Good Morning Florida Keys

There’s a new counter-terrorism unit in the Keys, which you can learn more about and join by going to savingthekeys.com or savingkeywest.com. One of the ringleaders is Suki Miller, who reminds me of Sandra Downs of Cudjoe Key, whose steel-magnolia, heart-felt viewpoints can be read in the “Believe It or Not” menu page of goodmorningfloridakeys.com. If I knew how to provide easy-to-use “click-here” web links, I’d do it.

Meanwhile, a correction to yesterday’s posting, “Development.Religion.” What I was sent by a third party looked to me like it said Pritam Singh got his spiritual start reading the autobiography of an India yogi named Muktananda. Actually, this is what happened to someone who had been to Pritam’s posh spiritual retreat in Woodstock, Vermont, paid for with money Pritam had made on his developments in the Keys. How Pritam got started spiritually, I was corrected, was with an India yogi, whose face appears on the packaging of herbal teas, the writer said. And, when Pritam realized this great man was raping his young female students, he spoke against it, and then had to get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, with a pack of eastern-style Elmer Gantry-worshipping vigilantes hot on his tail. Later, Pritam became a Sikh, and even later, a Zen Buddhist, as well. Even as the original great one still resides in Pritam, pulling pretty near all the strings, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because Pritam has enormous potential for good, but it cannot be realized because of this yogi resding in him, who has enoromous potential for whatever suits him.

Further meanwhile, below is the text of an email last night to Ken Wadlow of the Keynoter, with a copy to Keynoter Key West Bureau Chief Alyson Crean. I corrected grammatical errors in the original — pretty hot under the collar when I wrote it. This is not the first time I’ve had this kind of thing happen with the Keynoter, and it has happened with Key West Citizen, as well. I don’t know if these two newspapers are simply lazy, prejudiced, or just don’t give a damn. I do know that Keynoter Editor Larry Kahn asked me to take him off my email list, which I did for a while, then put him back on because he’s a journalist and I was making a lot of noise about Keys and Key West politics. I also know the copy of yesterday’s posting sent to the Keynoter Publisher Wayne Markam was returned “undeliverable.” And, I know that once upon a time someone in the Keynoter tried to block all my emails to individuals in the Keynoter, and when Alyson Crean heard of it, she raised hell. If you know Alyson, then you know she did it real sweet like.

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“Another Un-arrrrrgg!-uably weird year?” — title of Wadlow’s article

Weird indeed, Ken, for me to read under your byline just now, after being told of it by a friend, “Sloan Bashinsky was convinced his campaign to dress up Kew West City staff and the city’s homeless population was pirates would get him elected.”

I never said or believed that. I never believed I would get elected. I would have died of fright if I had been, and said so plenty of times. I declined to ask anyone to vote for me at candidate forums and media interviews. I said I came from outside of the box, and if I got elected, then it would be very different. People who wanted things to stay much the same should vote for Morgan McPherson or Jimmy Weekley, is what I recommended over and over again. I also said neither Morgan nor Jimmy could take Key West where it needed to go, and I was the only candidate who could, and I needed two years to do enough to get the city moving in a different direction, and would not seek reelection.

What I said about pirates was the city could draw a great deal of attention to itself, thus increase visitors, thus increase business and therefore city revenues, by dressing up the Duval and Mallory Square area police in casual pirate attire. Likewise, parking meter cops, and homeless people who wanted to be litter cops. And for stores and shops and restaurants and bars and lodging employees to dress so. And to turn Key West into the pirate capital, er, capitol of the world, nay, matey, the universe! That’s what I said, and I believed, and still believe, it would do for Key West what no other idea yet floated will do, or even come close to doing.

Also, in conjunction, I wanted the city to acquire, not annex, but acquire Wisteria Island and turn it into a clothing-optional nature/camping park, using city operated ferries to take people out there for a fee, and a fee to be there; and put environmentally friendly concession and toilets out there, solar operated, with a cistern to collect drinking water; and create a Wisteria Nature Society, to take memberships for a fee and sell Wisteria nature Society relics (T-shirts, charms, posters, flags, whatever), also run by the city; and to make that known all over the world, nay, the universe. I said the island would pay for itself.

And, I wanted to get dorms for Florida Keys Community College, because that would make it a world-wide attraction to students, give them an affordable place to live, and turn them into world-wide emissaries for Key West and the Keys.

I had other weird ideas, none of which you mentioned in your utterly just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck blip on the radar article, either.

Don’t take my word for it, Ken. Ask Alyson Crean, Kyle Teal, Wayne Markam, Larry Kahn at the Keynoter . . . Or maybe you should just become a publicist for Sonny McCoy, whose county commission seat is now coming up for grabs, and I’m grabbing in spades, as anyone who’s been following the daily postings to goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, or who, like the aforementioned Keynoter folks, receive copies of those postings by email, certainly know. But don’t be distracted by any of that weirdness, Ken. You might just have a terrific future in politics. A terrific future.

Where’d you folks get this guy, Alyson? Or, maybe I should ask, where’d he get his information?

Sloan

Recently, I received an email about Pritam Singh’s spiritual path and the very posh looking spiritual retreat he built on several acres of land in Vermont with money I suppose he made in the Keys. The retreat didn’t appeal to me. His spiritual journey was reported as having been ignited during his reading of the India yogi Muktananda’s autobiography. Then, Pritam became a Sikh. Then, Zen Buddhist.

Every time I’ve been around Pritam, I’ve gotten the willies, felt something bad. Similar to how it goes for me when I sit through church services, or am around County Commissioner Mario Di Gennaro, Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson, and local developer Ed Swift, to make some analogies.

I read about half of Muktananda’s autobiography in the early 1990s, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, because quite a few people I was getting to know thereabouts had spent time with him in India and in California. I also read stuff Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote about Muktananda, based on his own personal experiences with him in India.

People I knew who’d had contact with Muktananda had received what they called Shaktipat, which was supposed to trigger/activtate the kundalini, which is a supra human energy that used to run more freely in people than it does today. Pearce said the inhibition had to do with modern ways of raising and educating children, which are unnatural in the soul sense. A friend of my wife ditched Muktananda after learning he was having sex with teenage women in his ashram. She ditched her husband, too, who, as I recall her telling it, remained with Muktananda and was messing around as well.

I also knew a few people who came into liaison with Muktananda’s hand-picked protégé, Gurumayi (not sure of spelling), who kept an ashram in Boulder and sometimes was there. Never felt comfortable about what was going on with those people, either. Or with people in the very large Tibetan Buddhist community in Boulder. In fact, I never felt comfortable with any eastern or western esoteric group I had dealings with. Did a good bit of that in those days, before I was moved away from that venue back into Christendom, mainly, in Alabama, then the Keys and Georgia, with about the same sensations and results.

When my next to last wife and I realized while we were in South Africa in 2000 that we were to buy air tickets to India, she immediately got very ill and threw up something awful, and was a couple of days getting over it. When we were headed to our hotel in Bombay (Mumbai) in the taxi from the airport, she said all she could see in the air were serpents. I said they weren’t the nice kind of serpents one sees on Saturday morning kids shows. Not those kind, she said. We were very glad to get out of there, after only three nights.

She once had lived in an ashram in New England, set up by an India yogi named Kirpal Singh. From what she told me, he seemed like a good man, a yogi who was into what yoga was really about. But she came to a point of knowing she had to move on. After meeting me, she had a dream of Kirpal sitting in the lotus position over her in the air, drawing energy from her. We did spirit work around it. He came back in a vision, and I spoke with him, said he needed to get on with his life. It wasn’t doing him or her, or any of his other students, any good for him to be doing this. I asked Archangel Michael and Melchizedek to take him where he now needed to be. My wife gasped, even as she knew this was necessary. She watched them take him away.

