Sunday, June 30, 2024

writing as medicine

  

    Two days ago, medium.com invited its members to apply to present at an online workshop. I applied and offered the topic: Writing as a mystical experience. The requested summary of me was at my Goggle profile: 

After many moons, this southern lawyer took a road less traveled, which his family and friends viewed as stranger than fiction. I cannot prove any of it happened, and I would be crazy if I thought I could. The good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, of and not of this world, as I and other people experienced it.

    For the theme of my presentation, I offered: 

Although he sometimes he tries to write fiction, when the tale is told, every character is a character in him, ever plot a plot in him; there are no surprises- only his to discover parts of himself he has lost, forgotten, thrown away, or never even knew were there. In this way, perhaps God and he are somewhat alike: they both create to discover just who and what they really are.

    I will be advised of acceptance, or not, in a couple of weeks.

    In a dream around dawn today, I was told by a woman I did not recognize that the best hospital in Birmingham is at Birmingham Southern. Sitting in folding chairs off to the left were two very old people, whose skin was all dried up and crinkly, and they were almost black from aging. In my spirit code, left is female, right is male. I write left-handed.

     Birmingham Southern College had an excellent reputation as a liberal arts university, but did not have a medical school. Recently, Birmingham Southern closed because it wasn’t taking in enough money to cover its expenses. 

    I have noticed that my old worn out ailing G.I. tract, which is serpentine shaped, thus female in my spirit code, seems happier when I write about stuff that makes my soul sing, laugh and even cry😎. Writing about politics is like digging a ditch in a stinking swamp.

    In 1990, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, a Birmingham publicist I had used for my first three books, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?, Selling Your Home $weet Home and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client’s Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers, had a woman employee, who was a writer and a book editor. I hired her to help me shape up THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems.

    By and by, the editor asked me if I would like to present at a two-day writers conference at Birmingham Southern College, which she was helping to organize?

    I said, okay, I would do it. She told me to come up with a topic. I thought about it for a couple of days, and “Writing as a mystical experience” came to me. Then, I was flooded with notions that Ernest Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea, the last book he completed, was his unconscious suicide note. I called my editor and told her the title for my presentation.

    I flew to Birmingham and presented the first morning in a small room with about 10 people present, including my publicist and her employee, my editor. The publicist was deeply involved in the work of the East European mystic G.I. Gurdjeiff. The audience didn’t seem to have any interest in my notion that The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway’s unconscious suicide note.

    The 2nd day, I had the main auditorium and every person at the writer’s conference was there. Again, no one seemed interested in my topic. Someone asked what I did about writer’s block? The audience seemed to perk up. I said I don’t get writer's block. When there is something to write, I have to write. When there is nothing to write, I do something else.

    I asked the audience if they read books that said they had to sit in front of their typewriter or computer for 4 hours every day, even if nothing came to them to write? Several people nodded, yes. I said not everyone is a writer, but everyone is something, and figuring out what that is and doing it is what is important.

    Yesterday, I picked up a new follower at my Sutstack newsletter:

Elizabeth White 
@elizabethwhite718614

Looking for a partner who is an independent thinker and decision maker, able to make important life decisions together

    I messaged her this morning:

Welcome to an old fossil's musings, hope you find a partner that suits you. Once upon a time, I wrote 5 novels about “paradise mating”, which I actually experienced with several very different women. It ain’t entirely of this world, actually. 3 of the novels survived. Kundalina Alabama (1991) is sophomoric. Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale (2001) and its sequel Return of the Strange (2023) are for grown ups. They can be read at the free internet library, which is run by American colleges. The library specializes in out of print books and books by writers not seeking payment. Here are links to those 3 novels:

https://archive.org/details/kundalina

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

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

    archive.org also has about a dozen of my often stranger than fiction books about stuff that really happened, and the novels ain’t entirely all made up. Parental discretion advised.

    This morning, I received a text from my amiga Mortica about yesterday’s Hey you 6 right wing Christians on the US Supreme Court, your Savior was homeless!  post. We met online in 2010, when I was writing at goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com about my younger brother Major, who had gone missing and later his body was found in the pond at Highland Golf Course in Birmingham, and the county medical examiner and the Birmingham police department and the FBI ruled it was suicide made to look like murder. In 2017, those blogs died and went to Internet Heaven, and I started this blog.

