(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