About two months ago, a couple of men from Pritam Singh’s company and I got into a discussion. The issue was development. Upscale development. Turning Key West and the Keys into an rich folks place. I told them where I stood. I brought Pritam’s Parrot Key development in Key West into it, said a perfectly good and reasonably priced hotel was being replaced with something much bigger land-use wise, which only the very rich could afford. One of the men belittled the Hampton and the class of people who had used it. His tone was mean. Righteous. When I mentioned the huge Spottswood development where the old Holiday Inn used to be on North Roosevelt, it went about the same. The other fellow was cordial, sort of struck me as brainwashed, not unlike I’ve often seen in glassy-eyed church and ashram people. Left me very reluctant to have any more conversations with the first man.

I met Jack Spottswood at Todd German’s post-city-commission-election-thank-you party. Jack came a little late, already intoxicated. He was loud, hogged the conversation, laughed at his own stories, and struck me as a flaming asshole. He told me he read my emails, and when I asked how he came to get them, he would not say. Seemed smug. I said maybe he got them from one of the lawyers in his firm, who was on my email list. He smiled. I didn’t say she had royally screwed up a gift I tried to make of my Little Torch property to Key West Botanical Garden and Tropical Forest Society. When later I started learning about the Spottswoods through the newspapers and local grapevine, I wondered if the gift was doomed from the get-go because of the law firm Carol Ann Sharkey, Director of the Garden, had chosen to do the legal work pro bono.

It’s not politically correct or socially polite to speak of people and events the way I often do. I learned years ago, though, that the spiritual path is not a popularity contest. The people discussed earlier in this email, and County Commissioners Sonny McCoy (my opponent) and Dixie Spehar, to name two more, are seriously influenced by Lucifer. When Lucifer really has a grip on someone, there’s no acting out, no overt misbehavior. The person is smooth, looks and sounds good, and may or may not know what’s behind it. Such people are used as bait to lure in other fishes unawares.

My own personal experiences, some very, very rugged, due to my own ignorance, stupidity and arrogance, brought me to have great respect for Lucifer. Not love, not affection, but respect. My experiences also brought me to accept that, compared to Lucifer, I am indeed ignorant and stupid, and for that reason I dread writing or speaking seriously about demonic possession, because for all I know Lucifer is influencing me to do it, to get a better grip on me.

We all have Lucifer in us. It’s part of being human, as is having God in us part of being human. I learned through very difficult experiences that only when this duality is faced and accepted is real spiritual development possible. Even then, because the terrain is so very tricky and difficult, it is necessary to be led through it, because no person is smart enough to lead him or herself through it. Not even Jesus was smart enough. He was led.

In hindsight, even Jesus, and perhaps also his spirit handlers, made mistakes. The biggest was making miracles, what yogis call siddhis, which so wowed people that they made Christianity a religion of miracles, including a simply miraculous salvation formula. I have good reason to say that, hoping to head off that outcome, Judas consistently argued that miracles were getting in the way. He tried to talk Jesus out of using them, including the last one, upon which a religion would be founded, instead of upon the teachings by which Jesus lived, and urged others to live, too.

Muktananda told in his autobiography of having developed great powers as a yogi, all on his own. He enjoyed using his siddhis. Then, he met his teacher, who told Muktananda to let go of and stop using siddhis. This, Muktanada didn’t want to do. Finally, his teacher took a stick to and beat him until he agreed to stop using siddhis. Then, Muktananda started making progress. According to what he wrote. He also wrote that he started having huge sexual arousals, which freaked him out because he’d been able to control that with his yogi practices, before his teacher came along.

I had a number of “assignments” in which I was to try to wean someone from a guru (eastern or western). I had some success with one woman in Boulder because she already was wanting help getting away from that guru, and asked me to help her. I also had some success warning people not to get involved with a guru they had become interested in. Except for the thing with Kirpal Singh and my first wife, I had no other success with such people. One I could not help was Sikh, a pretty good friend in Birmingham, who kept coming to me for help, but there was nothing I could do because she would not give up being a Sikh. Just as I had no success with church people. Lucifer used “religion” to keep them. Development is a religion in the Keys. So is its politics.

I attended State Representative Ron Saunders’ post-election party at Tranquility Bay, in Marathon, before I knew Pritam Singh had built it. Said to myself that it was pretty, I used to enjoy such places. Wondered how much it cost to stay there, own a unit. Didn’t feel good there, wished the Keys were like they were when I fell in love with them in 1956. When they had charm. Before the new highway and bigger water line. When no one else could tap onto the water line.

In a dream before dawn, I’m given a small case by the District Attorney to prosecute, even as I’m charged from another quarter with murder of a woman I claim not even to know. The setting is Nashville, Tennessee, but the woman is from outside Nashville, in the countryside. I tell the D.A. I can’t accept the case assignment because I have to stand trial for murder today. So began another day in the school of very hard knocks, as I lay in bed wondering who I murdered? Was it my first wife? We met at Vanderbilt, in Nashville. Was it the creed of my college fraternity, “Deus et les dames,” Latin for, God and the women, I killed? Was it yesterday’s posting,“Objective.Subjective,” in which I described how it’s going for me with the woman I’ve written about some lately?

A Key West friend called me yesterday, said I was crazy for publicly sharing yesterday‘s posting. But by the time we were through talking, he thanked me for what all I shared with him. I said the woman and I haven’t even been out together. In all, we had talked maybe an hour. I just didn’t have it in me to enter a relationship with another woman with whom I can not relate. It was not against her. She is a nice person. But he and I’d both learned learned in spades what it’s like to be in relationship with a woman who is not on the same page we’re on. He said women are crazy. I said they are a different species. It wasn’t so in the beginning, but that’s how it ended up, because of how it had gone for women on this world. But what did I know? Maybe I was full of shit, I said. Maybe he was sent by God to let me know that. I said I was asking God to show me what I needed to see.

As I lay in bed, pondering the dream, my thoughts drifted to my last wife, Patricia. Our romance began out of the blue in late April 2001. She knew where it was going quite a while before I knew, she later told me. She knew a lot of things, which she later told me. Things that would have made our time together a great deal easier, if she had told me to begin with. Things that literally had to be pried out of her, if not by me, then by the angels assigned to us both. The depth of it was revealed the first time we made love. Just as we joined, I knew beyond any doubt that she had a sexual history very different from the one she had described. The knowing was so overwhelming that I lost my erection. Talk about embarrassed. I was mortified. And furious at heaven for once again using sex to stir up hidden shit in a woman I loved.

I had hoped this would never happen again, because it had made sex a Catch-22 the coiner of that phrase could not possibly imagine. When the angels wanted us to have sex, there was no way we couldn’t. Then the shit would come, and we were in hell, trying to survive, often not, as she took off for parts unknown, left me writhing on the ground, feeling as if I had been bitten by a cobra, wondering how I would survive, hoping I wouldn’t. Not just Patricia, but with all paradise mating partners before her did this happen. And even when were weren’t having sex, when we weren’t even together; maybe we were only talking on the phone long distance, trying to move back together, and the angels found a way to trigger yet another dump truck load of shit, which left us both reeling, gagging, gasping, as she took off again for parts unknown.

I thought about Patricia some yesterday. About how she fought tooth and nail to keep her secrets. About how she fought to prevent heaven from showing her stuff about herself that she had forgotten, repressed, or just wanted to pretend wasn’t relevant. I thought some yesterday about just how little I want to go through something like that again with a woman. Then, at Bubba’s last night, at the intersection of Fleming and Margaret Streets in Key West, during a break in the live entertainment, Deedee Finney, the female half of the musicians, offered me the mike to cut some jokes, use as a platform. Right off, a woman in the audience asked me to sing a song. I replied, “Lady, if I sing a song, you will get up and leave as quickly as possible.” She, laughed. She, everyone there, understood I meant I was a really bad singer. But, and to my shock, I launched right away into what I remembered of “Honky Tonk Angel,” a country singer’s lament about a woman he’d fallen head over heels in love with, who wouldn’t read his letters even if he wrote them, so he wrote it in the words of a baleful song: “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels, but I knew that you’d never make a wife! You gave up the only one who ever loved you, and went back to the wilder side of life!” Then, I cut some jokes.