Morticia
Sad post. Supreme Court has gone crazier. Don’t ever worry about being homeless again. As long as M is alive on earth Ain’t Happening!! I have never been and did not realize how terrible it is. Maybe the Couts need to live that way to see how thing are. Opinions might change. I read the reason Joe Biden could not talk loud he was sick.

Me
I read this morning that Biden had a cold. If that’s true, why the hell didn't he say so when he spoke the first time and why didn’t he ask CNN's moderators Dana Bash and Jake Trapper to turn up his mic volume? 
I have plenty of my daddy’s money, use yours to look after you 😎
If my brother had not done what he did, I would not have met you ðŸ˜Ž

Morticia
Oh I was just saying Let not your heart be troubled about ever being homeless. True on our meeting. 

    Shortly after I learned from friends in Birmingham that Major had gone missing, it came to me from out of the blue that he killed himself and tried to make it look like murder. A journalist at the Birmingham News interviewed me by telephone later that morning, as I sat in Sippin’ Internet Cafe in Key West. When I told him what came to me from out of the blue before he called me, he said cold chills were running up and down his spine, because the same thing came to him from out of the blue  before he called me.

    The Birmingham News didn’t publish what he  wrote, which contained nothing about what sent cold chills running up and down his spine. 

    If cold chills don’t sometimes run up and down the spines of people who read my books and blog posts, they should wonder why? Seek help?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Saturday, June 29, 2024

Hey you 6 right wing Christians on the US Supreme Court, your Savior was homeless!

 

    Just now, an amiga, who once was married to a Mexican man and was homeless in Key West and north Georgia, called me to say she is seeing on TV and reading online that the US government is putting immigrants from Mexico up in 5-star motels, but homeless Americans are not put up in motels and that ain’t right, and she woke up with a splitting headache this morning, and it's still there. 

    I said I doubt it's 5-star motels, but I agree it ain’t right, and I am writing about the 6 good Christians on the US Supreme Court, who decided today that homeless Americans can be fined and jailed for being homeless, and is your headache leaving? She said, yes.

    Yesterday, an amigo down Key West way sent me link to a recent edition of the Key West Citizen, the city’s local newspaper. I opened the link and saw an article about the city having upgraded the public bathroom at Higgs Beach, so that it resembled a spa bathroom. When I lived on the street in Key West in 2000 and later, I was at that bathroom when it opened at 7 a.m. Sometimes I couldn’t wait and had to pee and poop somewhere outside.

    I called him and said I had received the link. He said he wanted me to see the article about the city firing yet another professional city manager. I said I did not see that article, but I enjoyed the Higgs Beach bathroom article, because of how important that bathroom was to me when I was homeless, and if I have to come back to Key West and be homeless there again, I will enjoy using the new bathroom at Higgs Beach.

    I was homeless for 2 stretches of time: 2000-2005 and 2015-2017. I was homeless because I ran out of money after becoming unable to make a living wage at what I knew how to do. I  tried very hard to make a living wage at  what I knew how to do, and it just did not work out. I came to wonder if it was karma or something God wanted me to experience? Unlike most homeless people I met during that time, I was not an alcoholic or drug addict and I did not use tobacco. I bathed every day at a cold water public shower. I washed my briefs and T-shirts every day with soap and water and let them dry out in the sun and wind. 

    On Maui and in Key West, I slept on the ground, in doorways, on beaches, on fishing piers, in churchyards, on the front porch of houses, in someone's old camper vehicle, in spare rooms of friend’s homes, in tents on public land, in the back of a Chevy Blazer I owned for a while, in Key West’s homeless homeless shelter, in a homeless shelter in Birmingham and a homeless shelter in Kansas City, and most recently, on a steel bench in the front lobby of the Key West Police Department, after I was banned from that city’s homeless shelter because of what I wrote about it and its employees and homeless people generally at my blog, goodmorningkeywest.com, which subsequently died and went to internet heaven.

