(the full Monty on Duval Street but we don’t have a nude beach)
This being Fantasy Fest and all, I was in such a festive mood yesterday that I wrote and sent this festive little letter to the editor to Key West Citizen. Following it is the second festive chapter in HABITAT FOR HUMANITY: A pilgrim’s travels with God on this world, which I can’t say I ever expect to see reviewed in the Citizen, or anywhere.
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During an interview on radiofreekeywest.com, a life-feed local morning radio-video show, I was asked by host The Reverend Doug how I would have handled the Myra Wittenber demotion and salary cut by City Manager Jim Scholl, if I was mayor?
I said if I was convinced Director of Transportation Myra Wittenburg had ordered a city public works crew to do special right-of-way improvements in front of her ex-husband’s home, so her grandchildren children would not have to step in mud puddles when they got out of car to visit their grandfather, then at the next duly held city commission meeting I would would say I was not satisfied that a mere demotion (change of the name of job description) and cut in pay was sufficient discipline. I would say Wittenberg should have been fired. This sort of special treatment has to stop, and the way to do it is get rid of people who do it. Then I would ask the city commissioners if they had anything they wished to say anything about it?
After the interview it occurred to me that the first thing I would do would be to I would pick up the phone and call State Attorney Dennis Ward and ask him to investigate Mira Wittenberg for criminal activity. What’s the difference, really, between her getting special treatment from the city for herself, her children and her ex-husband, and Randy Acevedo covering up for his wife, Monique? Both Mira and Randy were in positions of responsibility, positions of public trust. They both violated that public trust. Randy lost his job and was criminally prosecuted. Mira should be treated the same.
By copy of this email/letter to the editor, as a private citizen, I am asking Dennis Ward to launch an investigation into what Mira Wittenberg did, if he has not already done that.
Sloan Bashinky
626 Josephine Parker Road #102
Key West 33040
(305) 407-4285
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CHAPTER 2, I SUPPOSE
NO FIG LEAVES IN PARADISE
Maybe around 1992, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I chanced (if you believe in chance — already by then I didn’t believe in it) upon Mutant Message Down Under, by Marlo Morgan. A story about her going to Australia to help lead some sort of mental health care conference, only to find herself on a rather unexpected and rigorous (slight understatement) walkabout in the outback with a tribe of aborigines living in the old way — in the wild. They viewed themselves as real people, and everyone else, including other aborigines who had adapted to modern civilization, as mutants. Morgan’s book was the tribe’s message from the real people to the mutants: you and me.
This book had a ring of truth when I read it, even if some of the scenarios maybe had suffered some poetic license or even outfight subversion, to keep the tribe’s identity and location a secret. For God only knew what civilized people would have done to a tribe like that — Australia’s post-white-invasion history is rank with horror stories of aborigines being “civilized for their own good.”
The savages Morgan met were, for example, totally telepathic, and only spoke with their mouths for Morgan’s benefit, since she wasn’t telepathic when they adopted her because one of them had a soul contract with her to try to help her. Meaning, she did not go to Australia to help lead a conference in mental health. She went there to have her mental health restored, or at least experience a full Monty attempt to restore it. Read the book and see for yourself.
Morgan sold several hundred thousand softback copies of Mutant Message Down Under by mail/UPS out of her basement, using a copying machine to put them together, her son told me on the telephone when I called there to thank her for writing the book. Later, Harper San Francisco approached Morgan about taking over the book, reversing it by reintroducing it in hardback. One catch, she had to verify it really had happened, if it was to be published non-fiction. Well, she had sworn a soul oath not to jeopardize the tribe’s identity, so she could not prove any of it. Harper published the book as a novel, with an introduction by Morgan saying it was a novel for people who wanted to believe it was a novel, but for other people . . .
For most of my life I had felt like I wanted to live in Australia. Morgan’s book enhanced that desire. When, in the early fall of 1995, my life in Boulder came to a sudden, screeching end (I did plenty of screeching, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth), I took off for Nepal to trek, which was something a lot of Boulder people did, and I had gotten the bug to follow suit.
In Katmandu, I got the bug to go to Australia after I was done trekking, which is another tale altogether. Everyone else out there walking around was having a nature and international experience. I was having that and an experience you might not even believe were I to tell it to you, and then you were told by what you knew in your bones was God in a dream that I really did have that experience. So I won’t tell it right now, today.
I flew into Darwin from Singapore, and going through customs learned there was a hostel in town. It was just before dawn, and I wasn’t real thrilled about the timing of my arrival into what I would learn was a city named after Charles Darwin, whom I somewhat obliquely mentioned at the end of the first chapter of this here book. It occurred to me, on learning this historical fact, that perhaps my arrival in Darwin had something to do with evolution. However, it probably didn’t dawn on me, as I don’t remember it dawning on me, that it was my own personal evolution at stake.
I learned the next day at the front desk of a three-day outback tour in SUVs, and signed up. We gathered about 7 a.m. a couple of days later, me and two men guides and a mixture of men and women Australians, all about half my age, which was, my age, fifty-three, or going there. By lunch time, I realized Australians only have one speed: wide open. Well, they also sleep after they drop.
By dinner time the first night I was exhausted, figured we would camp near where we stopped to have a meal. I figured wrong. We had several more hours of rough, unpaved road ahead into Kakadoo, where some of the first “Crocodile Dundee” film was shot.
Maybe around 10 p.m., as we were pummeled by a washboard dirt road because we were going 60 m.p.h., two aborigines came out of dream time into the rear of the SUV, right in front of me. It didn’t take being Sherlock Holmes to deduce that I was the only person in the SUV who saw them. I knew who they were, but not what they were doing there.
It then was my custom to ask spirits that showed up before me what I had that they wanted? So I asked these two, a man and a woman, what I had that they wanted? Telepathically, I asked. Telepathically, and actually, they laughed, said, “We’re real people, what could you possibly have that we would want?!” I was mortified, wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt over me.
Instead, I asked why they were there? They came back with, “We just came to welcome you into our tribe.” Then, they dissolved back into dream time. All the while, the kids in the SUV were carrying on conversation, cutting up, oblivious to what I had just experienced. When later I told two of them about it, after getting to know them a bit better, they were nice about it but didn’t seem exactly persuaded I wasn’t nuts.
We saw some beautiful places during that three days, and plenty of bleak land in between. It was still the dry season, and maybe it looked a lot better after the rains came shortly thereafter. Whatever, I felt I would not survive three days with those kids, and boy was I glad to get back to the Hostel late the third night.
I had planned to spend six months in Australia but I no longer felt like being there and booked a flight to New Zealand where I had also wanted to live. One night in Aukland and I was headed back to the States. That’s where the real people sent me, to try to live like them but in civilization.
Some of them told Morgan that they had tried to live in civilization, while others had remained in the wild. The ones who had tried it in civilization had started to lose their essence and abilities, so they went back to the wild. They sent her back to America to speak for them to the mutants. They sent me back to America to see if I actually could live in civilization the way they lived in the wild. Five years later I was homeless, living in civilization the way they lived in the wild.
Morgan didn’t become homeless. She made a bundle off her book, and perhaps did okay on a sequel, which I tried to read and couldn’t get into. I found myself wondering if she had missed something, the point maybe? For all I heard about her while she was in America seemed like she was living high on the hog and in very much the mutant paradigm. She got on the speaker’s and workshops tour, and I suppose made another bundle off of that.
As far as I know, I’m the only other white person the real people took under their wing, so to speak. And, as far as I know, I’m the only white person who actually got turned into a real person. For what happened to me after I went back to the States, specifically to Birmingham, Alabama, was very different from what Morgan reported happened to her in the outback with the real people. What happened to me was that I was systematically taken back into myself, over and over again, painfully, horribly, until everything I didn’t want to know about myself, and everything I didn’t want to know about people dear to me, my parents in particular, was revealed to me.
The internal ordeal was much worse than the external ordeal Morgan experienced in the bush with the real people. Worse psychically, and worse physically, because the psychic wounding was merged with my physical body, and my psyche and my physical body were wracked in tandem, as the demons from hell, literally, were systematically brought up out of me into the light of day. I was required to see all of it. Nothing remained hidden, all in keeping with a “little” poem that had come to me when I lived in Boulder:
There are no fig leaves in paradise,
Nor any secrets.
Like Morgan, I had been involved in healing work before I met the real people. Perhaps like Morgan, I had already undergone a good deal of personal healing. Perhaps I had undergone even more healing than she had undergone, for I already was on a rapid and deep healing program when I was visited by the real people. A healing program being directed by angels.
From reading Morgan’s book, I did not get a sense that she was on that kind of program before the met the real people. She seemed to be still operating out of her will and intellect, until the real people got a hold of her. And I saw nothing in her book, or in anything she wrote afterward, to suggest that she ever was taken into the dungeon of her own soul, and left to marinate there with all the critters that lived there.
Flashback to when I reached Anapurna Base Camp, elevation about 15,000 feet, in Nepal, I was exhausted. I had been very ill in Boulder for four years, and it had only just started to lift a few months before everything fell apart there, leaving my heart and soul shattered. During the trek, I felt better physically than I had felt in decades. A long-standing disturbance in my G.I. tract was abated for the most part. I knew it was the work of the angels. By now, I also knew the four years of torture was to some extent due to my carrying my wife and her son inside of me, to try to help them. To say she was not thrilled to be told that by me, after it was told to me, would be somewhat of an understatement.