That was Patricia’s song. She was my honky tonk angel. Over and over again. Whenever she took off, twice she took of on Valentine’s Day, she wouldn’t answer my cards and letters. Then, weeks or months later, out of nowhere, she’d call. A couple of times she’d write, but she really didn’t like writing. Last time she called was late in the evening of October 7, 2006, my birthday. I’d been laid low all day. Felt like I would be better off dead. A lot better off. The call came about 10:15, on her old cell phone, which she told me she’d given to someone else. I’d tried to call her a couple of days before, because I felt I was supposed to. The new owner of the phone tracked Patricia down at work, and she was calling me during a fifteen minute break, because I had called her, because it was my birthday. I had figured she would call me, but wasn’t sure. She tended to do that on my birthday, and then we’d start moving back toward each other again. Not this time., I told her I’d felt like shit all day, and now that she called, I knew where it was coming from. She said she didn’t want to make me feel bad. I chewed her out for giving me the silent treatment. Asked her to change positions, try to look at it from my side of it. Would she, if she was me, feel like she cared a shit about me? No, she admitted. She said the angels were putting her through her paces, ripping her a new one. She had been feeling like writing to me about it. I said, if that was so, how come she didn’t already write to me about it?

Then I softened. Said the angels had sold her out, because they’d told her years before that she needed to return to her hometown and leave no stone unturned, so she could come to me without hesitation or reservation. But when she went back, they didn’t get to work on her. They let her alone, mostly, and she kept going back and forth between coming toward me and doing some work, and running away and going back to her old ways. I said I’d been giving heaven hell about how it had treated her. And, I said, I just didn’t know if I wanted to get any letters from her, be drawn back into it with her, just as it seemed I was starting a new life. Maybe I’d feel different later, but that was how I felt then. Maybe if she wrote, something would change. I just didn’t know. She said she had to get back to work. I said she was at work talking to me, and what she called work wasn’t work. How many times had we had that conversation, I could not begin to remember. Patricia said, yes, I was right, but she had to get back to work.

I told my friend yesterday, who called to tell me I was crazy, that this political work I do is a pretty recent development. Before politics, eighty percent of my work was with the woman I was given to be with, twenty percent was away from the relationship. Even when Patricia and I were not together on this world, the mating work continued, if only inside of me. For her, it seemed she was left alone, put in some sort of suspended animation where she did not yearn to be with me, pine for me. For her, from what she kept telling me, it was as if she had only just left me. She was in “no time.” For me, it was living hell, and she just could not seem to see, feel, comprehend, what it was like for me. It was like that with women before her. When they ran, they did not suffer. I always suffered. With Patricia I suffered the most. Our leavings were, as I said, like being bit by a cobra. I was fucked up for months afterwards. I messed up work assignments having nothing to do with her. The most notable was pulling out of the county commission race in the early spring of 2004. The race for Sonny McCoy’s seat. It took heaven two years to put me back together after I dropped out. I can’t but help wonder, if I had not pulled out, would I even be here now? Would I be doing something else entirely? Would I even be on this world?

Back to the night of October 7, 2006. My birthday. The last time I heard from Patricia in a human way. I said I was glad the angels finally were leaning on her, but it seemed way too late, and they didn’t seem yet to have impressed on her what bad manners she had, or how much more important her work with me was than working at some women’s clothing store, or taking a vow of celibacy. She said she wondered about that, too. She admitted it wasn’t for God that she took the vow. We had fought about this before. Now, she had to go back to work, and she had no phone because she’d given it away. She didn’t know if she should write me, she didn’t want to cause me more problems. I said to write if she wanted to write, but I didn’t know how I would receive it. The conversation ended.

The horrible feeling started lifting off me. I started feeling like I was going to live. I fell asleep, and was sweetly ministered to all night in dreams by women. I knew none of them. They were tender, loving, encouraging. It was the best night’s sleep I’d had in years. The best night’s sleep in the time to come. By far the best night’s sleep I can remember. And now I’m charged with murder? I plead self defense. I plead the truth. I plead love. If I didn’t love Patricia, I would not have cared enough to tell her anything. I’d have just left her to her own delusions. My love for her was never questioned by heaven. Never. My behavior, yeah, sometimes that was questioned. Sometimes. But not my love. Nor her love for me. I still love her. I will always love her. I can’t stop loving her. It’s useless to try.

When she came to me in a dream about month ago, to tell me about something coming in and to wish me good luck, my heart wrenched, felt torn out of my body. I gasped, could barely breathe. Barely weep, even though I so very much wanted to weep. And now I’m accused of murdering her? She killed herself. She gave up the only one who ever loved her, which she told me many times. Maybe women really are crazy. Maybe there’s nothing a man can do but love them. I’ve said that many times. I’ve also said many times that I’d be crazy, too, if I was a woman, living on a planet where women are viewed so disparagingly.

The assassination of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan hit me very hard. I felt nothing when 911 came, but her murder stuck me as the worst thing that’s happened to humanity in centuries. Despite her perhaps sordid history, Benazir Bhutto was humanity’s best hope for the return of the female to this world. She was a woman. A modern Mary Magdalene. Hillary Clinton is a man in woman’s clothing. Consider that, if you ever are inclined to throw darts at Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky. As are most women men in women’s bodies. Not their fault. This world made them so. Patricia, her predecessors, taught me this; and just how powerful they were; and just how screwed up this world is because they were unable to be what God made them: women.

If there needs to be a murder trial, then indict Moses, who wrote Genesis. Indict St. Paul, who wrote women into oblivion. Indict whoever left out of the New Testament the love affair of the Age: Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Indict whoever destroyed Patricia. Indict the angels who told her to go home and leave no stone unturned, then they took a vacation. Indict whoever destroyed Patricia’s predecessors in my life, each of whom, in her own way, committed suicide. I know, I saw it happen. Even as I saw me kill myself. If I’m to be indicted, indict me for that. Killing myself. The Eve in me. But do not indict me for the death of the species. For the death of Patricia. The female angels loved me through the night after she and I last spoke. The charges against me are false. I plead guilty to loving her too much, for being a fool. But I did not kill her. She killed herself. And she darn near killed me. Darn near.  Well, she was convinced she had been Mata Hari. Maybe more than darn near. Maybe I’m dead but just don’t know it yet. No country for old men. No siree.

Every conversation I have with the woman I’ve been writing about lately leaves me feeling that I’m talking to myself, that we just do not seem to be on the same page. When I told her she was at the center of why my trip to Oregon was scrubbed, the angels told me so, she said they had nothing to do with her. I said they have to do with all of us. She again said no. She wasn’t denying them, only that she is connected elsewhere, and not to what, clearly to me, brought her and me together. Objectively, it was clear. Subjectively, it was clear. To me. The odd thing is, she says stuff that I really need to hear. Hear subjectively, as well as objectively. She said she was going to see No County for Old Men again, at Tropic Cinema. She said there was a lot to it. I said I agreed, tried to talk about it, and was left feeling like I was talking to myself. So I went to see it again, last night. Yep, rough as that movie is, I needed to see it again.

