Okay, baby fossils, once upon a time, the first of you was born and your father called me in Colorado, where I then lived, and asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me, and out of my mouth popped, “Grandfossil”, and that’s how your having a dinosaur for a grandfather began.
A while before, I had escaped from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., which really liked having an actual live dinosaur in residence, because it attracted a lot of people and helped the Smithsonian raise lots of money to fund their search for others of my kind. I didn’t mind being stared, gawked and pointed at day after day, but I did mind being cooped up all the time in such a small place, after having roamed with others of my kind all over America for a very long time.
So, I started getting grouchy, and I started growling and roaring at the spectators, and finally the zookeepers at the Smithsonian asked me what it would take for me to be nice to the parents and children who came to gawk at me, and I said I needed to be allowed to go outside and roam around a little each day, and not to worry, I would be nice and would not eat any humans, and I would evolve and become a vegetarian and nibble grass and leaves off bushes and trees.
The zookeepers said okay to that, if I would wear a tracker on my right hind ankle, in case something happened to me and I couldn’t get back to the Smithsonian, and they would know where to bring a crane and a flatbed truck to haul me home to safety. I agreed to that, and they put a tracker on my hind right ankle, and I was allowed to leave out the back door after the sun went down and there was much less chance of my being seen. I moseyed down a dark ally and came to a large what I later learned humans called a dumpster, and I gnawed off my right hind foot and the tracker, and started growing a new right hind foot, and I’ve been on the lam every since.
While I have not yet eaten even one human, there were plenty of times when I wanted to eat quite a few of them, especially some lawyers I got to know pretty well. But I had made a promise, and keeping my word was really important to me, and I didn’t eat even one human, but I did nibble on them sometimes, and I liked doing that, and I nibbled on more of them, and I liked doing that, and so I became accustomed to nibbling on humans, and even though some of them didn’t like being nibbled, I couldn’t help myself, because I still had those ancient meat-eating genes stored deep inside of me, and nibbling humans was how I kept those genes happy enough that they did not eat me alive for trying to be something I was not.
So, that’s how it began, before you were born, and that’s how it went after you were born, and that’s how it will go for a while longer, until I leave for the Great Beyond, but I won’t be gone entirely, because of all the tales I will leave behind of how I nibbled on humans, and even became very close to some of them, including your mothers and their husbands and you baby fossils, but also quite a few other humans who became very dear to me. And, yes, there was your mothers' older brother, who died in infancy of what then was called crib death, which later became known as sudden infant death syndrome, aka SIDS.
I was leveled by his death, but I knew he had not died but had only left his body and gone in the Great Beyond and was doing very well. Even so, it took me a very long time to understand that he had done what he came to do, which was to so disturb me, that I would never, regardless of how much I tried, be able to fit myself into the plans my parents and grandparents and even I had for me. Thus began my evolution into a grandfossil, which took a very long time, and it was not easy, and often it was awful, but my star's course was set and there was nothing I could do but go with it, even as many people I knew became convinced I had lost my mind, and sometimes when it got really rough, I felt that maybe I had, but something seemed there that kept poking and prodding me, and sometimes encouraging me, and I kept lumbering along and nibbling.
As time passed, I got where I no longer could physically romp around and play various sports like I once did, and I returned to playing the card game known as bridge, which my parents had taught me, and I found bridge clubs where I lived and played there, and I made lots of friends doing that, and some not good friends. I later took up playing chess, which had terrified me all of my life, because of how stupid it made me feel. But after a voice I knew well told me in my sleep in early 2005, that I needed to learn how to play chess, I knew where people played chess, as I had been watching them, and I started playing chess with them, and I must have lost a thousand games before I won one. Today, I play chess with several old farts, whom I really like.
Bridge and chess were something I could take with me wherever I lived, and exercised my brain and maybe helped it stave off feeble mindless. Bridge and chess became the major aspect of my social life, after I got too old and feeble to dance with and date women, if any were around who wanted to have dealings with a dinosaur. I had met a few women along the way, who did want to do that, and they woke up something new in me, which I did not know existed, as the women I loved before them, dating back to my first wife, your grandmother. They enriched my life. The last of them passed away in 2022, and then I did a podcast about her called, “Homeless cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurricane Irma obliteration.” A whole lot of people around the world watched that podcast. Here’s a link for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0Dc03eksU&t=54s
Hurricane Irma is what led to my deciding to move from Key West back to Alabama, and how that came about, you two older baby fossils’ mother can tell you all about.
Meanwhile, a few days ago, I ordered online two Poetic Outlaws T-shirts, one to wear, the other to hang on a hammered nail somewhere in my apartment, which has a variety of artistic impressions hanging on walls and anywhere else they can find purchase. The t-shirts arrived yesterday and I hung one of them beside the front door to my apartment.
The Sloan’s Place sign was made by an interesting fellow living on Big Pine Key, who did some work for me in and around my trailer on Little Torch Key from 2010-2103. He also made a wooden sign on which was purloined from the “Gladiator” movie: “What we do here today echoes in Eternity”. That sign was much larger and I don’t recall what became it, but if anyone down Florida Keys way has seen it lately, I would love to pay for its transportation to Birmingham.
