked like he might cry. He wrote a new script for the same antibiotic he had prescribed before. 

    That night in my sleep, I had a dream that caused me on waking to think I should take one day’s dosage of the new prescription, and then stop taking it and see what happened. So, that’s what I did, and as days passed, the new MRSA lesion began to recede, and after about 20 days it was healed over.. There was no way in medical science that infection could have healed, which left me to pin the cure on angels. That, and no new MRSA boils appeared on my skin.

    In 2004 or 2005, Dr. Garriques published a letter to the editor in the Key West Citizen, which was read all over the Florida Keys, that MRSA was being treated by doctors throughout the Florida Keys and was pandemic in the Keys.

    Around 2007, a friend of mine shaved one morning, went for a swim in the lagoon in front of his home on Summerland Key, and a few days later he had a MRSA abscess on his left cheek. His doctor prescribed something that finally got rid of it. Perhaps by then, Keys doctors had learned that prescribing several antibiotics, rotating between them every few days, along with steroid injections to shock MRSA, finally would prevail?

    In 2009, a MRSA lesion came up on the right side of my belly, after I got into a fracas with Mayor Morgan McPherson over something regarding his wife, who was lovely and a very respected educator in the local system. There had been a scandal in the school system, and law enforcement had interviewed everyone but Morgan’s wife, and I wondered out loud on my blog, goodmorningkeywest.com (no longer available) why that was so? 

    Morgan was a very large man, and that night in my sleep, two huge gorilla football players slammed into my right side, and when I woke that morning, my low back was out and I would be weeks recovering from that. Meanwhile, the MRSA abscess appeared on the right side of my belly, and I wrote about that on my blog, goodmorningkeywest.com (no longer available).

    A woman friend, who read my blog told me to go to CVS and buy a small jar of Vaseline petroleum jelly, generic would do, and a bottle of red iodine, and get flat kitchen knife and scoop out a small hole in the petroleum jelly and fill the hole with red iodine, and use the knife to poke and mix the iodine into the jelly, until the entire concoction was pink, and then I should apply a dab of that to the MRSA abscess 4 times a day. She said no bacteria can survive iodine. She said to store the remedy in a cool, dark space, with the lid tight, as air and light diminish idoine’s effectiveness. In about 2 weeks, the MRSA wound was healed over.

    I shared that on my blog, which was read all over the Florida Keys. 

    A friend told me of a physician up in Marathon, about 50 miles up US 1 from Key West, who had developed a band-aid with iodine on the patch, to treat MRSA. I got his email address and  emailed him about the petroleum jelly-iodine cure. He replied that it he wasn’t interested, because he could not make money off iodine and petroleum jelly.

    There was a hugely popular public forum at bigpinekey.com, called The Coconut Telegraph. Its owner had created my blog for me. I published a lot in that forum over the years, and some people there liked me, and a lot of people there really didn’t like me. 

    Around 2011, I published on the Coconut Telegraph what I had experienced with MRSA, and that local divers and physicians knew local waters were full of MRSA, and the risk of going into the water with a nick or scratch on the skin. I described the petroleum jelly iodine remedy, and was blasted by several Coconut Telegraph readers, who said I was full of shit and should be ignored.

    A reader then wrote on the Coconut Telegraph that he was a professional diver and Sloan was correct, local divers knew the ocean was  full of MRSA.

    A couple of weeks later, a woman on the Florida West coast published at the Coconut Telegraph that she lived on the Florida West coast and was going crazy over not being able to be healed of a MRSA abscess on her skin, and she read what I had published on the Coconut Telegraph and she used it and her MRSA was gone and her sanity and life were saved. 

    I posted at the Coconut Telegraph that the local governments, lodging industry, ocean sports industry, and the Tourist Development Council needed to be warning visitors to the Florida Keys about the horrible risk they took by going into the ocean with a nick or scratch on their skin, say, from shaving. Visitors enjoy their trip, go home, have a MRSA outbreak on their skin, go to their doctor, begin fighting for their lives, and they and their doctor don’t have a clue how they got it.

    Nothing came back from Coconut Telegraph readers. 

    The Florida Keys economy then, and today, is totally dependent on tourism. 

    During the 2014 Key Westmayor’s race, in which I was a candidate, there was a candidate debate on a popular local radio station. I told the listening audience about the MRSA problem in the ocean and that tourists needed to be warned about it. Incumbent Mayor Craig Cates said I was wrong, Key West waters were clean and beautiful and safe - Ya’ll come! I shook my head.

    Around 2016, a homeless man I knew well contracted MRSA and was put into an intensive care room in the hospital on Stock Island. I rode my bicycle up there a couple of times to visit him. He was hooked up to IV drips. He said he was getting one antibiotic, then a different antibiotic, back and forth, to mitigate MRSA’s ability to mutate. And, he was receiving a steroid for a while every day, to shock and weaken the MRSA. He was in the hospital about 3 weeks, as i recall, before he was released. He did not have a recurrence of MRSA.

    MRSA was greatly feared by homeless people in Key West, who knew about it. A long-time homeless man there told me that back in the old days, homeless people kept vinegar handy, to pour on a cut, nick or scratch on the skin, to prevent catching MRSA.

    Many times I saw homeless people in Key West with gauze bandages around their wrist, arms, ankles and lower legs, which meant they had MRSA. After the homeless shelter was built on Stock Island in 2005, homeless clients with MRSA were segregate from other clients.

    During my time in Key West, I became very good friends with a couple who published Key West the Newspaper, thebluepaper.com. Naja was American, Arnaud was French. The blue paper relentlessly rocked the establishment boat in Key West and the lower Keys. The blue paper had a very large reader base, extending into the U.S. mainland.