How often, I cannot begin to count, have I run into this. The soul and the personality speak, using the same words, the same phrases, and two entirely different meanings are expressed, which I see and have to get to the bottom of, to determine what is really going on. At the level of soul, this woman and I probably are perfectly matched, or close enough to have a very good experience together. But at the level of this world, we are two ships passing, one knowing it, the other seeming not to. One knowing there is nothing whatsoever he can do about it; knowing there is nothing he is supposed to try to do about it, unless specifically instructed to try, which I truly hope doesn’t happen. I’ve been there, many times. It never worked, and I doubt it ever will, unless the angels take an entirely different approach from the way they have dealt with me and women. That is, the angels deal with women as they deal with me. Not the same as they deal with me, but equivalent, for women and men are not the same, although they are equivalent.  Or maybe I have this turned upside down. Maybe I need to be treated like the women are treated, instead of getting the living shit beat out of me, like I’m just an old dirty rug. Maybe I need to file a Civil Rights action. But where?

I was hailed by Bill Estes yesterday, as I neared Lobos Mixed Grill situated in the walkway off Southard Street, behind Old Mexico Café. I often eat at Lobos because I like the food and the people who run it. This is one of the places I run into Bill from time to time, because he hosts a television show for Channel 77, I think is the number, in a space upstairs near Lobos. The other place I often run into Bill is at Harpoon Harry’s on Caroline Street, where he eats breakfast frequently. When I asked Bill if he was still in the race for Dixie Spehar’s seat on the County Commission, he said indeed he is; he’d just qualified and it was written up in the Citizen yesterday and the last Keynoter issue. I said I was glad he was in the race, which I am. The current regime is causing the Keys a great deal of trouble, especially the three commissioners known for some time as the Gang of Three, one of whom is my opponent in the county commission race. Sonny McCoy. The other two are Mario Di Gennaro and Dixie.

Bill wanted to talk about the county commissioners not knowing how much money the County had. How they had relied on County Administrator Tom Willi to inform them, and because he had not was a reason they had let him go. We laughed together. The County Commissioners should have made it a point to know how much money the County had, and not waited on Tom Willi to inform them.

We laughed over the recent development with the Hickory House Restaurant, which Dixie pressed the County to purchase, so one of her bubba friends could cash in his investment in it. A deal Dixie got run through the County Commission with the aid of the other two gang members. Then, it went sour. Then, the County tried to sell it. Then, a buyer posing as a white knight came along. Now, Bill said yesterday, the buyer wants not only to buy the Hickory House, but also to be able to build, what, six “affordable housing units” on the property for employees. “You know how long they will remain affordable,” Bill said. I said the County could put a one-hundred-year affordable requirement on them. Bill said the buyer wouldn’t go along with it. No shit.

Then, Bill said the buyer also wanted a deed to the entire road into the Hickory House. I said, “No shit.” Some white knight. I said too bad the County didn’t buy the Hickory House. Maybe if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t now be trying to close some of the County’s branch libraries. When I asked Bill if he was talked about this stuff when he was interviewed, he said he had but it wasn’t covered in the newspaper articles. But he was going to talk about it in an upcoming television interview.

When later I read the Citizen piece, Bill was reported to say he had opposed transient housing. We didn’t talk about that yesterday. Sometime ago, Bill told me he owned a transient rental unit in Truman Annex. Not long after that, I advised him, in one of my general emails, to either get rid of that unit or rent it out at a truly affordable rate to someone who lives in Key West, if he was going to run against Dixie. I give Bill the same advice today. We just don’t need any more elected officials who say one thing, then do the other. We just don’t need anymore elected officials like that. And we just don’t need anymore half-measure newspaper reporting. We need journalists who are willing to go all the way out on a limb, like Bill Becker at US 1 104.1 Radio does, like Steve Estes at the News-Barometer on Big Pine Key does, like Bill Hobe and Miss Loretta at WAIL 99 do. We need those kind of elected officials, too. Meaning, I suppose, I need to stop viewing myself as too old to be doing this kind of work. I need to just do it.

So I return to another item Bill Estes and I discussed, the County’s continued employment of local Attorney Jerry Coleman, whose employment was recently extended by the County Commission. When I said the County needed to stop using Jerry altogether, Bill disagreed. I was flabbergasted, just as I was flabbergasted to learn that Commissioner George Neugent, against whom I ran last year and personally like, voted to keep Jerry on board. One of the first things I will do, if elected, is to do whatever I can to get the County to stop doing business with Jerry Coleman. Not because I don’t like him. I do like him. But because the county has a perfectly good attorney and doesn’t need Jerry, and because Jerry is still closely tied to developers, especially Ed Swift. Maybe a month ago now, I was told by a prominent Keys business person that Ed is amoral; he never does anything that doesn’t further his own personal interests. No shit.

Meaning, I suppose, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

After writing and posting “TheOldWay.Eden” yesterday morning, I was exhausted and went home and fell into bed and dreamt of a man in authority I do not know in this life telling me that two days and two hours before, a man had been issued a library card in Oregon. Waking, I wondered if that man was me and my spirit was already in Oregon and my body soon to follow, or was that some other man who was sent to Oregon in my stead? My dreams were very rough last night, and I was sorely afraid and prayed for help and clarity, knowing there was nothing I else I could do but trust it would somehow be worked out. Toward dawn, I dreamt of being given a quarter and a dollar bill, which bear the likeness of George Washington, who, as a boy, was reputed to tell his parents after he chopped down a cherry tree that he could not tell a lie: he did it. Later, after sunrise, I awoke in peace, feeling I’m to stay in Key West. Truly, I did not want to go to Oregon in the winter. Truly, I love winter in the Keys. Truly, I want to watch my urban garden grow, become even more beautiful.

Truly, I wonder what this woman who has come into my life means to me? Truly, I dread another relationship that will chew up a woman I love and me, because the angels won’t leave us alone, because they keep pressing and stretching us to our outer limits, and beyond. Truly, I dread another such experience. Truly. Yet what comes is what comes, and somehow I will deal with and get through it, playing by the old rules. That is, using golf as a analogy, I play each shot as it lies. If the ball is buried in a sand bunker, I hit it from where it lies buried. If the ball is in a divot, I hit it from the divot. If the ball is in a water hazard, I either try to hit it out of the hazard, or I take the one-stroke penalty and drop the ball on dry ground and strike it from there. If the ball is behind a tree, I play it from behind the tree. And so forth. At no time do I try to improve my lie. This I was told and agreed in a dream night before last, with respect to this new woman, with respect to everything. It’s been the way I am expected to play for many moons now, but perhaps I needed a reminder.

A woman I once was with was told by Melchizedek, she said, that regardless of how other people might feel about it, on this world men are God’s chosen vessels for truth, and through truth men come to love. While women are God’s chosen vessels for love, and through love, women come to truth. This was not a church woman, she had no religious upbringing. When she and I met, she did not even use the word, God. She was basically a white aborigine living in modern society, in America. From Ohio. She attended the first Woodstock concert. She was one of the students fired upon by National Guardsmen at Kent State. Of all the women I was with, she was the most able to hear from heaven, see spirit phenomenon, feel what was right and what was not; and she was the most able to adapt to the enormous pressure heaven put on her, and on me, once we came together. In the end, though, the pressure became more than either of us could bear, and we parted ways on Maui in December 2000, and I was sent to Key West, flat broke, to enter the next phase of my truly weird life; weird by the measure of this world, not weird in the least by the measure of the worlds where I and sometimes a woman had lived for a number of years. I brought with me the poem at the end of yesterday’s posting, which came to me while she and I were together.

I fell in love again the next summer, probably deeper than I ever fell in love before. It was the same as before: we were pushed and stretched to and beyond our limits. I do truly hope never to have that experience again. I do truly hope it for my sake and for the woman’s sake. And yet it is not my call, nor hers. It may be, I have long suspected it, that heaven is hoping to do something remarkable by bringing one man and one woman all the way into Eden, where they then live out their days. If that happens, perhaps something will happen in the soul of the species, perhaps a pathway will be opened for other couples to follow suit. Perhaps that will change everything for the species, by restoring the equal but different holy relationship Adam and Eve portrayed in Genesis, before the fall. Perhaps.

