Saturday, December 23, 2023

Mary Poppins, I ain’t, but sometimes wish I was

     I recently subscribed to and am reading two Al.com journalists' musings about past and present goings on in Alabama. John Archibald is a white man, and Roy Johnson is a black. Archibald calls his column, "Down In Alabama", and Johnson calls his column, "Welcome to the Barbershop". I recommend Archibald and Johnson to anyone wishing to get a flavor for their “Alabama neck of the woods".

    When I entered Ramsay High School in Birmingham, in 1956, my father suggested I take a typing course, which he thought would help me in life, as being able to touch type had helped him. Little did he or I know that in the middle of my life I would become a writer. 

    Little did I know in the early 1980s, when I wrote the consumer protection books, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?, Selling Your Home $weet Home, and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers, published by the Prentice-Hall division of Simon & Schuster, what kind of books I later would write.

    Or that I would become a mystic, and the family black sheep and keeper of the family skeletons, and would write blogs and lots of non-fiction, fiction and stranger than fiction books, and poetry, which reflected my experiences and the changes I was going through in my way of thinking, speaking, living and writing.

    But I get ahead of myself.

    During the early 1980s, as I was realizing that practicing law was not working out, I wrote three consumer protection books, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?, Selling Your Home $weet Home, and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers, published by the Prentice-Hall division of Simon & Schuster. I was widely interviewed by national, regional and local news media, including an appearance with Jane Pauley on the Today Show.

    By then, I was very interested in The New Age, and in late 1985, I closed my law practice and in early 1986 I moved my 2nd wife and me to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    Jane was a fabulous watercolor artist and she got into a respected gallery. I went to a massage and natural healing school in Santa Fe, and plunged whole hog into the New Age and other spiritual traditions.

    About a year later, my 45th year, I realized none of that was fixing me, and I moved out of the house Jane and I had rented and got an apartment and met a woman who was a scientist at one of the labs in Los Alamos, about 50 miles across the desert from Santa Fe.

    Judith was a biologist, and her lab’s work was trying to figure out how to use native vegetation to absorb the awful chemical wastes the other Los Alamos labs were dumping onto the ground and into the water table. She got her lab lots of grants for that work.

    Judith was somewhat of a mystic. Maybe she had picked it up from aborigines in Australia, where she was born before her parents moved to America.

    Not long after meeting Judith, I realized I had hit a wall, was out of bright ideas, and felt like I had failed in every way a man could fail.

    In that state, I prayed, “Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed. Please help me.” I paused, added to the prayer, “I offer my life to human service.”

    Maybe ten days passed.

    I stayed over at Judith’s home over the weekend.

    I woke up in the wee hours Saturday night and saw two etheric beings hovering above me in the darkness. Shift shaped, white with a tint of blue. No wings, but angels, I assumed.

    I heard, “This will push you to your limits but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you.” I remembered the prayer I had made.

    I saw a white flash and was jolted physically by something electrical. That happened two more times, very fast. The two beings faded out. I was shaking and sweating.

    I saw Judith was awake, looking at me. I asked her what she had seen? She said she saw my body jerking. I asked if she had seen or heard the angels? No. I told her what had happened. She laughed, said, “Let’s go back to sleep, you strange man.”

    That’s when the changes began. Slowly, but the pace picked up. The angels moved me to Boulder, Colorado, where I was put with a new woman, who would become my 3rd wife, who was a bit of a mystic.

    The tests increased. I was stood before many mirrors looking at me and the many beams in my own eyes. I was turned upside down and inside out and every which-a-way but loose by those two angels. I started writing metaphysical books, and a whole lot of stunning not of this world poetry fell out of me.

    I was swamped with spiritual phenomena. I went into a dark night of the soul, which was awful. I learned God is far bigger than any religion, and I came to wonder when was I ever not in church? 

    Shortly after the dark night lifted in mid-1995, the Boulder experiment ended abruptly and painfully. I returned to Birmingham, where I soon went into a back night of the soul, which made the dark night in Boulder seem like paradise.

    After a while, the angels dragged me out of the black night and started rehabilitating me, and changing me, again.