    But for inheritance from my father, I would still be homeless, or I would be dead.

    Let me back up start over.

    Standing in a Key West Church Sunday afternoon soup kitchen line with about 100 other homeless people in early 2001, I heard one of the church members helping with the event say, “If you were saved by Jesus, you would not be homeless.” I said loudly, “What’s wrong with being homeless? Jesus was homeless! Everyone in this line, except for a Jewish man, was saved several times by Jesus, and we are homeless.” 

    I started eating my meal and a young pastor of the church named Mark, whom I was getting to know, walked over to me and asked why I said Jesus was homeless? I asked Mark if he had read his Bible? He said he had. I said then you know Jesus said he was homeless. Mark asked where Jesus said that? I said, in the passage where a man told Jesus he wanted to follow him, and Jesus said the foxes have their dens and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. Mark said that did not mean Jesus was homeless. I said of course that’s what it meant. Mark said Jesus could stay with his mother. I asked Mark where in the Bible does it say Jesus stayed with his mother after he started his ministry? 

    Key West arrested and jailed homeless people until a US District Court in Miami ruled in Pottinger v. City of Miami (1998), that it was cruel and unusual punishment under the the 8th Amendment to the United States Constitution for the City of Miami to use its police to stop homeless people from doing necessary things to survive, such as sleep, cook food, pee and defecate outside, if there was no place inside for them to do it. Key West had a federal courthouse, which was in that same US District Court’s jurisdiction. 

    In 2004, my friend and personal lawyer Sam Kaufman and I, who had practiced law after clerking for for a United States District Judge in Birmingham, Alabama, convinced the Key West city government that we would bring a Pottinger class action in the Key West federal court if the city’s police did not stop harassing, arresting and jailing homeless people simply for being homeless. The city police stopped doing that. The city built a homeless shelter and the city police only arrested homeless people for sleeping outside at night, who were not at the shelter.

    Homeless people banned from the shelter had no place to sleep at night and were arrested and put in the sheriff’s jail on Stock Island, just above Key West. The sheriff’s jail became the city’s second homeless shelter. The city paid the sheriff nothing for housing the city’s homeless and feeding and providing them medical care. The sheriff spent a lot of money housing the city’s homeless people, who were banned from the shelter, or who would not use it. The local courts and probation officers spent a lot of time and money handling cases brought by city police against homeless people for simply being homeless. 

    Later, Key West city police started arresting and jailing homes people for sitting on a towel or blanket on the ground during the day, which city police said violated the city’s no camping ordinance, which was not applied against local people who were not homeless and tourists who sat on a towel or blanket on the ground. The city  only enforced its “open container” (booze) ordinance against homeless people.

    I think it’s fair for me to say the Key West city government officials and its police force, whom I knew, were Christians, who forgot or ignored their Savior was homeless, and that he also said:

Matthew 25:31-46
New International Version
The Sheep and the Goats
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

    As I passed through Tallahassee on a Greyhound bus headed to Key West in December 2000, the US District Judge for whom I had clerked came to me in a dream and said he was thinking about getting into politics. He had run the Democratic Party in Alabama behind the scenes, except for the. George Wallace faction. In the dream, I told him that I did not think that was a good idea, but knowing him, I figured he was going to do it. I woke up in shock, knowing I was going to get into politics, which I detested.

    Below is today's USA Today's article about yesterday’s 6-3 US Supreme Court decision that made being homeless in America a crime. The 6 conservative Christian majority and the Grant’s Pass, Oregon city officials never knew Jesus. Below the USA Today article is a tale about a novel and a non-fiction book I wrote when I was homeless.

In major decision, Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps
The decision is the most significant ruling from the court on homelessness in decades. Last year, 40% of homeless people slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, cars, and abandoned buildings.
 

Maureen Groppe
Bart Jansen
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court ruled Friday that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.

The 6-3 decision was the most significant ruling on the issue from the high court in decades.

It comes as record numbers of Americans lack permanent housing and as both Democratic and Republican leaders have complained a 2018 decision by a lower court has hamstrung their ability to address homeless encampments that threaten health and public safety.