Anyway, the base camp was fogged-in when I got there, and the fog remained for three days, as did I, because I wanted to see the sun rise on the rim of towering peaks that made the Colorado Rockies look like bumps. When the stars came out just before daybreak of the third day, I went with others up to the ridge where we could see the sun come up over Fishtail Mountain and hit the rim of peaks facing Fishtail, where it was said gods lived, and that is why nobody was allowed on that mountain, the split top of which looked like the tail of a fish or whale.
As the sun hit those majestic peaks, I saw the great blacksmith who had first come to me in Boulder the year before, heralding a great storm coming my way, and my being placed on his big anvil under him and pounded by his huge hammer into something very different. I heard telepathically, “The son and I are one. The son and I are one.” I had thought I was going to hear, “The Father and I are one.” Meaning the Father and me. So I was confused, and arrogant.
I came down off that mountain that day, and two days later, wandering around alone, I got disoriented and got off the trail. It was a misty, light rain kind of a day. I felt lost in more way than being off the trail. Isolated, I was told, “You once were Judas.” This I already knew, as did my Boulder wife and a good friend of mine in Birmingham. Then I was told, “You have a strain of Lucifer in you.” This scared the living shit out of me. Soon I was back on the trail. Shortly after reaching Birmingham, I was told in my sleep, “It’s very easy to mistake Lucifer for the Holy Spirit.” This really scared the shit out of me.
About fifteen months later, in the middle of a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest experience I had stupidly brought onto myself, the Blacksmith showed up in the state mental hospital just like the real people had showed up in the SUV. Only then did it dawn on me that the Blacksmith was the Christ: “The son and I are one.” I felt so stupid, mortified. Immediately, I stopped a lot of behavior I was doing that wasn’t in keeping with Jesus’ way.
Then a rescue came and I was liberated from that hell hole. About two weeks later, I went into a dark night of the soul the likes of which I’d never heard anyone speak of except John of the Cross in his commentaries. The lights went out, I stopped dreaming, felt as if I had been disconnected from God. And like a part of my mind had simply died. The kind of dark night where you pray do die and plot your own demise each day. When fourteen months into it I was told in my sleep, “The reason you are having this experience is because you once were Judas,” I went to an Episcopal priest who told me Judas’ only real mistake was killing himself.
It started to lift two months later, when I left the woman I was with. I then was liberated from psychiatry and its poisons (pills),which took seven months of horrible physical and psychic detox . Then the real show and tell show began. The show and tell that would put me to living on the street eventually, living there like the real people lived in the bush, like Jesus had lived when he walked this world. Even as the show and tell continued. Even as it continues today. Being telepathic, the real people had no secrets among themselves. There are no fig leaves in paradise, nor any secrets. Abide in me, Jesus told his disciples, and you shall come to know the truth and the truth will make you free.
The real people told Morgan that Jesus was a good man who came to this world to help mutants, but they didn’t need him because they were real people. Jesus and the real people tag-teamed me, and anytime I dream or have something come up in waking time about Australia, that’s a cue I’m going down under again, down under into myself and perhaps down under into someone or someones else.
Once a mutant, it’s so terribly easy to revert back to it, especially living in civilization. When I was homeless, it was easier to be real, but harder to stay civilized — I saw that I slowly was going feral. Now that I have some civilized comforts again, feral is not a threat but it’s a real test each day to remain real. I need constant reminding of who I am, as opposed to who I would like to think I am.
For example, when I wrote this chapter yesterday, it seemed okay. I felt smooth. But my dreams last night disagreed. On waking before dawn, I got up and went back to work (writing). The first part of the chapter I left alone. The last part, starting with “As far as I know I’m the only other white person the real people took under their wing,” went through radical surgery, taking me out of it and putting God in it.
It appears, alas, that I need repeated visits down under, because there always seems to be something else down there that needs attention. Jesus told his disciples that what is in them will destroy them if it is left in them, but if it is brought up out of them, it will save them.
Outwardly, the real people look like savages. Inwardly, they look like Adam and Eve before the fall. Except unlike Adam and Eve, they have been tested by life and have become savvy and wise. They have seen and lived in the kingdom civilization doesn’t even know exists.
I sometimes say only in Key West can someone like me live openly and not be caught and bagged and sent to the cuckoo’s nest and the key thrown away.
Sloan
 (Pan) (Mother Nature)
Last night my dream maker surprised me by pushing me toward publishing serially it seems, chapter by chapter, the fairly short book (and fairly short chapters) that started falling out of me about three weeks ago. The brief intro below, or maybe it’s just an author’s preface, came to me after three chapters had fallen out of me and I now felt this indeed was a new book. I tell you truly, I really don’t want to publish this book like this. In fact, I can’t say I want to publish it in anyway, for a variety of reasons. However, I learned a long time ago not to ignore the Editorial Board after it made its sentiments known to me. As I told someone yesterday, this book is really way out there. Really way out there.
Sloan
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FOREPLAY
I’m not sure, but maybe I’m writing another book. That explains the I supposes and so forths in the first few chapter headings. I suppose this book, if that’s what it is, will continue to be autobiographical, as I seriously doubt I can improve on the last novel that upped and fell out of me, literally, in six weeks’ time, in the spring of 2001. It was autobiographical too, but some of it, for better and for worse, hadn’t happened yet, and a lot of it was put into a different suit of clothes, but underneath it all was a great deal of personal experience. Well, enough foreplay.
CHAPTER 1, I SUPPOSE
WET DREAMS, ABDUCTIONS AND OTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
Years before I started writing, I felt I wanted to be a writer. I started writing my first book in 1982, as I recall. From that moment, I dreamed of making it as a writer. Or more than making it. Hitting the jackpot. So far, now age 67, it hasn’t happened. At least not in any human measure of hitting the jackpot. Perhaps in spirit ways the jackpot was hit, but that doesn’t put money in my pocket or food on the table or a roof over my head or a car in the garage.
Here’s my dilemma: the second poem that fell out of me, oh, maybe in 1992, prelude to skads of poems falling out of me — kerplop!
I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off.
I asked it how and why it sang,
But all it did was look ahead,
All it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
Or asked if I liked its music,
Or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
By that point in my life, I knew I was in the grips of what appeared to be a deep and not exactly gentle mystical experience, which seemed headed to places I didn’t particularly want to go but I didn’t see any alternative destinations nor any way to change the course heading I was on. Although I had not yet thought of my plight as one of having been shanghaied, that’s nevertheless what it already felt and seemed like. So I knew the mockingbird poem was a watershed event, a template for my life, and while I didn’t like it, it rang true and has continued to ring true until this day, 20 October 2009.
I live in Key West, where Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Robert Frost, to name the most famous in our stable of many writers, past and present, hung out. I may be the only local writer who never had a book reviewed by the local press. I also may have written and published more books than any of the local writers, and, as far as I know, more books than the aforementioned heavy weights. One way to get to the bottom of that is to query the editors of our local newspapers, whom I use as my own personal dart boards. Another way would be to give the mockingbird poem even deeper consideration.
I once worshipped Hemingway, wanted to emulate him. But reading Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway, when I was in law school at the University of Alabama, and a few years later Baker’s compilation of letters Hemingway had written to other people, which they had saved, caused me not to like Hemingway very much as a person, even though I still liked his literature. As time passed, it was what Robert Frost wrote that really rang true to me: “I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference.”
As for my Muse, cruel lady you are, moving me to write maybe twenty books of different sizes, shapes, tones and depths, each one of a kind, each out of the box, each a testament to fools rushing in where even angels fear to tread, and yet you seem determined for me to end my days in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, who depended on a relative, as I do, to pay the bills that living on this world requires to be paid, unless you are homeless and live off welfare agencies, which I also have done. Having written that, I wonder if my life will end as Van Gogh’s did: self-infliction. Well, from where he now sits, he gets the last laugh, I suppose, as he watches people pay enormous sums for what, I imagine, he gladly would have accepted six months’ rent in payment.
I tell you truly, not all the heart heaving, not all the tears, not all the rapture I experienced during deeply inspired moments of writing, and many such moments there were, assuages or salves the depression, despair and grief of being a starving artist whose Muse sends stuff like this below through him, just to cause him to hope all the more to make a living wage by his God-given craft:
He feels deep beauty
in the dark pool
from which is writings flow,
She clings to him like fine silk,
Precious oil,
She feels solid, compressed,
Like . . . A black pearl
growing from inside out,
ever larger with each stroke of his pen,
Pushing her precious waters
over her banks
into his dreams and life.
I used to attend and participate at poetry readings. Used to. I attended two fiction writing classes back in the early 1980s, in my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, offered by the local same writer, Fred Bonnie, a French Canadian ex pat, who’d had a book of off-beat (maybe weird is more accurate) short stories published. During the middle of the second class, Fred told me to stop attending writing classes and start writing. I dedicated my first book to him. Non-fiction, accused by its evil targets of being fiction: HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter? The cartoons I imagined and a local artist created were, well, a picture is worth a thousand words
.