    I became the family black sheep and keeper of the family skeletons.

    In late 1999, that Birmingham experiment dramatically crashed and burned, and the angels sent me away for 18 years. 

    I ran out of money and lived on and off the street, depending on whether I was provided money by my father.

    The angels got me into local politics in Key West and the Florida Keys. I detested politics, but it was interesting and enlightening. 

    I never joined a political party, and viewed political parties as religions, or cults. I viewed religions as cults.

    All of that, and much more, provided a deep well for my writings at blogs and different books I wrote.

    That well was greatly enhanced by the eight wives I had: the first by church ceremony, the next three by judge ceremony, and the next four by common law. The last 6 were mystics, of sorts.

    Each of those very different remarkable women opened up something in me, which I did not know was there. I view my time with each of them as a distinct separate lifetimes.

     My first wife, Dianne bore my three children. Our first-born died of sudden infant death syndrome during my last year of law school. It took me a very long time to realize his death had so disturbed me that it became impossible for me to be who my parents, grandparents and I wanted me to be.

    I sometimes quipped that I was going for a PhD in women’s studies, but the truth is, no man can get a PhD in women’s studies, because only women can do that.

    In 2004, something got a hold of me and, gushing oceans of tears and snot, I wrote A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known, about six people who greatly influenced me. I got lots of attaboys for that book from people who probably didn’t care all that much for my later books.

    A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known is a free read at the free internet library, archive.org.  Here’s direct link: https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210/page/n25/mode/2up  
 
    A recent tally showed 42,000 complete online reads. My three books combined at Simon & Schuster/Prentice-Hall sold about 40,000 copies.

    Last year, I wrote The Golden Flake Clown's Tale, in which I tell a bit about what it was like growing up in my family, and about Golden Flake, where I worked summers in high school and college, and four years after I graduated from the University of Alabama School of law in 1968 and clerked for a federal judge in Birmingham, and what it was like for me practicing law in Birmingham, starting 1973.

    The Golden Fake's Clown Tale is a free read at the internet library. A recent tally showed 53,000 complete online reads. Here's a link:  https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale

    In the first half of this year, 2023, I wrote Alabama's Tiny Kingdom Blacksheep, which is a free read at the internet library. A recent tally showed 63,000 complete online reads. Here' a link:  https://archive.org/details/alabamas-tiny-kingdom-black-sheep_202307

    A few days ago, I began writing a new body of work, Late Life Reflections of a Tiny Kingdom Birmingham Country Club Heretic , which I now realize is a sequel to Tiny Kingdom Blacksheep.

    Here are links to the first three chapters of the blog where I am writing it:

From Birmingham, Alabama, some hideously twisted religious vaudeville

    I also wrote three romp novels rooted in Birmingham, which should be read in the order written. Hang onto you hats, bippies and britches,
 
    Free reads at the internet library:  Kundalina, Alabama (1992); Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale (2001); Return of the Strange (2023).

https://archive.org/details/kundalina
53,500 complete online reads.

    The free internet library contains other of my non-fiction books, which can be brought up by entering Sloan Bashinsky in the search space.

    All of my books reveal who I am and what I have experienced. 

    As does The Redneck Mystic Lawyer for President on the Unicorn Ticket blog https://redneckmysticlawyer.blogspot.com, and free, ad-free The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast.

    Here are links to the last 4 episodes, which combined are approaching 1,000,000 complete watches at YouTube and the Torrent system:

BIG BROTHER DOES NOT LOVE YOU.

Amendment 14 Section 3 Law School Exam Question Not for Faint of Heart

Sloan Explains the Motions and Legal Strategy to Shutup Trump & See Him Rot in Jail

Recounting Adventures, X-Raying the Great Pussy Grabber Religion & Trump's Chief Lawyer A. Habba

    If I had stayed in Birmingham, if I had kept working for Golden  Flake, if I had kept practicing law, none of any of that would have happened. I imagine I would have died pretty quick, if I did not drink myself stupid.

    Blessings.
By Sloan Bashinsky, Jr. at

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