“The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, referring to the small Oregon municipality at the center of the case.

“The city imposes only limited fines for first-time offenders, an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park for repeat offenders, and a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail for those who later violate an order.”

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court's liberal minority, said the laws essentially criminalized the act of sleeping.

“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”

Sotomayor noted that Grants Pass jails and fines people who sleep in public, such as in a car, or for using as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. “For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless,” she wrote. “That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the decision gives “free reign to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions.”

“This tactic has consistently failed to reduce homelessness in the past,” Oliva said, “and it will assuredly fail to reduce homelessness in the future.”

Theane Evangelis, who represented Grants Pass, said the decision brought “urgent relief to the many communities that have struggled to address the growing problem of dangerous encampments.”

“For the past six years, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions have tied the hands of local governments,” Evangelis said.  “The Court has now restored the ability of cities on the frontlines of this crisis to develop lasting solutions that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of their communities, while also keeping our public spaces safe and clean.” 

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees nine Western states, ruled in 2018 that banning camping in areas lacking sufficient shelter beds amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in at the time on that case from Boise, Idaho, but took up the issue this term after that precedent was used to challenge anti-camping rules in Grants Pass.

Homeless residents of the southern Oregon city of 38,000 had faced fines starting at $250 and leading to jail time for repeat offenses.

Criminalizing homelessness in a city without a homeless shelter

Advocates for homeless people said the rules amounted to criminalizing someone for having nowhere to live. The city lacks sufficient affordable housing. The one shelter for adults requires attending daily Christian services and other rules. Hundreds of residents are unhoused.

"We don't want to be in the parks," said Helen Cruz, a Grants Pass resident who lacks permanent shelter. "We want a place to live."

City officials said without the Supreme Court’s intervention, they would be forced to surrender their public spaces.

The Department of Justice had mostly backed the challengers while also arguing that the appeals court ruling was too broad and didn’t take into account individual circumstances such as whether someone had access to a shelter and refused it.

On any given night in the United States, more than 600,000 people are likely to be homeless, according to the federal government. Last year, 40% of homeless individuals slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, cars, abandoned buildings and other public locations.

The case, which is the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, attracted an unusually large number of briefs filed by outside interests.

Advocates for the homeless hoped that even if the decision didn't go their way, the case would spur elected officials at all levels of government to do more to address homelessness.

    For about 6 months, starting April 2001, I slept in a tent on a friend’s land near Helen, Georgia. Birdie McClaine, an orphan who had grown up in a circus company, was a street performer I had met in Key West. After learning I was a writer and had written novels, Birdie told me the storyline for a novel he and dreamed up years before, and he asked if I could write it? I said I had lived half of it the year before, so I guessed I could.

    Birdie bought me a tent and a new pair of shoes to replace the sandals I had worn out, which a Key West shoe store owner had given me. I hitchhiked into Helen every day and used a desktop computer in the Helen public library to write the novel, which I saved onto a floppy disc and gave to a man I met in Helen, who was from Alabama and had known my younger brother. My new friend had several copies of the manuscript printed, and much later I had the novel published by a print to order publisher, and it went nowhere. 

    I would live in my new friend’s home for several months in 2004, when I wrote A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known, now a free read at the internet library, archive.org.

    The preface to Birdie’s and my novel explains how I met him and ended up in Helen and is a stranger than short tale in and of itself. The never know what’s gonna happen next roller coaster novel feature's a very good Birmingham trial lawyer, Riley Strange, who had clerked for a United States District Judge, and his two to die for lady loves Mary Lou Snow and Willa Sue Jenkins. Not for the faint of heart or conservative Christians, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale now is a free read at the internet library, archive.org. 

    I met the amiga who called me this morning near Helen, Georgia. After she read some of the Heavy Wait manuscript, she started feeling awful and she quit reading it. I said she was feeling awful because she saw herself in Willa Sue Jenkins. After my amiga purged for a while, she read the strange tale and said she really liked it. 