Some years and three books later, September 1990, if my ageheizmer’s recalls accurately, I was one of the invited presenters at a writers conference at Birmingham Southern College. I then lived in Boulder, Colorado, and being from out of town, way out of town actually, and having been published made me an expert. I named my presentation, “Writing As a Mystical Experience,” and gave the participants who showed up my take, based on a revelation to me, of The Old Man and the Sea being Hemingway’s unconscious suicide note; he later blew his own brains out without completing another book.
More specifically, I opined that the old man, the boy, the fish, the sea, the great marlin, the sharks that ate it away until nothing was left were metaphor for Hemingway’s own life of trying to prove himself as a man, to his own distant father and to himself. The boy was the young Hemingway. The Old Man, who left the boy behind, was Hemingway’s father. The great billfish was a phallic symbol. The sharks came out of the depths of Hemingway’s troubled psyche and lost feminine, the cancer that would eat away his brain that he eventually would blow out.
Perhaps also contributing to this perspective was my recollection of a letter in Carlos Baker’s second book, written by Hemingway to his editor, Max Perkins, I think was his name, at Scribner & Sons, I think was the publishing house. Hemingway was mightily upset, he told Perkins, about people reading symbolism into The Old Man and the Sea. The old man was an old man, the boy was a boy, the fish was a fish, the sea was the sea, Hemingway insisted — too loudly, it seemed to me, even back in the dark ages when I was studying to be a lawyer.
Maybe, also, I identified with the Hemingway and maybe was writing to prove myself to me and to my own father. However, I don’t think I had thought about that angle — or was it an angel? — at the writer’s conference, or even had wanted to think about it, so I doubt I mentioned that minor inconvenience at the conference. Or that my trying in myriad ways to prove myself as a man had taken precedence over being a father to my daughters and a husband to their mother, which chickens eventually came home to roost in spades.
What the participants really wanted to know, basically, was how I dealt with writer’s block? I said I didn’t get writer’s block. When it was time for me to write, I wrote; it consumed me, until I was done with it. When it was not time for me to write, only garbage came out of me when I tried to write. I was better off doing something else. No, I didn’t go to writers workshops? No, I didn’t get up every morning and sit at my typewriter or computer or writing pad for a set time each morning. If I wrote, it was because I had to write, and if I didn’t have to write, I might be writing in my soul but until it was ready to go onto paper or to the monitor I needed to do something else.
I sensed maybe they thought I was a heretic, wore horns, or was just plain crazy, although a few seemed to get my drift, sort of. But none of them seemed to take in my saying that maybe some of them weren’t writers. Maybe they were artists, or potters, or had some other way of creative expression they had not discovered. All that money and time and effort they had spent trying to learn how to be writers, I don’t suppose it was realistic for me to expect any of them to take in what I had to say.
Looking back, I think the person who really needed to hear what I said the most was me. Hemingway was a famous writer. He made a good bit of money on his novels. His writing took him to exotic places. But in the end, what did all of that get him? A double barrel shotgun under his chin, his big toe on the trigger. Same end as Van Gogh, different weapon of mass destruction.
Three years ago, and maybe seventeen more books later, something happened to change everything for me as a writer. A friend suggested that I get my own blog. I talked with a fellow who was publishing my daily email missives to an archive on his own website, and he said he could set me up a website. Thus came into being goodmorningkeywest.com, and the Today’s Cock-a-doodle-doo file on the homepage of that website, to which I have been posting nearly daily ever since. Unable to find a publisher or widespread audience for my writings, I was given one by God: the World Wide Web.
The Archives at goodmorningkeywest.com contain everything I published daily since March 2007. When goodmorningfloridakeys.com later came into being, and the Today’s FlaKey Drivel file copycatting the Today’s Cock-a-doodle-doo file at goodmorningkeywest.com, I started publishing simultaneously to both non-commercial websites. Imagine being able to get those two domain names without any hassle in this day and age of capitalism, free enterprise and online business promotion. But they both were available because God had reserved them for me.
Nowadays, pilgrims from faraway places, and nearby places, too, who google this or that topic online, sometimes stumble across stuff I have written, the likes of which I seriously doubt they will ever find written by anyone else. What they do with it is out of my hands. Sometimes they write to me, usually not. Can’t say I blame them, as I have a bad habit of publishing what people write to me, and sometimes I have the even badder habit of revealing their identity, home town, email address, home address, phone number, birth date, etc. Well, this is paradise, ain’t it, and even Adam and Eve knew there were no fig leaves there, nor any secrets.
Maybe that’s why I never received (yet) what I knew to be a reply from an extraterrestrial. They seem to prefer to conduct their affairs on this planet clandestinely. Mostly, I suppose, because they don’t want to cause a world-wide panic, which would emanate out of the religions on this world that still seem to hold to the quaint notion that this planet is the only one, in the billions of billions of billions squared and cubed planets, stars, worm holes, black holes, and so forth in the Creation, that harbors “intelligent” life. I don’t suppose I should say that my first two novels touched not very lightly on the extraterrestrial-on-earth theme, should I? I don’t suppose I should say that I know for a fact that extraterrestrial beings are on and around this planet all the time. So I won’t say it, because I don’t want to be asked to prove it and cause a world wide panic.
In case someone is wondering, yeah, I attended a few MUFON meetings, until I got the sense that the UFO stuff they were tracking/trying to find didn’t jive all that well with the UFO stuff that was tracking me. Maybe tracking me because maybe I give off different “vibes” than most “humans” give off. Maybe because human is merely a relative term. Maybe because humans aren’t even from this planet, but it’s been so long since they were seeded here that all of that’s been forgotten in the name of religion, if not abject ignorance.
Not to worry, I’m not suggesting that anyone should chase after or be chased by ETs. Far as I can tell, it’s a major, if not catastrophic diversion away from what people really need to chase after or by chased by. Pray that you never catch God, and pray even harder that God never catches you.
In case anyone is wondering, this missive pretty much just up and jumped out of me, like a wet dream. It came nearly as fast as I could write it down. I had no idea what the next sentence would be, much less the next paragraph. This ending popped out of me after I re-read the emission and made a few corrections of typographical, clarification or comic (not necessarily to be confused with cosmic) nature.
Sloan, Key West – Where people accused of being weirdos some place else can come mingle with real weirdos
P.S. In case anyone is still wondering, ETs come to this planet to try to figure out if people descended from monkeys, or if it was monkeys that descended from people. They, the ETs, discovered that Key West is perhaps better than most places to study this important cosmic question, because there are as many people here as there are monkeys. Or is it the other way around? Actually, it’s hard to really tell, because they all look pretty much alike, but they don’t all act pretty much alike. Actually, some of them don’t act like either people or monkeys.
 Received this from someone on my email list, related to my reply to her inquiry about what actually had happened to cause the Unitarian Universalist Church of Key West to kick me out and permanently ban me in 2006. She attends that church.======================
See red below. You are a minister, like it or not, and the purpose of a minister is to comfort the distressed and distress the comfortable. Live with it, dear. (I don’t know who said that first — I got it from a beautiful UU minister, brilliant and almost six feet tall.)
My strong suit is spiritual healing/growth, putting people on the edge where they aren’t comfortable. This is how God does me. People don’t change when they are comfortable. They need to be discombobulated, shaken up inside, to break up the concrete, make them more viscous, so they can be remolded internally.======================
The red above was quoted from my “Nazi Germany – Key West” post of maybe two days ago, which mostly was about Key West’s homeless people and how this city has tended to treat them — lnot as part of God’s One Human Family.
In my reply to the UU member, who has been on my email list quite while and is a friend, I said UU was but one of several Key West churches I had been sent into on a spiritual work assignment, and I had been sent into churches elsewhere, and none of the church assignments had left me popular and I had come away with a sense that not much had been accomplished. I said as the UU situation was coming to a boiling head, I had a dream in which its leadership were compared to the Luftwaffe, which was the Spirit’s way of telling me I was dealing with Nazi energy. I felt it, too, psychically and physically — very rough symptoms. I sent the UU leadership an email describing that dream and its meaning, even as they were forming a committee on permanent madness, or some such, to ban me forever, without my even being at my own trial and execution. Actually, another trial and execution were underway, about which they knew nothing — theirs.
UU in Key West was the third UU church I had attended. The first was in Birmingham, Alabama, before I got abducted by God and started being used to distress the comfortable. Later, however, I did get an opportunity to distress a segment of that congregation. The second UU church was in Boulder, Colorado, which moved in the distress direction toward the end of my tenure with that church. In none of the three UU churches did I see any sign of a minister like the UU minister described above, whose self-stated purpose was to comfort the distressed and distress the comfortable. So I’m glad to know such a UU minister exists, somewhere, because that’s the kind of minister Jesus was, and he’s my role model for a minister. I can and sometimes am given opportunities to comfort the distressed, but there’s a lot of that kind of ministers around and mostly what I’m given is to distress the comfortable.
