The other day, Kari Dangler told me that she is seeing someone in Key West. I didn't ask who, but figured it was the homeless man who got arrested with her for trespass the last time she was jailed. He was jailed, too. According to Kari, they were given time served by Judge Mark Wilson.
I first learned of Kari running with this fellow from Mike Tolbert, while Kari was in jail. When she called me from the jail one day, I read to her what Mike had written to me. She did not seem happy, but I did not yet know the fellow might be more than a friend to her. I was suspecting that was the case by the time she told me she was seeing someone in Key West.
I told Kari that I hoped the new relationship works out. Her cell phone bill then came due, and when I called her about something I felt we needed to talk about, as part of winding down her and my relationship, a pleasant artificial female voice said the person I had called was not able to take calls at that time. That meant Kari's cell phone bill had not been paid. I called several more times over the following days, and heard the same message.
Grubby respiratory, sinus and throat symptoms then came on me in one afternoon, which I figure has to do with Kari and me coming to an end, at least in human ways. I figure it also is part and parcel of my winding down my long involvement in Key West and Florida Keys political and social affairs. A subconscious grieving, perhaps, as no tears are being shed.
It might also be the many political and social dramas, in which I became involved down there, which did not resolve, coming out of their hiding places in me, en route to leaving me, like the Jim Hendrick Chronicles published a while back at this website. I hope that's the case.
Of the people I met and came to know in Key West, Kari was the closet, by some measure, to my perspective of the interface between the spirit and the human realms. Yet, she did not seem to really want it, while I was engulfed by and it was part of me and my life, like breathing, drinking water, eating, pooping and peeing are part of me and my life.
I heard enough from Kari of her childhood to know that is where the seeds were planted that sprouted into choices she later made, which evolved into her life becoming a quite sad progression of mostly unfortunate experiences, including her now living on the streets of Key West, when she isn't in the county jail on the next island up US 1.
What I know of Kari's childhood causes me to think about my own childhood. Gloria Reiser, my professional psychic friend, recently told me that one of her spirit guides told her that I should write a book about my childhood. I replied that, while there were some bright spots, my childhood mostly was a trail of silent tears, and if I wrote that book, it would be named, "How to Fuck Up a Child". I didn't say it might be a miracle that I didn't go mad and kill myself like my brother ended up doing.
I dreamed last night of the basement of my parents' second home. A boy I had tried to be his stepfather for a number of years was living in the basement. It was shabby. Alone. Lonely. I left. He'd had a terribly rough childhood before I met his mother, a licensed clinical social worker child and family therapist. His father had a PhD in psychology and his own private adult practice. Hardly a perfect stepfather, many times I felt I was that boy's only real ally. His childhood story could have been named, "How to Fuck Up a Child."
Same book could have been written about most homeless people I met and got to know in Key West and elsewhere. They had acute post traumatic childhood distress.
Other homeless people I met were combat veterans suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by their combat experiences in fake American wars. Their childhood stories often weren't pretty, either. They had double PTSD.
I think it's fair to say most people I have known suffered PTSD rooted in their past experiences. What else could explain the wide-spread use of booze and/or narcotic drugs in Key West and the Florida Keys? In America?
What else could explain the character and behavior of President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the Republican and the Democratic Parties?
What else could explain America's fake wars?
Greed?
Do greed, bigotry, religious fanaticism, lives of crime, for examples, come first, or are they reactions to soul wounding?
Why do some people with awful soul wounding turn out okay, or well, or great? Instead of, well, like Kari Dangler and me?
My former stepson reconnected with me maybe in 2010. He was doing great. It started going in that direction when he enlisted in the Navy, instead of going to college, which his parents wanted more than anything. He did not tell them he was going to enlist. I said I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he broke that news to them. We both laughed.
He said the Navy taught him math and cryptology, which is the study of codes, or the art of writing and solving them. He was terrible at math in a private grade school, for which I paid the tuition. I paid for everything he and his mother and I needed. She spent what little profit she made in her private practice on furthering her professional training.