    Key West grande dame Shirley Freeman, who had been a county commissioner and a previous sheriff’s wife, told me that she read  Heavy Wait in one night, she couldn’t put it down.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

    

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Defeat, and some if God did not exist the topic never would come up cosmic humor

 

    From Erik Rittenberry’s

Defeat
By: Kahlil Gibran
POETIC OUTLAWS
JUN 26, 2024

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness;
You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs,
And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory.

Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance,
Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot
And not to be trapped by withering laurels.
And in you I have found aloneness
And the joy of being shunned and scorned.

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be leveled down,
And to be grasped is but to reach one's fullness
And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.

Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,
You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,
And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,
And urging of seas,
And of mountains that burn in the night,
And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter

Gibran was way ahead of his years and time. I read his biography by his American girlfriend and secretary, and then I read his biography by a Lebanon man, who had read and was complimentary of the first biography. Both biographies were excellent. Gibran left Lebanon, where he was a political rabblerouser and had a following even at a young age, because he was no longer safe there. His mother told him after he showed her The Prophet, to tuck it away and wait some years before sharing it with the public. He had physical ailments, according to his American girlfriend, and people came to him seeking his counsel and he gave it to them. She addressed rumors of his celibacy by saying he was very. creative and as such … As I recall, he died in his fifties from heart failure. But he indeed was dangerous in the ego and spiritual sense. His defeat poem kinda reminded me of a poem that leaped out of me in the spring of 2001, when I was living on the street in Key West.

“The World's Greatest Failure” 

I know what it is 
to love fully,
have my heart broken by death
and by loved ones’ rejections,
Over and over again,
So I can love even more. 
 
I know what it is 
to be engulfed in pain,
Awash in evil,
Terrified, enraged, despaired,
Believing God has again forsaken me,
Then be given the truth
that again makes me free 
 
I know what it is 
to doubt,
Be lost and wandering
time and time again,
Then be rescued yet again
and my faith grows deeper. 
 
I know what it is 
to blindly trust,
Then be destroyed by betrayal
time and time again,
Until I trust only God. 
 
I know what it is
to have much
and be completely of this world,
Then have it all taken away
and be in the world but not of it. 
 
I know what it is 
to fail in this world,
And fail and fail and fail:
The world’s greatest failure,
I can serve only God. 
 
I know what it is 
to give and give and give and give;
I cannot stop giving
because giving is receiving. 
 
I know what it is 
to explain God
time after time after time again. 
Something demands I keep explaining:
Maybe someone will listen, 

Maybe me. 

    Some cosmic comic relief:

Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned

I’m on the road to hell!

https://medium.com/the-springboard/bless-me-father-for-i-have-sinned-fd3ba7f11750
Brendan Donaghy

So, here’s me sitting on the 7b bus heading into town. I shouldn’t be on the bus. I don’t want to be on the bus. I should be on a bike, legs pumping like pistons. The freedom of the open road. Direction where the tyres press, as the poet said.

Ah, no! Not your poetry stuff again! You know that bores me rigid, right?

The docking station

When I left the house, I intended to hop onto one of Belfast’s public bikes. There’s a docking station on the main road at the top of our street. The bike gets me into town quicker than the bus. I also get to enjoy some healthy exercise.

Sat amongst the traffic, breathing in carbon monoxide fumes? That’s a healthy option now?

At the docking station, I fish out my phone. The handy app means I only need to scan a QR code to unlock a bike and start my journey.

The handy app invites me to log in. This doesn’t usually happen. It wants my username and six-digit PIN. This isn’t handy at all.

The username is my phone number. The PIN? Round up the usual six-digit suspects. It could be my birthday, her birthday, or the son’s. Might be our wedding day. It might even be our landline number.

You’re still using a landline? What are you, ninety?

I could try these usual suspects, but I’ll only get three attempts before I’m locked out.

There’s a helpline number. They can unlock a bike remotely.

The road

I ring the helpline, but I can’t hear a word the fella’s saying.

The docking station sits on one of the busiest roads in Belfast. Freight lorries and motorbikes whizz past, not three feet away. Buses hurtle by.

The buses are electric. They’re silent. I like your punchy sentences, though.

