Grandfossil's Tales to His Grandchildren is a free read at archive.org

  

  Grandfossil’s Tales to His Grandchildren, which began at grandfossil.blogspot.com, now is a free read in English and about 33 other languages at the internet library, archive.org, 585 pages. A zoom-in button allows old tired eyes read it on any internet device.

Grandfossil’s Tales To His Grandchildren : Sloan Y. Bashinsky Jr. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

    From my good friend Bob in Tech Support, who formatted and digitized the book, and put it in the free internet library:

"This elegiac book serves as Sloan Bashinsky's own unique brand of last will and testament. This collects a summation of his beliefs and recounts his analysis of both mortality and morality. Sloan pulls no punches and there are no sacred cows: be it religion, wealth, poverty, homelessness,  politics and politicos. The throttle is wide open all the way on this ride with the Redneck Mystic Lawyer.

    The first chapter, aka the Introduction. 

Tuesday, February 25, 2024

A different sort of last will and testament

 

    Okay, baby fossils, once upon a time, the first of you was born and your father called me in Colorado, where I then lived, and asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me, and out of my mouth popped, “Grandfossil”, and that’s how your having a dinosaur for a grandfather began.

    A while before, I had escaped from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., which really liked having an actual live dinosaur in residence, because it attracted a lot of people and helped the Smithsonian raise lots of money to fund their search for others of my kind. I didn’t mind being stared, gawked and pointed at day after day, but I did mind being cooped up all the time in such a small place, after having roamed with others of my kind all over America for a very long time.

    So, I started getting grouchy, and I started growling and roaring at the spectators, and finally the zookeepers at the Smithsonian asked me what it would take for me to be nice to the parents and children who came to gawk at me, and I said I needed to be allowed to go outside and roam around a little each day, and not to worry, I would be nice and would not eat any humans, and I would evolve and become a vegetarian and nibble grass and leaves off bushes and trees.

    The zookeepers said okay to that, if I would wear a tracker on my right hind ankle, in case something happened to me and I couldn’t get back to the Smithsonian, and they would know where to bring a crane and a flatbed truck to haul me home to safety. I agreed to that, and they put a tracker on my hind right ankle, and I was allowed to leave out the back door after the sun went down and there was much less chance of my being seen. I moseyed down a dark ally and came to a large what I later learned humans called a dumpster, and I gnawed off my right hind foot and the tracker, and started growing a new right hind foot, and I’ve been on the lam every since.

    While I have not yet eaten even one human, there were plenty of times when I wanted to eat quite a few of them, especially some lawyers | got to know pretty well. But I had made a promise, and keeping my word was really important to me, and I didn’t eat even one human, but I did nibble on them sometimes, and I liked doing that, and I nibbled on more of them, and I liked doing that, and so I became accustomed to nibbling on humans, and even though some of them didn’t like being nibbled, I couldn't help myself, because I still had those ancient meat-eating genes stored deep inside of me, and nibbling humans was how I kept those genes happy enough that they did not eat me alive for trying to be something I was not.

    So, that’s how it began, before you were born, and that’s how it went after you were born, and that’s how it will go for a while longer, until | leave for the Great Beyond, but I won’t be gone entirely, because of all the tales I will leave behind of how I nibbled on humans, and even became very close to some of them, including your mothers and their husbands and you baby fossils, but also quite a few other humans who became very dear to me. And, yes, there was your mothers’ older brother, who died in infancy of what then was called crib death, which later became known as sudden infant death syndrome, aka SIDS.

    I was leveled by his death, but I knew he had not died but had only left his body and gone in the Great Beyond and was doing very well. Even so, it took me a very long time to understand that he had done what he came to do, which was to so disturb me, that | would never, regardless of how much I tried, be able to fit myself into the plans my parents and grandparents and even I had for me. Thus began my evolution into a grandfossil, which took a very long time, and it was not easy, and often it was awful, but my star's course was set and there was nothing I could do but go with it, even as many people I knew became convinced I had lost my mind, and sometimes when it got really rough, I felt that maybe I had, but something seemed there that kept poking and prodding me, and sometimes encouraging me, and I kept lumbering along and nibbling.

    

    As time passed, I got where I no longer could physically romp around and play various sports like I once did, and I returned to playing the card game known as bridge, which my parents had taught me, and I found bridge clubs where I lived and played there, and I made lots of friends doing that, and some not good friends. I later took up playing chess, which had terrified me all of my life, because of how stupid it made me feel. But after a voice I knew well told me in my sleep in early 2005, that I needed to learn how to play chess, I knew where people played chess, as I had been watching them, and I started playing chess with them, and I must have lost a thousand games before I won one. Today, I play chess with several old farts, whom I really like.

    

    Bridge and chess were something I could take with me wherever I lived, and exercised my brain and maybe helped it stave off feeble mindless. Bridge and chess became the major aspect of my social life, after I got too old and feeble to dance with and date women, if any were around who wanted to have dealings with a dinosaur. I had met a few women along the way, who did want to do that, and they woke up something new in me, which I did not know existed, as had the women I loved before them, dating back to my first wife, your grandmother. They enriched my life. The last of them passed away in 2022, and then I did a podcast about her called, “Homeless cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurricane Irma obliteration.” A whole lot of people around the world watched that podcast. 

    Hurricane Irma is what led to my deciding to move from Key West back to Alabama, and how that came about you two older baby fossils’ mother can tell you all about.

    Meanwhile, a few days ago, I ordered online two Poetic Outlaws T-shirts, one to wear, the other to hang on a hammered nail somewhere in my apartment, which has a variety of artistic impressions hanging on walls and anywhere else they can find purchase. The T-shirts arrived yesterday and I hung one of them beside the front door of my apartment.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com