My stepson didn't get along well with many of the kids in the private school. Especially, he didn't get along with the girls. After his mother broke up with me, his father put him in public school, where he blossomed socially, was well liked. But his grades were mostly Cs. The Navy changed that.
When he reconnected with me many years later, he lived on the west coast, as far from his parents as he could be and still live in the continental United States. He was studying physics in a community college, and was deeply involved in producing music. When I was trying to raise him, he seemed most drawn to music, when he wasn't watching TV or playing video games, at which he was very good.
Why did Kari Dangler, the daughter of two high school English teachers, and a former state high school barrel racing rodeo champion and rising basket ball star, end up being an alcoholic, a felon and homeless? Why did I end up being a mystic, and from time to time homeless, after nothing in mainstream panned out for me? I imagine I would have ended up worse off than Kari, if, in early 1987, I had not asked God to help me, and offered my life to human service.
I bet if I spent time with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and they opened up to me about themselves, and they did not jump up and leave the conversation, or order me to leave, pretty soon it would be clear they really are about the same deep down in side as Kari Dangler and Sloan Bashinsky, who were not highly thought of by the mainstream Key West status quo.
My great prep school, college and law school educations didn't come anywhere close to "saving" me.
When I ran for school board in the Florida Keys, in 2012, I harped at my blogs and at school board meetings and at candidate forums up and down the Keys, that the school district was really screwing up having only a college prep curriculum. The high school drop out rate was high. The college drop out rate for Keys high school graduates was high. Many Keys high school graduates who graduated from college, could not find good paying jobs.
I harped that every student should graduate from high school with a trade skill that would support them, and they were fluent in English and Spanish, and were able to touch type. I was the only, of about a dozen candidates, who represented the students's welfare against the status quo.
When I ran for county commission three times, and Key West mayor six times, I was the only candidate who represented Mother Nature's welfare against the status quo.
I was the only candidate who harped banning cruise ships that did not have advanced, up to date, waste water treatment plants on board. It was known that the dirtiest, worst possible cruise ships were calling on West, and they were dumping their wastewater and food scraps offshore.
I was the only candidate who harped the City of Key West Dock Master should stop selling fresh water to cruise ships, which could fill their freshwater tanks at their point of origins in southeast Florida. Key West was drawing all its fresh water from aquifers below and west of Miami, and piping it down through Keys to Key West.
I was the only candidate who harped the local governments and tourist industries should warn visitors that the ocean was infested with MRSA flesh-eating bacteria; that MRSA was pandemic in Key West and the Florida Keys; that going into the ocean with a nick or scratch on the skin was perilous.
The status quo is an interesting thing. It's actually a living organism. It spends a great deal of energy trying to stay the same. It views any effort to change it as life-threatening, and it will use any and all methods, including lethal force as a last resort, to stay the same. The only thing I know that has a decent chance of changing the status quo is God, and even God seems developmentally-challenged in that endeavor.
I left Key West about a year ago, and did not go back. I don't miss Key West or the Florida Keys. I don't miss the dramas down there. I do miss quite a few friends I made down there. But then, I left other places where I had lived and made quite a few friends, and I moved on into the next phase of my totally unpredictable life.
To Key West Police Department.
Some of your officers have had fun making life hard for Kari Dangler. I figure that had to do with her being my girlfriend, and they didn't care for what I wrote about them and KWPD and the sheriff's jail on my blogs. They harassed Kari to get at me. Why else would they selectively harass her? She did not bug them. She did not do anything spectacular to otherwise get on their radar.
Is it because Kari really likes vodka and cigarettes? Gosh, if there were no booze or tobacco in Key West, its economy would crash.
So, I leave those Key West police officers with this question. When your roll is called up yonder, how do you think the homeless man Jesus will speak with you about your treatment of Kari Dangler?
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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