Good Morning Key West

I always sort of suspected the inventor of nuclear warfare was a lunatic, then I found this on the Coconut Telegraph of bigpinekey.com yesterday proving it:
 
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my own imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination circles the world.    ~Albert Einstein

 Anyway, thanks as always for the angels’ flow. 
 
KW pilgrim
  
ps–some very interesting things going on, but I’d prefer to discuss them with you and Peg when/if we can all get together here.

Hi, pilgrim. Thanks for sharing this. Will keep you anonymous, but am interested in the homeless woman’s name, just for my information. Peggy and I have talked of breaking bread at Coco’s, but I was thinking yesterday or the day before that I wanted to see her in Key West, too, if possible. So I hope we can all get together. I might used what you wrote, perhaps tomorrow. Will sleep on it for that and other relateds. Some thoughts already forming, we’ll see where they lead. Sloan

Was wondering if she was Jeanie. That is an African gray, Scorpio by name, as I recall.
 
Got to know them both in the early winter of 2009, they hung out at Higgs Beach. I introduced them both to [County Commissioner] Heather Carruthers and [City Commissioner] Teri Johnston, during a visit Heather and Teri coordinated at Higgs to scope it out and meet some homeless people. All tied into the forming movement to deal with the few out of bounds homeless people who hung out at Higgs, get the bathrooms better serviced, and a deputy on station out there again. (The Friends of Higgs Beach Committee would derive from that.)
 
I had met Jeanie maybe a week before the convening, and when this fellow named Brandon/Brenden saw her talking to me, he came over and started threatening her. I pulled out my cell phone an dialed 911, and after some wrangling with the dispatcher, including naming friends in high places, [Mayor] Morgan McPherson, [Police Cheif] Donnie Lee and [Sheriff] Bob Peryam, officers were dispatched. Three KW cruisers showed up with five officers. By then Brandon/Brendon had taken off, after telling Jeanie her days were numbered.
 
Jeanie told the one plain clothes officer Brandon had beaten her up before and threatened to kill her, and he had beaten up other homeless people and threatened to kill them. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to beat me up while I had the dispatcher on the phone, or afterward. The uniformed officers didn’t seem interested in taking reports from Jeanie or the other homeless people there, because, they said, they had not seen the crimes. I told the uniformed officers they took reports of crimes from witnesses all the time. Got nowhere, but the plain clothes officer seemed interested and said he was going to find Brandon/Brendon and got into his cruiser and left.
 
I wrote of all of that back then, and named Jeanie and Scorpio.
 
Jeanie told me some of her story: she had to go homeless, didn’t like it, had a place outside she cribbed at night. You don’t ask homeless people where they crib at night. I bumped into her and Scorpio from time to time. One time, she said someone had found her bedded down and was trying to steal her bike, which had Scorpio in his cage on it, and she was able to save Scorpio. Another time, she told me she had a friend, a man I think, who sometimes provided her shelter. I think the last time I saw her, or maybe someone told me, Jeanie had been given a place inside. That was maybe a year ago.
 
What goes around comes around.
 
How to handle this now, if I’m to write about it?
 
Sloan
 
I suppose not more than five minutes passed after I pressed “Send” when my thoughts returned to that day at Higgs Beach, when I introduced Heather and Teri to Jeanie and Scorpio. Heather recognized Scorpio as an African gray and in moments Scorpio was off off his perch on Heather’s hand headed up her arm to her shoulder. (It would take a while before Scorpio would trust me like that.) Heather seemed deeply moved as she and Jeanie talked. When Brandon/Brendon showed up and started injecting himself into the gathering, I whispered to Heather, and then to Teri, that this was the man who had beaten Jeanie up and threatened to kill her. If looks could kill.

I suppose I could spend a lot of time trying to think up a way to tell people about the ways of God and angels, and I suppose I could get a hernia in my tiny left brain and still not come up with a story anywhere remotely close to this elegant. How do we know Jeanie is not an angel? How do we know she is not Jesus? Did he not tell his disciples in the Gospels, as they do to the least of these (the poor), they do also to him? Did he not tell his disciples, it is more blessed to give than to receive? If you think Archangel Michael cannot take up residence in a parrot, you have a very small mind indeed.
 
Governor Heartless is gutting state homeless agencies, services and funding to local homeless-help organizations. Who will pick up the slack? What if KOTS closes? What if Samuel’s House and Florida Keys Outreach Coalition close? What if MARC House closes and its mentally-challenged people put onto the street? Will Key West put its street people in jail? Will more fortunate residents come forward and offer shelter to street people who don’t want to sleep outside at night? Will churches open their doors to street people who want to bathe and sleep inside at night? Is Key West really invested in One Human Family? Looks like KW pilgrim and his wife are.
 
Don’t you see? Because Key West formally adopted the One Human Family philosophy as Key West’s philosophy, God and the angels are giving Key West the opportunity to walk its talk. Even the dimwit Albert Einstein could see that, if he were among us.

I didn’t find much elegant about being a street person in Key West, however I did end up making life-long friendships with people I would never have met, if I had not lived on the street. And a lot of what was left of my already seriously mangled ego and pride was crushed flat. My friends in Los Angels had the means to prevent that , but they opted out of that opportunity. My family had the means to get me off the street, and they opted out. The Unity Church minister in Key West offered me refuge in an outbuilding behind her church, and sought my counsel about troubles she was having with the congregation. When they learned she was letting me sleep in the outbuilding, they went haywire. Then they got rid of her, even though they were getting lots of blatant signs that they should keep her on. Hurricane Wilma flattened that church.
 
Some time after I moved out of the outbuilding at Unity, a family in Old Town offered me an old travel camper sitting on their property as a place to sleep at night. After I moved in, they started giving me chores. The longer I stayed, the more persnickety they became and the more I thought maybe I was better off living on the street. He was interested in becoming a shaman, so I wrote him a letter about what he might expect. I minced no words. He showed it to her, and when I came back that night to sleep, she had put all of my belongings in a large black plastic bag outside the camper, on top of which was a cryptic note that my services were no longer needed. She didn’t even want me to repack into my backpack and daypack. I said tough shit, I wasn’t leaving toting everything I owned in a plastic bag.
 
I found myself thinking yesterday that it might be a good thing KW pilgrim and his wife have not taken Jeanie up on her offer to do chores, but I hope she is painting. Art is so terribly important on this Vulcan world. I suppose I could spend a lot of time trying to think up a way to tell people about the ways of God and angels, and I suppose I could get a hernia in my tiny left brain and still not come up with a story anywhere remotely close to this elegant. However, I tried once again in the comic relief section last below.
 
Sloan Bashinsky
 
keysmyhome@hotmail.com
 
goodmorningkeywest.com, goodmorningfloridakeys.com

 
-comic relief 
 
Somewhere in yesterday’s ”deep currents” post, I wrote, “Actually, it are me.” That provoked this from a Sugarloaf Key snowbird who somehow repressed all of his lifelong far-right Yankee aggressor prejudices and took up an odd couple friendship with me.

I realized just after I wrote it your way that no self-respecting hick would say “It is I” and I changed it.