    Arnaud operated a salvage boat and was in the ocean in diving gear as part of that business. He caught MRSA. He and Naja knew how very difficult MRSA was to treat, and how expensive going into the local hospital on Stock Island would be. Since Arnaud had dual citizenship, he flew to a French Island in the Caribbean, where he was treated in a hospital for a lot less money than he would have paid at the hospital on Stock Island.

    Earlier this year, I realized something that I had not understood when I lived in Key West. I realized osquitoes were Mother Nature’s first line of defense against the invasive species, humans. Mother Nature’s second line of defense was occasional kick ass hurricanes. That kept invasive species somewhat in check.

    Eventually, the invasive species created a Mosquito Control Board, which acquired aircraft and helicopters and modern insecticides, which got rid of most of the freshwater breeding mosquitoes and made Key West and the Florida Keys far more comfortable for the invasive species, and far more attractive to real estate developers.

    As did widening of US 1 and building a much bigger diameter freshwater waterline from the mainland to Key West. Before the new waterline was built, real estate development was dead, because new construction could not tap into the old waterline, which was maxed out.

    After the new waterline was built, development exploded in the Florida Keys and Key West. Septic tanks and cesspits were all over the keys, as were people living on boats and dumping their raw sewage into the water. 

    The raw sewage, and the silt from bulldozing roads in new developments and dredging new canals, drifted out to the beautiful reef, which began to die, to the point that 95 percent of it was dead when I arrived in Key West in 2000, homeless.

    Also in play, the Florida Legislature declared the Florida Keys an area of critical environmental concern, and new residential real estate development permits were tied into how fast the Keys could be evacuated ahead of an incoming hurricane. The faster the Keys could be evacuated, the more new residential building permits could be issued by local governments, and the more hotels and motels could be built.

    The local Keys governments and chambers of commerce said they were trying to save lives by enabling quicker evacuation before hurricanes, but the real reason was to please developers.

    I had loved the Florida Keys since my family spent spring break at the Ocean Reef Club on the upper east end of Key Largo, That’s when I fell in love with fishing the flats for bonefish.

    We came back the next year at spring break, and stayed in Islamorada, where I caught my first bonefish, and was totally hook, line and sinker gobsmacked in love with fishing in the Florida Keys.

    In 1963, my father bought a home on the Atlantic Ocean on Lower Matecumbe Key, in lower Islamorada. That’s when I learned to pole my own boat and catch bone fish all by myself.

    Back then, the Florida Keys truly were paradise.

    In early 1995, angels sent me to Big Pine Key, where, whenI was in law school, I had caused a large Tarpon near the Old Wooden Bridge remains after a fire burned it mostly down. During that 1995 trip, on the new concrete bridge, I had a vision that nearly ripped my heart out: that since I loved the Keys so much, I would be used to try to protect them.

    I ran the first time for the Monroe County Commission in 2006. My campaign mantra was, “No more new development, period, the end. The Florida Keys already are way-over-developed and there is not a person living here who can look in a mirror and honestly say otherwise."

    At a candidate forum in Key West, I was asked what did I think of the talk about making Mosquito Control part of the county government again? I paused, said, I would get rid of Mosquito Control, because I think the chemicals it uses are more dangerous than the mosquitoes. The incumbent county commissioner sitting beside me, chuckled, said, “That would create a lot of affordable housing.”

    It that context, it occurred to me earlier this year that Mother Nature took high offense to being raped in the Florida Keys, and She responded with MRSA, and early this year, 2023, I wove all of that into The Return of the Strange, which was the sequel to the novel, Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale, which fell out of me in April-May-June 2001, in Helen, Georgia, where I spent nights in a tent on a friend’s land that summer, to get away from the Key West heat, mosquitoes and hurricanes.

    The Preface of Heavy Wait explains how it was inspired by a dream I had while sleeping in a doorway in Key West, featuring that friend, who was a street performer I had met in Key West earlier in 2001. In the dream, he was riding a 6-foot unicycle and juggling and he was teaching me how to do my own street act. The next time I saw him was Helen. He was doing his act on the town square, riding a 6-foot unicorn and juggling. 

    We had dinner afterward, and then returned to his home outside of Helen, where he said he had heard I wrote books. I said, yes. He asked if I had ever written a novel? I said, yes, three. He said he had a great storyline for a novel, did I want to hear it? I said, yes, He told me the storyline and ask, if I could write that novel? I said, yes, I had lived the first half of the story line in 2000. His jaw dropped.

    Heavy Wait is a really wild ride that starts off in Birmingham, Alabama, and wends its way down to Port St. Joe and Apalachicola, Florida, then back to Birmingham, then to the Oprah show, and then to the Caribbean island, Dominica, then back to Birmingham, and ends up with the disbarred lawyer hero Riley Strange in a north Florida prison, and his 2nd wife, Willa Sue Jenkins, who looks just like Rile’s 1st wife, Mary Lou Snow, who died tragically, writing to her good friend Oprah, who made Willa Sue and Riley the most popular people in America, with a great deal of help from President George Bush and his Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who had Riley prosecuted for saving Willa Sue’s life and her sanity.

    Return of the Strange takes up where Heavy Wait left off, and then all the gloves come all off after Oprah and Larry King and their legions of fans are chanting “Riley for president!” and “Willa Sue for First Lady!”, while on Oprah and Larry King Live Riley is eviscerating America at war and the invasive species, and on the Coconut Telegraph he is evicerating the local governments in Key West and the Florida Keys for lying down and spreading their legs wide to developers hell-bent on destroying Mother Nature’s beautiful Florida Keys.

    Both tales can be read for free at the internet library, archive.org. Heavy Wait should be read first. Here are links:

https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212

https://archive.org/details/retun-of-the-strange-v-20_202306


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