Janis Joplin v. Kurt Vonnegut: Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose

    One of my kids cracked me up yesterday with a report that just a little while earlier their old retriever dog Grizzly, who never caught a duck and gets around about like I get around, had treed a black bear near their home with fierce barking from a safe distance. 

    My other kid left me a happy Father’s Day 💔 and a hope I don't get into too much trouble voicemail, and I called back and said I already got into a lot of trouble.

    Facebook reactions to yesterday’s Father’s Day

poem, which ended:

My body failing,

brain farts increasing,

I hoped to wake up on 

the Mother Ship this morning,

but since I didn’t…

Mary Sherrell

So,You Did awaken?

Sloan Bashinsky

seems so 

Elizabeth Hinds Davis

If you're a Vonnegut fan, try Sloan Bashinsky who still lives.

SloanBashinsky

As does Elizabeth 

“Pigs in mud” 

All want the security of the well fed pig.

Horror at the baseness unrecognized.

A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.

And pen comparison.

Is truth more palatable when honeyed?

Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet? 

May my affectations always be understood.

Peggy Butler

Deep from the heart of Sloan Bashinsky, this truly is a special work of art. Many of us can relate in so many ways. I hope you live the rest of your life in peace, dear soul.   

Sloan Bashinsky

Thanks, Peggy. I experience brief interludes of peace, surrounded by external violence that for now mostly is emotional, on the one hand, and not of this world origin on the other hand, and internal physical violence that is my failing body, on the one hand, and a very different sort of internal violence, which is not of this world. 

 

Peggy Butler

I hope soon the interludes of peace outweigh the violence of both kinds. I'll be thinking of you and hoping for that.

Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks, but given what old age and prostate radiation therapy did to my innards, and given I absorb the rough energies in what I engage, which are processed in me like a waste treatment plant of sorts, I don’t expect much relief other than what the Angel of Death or legal or illegal narcotics can can provide:-), and I don’t use either. 

Roy Knight
This is really special, and as my father was a friend of yours and your grandfather I can connect quite well with what you have expressed. That is even though our families were quite different. I also share the feelings about our children and grandchildren. Remarkable. Thank you for providing so much of importance to think about. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks, Roy. 

The child who died when I was in law school at Alabama left me in such all encompassing disarray that I simply was no longer able to fit into any hopes, dreams or plans I or anyone else had for me, and was in that sense, which I eventually had put on his grave marker, he opened my heart and set me on my journey, but the cost to his younger siblings and many women I came to love, one at a time, was extensive. Each of those women woke up something in me that I did not know was there. It was like a different lifetime with each of them, to go with lifetimes before and after them, and when I was alone along the way, and now. More lives than a cat even, and I’m still here for some reason I truly can’t imagine. 
The CVS I had used on Clairmont Avenue across from the Highland golf course went out of business and CVS shifted me to their store in Crestline Village, where I grew up and rode my bicycle everywhere in my second lifetime- the first lifetime was before I started school and was a free man- God, did I hate school, it was like being sent to prison 5 days a week. 
I had to drive into The Tiny Kingdom yesterday to pick up a script for something that wards off cognitive weakening, and to buy a lot more Prevagen than I was taking for the same reason, because a dream the night before had told me to increase the Prevagen from 1 to 3 pills a day. 
I only go into the Tiny Kingdom when I have to, and yesterday I also needed to go the Fresh Market on Lakeshore drive, so Ieft Crestline on the interior road that runs along the south side of the Birmingham Country Club's East Course, where I played thousands of rounds and won the club junior championship when I was 16. I did not recognize the once lovely home of my father’s brother Leo, when I drove past it.
I got onto Montevallo Road, where my family had lived a few years, and headed toward Mountain Brook Village, and turned left onto a side road, so I could avoid the main intersection at Culver Road. I saw homes I remembered, and I saw what had been done to homes so that they could not be remembered.
Arriving at Lakeshore Drive, I felt like I had escaped some place that is not healthy for me, maybe not for any living person, and I headed to the fresh market and bought some provisions I can’t get anywhere else but online, and headed back to Highland Park, where I have lived every time I quit running away from home since the 1995 return.
I watched the US Open yesterday afternoon, and I saw Irishman Rory Mcllroy missed two short puts, not quite gimmies, on 2 of the last three holes, and Bryson DeChambeau, who was not able to hit his drives in the fairways most of the day, won by one stoke amidst "USA, USA" chants by so-called Americans who ignored Bryson had sold himself to the Saudis for generational million$$$, while Rory had remained faithful as modern times allow to earn a good pro golfer living the old fashioned way, and I was ashamed to be an American. 
After dinner, I waddled my old body down into the beautiful public park across the street from this old apartment building. The city parks service has let the shrubs and bushes grow wild and brambly. Some of the trees in the park are older than me, 81. I have an arrangement with something that lives in the park. I sit on a bench and wait on it to show up and take me on a ride that is 100 percent not of this world, and that happened for about a half hour yesterday, and I came out of it and waddled my body back up the ancient stone stairs to Highland Avenue, to where I live, to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime and play chess at chess.com, until I got sleepy, after two naps yesterday.
Now I’m up at way before dawn, still wondering what a dream about Texas A & M and someone reneging an important promise is about?
The boy who grew up in Crestline had no clue how many prisons and prison breaks lay ahead.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com