I realized when UU banned me that it was simply old-fashioned Puritan shunning. I thought it was amusing: they call themselves Universalists but practiced shunning. I was the second person they had banned. I can’t speak for the first person, but I was glad to be done with them, for I had never been comfortable with how the leaders in that church went about things. Even before the situation arose that finally got me banned, I was not comfortable in that church. But then, I’m never comfortable in any church I’m sent in to distress the comfortable, and when a church assignment ends I’m glad to be out of there, and the people I was dealing with in the church are just as glad.
There was another part of the UU assignment that was very personal to me. My own family practices shunning. They shunned me. Before me, I had seen my father’s father shun my brother, until my brother’s life started to suit his grandfather. Cut my brother out of his will, he did, until my brother started to suit him; then he put him back into his will. My grandfather was known in Birmingham as a churchman, humanitarian and businessman, and was very respected by people who never really got to know him. It took me a very long time to really get to know him — he was long gone from this world by the time I had it all put together. This man thought he was God and behaved like it. He was the most manipulative, evil man I have known in this life.
I realized when it was going on that what I was experiencing with the leaders of UU was bringing some more of my dearly-departed churchman, humanitarian, businessman grandfather up out of me, the sins of the fathers, to be aired out and healed. I realized in the wee hours of this morning, after some dreams pointed me in the direction of my grandfather, that the terrible toxic waste dump it felt like I had swallowed yesterday about noon, was actually yet another pass at the dearly-departed churchman, humanitarian and businessman. I had missed the early signal yesterday, when someone came to me, sent by a friend, to talk about a company in which he had invested, which specializes in removing and dealing with toxic metals, mostly, helping the city clean up Truman Waterfront. This fellow himself was hard for me to be around and by the time we were done talking he called me an “asshole” and left. It was right after that that I felt I had swallowed a toxic waste dump — my dearly departed churchman, humanitarian, businessman grandfather.
This, folks, is what is going on all the time, for everybody. But how many people actually are able to read the shit life throws at us in this way? Very darn few. And how many people actually even want to read the shit life throws at us in this way? A whole lot fewer. Certainly, I don’t like reading life in this way, but if I don’t, then I miss the entire reading assignment and have to do it all over again sooner or later. If the leaders of UU here in Key West had had any understanding of how life really goes, they would have asked themselves what in the dickens Sloan represented to them? What was he trying to tell them, even if he didn’t know he is trying to tell them? But they didn’t look at life in that way. They frequently said in church services and functions that they were on a spiritual path, but they had no clue what being on a spiritual path entailed. It was really no different than people saying they were saved by Jesus but they didn’t live the way he had lived and had taught others to live.
If you who claim salvation through Jesus believe he would condemn a homeless person for being homeless, or a clothing optional public beach in Key West, you are sadly mistaken. To the contrary, he would welcome homeless people and such a beach, because he would know that it would distress the comfortable, which is the only way for them to have any chance of changing and moving closer to God. He also would know that homelessness and physical nakedness reflect spiritual nakedness, which is absolutely necessary to walk with God. People who have deep dark secrets, who do things they don’t want people to know, while outwardly professing righteousness, are no different from the very God-homeless Pharisees of Jesus’ day, whom he roundly provoked at every opportunity. He did it to offer them a chance to change, and he did it to use them as a teaching contrast for other people to observe and hopefully they would take a different tack.
As for my dearly-departed churchman, humanitarian, businessman grandfather, Jesus told his disciples that what was in them would destroy them, if it remained in them, but it would save them if it was brought up out of them. He also told them that if they abided in him, they would come to know the truth and the truth would make them free. If you think Jesus came to bring peace on this world, you never knew him, and you never read the Gospels, either. He plainly said many times and many ways that he came not to bring peace but to bring fire to set the world on fire and a sword to divide. He was the fire and the sword. And yes, he comforted the distressed, even as he was ruthless with the comfortable. Ruthless.
Sloan
(local nude beach insurgent)
I FYI’d yesterday’s ”Just Another Roadside Attraction” post to the as yet undentified flying kwkanaka.com object operator, who had come at me through cyberspace with great vigor protesting a public nude beach, and to what appears to be an also as yet unidentified accomplice, DFCBW401@ATT.NET. That sponsored more vigorous kanaka protests and not entirely tame redoubts from me. To simplify, I left out the email addresses this time and put the text of kanaka’s emails in italics. Below all of that quibble is a report of more local counterinsurgency.Sloan
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Haulover Beach cannot be compared to South Roosevelt Blvd. You are trying to equate apples to oranges. I noticed the tax supported cop in your email. Tax money being spent unwisely.
We have tax supported cops drop in on our beaches now.
Haulover has been an economic bonanza for Miami area. It’s the closest geographic ”comparable” to Key West. Nobody expects or ever said as many people will use a KW clothing optional beach as go to Haulover.
I don’t believe your objection has anything to do with the reasons you give. I think your reasons are pure religious-based, because you are picking over pennies KW City will not even have to pony up to create a clothing optional beach.
If you were really concerned about costs, you’d be raising bloody hell about real expenditures, like the mega yacht harbor, a new city hall.
And if you were worried about tens of thousands of tourists, you’d be raising bloody hell about cruise ships.
Are you going to attend the next clothing optional beach workshop when the city commission holds it (to be scheduled) and personally state your name and address and your objections?
I don’t want tens of thousands of anyone, especially nudists! This island is too small. If a private beach is too small , then like a filled to capacity resturant, you go to another resturant. Simple and no one is offended.
It is as I felt all along, this isn’t about cost to the city for you but is about nudists.
Of course, it is about nudists on display!
Much time could have been said, and B.S. avoided, if you simply had said this to begin with.
I don’t object to nude beaches, per se.
My objections to a nude beach on city property are twofold:
We have had nude beaches within the City and in the County on various private properties – None were at a cost to taxpayers and all were far enough away from normal human traffic.
So, why now on a public beach? It simply isn’t necessary.
Haulover Beach is not Key West. The only similiarity to Haulover and Key West is the sand and the water, period.
I think you do object to nude beaches, per se, but you know you probably can’t stop them from being on personal property, so that’s your line of defense, and making nit-picking arguments. I could take from your silence that you don’t intend to go public about this at a city commission meeting, which is where you need to do it, as I have no decision making power over it, and you are not persuading me, and I seriously doubt you are persuading anyone on my email list (about 350 people), or who read what I post to the two websites, maybe somewhat more than 350 people.
I have not intention of persuading you. That was not my purpose. I was only providing an opinion. You have decided to make it more.
I take it, from your repeated decline to answer my question, that you will not be at the city commisson workshop on clothing optional beaches.
I’m glad you wrote, stating your various objections and opinions, each of which I addressed, because I imagine you represent others with similar views. You did write to try to persuade, or, if you prefer, win your point.
All of the city commissioners and the mayor, and the city manager and city attorney, receive copies of my daily posts, so they are apprised our dialogue.
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Apparently, the opponents of a clothing optional beach down here don’t want to identify themselves publicly (I still don’t know who kwkanaka is). Looks like they don’t want to say they oppose on religious grounds, so they talk about culture, money, being fair to other beach users, too many tourists already, and so forth.
Maybe they really are worried about getting crosses burned in their yards, or nudists pop-calling their churches for Sunday service, or their businesses being boycotted, or their children being teased at school, or them being teased by other adults. Maybe they have reason to be worried about such things, except for the cross burnings, although I bet a few of those would turn the attention of the entire world and even much of the Universe toward Key West, the comic strip of all comic strips.
The barista at Sippin’ Internet Cafe, Holly, told me yesterday morning that three totally naked women in heels walked by Island Dog Bar where she works her other job night before last. Then, Smiley, who hangs out at Sippin’ mornings and Island Dog lots of evenings, grumbled it was about twenty naked women that went by Island Dog that night. He sits outside, Holly was inside and can’t see the sidewalk as well. She asked why should women spend a lot of money getting body-painted, it’s an art form in Key West, good body painters make an enviable wage? Why not women just go naked around Fantasy Fest and save the expense? In economic hard times like these, which the kanakaites seem to want to perpetuate, who but the aforesaid kanakaites can argue with that basic dollars-and-cents logic?
Later yesterday morning I dropped by radiofreekeywest.com, right into an interview with City Commissioner Clayton Lopez. After the interview ended I told Clayton about what had gone on in front of Island Dog. He said, as a man, he’d like to have been there to see it, but as a city commissioner, something should have been done about it. Out of the blue, I had a revelation on the mountain in the presence of those witnesses, which I voiced: We give them the beaches, they give us Duval Street as a clothing optional walking mall! It’s already darn near naked anyway, the religious folks don’t like to come down there, let them have the beaches! Shazam!!!
For sure, this year is the first time I have seen this much bare flesh around Fantasy Fest. No body paint at all. Smiley told me this morning that there was a massive “plaid party” at Captain Tony’s Saloon last night, that blocked Green Street entirely. Naked men and women everywhere, people taking photos for prosterity or to share with their poor deprived friends living elsewhere. A Key West police cruiser showed up with all lights flashing, and when it was totally ignored, it left.
Maybe there’s something in the air. Maybe it’s a revolution. Maybe the KWPD are going to regroup and the jail’s going to be full of naked bodies. That sure might draw a big attention toward Key West. Well, we do want publicity, don’t we? Especially when it’s free! Doesn’t the city invite people in its advertising to come to Key West as they are? Well, maybe they are. Maybe they are.