The walking stick was given to me by a retired animal doctor, who graduated from Auburn University's veterinarian school, and I think he might have taught there a while. A crusty one, wry wit, really smart, calls them as he sees them, I never was tempted to nibble on him, but I did have some conversations with him about the puzzling habit of humans having vets put down their ailing pets, but humans requiring humans to live as long and painfully as possible, regardless of how much money that cost, and he said that puzzled him, too, but he was retired and, so sorry, he was not going to get involved with that puzzle.
The wall tapestry hanging on my front door is one of several made by a lady neighbor in my apartment building, who once was the legal secretary for an eccentric Birmingham lawyer for whom I held great affection, perhaps because he also was a writer of sorts. His old legal secretary is a bit touched in the head, and I knew she means well, but finally I had to tell her I was not interested, and if she kept nosing around, I would have to call a lawyer I would have preferred to eat, to help her stay in her own lane.
The colorful rug is from Home Depot, and the clock is from Target. The fake flowers in the urn are from Walmart, and the urn I found in a local thrift store. I found the dining room table and chairs and couch and the sitting chairs, and a lot of lovely impressionist art pieces, and some funky crafts and sculptures, and fake plants in that and another thrift store In Birmingham.
Obviously, I don’t take meals at the dining room table, which means I don’t have people over for dinner, either. Sometimes I take a couple of women I have known for a while out to dinner, one at a time. But nothing romantic, as they don’t speak dinosaur very well, and maybe it wouldn’t matter if they did, after the prostate cancer radiation during the covid shutdown maybe killed my rutting urges, finally.
I also have real plants, and nestled with them, more fake flowers form Walmart, and a fake bamboo plant to the right from a thrift store. No, I don’t nibble on the real plants:-).
The original parque wood floor dates the building back to the early 1950s.
The couch, aka the crime scene, is where I eat meals that I prepare in the kitchen or bring home from take out restaurants, and where I watch a lot of TV sports and Netflix and Prime movies, and play chess online against people I don’t know, and duplicate bridge online with a shut-in fellow, and that couch is where I sit and write on my laptop and record redneck mystic podcasts and say and write a lot of weird shit that some people seem to like, and other people don’t like.The red hat has Alabama on it. Part of the redneck costume.
This apartment building is located in a lovely area of Birmingham’s “Southside”. I’ve lived here three times. It’s where I come back to after I quit running away from home. The first time, 1995, only white people lived here. The second time, 1998, I was coming out of the black night of the soul and nearly all of the tenants were white. Now, people of all colors and nationalities live here. This large one-bedroom apartment, with stove and refrigerator, heat, hot water and garbage pick up provided by the landlord, rents for $965 a month, and in Key West would rent for $3,000 a month.
Since moving into this apartment in June 2019, I wrote six books, which began as blogs and now are free reads at the internet library, archive.org. Five of the books are non-fiction, but perhaps could be classified as stranger than fiction :-):
A Southern Lawyer Who Became a Mystic, a trilogy, which contains A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known (2004); Diary of a Redneck Mystic God Grabbed Once Upon a Time; Spontaneous Ramblings of a Bat Shaman; The Golden Flake Clown’s Tale; Alabama’s Tiny Kingdom Black Sheep.
The 6th book, Return of the Strange (2023), is the beyond stranger than fiction sequel to the beyond stranger than fiction novel, HEAVY WAIT; A Strange Tale (2001).
Also beyond stranger than fiction at archive.org is my 1st novel, Kundalina, Alabama (1992), which kinda fell out of me when I lived in Colorado. It was written under a pen name, Jake Carruthers, initials, J.C. :-), and in the Invocation, Jake tells the reader:
This tale - for it really is that and not a novel - is about Alabama, the “Heart of Dixie, as it is called by people from those parts. None of this book is true except the parts you believe are true. A real person didn’t write this book because no real person would be that crazy. So if you think you know a rea person who wrote it, then forget that nonsense right away. Or at the ver least, keep your opinion to yourself to protect the family of the real person you think wrote it.
The wear and tear of life and time nudged Jake to stop using a fake name.
Centered around somewhat but not entirely restrained to Birmingham, the not entirely made up characters in Kundalina, Heavy Wait and Return of the Strange take the reader on wild rides, which were not entirely made up.
Also at archive.org is Prisons & Freedom (1991), which really pissed of Bo Lozoff, who was viewed as the prison inmate guru back in that time until he confessed during some scandalous revelations that he was a fake, yet I still think his various books about the spiritual path, no matter what personal circumstances someone faces, are well worth reading.
My tech wizard amigo, known as “Bob” in The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast episodes, figured out how to convert those books so that they could be read at archive.org. He also figured out how to do the no-soliciting, ad-free podcast and run it up onto You Tube, and into the Torrent system, where people and platform moderators and their clients actually like something different, which also is the case at archive.org.
Bob is why the podcast and my books mentioned above are being watched and read all over the world, in far greater numbers than my first three consumer protection books, which were published by the Prentice-Hall Division of Simon & Schuster: HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?(1983), Selling Your Home $weet Home(1984), and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client’s Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers (1986).
