homelessness in the eye of the beholder hidden in plain view in Key West and beyond
Friday, December 7th, 2012
Jeanie and Scorpio, who mostly live on the street in Key West Gloria Reiser messaged me on Facebook re yesterday’s soul fishing in plain view – Key West and beyond post, which I had sent to her by email.
Gloria ReiserGreat article, Sloan. After you post it on your FB timeline, I’ll share it. A few friends from the old IE days will see it that way
I don’t know how to create a link directly to the article, even though the title on the page is a link – it transfers to my email account and holds as a link, but it only is a title, without link, if I transfer it to FB. Which leaves me writing about it being posted at the website, the www.goodmorningfloridakeys.com link for the website itself I can provide on FB. Any suggestions on how to transfer the link for a post from the website to FB?
Gloria ReiserToo much sun glare on iPad right now, but soon’s I can see the screen, I’ll see what I can do. I think you usually post a link to you FB WALL and that brings up the header and people can click on it.
Sloan BashinskyI posted how to get to it at www.goodmorningfloridakeys.com. I know how to create that sort of link, to a website, but I don’t know how to create it to a file on a website.
Gloria posted to the Facebook public:
Gloria Reiser How many of you know that Ella Fitzgerald, Cary Grant, Jim Carrey, and Charlie Chaplain were all homeless for a time?
Peggy Scarborough I had no idea, but it can happen to anyone I am thankful it has not happened to me but it has been close a few times.
Gloria Reiser asked me to post to FB a link to today’s “soul fishing in plain view – Key West and beyond” post at www.goodmorningfloridakeys.com. The post gives top billing to Gloria and husband Marty and some of their brood, and the Hidden In Plain View homeless art, poetry and music exhibition in Key West, where they are now, preparing to return to winter up north. Then the post wanders into other fishing holes. I don’t know how to transfer to FB the title of the post, which itself is a link, if I transfer it to an email. The best I can offer in my current state of computer and Internet duncedom is to say click on the above link to the website, and then click on the Today’s FlaKey Drivel link near the top of that home page. If you do that today, Dec. 6, it should take you to the post described above. If you do it tomorrow or later, you can click on the December Archive link in the right-hand menu of the home page, and scroll down/back to Dec. 6.
I asked Sloan to post a link to his article at goodmorningfloridakeys.com for several reasons. Firstly, if you are within easy driving, flying, or boating distance from Key West, or find yourself traveling in the Keys before Dec 14, I highly recommend that you take time to take in this exhibit. Photographic images (by Howard Garlock/Sheel) featured in the exhibit capture the heart and soul of the homeless. This is important because homelessness has become the elephant in the living room that most don’t want to think or talk about, but is what is in most communities. Many harbor ideas about the homeless that aren’t necessarily true. My friend Sloan, has been wealthy, homeless, and everything in between. Thankfully he is now comfortably enjoying life in the Keys. I can’t think of anyone more equipped to give voice to this issue, than someone like Sloan, who has first hand experience of near every rung of the socio-economic ladder. I hope to encourage him to write a book about homelessness and the homeless, giving voice to some of them, and to publish it in Kindle format. This is dialog that needs to happen.
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I felt peculiar after reading Gloria’s hoping to encourage me to write a book about homelessness and the homeless. I felt peculiar for three reasons.
Reason 1: From time to time since I have known Gloria, she has told me to do, or not do, things the angels told me not to do, or to do – just the opposite advised by Gloria, who is a professional psychic with an international clientele.
Reason 2: I already wrote a book about homelessness and the homeless, many chapters, scattered in posts to goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com and goodmorningbirmingham.com. Chapters in that book continue to unfold as the angels move me to write them.
Reason 3: In the separation from God homeless sense, everything I have written and published since I first started getting to know Gloria, as described in yesterday’s soul fishing in plain view – Key West and beyond post, and even before that, was about homelessness and homeless people. In God’s eyes, we all are homeless. In God’s eyes, Craig Cates, Mayor of Key West, is just as homeless as Frisbee Dave, Melvin and Jeanie described in yesterday’s post. In God’s eyes, Gloria and I are just as homeless as Frisbee Dave, Melvin and Jeanie.
In a dream this morning, I was telling some people, unidentified, that the same God of plentiful is the same God of unplentiful – there is only one God, was the thought. Therefore, being rich in $ sense and being poor in $ sense are but two sides of the same coin, and to view one as greater or lesser than is not correct.
For example, a rich drunk, who can pay to have people clean up his/her messes, who can hire lawyers to beat his/her DUI tickets, is no different from a poor drunk who lives on the street and ends up in jail for being drunk in public. Well, not quite. A rich drunk who drives a Lexus is a far greater threat to other people than a drunk street person.
Key West is said to have more bars per capita than any city in the world. Thus, it can be deduced that Key West has more drunks per capita than any city in the world. Key West also is said to have more churches, per capita, than any city in the world. Thus, it can be deduced that the cause of so many bars and drunks in Key West is its many churches.
Right, church people would say it can be deduced that the reason there are so many churches in Key West is because they are needed to counter so many bars and drunks. But as I told a Methodist minister once, who was convinced people who did not attend church regularly would end up dying and burning in hell forever, if the Devil wanted to hide where nobody would ever think to look for him, it would be in a church.
Last night, I finished reading Valley of Bones, the sequel to Tropic of Night, by Michael Gruber, which I reviewed somewhat in an earlier post. I found both novels in the Big Pine Key library. In Valley of Bones, the heroine, a nun with a checkered pass that would pale the past of any street person living in Key West, or anywhere, tells a non-believer that not only does the Devil exist, but the Devil works for God, plays that needed role. Except she does not say the Devil – she says The Shining Man, or Lucifer.