Meanwhile, two is the number in dreams that I associate with Jesus: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Below is a King James version of a saying of Jesus that waited in my email account this morning. For some years now I have wondered how this very private conversation he had with God ended up being reported verbatim in the New Testament? This passage is especially poignant for me, because the last five women I was with were as convinced as my two best men friends and I that I once was the disciple who was chosen to fulfill the scripture, because he was the only disciple who loved Jesus enough to do it.

Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20
1) When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee, 2) since thou hast given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him. 3) And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. 4) I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; 5) and now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made. 6) “ I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them to me, and they have kept thy word. 7) Now they know that everything that thou hast given me is from thee; for I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from thee; and they have believed that thou didst send me. 9) I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom thou hast given me, for they are thine; 10) all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them. 11) And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. 12) While I was with them, I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me; I have guarded them, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled. 13) But now I am coming to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

[The happy face above inserted itself, or something inserted it.]

My trip to Oregon either is delayed or stayed. Which it is, I suppose time will tell. My dreams and waking experiences for the past few nights suggested this was coming in. It seems to have to do with a woman I’ve recently started getting to know. In what ways I will get to know her, I don’t know yet, but she’s clearly at the center of my being held in Key West, and she’s clearly in a very different drumbeat from that of anyone I’ve met in a while.
 
I described yesterday a conversation I had with heaven in March 2004, after being asked in my sleep, “What do you think of the species?” I did not think to say yesterday that I told heaven the species had lost its creativity and was in a cloning devolution. I meant spirit cloning, but the effect is the same as physical cloning. Each successive cloned generation is further removed from the original design, less vibrant, less vital, until eventually cloning is the only way the species can reproduce, even as it is dying altogether.
 
Maybe that’s how I felt then, personally: I was dying, because I was essentially making love with myself, not having a woman to share my life with, give my love to, get lost in, merge and create with, which is how it was in the beginning between men and women on this world. They fused, were two souls in one, for life. There was no infidelity. No wandering eye. They had eyes only for each other because they were two sides of the same soul, manifested into two people. Together, they walked and talked with and were walked and talked to by angels, who were assigned to look over them, teach them. Yet they were innocent, and only in innocence did they know each other and God. Only in falling, thanks to Eve’s curiosity, which Adam lacked, which made her the heroine of the story, could they know the other and, thus, appreciate what they had in Eden. They were not bound to stay in the Fall, but they perhaps did not know it, or how to return, wizened, to Eden, which is yet another bone I have to pick with heaven. Why was the species allowed to blame Eve for humanity’s troubles? And why is Adam and Eve holding hands and going back to Eden only inferred in Bible? Why isn’t it plainly stated, explained, demonstrated, like it was told that Adam and Eve were not the only two people? Their son, Cain, went to the land of Nod to find a wife.
 
From time to time after the change in the species, attempts were made to bring a couple back into Eden. Some couples made it, most did not. Those who made it understood Eden was not a physical place but a state of being, something they felt, lived. I know this because I experienced Eden, to different degrees, with different women who were arranged (one at a time) to be with me, and I with them. It was less defined in the earlier relationships, less clear what was in play. As I aged, as new women came, I started getting a feel for what really was going on. And for the many seemingly endless tests we both were put, to cleanse us of our old behavior and restore us to the way men and women were in the beginning. It was not easy. Actually, it was harder than hell, trying to get past those two Cherubim with their fire swords, guarding the Tree of Life and its ways. Hard as hell, and, so far, no woman and I were able, or permitted, to stay in Eden, even though we did experience it together in myriad ways. All of which, I suppose, was designed to encourage us to stay the course, so we could experience Eden all the time, but we were not able to stay the course. Like I said, it was hard as hell.
 
Whether this opportunity to live under the Tree of Life is coming around again, I do not yet know. It seems the potential is there, the sensations are there, but how it will go, where it will go, I’m not about to attempt to predict. I learned in the school of hard spirit knocks that predicting is like making plans: a way to experience God’s humor. It’s safe to state potential, possibility, and that is appreciated above. But to go beyond, play the prophet, forecast the future, attempt to control the course of life’s events, instead of going with the flow, is a place I try not to go anymore, although sometimes I go there anyway. It’s never worked out, though, when I presumed to know the mind of God, when I attempted to be in control, and maybe I’ll keep that in mind in the future.
 
Maybe, also, I’ll become less jaundiced about the work given to me to do. Maybe. It’s stupid to try to get upbeat about waking on sharp nails, lying in beds of hot coals, swallowing razor blades, being bitten by cobras, eaten by sharks, buried in glaciers, thrown off cliffs, crushed in deep oceans, blown up in volcanoes, stranded in deserts, obliterated in hurricanes, but maybe I’ll get there some day. Maybe love conquers all, but perhaps only endurance and faith are key. Jesus told his disciples they would be saved if they endured to the end. I doubt his words and ways can be improved upon, although plenty of people in Christendom, the New Age and elsewhere seem to keep trying. Me, I’ve been through too many cafeterias on this world to expect anything but sadness, grief and despair, which makes love, joy and happiness feel so good. And so scary, because they are so fleeting on this world, and it hurts so much when they leave, and it’s already so difficult, that the jolt of their loss becomes too much to bear, and creativity ceases, and cloning begins.
 
There is no cloning in Eden. There, everything happens. Everything. And it’s effortless.
 
Meanwhile,
 
All fig leaves burn
All ugly seen
All truth beauty
All pain loved
All people one
All time now
All security God

Sloan – Sorry it doesn’t work for you, but it works for me and has kept me alive longer than I deserve, and my children as well.. So, from us who do, Merry Christmas to you. Stay safe my friend. M. J.

So wrote my oldest remaining close friend in Birmingham just after 1 a.m. this morning, responding to yesterday’s “Thy Will.NotMine” posting, even as, feeling like I’d swallowed rat poison, I came out of a very rough dream getting onto me about not having sent that posting to my entire Birmingham email list, instead of to my friend, one of our mutual old running mates, and another Birmingham person I doubt either of them know. So encouraged, what a great Christmas beginning, I hauled me and my laptop over to the County Library on Fleming Street and sent “ThyWill.NotMine to the rest of my Birmingham email list, then came home and tried to go back to sleep. It took a while.

I wanted to reply last night to my friend, but my laptop’s battery ran down just as I was doing that. What I started to tell him, before I lost power, was that as he was writing to me, I was being rousted awake to finish what I didn’t complete yesterday. I wanted to tell him that what I think isn’t always what I write, while what I write is what I think, but is also what the angels who look and keep after me think as well; otherwise, they would not get on me to write it. And about that I have a bone to pick with them this morning, which is Christmas Day. Interesting metaphor, as I sit in my flat on top of the fossilized coral rock sometimes referred to as Cayo Hueso — Bone Island. Nothing to do with pirates. When the first whites came here, they found collections of human bones lying around, left behind by the indigenous aborigines, perhaps the Calusa, perhaps an earlier people.

Anyway, the bone I have to pick this morning is that I feel heaven made a grave mistake in allowing religion to continue to exist on this world. What good is a holy text like the Bible, for example, if people don’t understand or believe what’s in it, evidenced by their not living what’s in it? More to the point, what good is a text like the Bible, when it has come to replace people living in direct relationship with God, as the righteous people in the Bible lived? Should a book replace actually walking and talking with and being walked with and talked to by God? I hardly think so, yet that is what has happened on this world, in the main. Sure, scattered here and there, in Christendom, in Judaism, in Islam, in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Yoga, in Taoism, in Zen Buddhism, in Shinto, in various so-called pagan religions, in aboriginal religions, in esoteric sects such as the Knights Grail, which have very little to do with what Dan Brown wrote in The da Vinci Code, are individuals and perhaps small groups of individuals who are in direct relationship with the unknowable. In the main, though, human beings are making their own way, using their own devices. The blind leading the blind.