I was widely interviewed by local, regional and national media about those books, which made me kinda famous for a while, but did not line my pockets with the desperately hoped for lucre I thought I needed to prove myself to my father and his by then deceased father, very successful capitalists.
At tinykingdomeblacksheep.blogspot.com, I am well into writing posts that will be chapters in yet another book, which I have been calling “Late Life Reflections of a Tiny Kingdom Birmingham County Club Heretic”, but perhaps a different title is incubating? Bob will load the finished product into the archive.org.
Beside many tales, the books contain some visions and a lot of poetry that up and jumped out of me, and a few of many soul drawings that leaped out of me. This soul drawing below of the homeless cowgirl shaman with the blues arrived 10 years before I met her. She was taught by a Native American shaman, and some of her rituals required wild bird feathers, which just showed up when she needed a feather to show up. All of my soul drawings were prophetic in some way.
I view my books and the podcast like my children and legacy, a last will and testament quite unlike anything my parents and their parents and I could have imagined when my father strongly recommended that I take a typing class during my first year at Ramsay High School in Birmingham.
For fifteen years, I had no contact with your mothers and fathers, thus with you baby fossils, which was not my choice. During that time, I had a lot of experiences, quite a few of which are recounted in my books and in the podcast episodes. I met new people and made some very good friends. Two of them, much younger than me, became like younger siblings. Bob is one of them. The other is a woman named Brenda, who was my closest friend since 2005, until Bob showed up in 2017, when I was in a rough situation only he could help me with. They know me far better than anyone else in this world knows me.
I pay Bob for the work he does for me, and he will look after the podcasts and my books after I leave this life. His association with me cost him good paying work because his employers thought he was nuts for having anything to do with me. Last fall, contracts were taken out on his life because of community service interventions he was doing where he lived. Then, some bad men nearly killed Bob and left him for dead. Now he is in a secret hideout, being attacked by demons that had sent the bad men to kill him. I have special affection for Bob and Brenda.
Now, in case you might be thinking Bob and I are a bit paranoid. the podcast he and I did on Donald Trump being barred by U.S. Constitution Amendment 14, Section 3, from holding public office, because he had engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, was picked up by a Colorado satellite radio station, which interviewed a federal judge about the podcast and an Article 14, Section 3 article I had written, which Bob published at the free internet library, archive.org, and the podcast went viral in Colorado and the radio station was inundated with death threats, and the station’s insurance carrier cancelled its insurance policy with the station, and the station went off the air. The Colorado Supreme Court then ruled 14/3 barred Trump from being on the Colorado ballot, and the Court was inundated with death threats. Here’s a link for that podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ool2d7q6hag&t=6s
So, younguns, America ain’t nothing today like it was when I was a boy and could get on a Birmingham city transit bus in Crestline, the “poor” side of Mt. Brook, aka The Tiny Kingdom, on Saturday afternoon, and ride the bus downtown with a friend to see a movie, and by a coke and popcorn, and ride the bus back to Crestline, all for 25 cents, and our parents never considered we might be at risk. If I were your ages, I might not want to bring a new child into this world, and I might give serious consideration to moving to another country.
In closing, for now, a how to live life in earlier America essay from Poetic Outlaws was in my email this Sunday morning, which for a very long time hasn’t been a day of rest for me. I commented below the essay, and then I shared a poem which pretty well explains your Grandfossil's journey since he gnawed off his hind foot and the tracker, not realizing a second tracker had been imbedded deep in his tail.
Sloan Bashinsky
In the second half of my life, which had begun in 1942, I made quite a few sudden up and leave where I was departures, with almost no planning, or, rather, with zero planning, and off I went into the next adventure into the unknown, and some of it was rather nice, interesting, exciting, and some of it was not rather nice, but was interesting and exciting.
We plan, God laughs!” ruled, and so I chuckled when I got to the end of the priceless Steinbeck piece:"Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this, a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
For example:
“SHANGHAIED” (2004)
A calling to serve carries its own wisdom,
which legitimates both the calling and the serving
so that the two are one:
Only the one called to serve
can know this wisdom,
and for some who are called
the knowing comes easily,
while for others the knowing is a fiery baptism.
Each calling is different,
and while some callings can be declined,
others cannot,
and those whose calling is without repentance
know they are in it for the duration of the calling,
and while others may try to persuade them out of it,
the calling for ones such as these always prevails;
thus is it advised to all called for keeps
that they view their calling as a blessing
even when it seems at times to be a curse,
and that they try to reconcile the loss of their captain status
and allow the Spirit of God to man the helm of their ship
and be glad and willing crew members thereon,
knowing that all sailing ships of souls
need a crew as well as a captain
to maintain and navigate the ship through
seas of many tones, depths and flavors;
so consider each league sailed
as part of the overall journey
going to where the captain deigns to go
by using whatever winds and sea currents available
to navigate the ship to the experiences
this ship and crew need to have
in order to fulfill their calling and its wisdom
revealed by the journey of many leagues,
many known only to the ship and its crew,
all of whom come to know,
some sooner than others,
that once conscripted
there is no safe jumping ship.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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