To hear Mr. Helpline, I have to nip behind a wall into the grounds of the nearby Catholic church. I stand in the church car park with the phone pressed against one ear and a finger jammed into the other. Even here, I have to shout to be heard.

“Okay”, says Mr. Helpline. “What’s the number of the docking station you’re standing beside?”

“Hold on,” I say.

I dash out of the church grounds to squint at the docking station before turning around and running back.

“3–6–2–3!”

“Perfect. And which bike would you like me to release?”

“Hold on again.”

Another dash. I see four bikes. One has a flat tyre. Two others have their saddles set so high you’d need legs the length of pylons to ride them. I note the number of the fourth bike and shuffle back into the church.

“5–3–7–0–2.”

“I’m unlocking it now. Has it been released?”

“Just a sec.”

Not so much of a dash this time. I haven’t done shuttle sprints since 1992 and I’m struggling. We need a traffic bypass!

You’re the one who needs a bypass, fella. The state of you after a bit of gentle exercise!

I try and lift the bike off the rack. It doesn’t budge. Back to the church.

“It hasn’t unlocked.”

“That’s unusual,” he says, more to himself than me.

I notice a man walking from the church towards me. He’s wearing a clerical collar. As he approaches, I acknowledge him with a smile and some clever use of my eyebrows.

“Is everything alright?” he asks. “Only I heard shouting. And then I saw you running around clutching both ears. Are you hurt?”

I shake my head. “No, Father, I was…” Mr.Helpline starts talking to me again.

“Have you paid your annual subscription fee?” he asks.

“It comes off my debit card automatically,” I shout irritably. “I don’t pay it. You take it out.”

“It’s not showing,” says the voice.

The priest waves a hand to get my attention. “We have a funeral this morning and the family will arrive any minute. We can’t have you shouting in the car park when they come in.”

I nod in agreement.

“Check again,” I tell Mr. Helpline in a much quieter voice.

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” he replies.

“CHECK. IT. AGAIN!” I shout into the phone.

“Please keep your voice down!” the priest whispers urgently. He’s looking over my shoulder. There’s a hearse pulling slowly into the car park followed by a line of mourners.

“I’ve checked it twice. The fee hasn’t been paid.”

“It hasn’t been collected, is what you mean, right? RIGHT? Are you people totally incompetent?

The priest stares at me in disbelief. Mourners look curiously in my direction as they file past. Ghosts of my ancestors appear before me and shake their heads sorrowfully.

“Have you changed your bank details recently?” Mr.Helpline asks.

Somewhere in a dark corner of my brain, a bell tinkles softly. A memory of a debit card lost and cancelled several months ago.

I mumble something abject and end the call.

“Sorry for the disturbance, Father,” I say. As I’m talking, I realise the fingers of my left hand are waggling a greeting at those mourners still staring at me.

I’m not sure why that’s happening. My brain has issued no instructions about finger-waggling. If my brain had issued instructions about finger-waggling, it would have been to impose a blanket ban on the practice, given the circumstances.

“Stop waving at the family and leave the church grounds,” the priest tells me.

I trudge out of the car park and through the gates. I feel like a sinner cast into the wilderness. The road to perdition lies before me.

Fortunately, the 7b runs down that very road every fifteen minutes.

    Some more cosmic comic relief:

Religious Forums

Thread starter Fire Dragon  
Start dateJun 16, 2024
Why "God does not exist" is a positive claim

Redneck Mystic
I have told Atheists, if God does not exist, the topic never would come up. 

Fiire Dragon
Hmm. Thinking about your statement here, I think it has a very deep meaning. Interesting. I don't know if you actually thought what I gathered from your statement. But this one goes a very very long way.
Nice.

Redneck Mystic
I also have told Atheists, and Christians, if they lived in my skin a little while, they would know for a fact that God exists, and they very well might wish God did not exist.

Fire Dragon
There are some who wish God does not exist. There are those who believe God exists but hates God. Distheists. Oh and even misotheists.