Waiting in my email account yesterday morning, after I was done writing “Thy Will.NotMine, was the following from the New Testament. Interesting, it came on the eve, so to speak, of my departure to Oregon, where I could care less about going in the winter, although I might really like to see it again in the warm months. I have tried many times, in many different ways, to explain what Jesus explained to his disciples. I never seem to get through, but I keep trying:

John 21:18. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.

I now am pretty well convinced why I never seem to get through, which returns to the bone I’m picking this morning. Heaven simply does not want human beings, in the main, to have the experience Jesus explained to his disciples, an experience I know so well that I’m now incapable of imagining another way of living. The question is, how come heaven is keeping humanity, in the main, from having a direct relationship with God? How come heaven continues to try to use surrogates, individuals, holy texts like the Bible, religions, to try to lead people, instead of just doing it in the way Jesus experienced it and explained it to his disciples who then experienced it? As other people before and after them experienced it? As I experience it? How come that way isn’t used across the board? How come?

If there was a court somewhere that I could file a lawsuit requiring not only and answer but also opportunity for an affirmative injunction commanding heaven to do to everyone what it did to Jesus and his disciples, and to some people before and after them, and to me, I would file that lawsuit straightaway. It might not go anywhere, because there might be something I’m too small in my outlook to see and/or understand; but I’d try it anyway, because I’m convinced beyond any doubt, which is a bit more convinced than a reasonable doubt, that humanity is doomed if such a change does not occur. Doomed. For proof, I offer the efforts of heaven through Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Laotse, Confucius, Joseph Smith, Rumi, Gurdjieff, Rudolp Steiner, the Knights Grail, the great yogis of India, the great priests of ancient Egypt, the great shamans in history, Gibran, Gandhi, Mandela, none of whose efforts, noble as they were, took root and sprouted and prospered and took over the species. To the contrary, what took root and sprouted and prospered and took over the species were religions claiming allegiance to those people, without knowing anything of the experience they had because it was not given to them to have it.

Perhaps what is holding heaven back is the obvious certainty that if human beings are put into direct relationship with the Almighty, if they hear from and are led/pushed by God, Allah, Om, Yaweh, Shiva, or whatever name might be used to described what is indescribable, all hell will break out on this world. Pandemonium will rule. People will be running all around like chickens with their heads chopped off, bewildered, terrified, because someone or something has girded them and is taking them places they flat do not want to go, even though they know the very same thing happened to people who were revered in their religions as saints, holy people, favored in the eyes of God.

If such a thing happens, perhaps 50,000 individuals will survive out of the now well over 5 billion human beings inhabiting this planet. Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, Genghis Kahn and their ilk will be rendered pipsqueaks by comparison to the holocaust such an interdiction from heaven will cause. Pipsqueaks. And, I suppose, of the well over 5 billion, perhaps only the 50,000 survivors will understand what really is going on. Maybe that’s why heaven doesn’t do it, but maybe it needs to do it anyway. Maybe it needs to do it anyway because the experiment with religion has failed beyond any reasonable doubt, and there is no other possible way to reach the species on this planet than in the way stated above.

The alternative is for heaven to lift the species off this world altogether, not entirely remote from the way the dinosaurs were lifted, simply because this world is not where the human species, that is, the souls who have formed it, now need to be. Move the species to where they can move forward, instead of recirculate at best, and, most likely, go backward in the soul sense. Proving what Darwin almost suspected: that it is apes and monkeys who descended from people, and not the other way around. Put the human species where it can move ahead. Put it on another planet. Put it in a different spirit realm. But put it somewhere that it can move forward. Do this because it cannot change on its own, because it is in over its head, because this is the only way to help the species without nearly destroying it.

This is pretty much the same conversation I had with heaven in March 2004, when I was living in a tent on the Bridle Path parallel to Atlantic Boulevard, across from Smathers Beach in Key West, after I was asked in my sleep: “What do you think of the species?” I awoke, startled; in trepidation, I replied that I really didn’t like being asked that question, but since I had been asked, I was going to answer it. I began by saying that I had been worked with by heaven day and night for many years, and look at what a mess I still was! If I was the best heaven could do, what was the point in trying to do it with others? Did heaven wish to reduce the population to 50,000 individuals much like me? If so, then go for it. But if heaven really wanted to help the species, put it where it will have a better chance of making progress. Since that moment nothing has happened to cause me to say anything different than I said then, and much has happened to cause me to say it again.

Amen

You’re into religion….what do you make of this? Seems kind of radical to me. But hey, that’s just me….I’m a ‘live and let live’ kinda person and very spiritual. However, my spirituality is personal and private so I tend to not have a lot of patience for the evangelical types. [weblinks below were provided]

Morning, ________. Thanks for writing.

I read the first of the 8-part series by Morgan McPeherson’s brother, Michael, in the link you provided: http://www.battleaxe.org/8%20Part%20Index.html. This was what Jimmy Weekley had seen, which I did not find when I went to battleaxe.org. The home page is a bit overwhelming.

One thing that jumps out me in Michael’s first sermon is he says not to trust in the pastor but to pray for him. Then he launches into a very long sermon, the first of eight very long sermons, it would appear from my opening briefly the second part of his presentation.

Another thing that jumps out at me is that Michael out of hand says Muslims and Buddhists do not follow Christ. How does he really know this? Would he also say Gandhi did not follow Christ? Abraham Lincoln, who said he followed God? The federal judge for whom I clerked, who was the most Christ-like man I ever met in this life? Who gave Michael authority to say who is following Christ and who is not?

The third thing answers the second. Michael says nothing in what I read about his own personal struggle on this world to follow Christ. Instead of preaching, I wish he would share his own experiences, what tests God puts to him, how he deals with them, for better and for worse. How he knew to do this instead of that, in this or that situation? Did he guess? Was it revealed to him in some way? If so, how did he receive his instruction, information?

More to the point, how is Michael doing what Jesus said to do? How is he being like the wise man who built his house on a rock, and when the flood came, the house stood fast? Instead of being like the foolish man who built his house on sand (interesting metaphor, given our physical present place of habitation and the shifting-sand nature of our politics), and when the flood came, the house fell down. This is how Jesus separated people who where his true followers from those who were not, according to that passage in the Bible, which Battle Axe claims is the soul, er, sole, source of God’s word on this world today, notwithstanding Michael’s sermons saying, and correctly, that any of us can hear and be led by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ brother James summed it up pretty darn well when he gave a sermon of sorts of his own to those who were making a lot of noise about their faith and how it had saved them. He said faith without works is dead, by his works they would see his faith. This is what I hope Michael and all Christian ministers will move toward doing: Show us their works, tell us about themselves, let us see what they are doing in their daily lives, for better and for worse, and in that way we will see their faith. Works, deeds, actions, interchangeable words in this discussion.

You said, perhaps not really meaning it, that I am into religion. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have been taken through religions, Christendom mainly, but also others. I did not stay there. Religions are very small potatoes compared to what lies beyond them. Perhaps religion is a good place for some people to begin to be in relationship with God, but to really grow into the fullness with God that is possible means to leave religion behind, just as to grow up as a person means to leave our parents behind. We do not stop loving our parents, or the people we might have gone to church with, but we grow into something much bigger that is the church Jesus knew, a one-on-one relationship with what I was raised to call God, so that is the name I use.