P.S. After yesterday’s interview at radiofreekeywest.com, Commissioner Lopez said in the studio that the reason there is a black mold problem in City Hall is because the building was built not to be air-conditioning, so that louver windows and other parts of the design would circulate air throughout the building and in the walls. Proper circulation dealt with black mold. When the building was air-conditioned, the circulation stopped and when the building got soaked, say by Hurricane Wilma, black mold became a problem. Mayor Cates told me yesterday that the AC bill for the building is $7,000 to $8,000 a month. If Clayton is correct, and if the AC can be torn out and the original air circulation restored, perhaps the building can be salvaged. Yeah, it’d be plenty sweaty working there, but it would be safe. Maybe if staff didn’t wear clothes, it would be less sweaty. Maybe if we make Key West clothing optional everywhere in pubilc, we won’t have any more depressions  .
Sloan
   (Haulover Beach, Miami)
Nude beach?
Mr. Bashinsky, I support Commissioner Wardlow’s opposition of a nude beach on city property. I see no reason why tax monies should be spent on a nude beach. The appropriate place for a nude beach. if it is determined we will have one, is on private property. Thank you,
RE: Nude beach?
Tax monies will be spent on a nude beach? Where did you hear that? From what I’ve heard, which our city commissioners, past and present, including Billy Wardlow, also have heard, a clothing optional beach won’t cost the city a penny.
Re: Nude beach?
Nonsense. Of course tax money will have to be spent. You don’t just let folks wander on a beach without a barrier. Why does it have to be on a public beach? It belongs, if necessary, and that hasn’t been established, on private property. Why does the City to have to cater every whim?
RE: Nude beach?
The Naturist Society told the City Commission at a commission meeting several months ago, at the workshop last week, in emails, and, I believe, in phone conversations and perhaps even face-to-face meetings with some commissioners, that barriers, signage (“warning, clothing optional beach”), beach patrol, portable toilets, etc. will be picked up by the Naturists. Commissioner Wardlow knows about this, as he was at the workshop when it was said, and that beaches run by Naturists are the best run, best behaved, cleanest beaches, as Haulover Beach has demonstrated to Miami.
This is hardly every whim. I have seen convincing evidence, based on what happens at Haulover Beach in Miami, that leaves me pretty well convinced that a clothing optional beach will attract hordes of naturists, ten of thousands, perhaps more, to Key West from North America, Europe and other overseas places. Travelers who don’t now come to Key West. There are 33,000,000 registered Naturists (they joined up) worldwide, about 2,000,000 in the US alone. About that many again world wide do not belong to an organization. They know where the nude beaches are, via the Internet. Most of the people who visit Haulover Beach are foreign visitors.
A decent-sized clothing optional public beach will provide an economic boom to this financially distressed city’s businesses, which boom will bleed into the city coffers. Our upside down real estate market might even turn right side up. All at no $$ cost to the city. Compare that to the very real huge cost of, say, the city partnering with the Spottswood group, to put in a mega-yacht basin on the city’s Truman Waterfront land. Catering to a whim at taxpayer expense is exactly what I call that.
I know of no private beach in Key West that could accommodate anywhere close to the amount of usage a decent-size segment of clothing optionnal pubic beach would attract. When there was a nude beach at the Pier House, that business did very well until the present anti-nudity ordinance was passed specifically to get rid of that nude beach on private property.
If a Key West hotel today with beach front is permitted today to have a nude beach, co-owned by the city (up to the high tide mark), my old lawyer mind can see that hotel’s competitors hollering unfair competition, monopolistic practices, citing the monopoly the city gave Ed Swift’s company on guided tours in Key West, which ended up costing the city $8,000,000 a few months ago and reduced our financial reserves to under one month. I put Ed Swift’s sweetheart deal into the every whim column.
Mayor McPherson often spoke of turning Key West into a world class destination. Commissioner Johnston said at the recent clothing optional workshop: if we want to be a world class destination, we need to cater to world class travelers. She also said we should give a clothing optional beach a trial period. If we don’t like the result, we get rid of it. The Naturists also suggested the trial basis approach. If it doesn’t work out, it didn’t cost the city any money.
Do you think the Spottswood group now pushing the city to let it develop the mega-yacht basin and a 5,000 seat amphitheater and park at Truman Waterfront, on city property and the City and taxpayer dime — $33,000,000 was the estimated total cost, wasn’t it? — will be on a trial basis? Do you think if the city decides it doesn’t like the result, the Spottswoods will reimburse the city and taxpayers what they spent?
If this wasn’t Key West, if this was, say, Marathon, I wouldn’t promote a clothing optional beach. But this is Key West and a clothing-optional public beach is completely in keeping with the city’s ambience and reputation. Around 3 p.m. today, I passed a naked painted man wearing sandals on Duval Street in front of La Concha Hotel. Just yesteday morning near dawn (7 a.m.), a buddy of mine passed a totally naked, not even painted woman, carrying a colorful beach ball, in the same place. Compared to that, compared to Fantasy Fest, compared to the many ”adult” attractions on Duval Street every day and night of the week, a clothing optional public beach is pretty ordinary, just another roadside attraction.
From the perspective of one who will not use a clothing optional beach because it doesn’t mean anything to me personally, denying the city a clothing optional beach will cater to whim of people who have a problem with it that has absolutely nothing to do with money or the economic welfare of this city
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Shortly after I posted the last reply above, a Duval Street vendor, who also saw the naked painted man mentioned above, who was gettng plenty of photos shot of him by seriously grossed out tourists to show to their seriously deprived friends back home, wherever that is, came into Sippin’ Internet Cafe where I spend some time and said he’d just heard a cruise ship loaded with Naturists is headed into Key West for Fantasy Fest. I said a cruise ship full of naked people? Yep, he said that’s what he’d heard. I said the churches will all have to move somewhere else. He said, no, they’ll just have to put guards at every door; naked people aren’t allowed in churches. I bet they wouldn’t even let a mermaid in.
 (Aphrodite)
My goodness! Pedaling my bicycle to Sippin’ Internet Cafe this morning, I wondered what all I might have to write about today? I wondered, because I had something that came in yesterday I thought was pretty cool, but last night I dreamt of a cell phone, needing one, or trying to use it, which usually means a message is coming in from “above.” Well, lo and behold, I passed the Troll sitting in his usual spot outside of Sippin’, and said “Hi!” and he smiled, said, “Good morning!” Inside, I passed the sour puss and said “Good morning, Smiley!” He grunted something unintelligible without looking up from the morning paper. Then I said “Hi,” to Holly, our barista this morning, and she said ”Hi” back.
Then, as I booted up this here laptop, Smiley came over and told me that walking on Duval toward Starbucks just before dawn this morning, Starbucks opens before Sippin’, as he reached Fresh Produce, walking toward him the other way with a multi-colored beach ball under her left arm was a stark naked woman. No body paint, stark naked. Well, maybe stark naked, because when I asked Smiley if she had on shoes?, he said he never looked at her feet. When I asked if she smiled at him, he said he never looked at her face either. But only at her boobs and a little patch of low hair did he look. And when she passed him by, he turned and looked back to make sure he had seen what he thought he had seen — yep. Right in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. That poor man must have rolled over in his grave — St. Paul. He must have rolled over. I nearly rolled off my chair laughing, said surely it was sign!
When Holly called Smiley depaved, or maybe it was digusting, I said he’d have been depraved not to look. As I recall, it was Holly, who ain’t exactly shy about bikinis, complaining about a bikini contest on Duval Street toward the end of spring break this year that helped give me the bright idea for Key West to have a nude beach. The other instigator of that bright idea was the nearby doggie apparel vendor, who mused that maybe a nude beach might beef up our sagging economy a bit (no pun intended, of course). Next thing, I meet Aphrodite (drawing above) and her naked-beach friends, and, with the aid of her naked-beach escapade at Hometown! PAC’s first Call to Candidates, at Salute, right in the middle of now Mayor Craig Cates’ debut into politics, the rest was, as is said, history.
Then I pick up today’s Solare Hill and turn axniously to the “speaking of manners” column, page 7. Wow, advice on how to behave at Fantasy Fest, which makes going to a nude beach a yawn. Gosh, if you are chatting up a woman online and are thinking about coming to Fantasy Fest for your own very first time and are wondering if you should invite the damsel to join you for her own very first time at Fantasy Fest, and with you, well, don’t do it. She might not like Fantasy Fest. Well, if she might not like Fantasy Fest, would you who want to do Fantasy Fest want to spend any more time chatting her up? Wouldn’t meeting her in Key West for both of you’s very first Fantasy Fest be a darn good litmus test for you two’s potential as a couple? Not according to Miss Manners.
Anyway, what I had from yesterday that I thought I might post today is this email from Richard Mason, husband of Shirley Mason, Mother of Haulover Beach up Miami way. The naked folks’ beach unnaked folks also use. The beach that is packed, like wall to wall, while the adjacent unaked beaches tend, by comparison, to look. well, naked — like something cut out of middle of the Gobi Desert. Death Valley also comes to mind. And the Sahara.