Redneck Mystic
Everyone is entitled to his/her own belief and opinion, but when I see poeple take a really strong stand about something they only believe, they are so sure they are right, but they only believe they are right, I wonder what is really going on, and I do often wonder how they would deal with what I deal with every day and night of my life since early 1987, when it began and there was zero doubt what started it. But I know I cannot prove any of it, nor can anyone disprove any of it 

Fire Dragon
Aight. Cheers. 
 
ppp
Which means that there is no good reason for anyone else to believe you.😀 

Redneck Mystic
Heh, someday, if not in this life, then in the afterlife, you will recall this conversation. Meanwhile, I wish you an interesting life in these really interesting times.😀 
 
ppp 
I do not think God fits in your skin.

Redneck Mystic
Nor did I say that, but I imagine if you were able to live in my skin for a while, you would have a different outlook 

ppp
Not only do I have no reason to believe you, but I have no reason to think that you know or are capable of knowing what you claim. 
Telling me that I will rue the day is silly. Might was well say, Nyah nyaah nyah nyah nyaaaah. 

Redneck Mystic
I didn’t say you would rue the day. I said someday, if not in this life, then in the afterlife, you will recall this conversation, and you will.

ppp
I said what I said.

Redneck Mystic
But I did not say what you said I said, and that might be a good place to start looking in the mirror, which I was forced to do for a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g t-i-m-e, with many refresher courses, by beings the likes of which you will meet someday, if not in the lifetime, then in the afterlife.

ppp
All that you are laying down is negging, pop psychology and innuendo. With a dollop of self-advertised hard-fought special wisdom. 
Can you be wrong about the nature of your experience in 1987? Could it simply be a product of a human mind misinterpreting an experience?

Redneck Mystic
No. It could not be. As I said earlier in this thread, I have told many Christians that if they lived in my skin, they might wish there were no God, and I meant that literally.
Believe is just that, believe. 
Having the direct experience is something else altogether, 
There are many reports of people having the direct experience, and they knew, as I know, there is no human way to prove it, and that’s just how it is.
Perhaps people who engage in discussions such as this one online, or elsewhere, might ponder just what they might be inviting into their lives?

PPS 
It could be.
Absolute conviction is the fundamental flaw,
You are incorrect. 
There is a duck in my sock drawer.
There is no duck in my sock drawer.
These are logically possible matters that are contradictions.

Redneck Mystic
No, it could not be what you wonder it might be, You were not there, You did not experience it. So, you have no clue what happened. And the way you are carrying on reminds me of Donald Turmp, who acts like he knows everything. As have many Christians I had talked with over decades, who lived in their beliefs and 1-dimensional earth experiences, as you do, because that’s all they have. Someday, if not in this lifetime, then in the afterlife, you will see differently, and you will remember this conversation. 
 
 
shunyadragon said:
Fair would be Natural Laws and natural processes determine what is fair If God is the Creator.
We flap our arms and jump off the 10 story building. We cannot fly

Redneck Mystic.
Never said I can fly, but I do have a lovely piece of art, entitled, “When pigs fly”, and I once knew the artist and how it came about that she did the painting, and it's hilarious. God has a terrific sense of humor, but sometimes it is not me laughing when it happens. I had a very religious girlfriend , who had a “We plan, God laughs” magnet on her refrigerator door. I kept telling her God had her put it there, and she heard me, but she kept making plans, and she kept trying to change me, even though she said God kept telling her to leave me alone, I was doing what God wanted me to do, and I told her if she kept it up, God would break us up, and when she finally spent the night with me, I had stayed over at her home many times, I woke up in the middle of the night and she was gone, and I ran outside in my sock feet and caught her at her car, and she said God had told her in her sleep, “You are not the one”, and she was terrified and fled. I was all torn up inside, because I really loved her, and our passion was not of this world, and when we were alone and getting along, we went to a place together, which was not of this world, and it was so wonderful there are no words to describe it, and it happened many times, and she called it “the space”, but I never felt it that way after that night. when we talked, nor did I feel it with later women in that way,, whom God or an angel had brought to me, and they knew God had brought them to me, and me to them, and they heard from God or an angel all the time, and, well, you have much to look forward to someday, if not on this world, then in the afterlife. I’m not going to tell you any more of which you know nothing, but if you get visited and want to talk about it, I will talk with you then.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com