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

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