St. Paul, stand up and take note!
Sloan,
Have too good ministers forgotten about St. Francis who advocated giving away your clothing?
Neither the Church or God, Himself had spoke against that.
Have they also forgotten about St Clement, who was sent to the desert, to be nude at God orders?
Have they forgotten about the Roman city that had a large public bath that was in the vicinity of Jesus and the Apostles? None of them spoke out against the nudity at the public baths. They did speak out about the money changes in the Temples.
Have the local ministers forgotten that the THE Church performed all baptisms in the nude for several hundred years.
We could sign a covenant with the community if the local churches will do the same. That covenant would read that should there be any sexual molestation done on the clothing-optional beach or by the signed churches, then both entities would have their privileges revoked.
The beach looses the dedication for nudity and the churches loose the license to operate as a church.
That seems fair.
With the separation of church and state by constitutional mandate, the churches and their ministers are entitled to their opinions but not the right to write the laws.
In secular law we speak to intent and behavior. Mere nudity is not illegal.
Richard
Hi, Richard. This email from you is a beauty. To your last sentence, which tracks the state statute, as I recall, I would add mere nudity also is not immoral. In fact, according to the Adam and Eve story, nudity is God’s perferred dress code for human beings. Sloan
First, today, congratulations to Fantasy Fest Queen Vicki Gordon and King Ralph Garcia, for raising the most money for AIDS Help. Key West’s biggest celebration, by far, Fantasy Fest was started by local gays.
I “chanced” to have a discussion over breakfast at Harpoon Harry’s with a fellow who said he had known the city commisisoner who, maybe in 1983, had ramrodded the anti-nudity ordinance, still in effect, which, I said, looks like it was written by someone who had never studied the law. I also said the righteous city commissionner had owned a plumbing contracting company and had used thinly clad, if at all clad, women on his business cards to attract business. The fellow at breakfast said when that city commisisoner ran for reelection, when asked at a candidate forum hosted by the Key West Business Guild, which was started by local gays, what he would do about trying to help people with AIDS. Would he support something like AIDS Help. He said he wouldn’t do anything about AIDS; it was something God was doing to punish gays. The father of our anti-nudity ordinance.Over lunch yesterday with a bunch of local attorneys and a local business man, I was teased that when Pastor Ernie De Loach, of Glad Tidings Tabernacle Church, comes out against Key West having a nude beach, that will be the end of it. Pastor Ernie is one of the best known and liked ministers in Key West. His church reminded me, from my attendance of services there, of a very conservative Pentecostal church. I smiled at the smug lawyer, said, Pastor Ernie had told Sandy and Nick Downs, who were in his parish, that he didn’t see anything wrong with a nude beach or with the ads Sandy had dreamed up and ran for my mayoral campaign on her dime in Key West the Newspaper, the most “famous” of which ads begins this post.
It was crystal clear at the recent city commission workshop that new Commissioner Billy Wardlow is strenuously opposed to designating any of our city beaches clothing-optional. When Billy leaned on our new Mayor Craig Cates, saying he represented Billy’s voting district, meaning, he should honor the objections of Billy’s constituents to a clothing optional beach, Craig replied that he represented all voting districts in Key West. I came away from the workshop convinced Billy will do whatever he can to defeat Key West having a clothing optional beach and he might not be very nice about it. Therefore, I advise Billy, and everyone in Key West who feels the way he does, to seek Pastor Ernie’s sage counsel. And if they come away not liking what they hear, then they might seek the counsel of two other well known and liked local ministers, Father Stephen Braddock and Rev. Joe McMurray.
I also suggest to Billy and the other commissioners, who have told us about constituents telling them they don’t want a nude beach, that they start telling those people to come to the next city commission workshop on a clothing optional beach and tell the commissioners and mayor and the rest of us who they are and why they object. I am not alone in being fed up with officials announcing from the dais that they are hearing a lot of objection from locals to Key West having a clothing optional beach, but no locals ever show up at or write letters to be read at city commission meetings, saying they object. Who are these people? Why don’t they come out of the closet and show their faces?
Another thing I probably should cover today is Commissioner Teri Johnston’s comment at the workshop about her and the other commissioners and our former mayor being inundated with objecting emails from people outside Key West and outside the Keys. Teri said it was some sort of organization behind it. Some sort of organization named The American Decency Association, headquartered in Somewhere, Michigan.
On learning of Key West considering a clothing optional beach, ADA’s fearless self-appointed leader sent out a mass email to his organization’s members, requesting money for an ADA crusade to save Key West from the infidels, along with a request for mass emailings to our then mayor and city commissioners threatening to never come to Key West if it got a nude beach. I hazard a wild guess and say the fearless leader and probably none of his lemmings had ever visited and had no intention of ever visiting Key West. And I also hazard a wild wager that none of them visited Key West after sending out their electronic paper arrows. But we’d love to have them visit and spend their money here. We’d love that. I wrote several times during the campaign that God had decided Key West should have a clothing optional beach, and it was the Devil who opposed it. I write it again. That’s right, Commissioner Wardlow and your invisible constituents. That’s right, Commissioners Gibson and Rossi and your invisible constituents. That’s right, former Mayor McPherson and your former invisible constituents. That’s right American Decency Society, the religious right, prudes, conservatives in liberal sheep clothing, God wants Key West to have a nude beach.
Commissioner Lopez, on this issue you also might wish to check in with your pastor brother, Sinclaire Forbes, who can tell you whose side God is on in this little nubile war. You do intend to put the will of God first, don’t you, Commissioner Lopez? As in, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth . . . As in, In the beginning, there were no fig leaves in Paradise, and there still aren’t any there . . .
Sloan
 (beach bonnet)
After reading Mandy Bolen’s report in yesterday’s Citizen about the nude beach workshop at Old City Hall night before last, I found myself ruminating.
The first thing I ruminated was I didn’t remember the term “nude beach” used during the entire workshop. Maybe it was used, but I didn’t remember it. What I remembered hearing over and over again from the citizens and the mayor and commissioners was “clothing optional beach.” Maybe splitting hairs, but some people might think nude beach means it’s mandatory to be naked as the day they were born our of their naked momma – shameful!- whereas clothing optional means they can be naked or wear a tuxedo, or even a space suit if that suits them.
The next thing I ruminated was Mandy calling me a “nude beach advocate,” which simply isn’t so. I got naked on two nude beaches on Maui, and at a beautiful waterfall. Some people were nude, others were not. It was no big deal either way. But I’m not an advocate for such beaches, nor am I an advocate against them. It’s not my religion, and if Key West has a nude beach, I probably won’t get naked on it and I might not even go there at all. I don’t use any of our beaches now, mainly because I’m afraid of what I might catch if I go in the water.
The next thing I ruminated was how come, after two city commission meetings about Key West having a clothing optional beach, not one private citizen person has come before the commission, personally or by letter, and objected to a clothing optional beach? Why don’t the objectors come forward publicly, like the proponents do, and let us see who they are and where they live? Is it that they don’t want to be identified? Is it that they want to keep Key West’s economy in the doldrums (I’m being kind here, this is a depression we’re in), but not be identified for doing it? Is it that they afraid we won’t like them, if we know who they are? Is it that they afraid we will stop patroning their businesses, if we know who they are? Is it that they are afraid we will burn crosses in their yards?
While I wish the naturists/clothing optional/nude beach advocates well, my interest in Key West having a clothing optional beach is purely economic. I’m convinced, from statistics furnished by the naturists, that a designating a decent size beach clothing optional will bring hordes of skinny dip lovers to Key West from all over North America and Europe and elsewhere overseas. Unlike schemes hatched to bring new tourists to Key West, the multi-million $$$ sinking of the Vandenberg comes to mind, the suggested mega multi million $$$$$$ mega yacht harbor at Truman waterfront, designating a clothing optional beach won’t cost the city a farthing because the naturists will pick up the costs of signage (”Clothing Optional Beyond this Point”), snow fences for visual lateral screens, beach clean up, beach patrol and crowd control, and portable toilets. Or so is my understanding based on what the naturist have said to me and to the City Commission. The hordes of new ”immigrants” will make the lodging, restaurant, bar, water activity, museum, gallery, tour, T-shirt and other shops on and near Duval Street and so forth deliriously happy. As their delirium increases, so will the city increasingly prosper from sales tax revenues, business licenses, parking meter fees, fines and so forth.
It sure looks like a no-brainer to me, and I’ve heard plenty of other Key West people say it looks like a no-brainer to them, too.
Well, that’s my two bits worth today. Following is something received by email yesterday by Shirley Mason, “mother” of the cosmically successful clothing-optional Haulover Beach in Miami, followed by her reply.
Sloan
State of Florida Nude Sunbathing Sanctions, Laws and Zoning
In my opinion, sanctions, laws, zoning in Florida, which restrict nude sunbathing must be reviewed in order to establish new sanctions, laws, and zoning, which enable and allow nude sunbathing to be expanded throughout the State of Florida at Florida beaches, costal-waterways, inter-costal-waterways and inland public and private properties throughout the State of Florida.