Compared to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Yoga, or whatever religion you might wish to name, God is all the beaches in the Creation compared to a single grain of sand. As many direct experiences as I’ve had with the hand of God, uncountable, day and night, I don’t know God. Nor did Jesus. He only knew what of God was revealed to him. Not even Archangels know God. Compared to you and me, Archangels might seem like they are God. But compared to God, I suppose they feel about like we do compared to them. All I, or any pastor, can do is tell people what I have experienced, what I have been taught, and steer them in that same general direction, with the same admonition Michael (Michael the minister, Michael the Archangel) gives: they need to be taught directly by God, not by their pastor. And, I would add, they don’t need to go to church, or even have to read the Bible, or even know about the Bible, for this to occur. As you describe your own spiritual journey, it can be just between you and God, which was the salvation Jesus tried to teach his disciples and anyone else who would listen:

“Thy will, oh Lord, not mine, be done.”

I’d love for us to hear from Michael what he’s telling his brother, Morgan, about doing God’s will, and how that’s going. What more important ministry could Michael now be doing? Easy to write to a web site, or to preach in a church. Not so easy to take your own brother to task, the way Jesus took his own mother and brothers to task, the way he took his own disciples to task, the way he took himself to task, and left a pubic record of it.

Maybe I should say something like Merry Christmas, but it wouldn’t work for me, as I don’t see Jesus in Christmas as it now is practiced, nor was he born in December. Pisces is around the Spring Equinox. The early Christian church changed the date of Jesus’ birth to coincide with the “pagan” Winter Solstice celebration, in an effort to make Christianity more marketable to non-Christians. The Bible was put together by a single man, knowledgeable in scriptures, at the order of the pagan or perhaps even atheist Emperor of Rome, Constantine. Constantine saw Christianity rising, felt it would win out, and he wanted to end up on the winning side.

The man who put the scriptures together, which became the Bible, discarded many more scriptures which many people in that day felt were just as important as the ones he included. The Vatican has hundreds of ancient scriptures locked away in its vaults, which it doesn’t allow the world to see, and it fights tooth and nail any new scriptures and relics being dug up out of the deserts where Jesus and his followers wandered. To say the Bible contains the entire word of God is ludicrous, but it does contain enough, if you know how to read it, to get you off to a good start, which isn’t much of a start of all, though, if God doesn’t start speaking directly to you.

If anyone thinks I’m looking foward to going to Oregon for the winter, they need to check into De Poo. But and unless I’m now told not to do it, that this has all been a test to see if I would do it, I’m going.

Sloan

Yesterdays’ Key West Citizen brought yet another revelation from on high: Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson does not remember what he and County Commissioner Dixie Spehar talked about before the last County Commission meeting. The County Commission meeting at which Dixie voted to keep Morgan on the Tourist Development Council, because, she said, he had assured her that he was not going to try to replace the TDC’s Chariman Harold Wheeler; because, she said, he had told her his plans for the TDC, which she said appealed to her. The Citizen said Morgan said tourism was dropping in the Keys, and the TDC had done nothing to stop it. The Citizen said Morgan said the mom and pop Keys businesses were losing business because the TDC was not stopping the loss of tourist dollars. The Citizen said Morgan said the Innkeepers and Lodging Associations had not supported him in either of his campaigns for Mayor. The Citizen said Morgan said he could not say whether or not the best course of action was to turn Key West (and the Keys) into a rich people’s resort. The Citizen said Morgan and Dixie did not answer phone calls placed to their places of work, homes, cell phones.

How very odd. I never heard any of that leading up the last County Commission meeting. All I heard was that Morgan and his bed buddy, County Commissioner Mario Di Gennaro, wanted to use a few million TDC dollars to build more infrastructure in Key West and the Keys, to increase our capacity to accommodate more upscale developments and resorts. How very odd, I attended all the candidate forums during the Key West mayoral. I read the newspapers and kept my ears to the ground and air waves. During that time I never heard Morgan even mention the TDC. Not one peep or cheep did I hear Morgan utter about the TDC, except when he was kicked off it because he didn’t attend four TDC meetings; except when he lobbied to get put back on the TDC, because he was off on Key West City business three of those four times. That’s the only mention of the TDC I ever heard during Morgan’s campaign to be re-elected. Not once did he criticize the TDC. Not once. Nor, during the campaign, did I hear Morgan come up with one proposal that had a snow ball’s chance in the Tropic of Cancer of bringing more tourists and their money into Key West. Nor did I hear Morgan come up with any proposal for saving the mom and pop businesses. In fact, I can’t say I heard him ever mention the mom and pop businesses until I read the Citizen yesterday. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but my understanding of the Innkeepers and Lodging Associations is that most of the members are mom and pop businesses.

I’m having a terrible struggle in myself, because there were times before and even during the Key West mayoral that I felt Morgan had done a pretty good job during his first term. I thought he was a pretty good person. Then, my apple cart was turned upside down, when I learned that Morgan was doing it eight ways to Sunday with Mario, who had made such an impression on the mom and pop industry, on mothers and fathers, that he got himself written up so good in the common folks favorite tabloid, Conch Color, that we almost could not help but forget that he actually was the self-appointed reincarnation of Henry Flagler, come to rescue the Keys from the mom and pops, the mothers and fathers, and from anyone else who sort of liked the Keys the way they were: when folks who lived here didn’t have to pay out the wazoo just to survive; when folks who came here to visit could still find a decent place to stay for a price they could afford; when the reef was still in pretty good shape and we didn’t have to sink old Navy warships to create artificial reefs to bring tourists back to Key West who were going elsewhere.

I can’t imagine why Morgan and Dixie did not return the Citizen’s phone calls. I cannot imagine any elected official not returning phone calls from the only daily newspaper in the Keys. I just cannot imagine it. But then, I cannot imagine why the State Attorney and the Florida Attorney General and the US Attorney and the F.B.I. are not already all over this. Just as I cannot imagine why the remainder of the County Commission and the balance of the Key West City Commission are not raising bloody public hell about this. If I were sitting on either body, I’d not believe anything Morgan, Mario or Dixie have to say about anything having to do with tourism or development, unless they were wired to a polygraph device the entire time there were speaking, and the needle wasn’t spiking. Ditto for their confederate, my opponent in the upcoming county commission race, Charles “Sonny” McCoy.

Back during the Key West mayoral, one of the main parts of my campaign was a vision of turning Key West into a place people would want to come from all of the United States and the world to visit. I said over and over that this was the cure to Key West’s financial woes, and it would translate all the way up the Keys, helping all businesses in the Keys. The vision was pretty simple and completely in keeping with Key West’s colorful character and history. It was to turn Key West into the pirate capitol of the world, nay, matey, the Universe! Bring the pirate soul into play across the board. Let casual pirate dress and lingo become the “patois” of Key West, especially in its financial engine, Duval Street, Mallory Pier, and places nearby. Especially there. After stating this vision, I was interviewed by radio stations, one nationally syndicated, from as far away as New York City and Hawaii. From the Midwest — Indianapolis. From Alaska — Anchorage. There was tremendous interest in pirates and dressing Key West’s police and parking meter enforcers in casual pirate clothing; in giving homeless people casual pirate garb to wear, to patrol the streets as litter cops; in shops and restaurant personnel wearing casual pirate garb. Tremendous interest.

And guess what? Guess how much all that free advertising Key West got, advertising that was spread all over the World Wide Web, cost Key West? Zip. Nada. Zilch. That’s how much it cost. I just wrote it, sent out emails about it, posted it to goodmorningkeywest.com, said it at candidate forums and during media interviews, and it went from there. Even as Morgan talked about turning tiny, man-made Higgs Beach and a few rough acres of land west of Truman Annex into world-wide tourist attractions. Hell, I was talking about turning Key West itself into the most famous tourist destination in the world, a place adults and children would want to come, see, experience; Americans, Canadians, Latin Americans, East and West Europeans, Africans, Middle Easterners, Asians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Australians, New Zealanders, and even Martians and Venusians. And for all of that, I received 64 votes.