I can’t imagine how Gruber became able to write such novels as those two, and I don’t suppose I ever will know, since I gave him a chance in an email to say something about that and he declined. What I do know is Gruber is not to be taken lightly. He is being used to put out information and perspectives that mainstream and its churches never will put out. As am I used in that way, albeit quite differently from Gruber.
If I thought people really wanted to see things more clearly, I would recommend Gruber’s two novels. But I don’t think people want to see things more clearly. I recently recommended The Spear of Destiny, by Trevor Ravenscroft, which explains how Evil took over Adolph Hitler, and then his inner Nazi circle, and put them in power in Germany. I wrote that the same Evil is behind the human species’ contribution to the destruction to this planet’s atmosphere, and the silence to my reading recommendation was deafening.
People simply do not wish to know how The Shining Man works. They prefer their own more comfy views of how things are, and to promote their comfy views in whatever forums they can find. And it matters not whether they are Catholics, or Christians, or Jews, or Mormons, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Muslims, or Sufis, or Hindus, or Taoists, or Buddhists, or Wiccans, or New Ageans, or Unitarians, or Atheists – or whatever. They do not want to know what is really going on. They do not want to know the truth that will set them free. And that, to be blunt, is why the human species is so screwed up, why this planet is under such human species stress, and why Darwin got it backward: to see where the human species is going on this planet, study the monkeys and apes.
Or, to see where America is headed, study its street people, who are the conscience of America, screaming to be recognized. Key West’s street addicts, for example, are the next evolutionary step of the drunks who frequent Key West City Commissioner Mark Rossi’s saloon and strip club on Duval Street. In God’s eyes, there is zero difference between a rich drug addict and a poor drug addict. And if the City of Key West forces homeless people who are not drug addicts into a shelter with drug addicts, the karma for those in charge of that will be horrific.
In early 2002, Gloria Reiser told me that she was told in her sleep to tell Sloan that he was of the Order of St. Anthony. I had never heard of St. Anthony, googled him, found The Desert Fathers and started reading. I was leveled. I was terrified. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted nothing to do with being homeless. Like what I want matters to God.
Sloan Bashinsky
P.S. received this email, which less financially well off senior citizens living in the Lower Keys need to see. I replied to Lynne Tejeda, saying I hope Keys Energy Services publishes this information in The Key West Citizen and The Keynoter. I sent it to bigpinekey.com’s Coconut Telegraph.
Subject: Keys Energy Services [Senior Citizen Discount] Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 08:06:02 -0500
To: welshjlsj@mac.com; 4shaver@gmail.com; AdminAsst@fla-keys.com; accessalan@gmail.com; safeharborhouse@comcast.net; allenkeywest@gmail.com; SOUTHGATEKW@aol.com; lilley.bill@gmail.com; bill@thewaltonwoodworks.com; rcsusa@earthlink.net; engrbruce@aol.com; bspq@comcast.net; bunniesmith@me.com; bwardlow@keywestcity.com; candaceblock@bellsouth.net; cmsusa@earthlink.net; charreho@mindspring.com; thebluepaper@kwtn.com; dmay@futureinc.org; e_block@bellsouth.net; casey@keysdigital.com; erika.b@earthlink.net; etupino@my100bank.com; garysymons@att.net; unclegkw@yahoo.com; gkeiser@me.com; JackMPaul@aol.com; JackMPaul@live.com; janevetterkeywest@yahoo.com; freedomj@bellsouth.net; keywestjane@keywestjane.com; johnpadget@aol.com; jandola@hotmail.com; jandola@keysnews.com; martinandjon@aol.com; jweekley@keywestcity.com; katheyf@comcast.net; kjdmdd@Bellsouth.net; kaufelt@aol.com; kathy.russ@comcast.net; keysk8e@aol.com; kurtl@keysbank.com; kwlynda@bellsouth.net; kwshelby@bellsouth.net; leemcmannis@gmail.com; liz.lustberg@gmail.com; maggie@springerassociates.com; mbolen@keysnews.com; margaret@domanskionline.com; ma.bell@earthlink.net; maryamassage@juno.com; clay_me@hotmail.com; mhhs1219@live.com; MichelBoye@aol.com; michael@javastudios.org; sadsav@aol.com; michealjtierney@bellsouth.net; mayor@keywestcity.com; nikkimcc521@aol.com; john4031@bellsouth.net; phil@caligo.com; bakerviana@aol.com; rfrec59@bellsouth.net; captinsams@aol.com; sdavidson13@yahoo.com; svfkw@bellsouth.net; svfkw@aol.com; keysmyhome@hotmail.com; southgatekw@gmail.com; twtusherinfo@aol.com; Vicki@barefootappraisal.com; kwtoml@yahoo.com CC: Lou_Hernandez83@Yahoo.com; Sabrina.Hall@KeysEnergy.com; Alex.Tejeda@KeysEnergy.com
Good Morning All –
Chairman Lou Hernandez forwarded me an email that all of you received regarding Keys Energy Services’ Senior Citizen Discount, and he asked that I respond and provide information.
Here is a link that will provide you with the details of our Sr. Citizen Discount http://keysenergy.com/discount.php
As you will see on the link, to qualify for the discount you will need to be 62 years old and have an annual household income that does not exceed $30,396.00.
The discount is that the Customer Charge is reduced from $15.03 to $5.50.
You can fill out the application right on line and hit submit; or you can stop by our offices and fill out a hard copy version. I hope you find the process simple.
Let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Lynne
Lynne Tejeda
General Manager/CEO
Keys Energy Services
1001 James Street
Key West, FL 33040
305-295-1040