In my opinion, a State of Florida Committee on Nude Sunbathing must be established in order to thoroughly discuss, review, weigh and measure opinions, sanctions, laws, and zoning which are for and against nude sunbathing. In my opinion, several classifications regarding nude sunbathing exist, which must be classified and defined in order to examine exactly where State of Florida constituency and governing authorities stand regarding nude sunbathing.
In my opinion, non-hedonism naturalist-holist based nude sunbathing is a classification of nude sunbathing, which does not apply in categories realized of the world of hedonism, which non-hedonism naturalist-holist based nude sunbathing is not a shameful activity, but rather a wholesome means of connecting with earth and nature, freely, of a decent, natural, non-sinful manner, which is primarily focused on being completely nude in the sun at Florida beaches, costal-waterways and inter-costal-waterways. In my opinion, non-hedonism naturalist-holist based nude sunbathing is one of the most mentally healthy activities in which one may engage in, thus revitalizing, energizing, cleansing and restoring.
In my opinion, connectedness to earth, nature is extremely important regarding maintaining one’s health of an balanced standard.
Sincerely,
Ross McClelland
Prepared and Authored by Ross McClelland
October 22, 2009, 6:19 PM
Dear Ross:You are very insightful on the subject and sensitive to naturism, its feeling and relationship to nature. Since I do not know your history with, knowledge of, or level of involvement in organized nude recreation, I’ll share with you a little of my experience with what you’ve touched on.
In October 1998, I headed up a legal symposium here in Miami called, “Non-Sexual Nudity: Threat or Benign”. It was sanctioned by the American Bar Association and awarded 14 CLE (continuing legal education) credits for attorneys. At that symposium, we had lawyers who dealt with this issue and working with everything from 1st to 14th Constitutional Amendments to zoning and natural law. They reviewed the various laws and how the radical right organizations’ arguments and strategies to make mere non-sexual nudity a crime in order to stop adult entertainment businesses and pornography. Stopping nude recreation on public beaches and in private clubs was a bonus.
I began dealing in earnest with the political and legal aspects of nude recreation in 1989 when my husband and I began researching the laws and more importantly, the case law, for establishing a “designated” clothing optional beach in South Florida. That is how we came to establishing Haulover’s “legal” clothing optional section of beach in 1991.
When we get the c/o beach in Key West, it will be time to have another legal symposium with a slightly different twist. Haulover has 18 years of a positive proven track record with facts and figures. I’m sure it is what has convinced the majority of both the Commissions of Key West and Monroe County to consider establishing a c/o beach(es). The City of Key West plans to change its anti-nudity law in order to accommodate having a beach. What I’ve learned over the years, is that it is not as much about the laws as much as it is about EDUCATION and MONEY. Everyone understands the difference between skinny-dipping and lewd behavior while being nude. And up until recently (last 15-20 years), 98% of the court’s interpretation of the laws reflected that difference until the well-organized, well-funded radical right legal organizations began changing them to make mere nudity a crime.I have a muti-pronged strategy for creating more successful c/o beaches throughout the Florida, which is also applicable throughout North America. It will take three main things:
1. Naturist/nudist groups and organizations need to recognize the value of c/o beaches for the survival and growth of organized nude recreation — (fortunately, most do, but do not know how or where to express it);
2. Naturist/nudist groups and organizations must work together to support existing c/o beaches and the establishment of new ones and;
3. Naturist/nudist groups and organizations must take virtual ownership and physical management of these beaches.This, for the most part, has been done at Haulover Beach with South Florida Free Beaches/FNA as the membership organization that does the political lobbying and B.E.A.C.H.E.S. Foundation that has the beach concession with the physical presence on the beach and using its proceeds from the concession, grants and private donations to make capital improvements to the beach-park and conducting educational environmental, health, safety and cultural activities. Together the two manage the beach — being a watchful eye by recruiting, training and supervising through our volunteer Beach Ambassador Program and working with park staff, lifeguards and police to maintain a safe and relaxing experience with high standards. The North American organizations,The Naturist Society, Federation of Canadian Naturists, Federation of Quebec Naturists and even the American Association for Nude Recreation along with various international organizations including the International Naturist Federation all saw the Haulover model and its unique approach to managing a c/o beach joined to supported it in varying degrees by promoting it through their publications.This makes a good, successful model c/o beach. Everyone benefits. Local business (increase profits and gaining a new market with new business opportunities); local/county/state government (increased taxes from tourists, sales and property taxes and fees); local residents (more jobs, income and recreation options) and; tourists (more recreation choices who spend more money and have return visits).
Anti-nudity laws will fall away with ease when other communities figure out how much money they can make from having c/o beaches. In the meantime, naturists will have to remain ever vigilant, raise money for professional lobbying efforts and educational campaigns. They also must be politically active and out of the closet as much as possible.So Ross, tell me something about yourself, where you live and how you came to write me.I hope you will be able to come to our Nude New Year’s Festival at Haulover. www.beachesfoundation.org
Shirley Mason
Founder and “Mother of Haulover Beach”
Executive Director, B.E.A.C.H.E.S. Foundation Institute
 I’ve now seen new Mayor Craig Cates preside over Tuesday night’s regular city commission meeting and last night’s clothing optional beach workshop. I like what I see and am glad I asked people to vote for him if they didn’t vote for me.
During citizen comments at last night’s workshop, I reminded Craig that Aphrodite chose his debut into politics at Hometown! PAC’s Call to Candidates at Salute last May, not my time at the mike nor Mayor Morgan McPherson’s, to burst onto the scene and pull off her tank top and yell “Nude beaches for Key West!” I told Craig it sure looked like a sign from above to me, but he would have to decide whether it was a sign from above or below.
I then mentioned two men and two women from Ohio, who appeared spontaneously on radiofreekeywest.com earlier this week. When they saw the Atlantic Shores T-shirt I had on, promoting Vicki Gordon for Fantasy Fest Queen, they asked where is the nude beach in Key West? There had been no mention by me or station staff of a nude beach.
Citizen comments last night were strongly in favor of a clothes-optional beach. No citizen comments opposed it. Besides several members of the local Naturist chapter, representatives of the Key West Lodging Association and the Key West Business Guild said their membership is heavily in favor. A local naturist cited a Key West Citizen online public poll, in which citizen replies were heavily in favor. (75 percent, as I recall.)
Citizen comments stressed the boost to the local economy a clothing-optional beach will bring.
A local naturist said Toronto, Canada had designated a clothing optional beach three years ago on a trial basis, and had recenlty made it permanent. Then followed scattered remarks about polar bears.
Judging from the sparse citizen turnout last night, there just aren’t that many people in Key West who will bare all on one of our beaches. It is not for our local naturists, therefore, that we should go forward with this. It is for the economic health of the city that we should go forward. If we were a community like, say, Marathon, I would not make this pitch. We are Key West, where pretty much anything goes, except we have no clothing optional beach.
Commissioner Gibson was not in attendance. Nor did I see anyone from Key West citizen or the Keynoter. Josie Kohler, from The Weekly newspapers was there. And some of the radiofreekeywest.com crew.
Mayor Cates and Commissioners Weekley, Johnston, Rossi and Lopez seemed strongly inclined to rewrite what may well be an unconstitutional anti-nudity city ordinance, and then pick a city beach to use as a clothing-optional beach on a trial basis.
The discussion from the dais focused on designating an easterly section of Smathers Beach, until Commissioner Rossi suggested the beach in front of the Berg property on Atlantic Boulevard. This is a dedicated hammock park with about 210 yards of seldom, if ever, used beach that cannot be seen from the street.
Interest in designating South Beach at the south end of Duval Street also was expressed.
As he had stated at candidate forums, new Commissioner Wardlow said he opposes clothing optional beaches on public property but he favors them on private property.
It was agreed by the others on the dais that they will hold another workshop after some beaches have been selected, to give the public one more chance to attend a public meeting and chime in for or against. The City Manager was asked to schedule another workshop.
Commissioner Johnston said when this issue came up before the old city commission a few months back, she and the other commissioners and mayor received a great deal of objection to a clothing optional beach from outside of Key West and outside the Keys, members of an organization perhaps, but she had heard no objections from Key West citizens.
New Commissioner Wardlow said he had heard nothing but objection, and Commissioner Rossi said he, too, had heard a lot of objection from locals, and he is not in favor of designating a part of Smathers Beach clothing optional. However, he seemed very favorably inclined toward designating the Berg beach, if there is no legal restriction in the deed from the Bergs to the city. The City Attorney was asked to look into that.
Citizens were given more chances to speak. I said the best beach for clothing optional, which Commissioner Gibson had suggested to me last summer, is the Berg property. Aphrodite and one of her girlfriends and two of their men friends went there a few times last summer and sunned naked as jaybirds. A few people staying in west-facing units of the adjacent condominium complex came out on the balconies and took photos; they were very upset (tongue-in-cheek remark).
However, I added, if a clothing optional beach turns out to be as popular as the Naturists say it will be, there will be a parking nightmare on Atlantic Boulevard; cars will be all along the shoulders and bike path. Perhaps some sort of shuttle can be arranged, to get people there from other parts of town.
Commissioner Rossi said the condos adjacent to the Berg Beach are predominantly transient rentals and there is plenty of parking over by the skating rink at the end of Atlantic Boulevard.