I suppose the reason I did so well was because I had another vision. I wanted Key West to acquire Wisteria Island, also known as Christmas Tree Island, so developers couldn’t get it an turn it into another millionaires’ vacation home private gated island like Sunset Key. I wanted the City to turn it into a clothes-optional nature park, where people could day visit and camp at reasonable prices, taken out there and back by a city owned and operated ferry for a reasonable fee. I wanted to start a Wisteria Nature Society, open to anyone to join: to have its own T-shirts and other wisteria artifacts and relics, to sell and the proceeds used to help fund the park. I said such an attraction would appeal to many people who might not otherwise give a second or any thought to coming to Key West. Oh, man, you should have heard some of the uptight responses I got to that idea. You should have heard. Hard to imagine what it’s going to be like for those tight wads when they leave this world and their wardrobes behind. Hard to imagine their shock to learn that heaven is one giant nudist colony, where everyone is wired to a polygraph device all the time. Personally, I can’t wait to get there.

Meanwhile, another bare asset Key West has, which could become a full-blown asset, if Morgan and Mario would listen to Morgan’s brother Michael, who works there, is Keys Community College, which I and other people have long felt and sometimes say is the most underutilized infrastructure already in place in Key West and the Keys. If the college had dormitories, which it is in the process of trying to obtain, it would draw students from all over the world, to study all manner of diverse on and off the beaten path courses in Paradise. These students would become Key West’s emmissaries to the world after leaving here. This, too, was part of my campaign platform. I bet if Morgan put half as much effort into bringing that seed to full bloom, as he spends trying to run the TDC, something truly remarkable and beautiful would happen for Key West, thus for the Keys. Something truly remarkable and beautiful.

Whenever I’m being moved into something new, I’m given stuff to do that winds down what I’ve been doing, so I can move into the new free of the old. Or, free of some of it. Some things I’m given have seasons, because they cannot or are not supposed to be finished all in one moment in time, but are an ongoing process that perhaps will complete by the time I leave this world, so after I’m gone there is no need for me to have any further dealings with it and I can move onto something new altogether, so to speak. I did not come up with this perspective on my own. It’s redundant in the teachings of Jesus, who told his followers to abide in him and they would come to know the truth and the truth would set them free. It’s redundant in the Buddhist and Yoga teachings — getting off the karmic wheel, moving onto something else instead of coming back to this world, which Jesus and his disciples together discussed from time to time, if you know where to look for it in the Gospels. But I don’t need to go into any of those places to know this, because it has been told to me in dreams and other spirit ways.

So, I’m headed off to Oregon for a while, to do what I know not. In getting ready to leave, I’m being put through a sort of mopping up operation, so when I leave Key West and the Keys, I can leave less encumbered, even as I expect to come back to Key West and be put back to work here. Why I’m going in Oregon remains a mystery to me. I don’t even know where in Oregon I’m going, and that’s a pretty darn big state to be heading toward and not know where to go in it. Yet it somehow will be shown to me, and I will end up where I’m supposed end up, to do what I’m supposed to do, which will just start showing up after I get there, without my having to do much but wait for it to happen and engage it in the ways I’m shown to engage it. Same for anywhere I’m sent. Living on Maui in late 2000, flat broke, I was told on waking one morning to go to the Keys, and within three days’ time, from out of the blue, stuff had happened to make it possible for me to do that. As the bus I was riding entered the capitol of Florida, I was told in a dream I was going to be getting into politics. I awoke very distressed, and knew there was nothing I could do about it but let it unfold.

Yesterday’s posting, WildThing.Wild, was a clearing of a phase of some work I’ve been doing in Christendom, in general, and with the church Morgan McPherson started in Key West, in particular, which I attended a while in 2003. Morgan and his father both are on my email list. Whether they read what I write, I do not know. It’s enough, it seems, that I copy them with what I write, and the rest is between them and God. Last night at Bubba’s at the corner of Fleming and Margaret streets, someone asked me what I did yesterday. I said I did Christianity. I paused, then found it amusing in an odd way, said, “I’m trying to help Christians convert to God.” Several people heard this, and their responses varied from laughter to stares to nervous gestures. Later, a friend, one of the musicians, gave me a back massage, which discipline she was taught and did more of in one of her “other lives.” After she was done, she said the tension in my upper back was because I was having trouble trusting people. I said I’d learned when push comes to shove, there were very few people I can trust. What I didn’t say, and maybe should have, is I learned the only thing I can really trust, all the time, is God. Later, it occurred to me that I also could have said maybe the reason my shoulders and upper back were so tight was from all the weight I was carrying, which was causing me to break down, crumble.

In an email, yesterday, a Keys person now living somewhere else mostly, but still very connected in business ways with the Keys, said perhaps I was being moved away for a while to protect me. I replied, yes, that could be part of it, but it might be that I need a rest from the current work in the Keys, and if I don’t get it, that might be as, if not more, dangerous for me than what someone might do to me. Most people go through life with little or no clue just how dangerous it is in the spirit, just what invisible forces in their own psyches and all around them are making their decisions, causing their actions, nearly all the time. I was like them before I was changed, before my eyes and ears and senses were opened. And even in that changed state, I don’t see and hear and feel everything I need to see and hear and feel, until it is shown to me, often in the eleventh hour, but in time for me to deal with it in a way I would not have dealt with it if I didn’t know about it.

Right now, after the Tourist Development Council fracas, it looks to me that the Monroe County Commission and the Key West City Commission are in grave crisis. Grave in the human sense, grave in the spirit sense. How can the County Commissioners and the Key West City Commissioners effectively operate, when they don’t really know what is going on behind the scenes? I will use County Commissioner Sylvia Murphy, whom I personally know and like, to attempt to make some points. Sylvia, apparently alone, wished to end the County’s employment of Key West attorney Jerry Coleman. Sylvia just can’t justify in her mind the huge sums of money the County has paid Jerry, and will pay him in the future, albeit perhaps not as huge. Especially can Sylvia not justify such payments when the County cannot even pay its own bills, when there is serious talk of closing some of the county branch libraries, just to name one particularly hot cutback under consideration. Sylvia may not believe or even care that Jerry Coleman was put into his position with the County through the influence of Ed Swift, who runs a great deal of what goes on in Key West from behind the scenes; or that it is Ed Swift’s influence that defeated Sylvia’s attempt to end the County’s use of Jerry Coleman; or that Morgan McPerhson’s brother, Ben, is Chief Financial Officer of Ed’s company, Historic Tours of America, in whose building is Jerry Coleman’s law office.

Moving laterally, Sylvia recently attempted to impose a tax on gasoline, to help the County through its very real financial crisis. She is correct in attempting to raise county revenues, which would not have been necessary, perhaps, if the County Commission had been more prudent in the past. If it had not built an entirely new airport in Key West, you really ought to drive over there and see that thing that’s going up, which is totally unneeded, but it was to be named after County Commissioner Charles “Sonny” McCoy. Likewise, a new County building on Key Largo, named after decesased County Commissioner Murray Nelson, in whose seat Sylvia now sits, after having defeated in a major upset the incumbent county commissioner, hand-picked by Murray, then appointed by Governor Bush, to take Murray’s seat on the County Commission. If I had been Sylvia, I would have proposed increasing the tax on something people don’t need, on something that actually is injuring them physically and spiritually: on alcohol and tobacco. But not on gasoline, which people do need to be able to get to work, shop for groceries, go to the doctor, take children to school, and so forth.

Privately, I’ve got some things to address with different individuals, which I’ll be doing today and tomorrow and so on, as I’m shown what needs to be done, before I leave for Oregon for what I was told would be about three months.