Commissioner Johnston said a clothing-optional beach on the Berg property might raise property values for the owners of the adjacent condominiums.
It is my understanding that a condo high rise was built by Donald Trump adjacent to Haulover Beach in Miami, for the very reason that it would be near that beach.
Haulover is the nearest major clothing optional beach to Key West. It’s usage numbers are incredible. It’s the safest, cleanest, best run beach in the Miami area.
One of our local naturists said teenage girls from the Miami area go to Haulover to sun in bathing suits, because they feel safe there, whereas they get harassed at other Miami beaches.
Commissioner Johnston said, if Key Wet wants to attract world class tourists, we need to provide what world class tourists want. She clearly has no qualms about Key West having a clothing optional beach. The sooner the better, for her.
Amen.
After ascertaining from the City Manager that the parasailing and wedding ceremony companies using Smathers Beach are not paying the city any money to conduct their businesses there, Commissioner Johnston said they ought to pay the city for using its beach.
Amen again.
Sloan
P.S. For anyone wondering, Fort Zachary Taylor’s beach is not currently an option for clothing optional. It’s a state park, and, as Commissioner Johnston pointed out last night, there are many hurdles to overcome, might take years. Might never happen. And it’s out of the city’s jurisdiction. As is Wisteria Island, which is privately owned and lies in the county.
   (Lynne Vantriglia, heart and soul of Art Behind Bars)
Two email exchanges on yesterday’s “Just for the Record” post, followed by more musings:
From: artbhndbrs@aol.com
hi Sloan, my bad for not getting back to you immediately with an email to clarify the finer points regarding our state of Florida grant. Au contraire, I hope this is not Taps for ABB; we’re working on a transition plan at this time, and I think it will be good for the organization to have fresh energy taking the program forward. The grant, from Culture Builds Florida, is intended to keep the classes going at the jail, and cover Art AFTER Bars activities through June 2010. It requires that we raise a matching $25,000, and towards that end, we will be having our “15th Birthday Party Show” on Sunday, November 22nd, at the Pier House. Now, more than ever, does the program need the support of the community to continue forward.
Everyone should know that helping people stay out of jail by encouraging creativity benefits communities by saving tax dollars and lowering crime.Anyone interested in going into the jail [Tuesday evenings for the men and Thursday evenings for the women] as a paid art instructor or paid assistant instructor should get in touch with me at 304-4772 to get the paperwork for being cleared. It requires an application, photo id, verifiable reference, etc. Criminal background check will be conducted; previous brushes with the legal system do not automatically disqualify someone, but it cannot have been within the past two years. This is an opportunity to do something creative and make a contribution to the community that benefits everyone involved, all while having fun. As always, thanks for your support, and I hope we can count on it in the future.Lynne [Vantrigilia]
Hi, Lynne. Thanks for furnishing this information about Art Behind Bars. I’ll publish it and let’s hope it helps. It’s going to seem weird not having you around here. Art Behind Bars has been the product of your heart and soul, and I know Ernie — gosh do I miss him, can’t imagine how much you miss him – was a big part of it, too. Sloan
——————————
Ah, and I suppose that you paid with hugs and kissers for the right to see that movie [”Capitalism: A Love Story”]… or to live where you live? 
Nothing moves in this society without money! There is nothing wrong with the “Free” Enterprise System, a lot of creativity and innovation has come from that, but like anything else in this World, it has its dark siblings… Greed & Exploitation!!!The real problem with Humanity is its basic moral and epistemological corruption(We are genetically inbred liars) of reality… and modern man as its latest manifestation, is at the zenith of this Prosperous Age of Materialism where we worships at the altar of the golden ram! For its favor, we would sacrifice our own children… and we have!Sancho Panza
“There is no greater catastrophe than wanting
to acquire.” (Lao-tzu)
Sancho Panza
Hi, Sancho.
I was homeless when I got to Key West in late 2000, had no money and paid no money to live here. Now, thanks to an inheritance, I live inside and pay money to do that. Something moved when I had no money, something moves when I have it. I didn’t like having no money, but I don’t like much of what I have do deal with when I have it. Different struggles.
Moore capitalized on the victims in his documentary, to make himself what might turn out to be a lot of money. Sort of reminds me, not entirely but sort of, of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam war (under two presidents), finally getting around to writing his apologia, In Hindsight, and making a bundle off the royalties and speaking engagements that followed. Some apology.
Moore says at the end of this documentary that he’s in favor of democracy, not capitalism. He says earlier in the documentary that he wants all companies to be run democratically, the workers have the same vote as the CEO, and the same salary, more or less. I wonder if he gave the people who helped him put the documentary together the same decision-making power he had, and the same remuneration he will get? This problem he addresses, as you indicate, has been around for a very long time, long before the birth of what we today call capitalism. I think if Moore had named it “Greed: A Love Story,” he’d been on safer ground personally, as I don’t see him as being greedy. But I do see him as as capitalist. Otherwise, he would have told us in the documentary about his employees having the same say so in the production of his movies, and getting about the same pay.
Jesus says in the Gospels, You cannot worship two masters; you cannot worship God and mammon. He was not against people making money in the work they did, but he didn’t seem particularly friendly with people who made that their number one priority. Jesus also said the poor will always be with us, and he recognized that some people would have physical wealth and did not condemn them for it. However, he did say that it is very difficult for someone with physical wealth to enter the kingdom of God, which you seem also to say. However, he did not tell people with wealth to let their workers have equal decision making, or receive the same wage as their employer.
Contrarily, Jesus and his followers pooled their assets and everyone got a share. Peter’s community, described in Acts 2, lived in this way. So I suppose the biblical model is there for what Moore preaches in “Capitalism: A Love Story.” He brought Jesus into it, in a satirical way. And he reported some successful modern companies pretty much following that model, but not, apparently, his own company. I’m reminded of Jesus saying in the Gospels, Hypocrite, first take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to help your brother remove the mote from his eye. Maybe Moore needs to use Jesus more than just satirically. Maybe the entire world needs to do that. I’m not going to hold my breath, though.
Don Quixote
On a personal note, for many years now, seems almost like forever, I have been spirit-blocked from making money off any work I do beyond something like washing dishes in a restaurant or yard work. Perhaps related to Jesus saying It’s more blessed to give than to receive. But then, my dream maker says after I slept on that last remark and perhaps this entire post, maybe Jesus has nothing to do with it. Perhaps what has to do with it, for me, is my father was the shrewdest, most successful capitalist and investor I have known. Perhaps it has to do with that being his life, instead of with me. Perhaps it has to do with him devoting his life to proving himself to his father, by succeeding so hugely in business and making money, because he dropped out of Princeton, his father’s alma mater, to marry the woman who would be my mother, because she was threatening to marry anyone, if he did not come home and marry her, who would save her from her Puritan parents.
In fact, that is indeed why my father tried to prove himself in business and making money, far beyond what anyone would want or need to be happy on that score. He told me it was the reason, when I asked him in 1988. And when I asked if he felt he had succeeded in winning his father’s forgiveness, he said yes, he felt he had done that. I didn’t believe him, and the way he kept at it reiforced my feeling. I’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to think maybe the path my father took caused me to react at some deep level, totally rebel and take an entirely different path, even though I wanted very much to succeed financially in my work, which in 1988 was writing. I started writing in 1982, and hoped it would lead to my financial and soul salvation. It was not to be. The books were good enough to earn me a handsome return, but it didn’t happen.
Like I said, I’m spirit-blocked, but not for any pretty reason. And I have to think, because of the time of onset, when I was trying to decide how to go into the world of earning a living, that the sudden illness that fell upon me in March 1867 was itself a deep rebellion against my going into that rite of passage, because of the very deep mixed feelings I held, and frankly still hold, about my father’s love affair with business and investing, instead of his love affair with me. I think the Old Testament of Bible would call this the sins of the fathers, which are visited on the sons for three to four generations.
Michael Moore’s bone to pick with capitalism is rooted in his having been born in Flint, Michigan, where he grew up. His father worked for one of the General Motors supplier companies. Michael saw the greed of General Motors, the terrible impact it had on his city, many people and his own father, and thus on Michael. That is what propelled him to produce “Capitalism: A Love Story.” And that is what causes him to be a successful capitalist himself, by feeding off the sins of capitalism. Not just in this movie but in every movie he has made.
For many years I had a ministry with inmates. It’s just my opinion, of course, but I feel Lynne Vantrigilia has contributed more to the arts and the state of the soul of Key West than any other person involved in the arts here. Yet she has had to skimp and beg for money for Arts Behind Bars the entire time it has been in existence, when what she needed to do was spend all of her time with her parishoners and training other people to do that kind of work. What’s wrong with this picture? Again, it’s just my opinion, but I think this picture has a great deal to do with Lynne deciding to leave Key West and move back to her roots in New England. I think if Art Behind Bars had received the local financial support it certainly deserved, Lynne might never have considered leaving Key West.
Maybe my moving into writing about all of this today is what caused me to start feeling poisoned yesterday afternoon. And even more poisoned as the evening and night progressed. The nastier something I engage is in the spirit, the more poisoned I feel as I work though it.
Sloan
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