A woman poet friend in Key West, who sometimes went on benders, was in bed with me in a dream around dawn this Sunday morning, and she said she needed to change her face because she knew what I wanted to do.
I woke up wondering that that could be about?
I met her in early 2001 at a Key West Poetry Guild monthly meeting, where local poets recited their own poetry. She was quite a good poet, and while I fancied her for a while, and we both had spent a good bit of time on the beautiful Caribbean Island nation Dominica, not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, it didn’t turn to romance.
Because of her, I joined the Key West Poetry Guild and recited my own poetry at its monthly meetings until I moved back to Alabama in late 2018.
The American poet Robert Frost lived in Key West and became a legend there, and it was to honor him that the Key West Poetry Guild came to be.
My favorite from Frost remains,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I also read where Frost said the only way to deal with a problem is to go through it.
There is a Hemingway lookalike contest in Key West every year, when mostly old white men with white Hemingway-style beards wearing Orvis fishing garb vie for the prize.
Several times, people told me I should enter the contest, and I declined.
Once, when pushed hard to reconsider, I said, unlike the Hemingway contestants, I know how to write and fish, and I don’t drink.
Hemingway drank like a fish and wasn’t always kind to women he loved, but he wrote from his heart and guts and life experiences, and was a hell of a novelist. After contracting brain cancer and beginning to lose his mind, he blew out his brains with his beloved double-barreled shotgun.
Over breakfast this morning, my ruminating took me back to the For the old who are tired of living and the young who want to die... post. I re-read readers' comments and my replies and added a comment about Key West under the last reader's comment.
Here are all of the readers’ comments, and my replies.
Patris
Patris’s Substack
Much as I would like to avoid being bopped by a lady dressed in black, (who likely is used to terrorize young children in the village), I could not stop reading this essay, particularly the journey you travelled to get here.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thank you, Patris.
Patris
There’s a Ulysses in you, Sloan. At a certain age we all wonder why we’ve survived when we had been once so convinced we would die young - particularly if we wanted to.
Bob Graham
Uncle Bob Is RuminatingI'd never heard of an Accabadora before, absolutely fascinating. Glad I stumbled upon this, cheers.Sloan Bashinsky
Nor had I ever heard of such a creature :-)
The Chaos Trials
This is beautiful. It resonates. I’m at a crossroads. Should I stay or should I go?
Sloan Bashinsky
I imagine either way will be an adventure, but if you leave, will you miss out on something on this world, which you cannot find anywhere else in Eternity or Infinity?
Consider something that fell out of me in April 1995, as I ate breakfast one morning in my kitchen, in Boulder, Colorado.
“Sacred Prism”
Earth,
The sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
Purified in Holy Fire,
Then one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
Simply because they are all
Unique Emanations of God,
Evolving . . .
The Chaos Trials
Yes. That is beautiful. I'm in this weird space. Luminal? I just writing on here. It's saved my life. When I get up in the morning, other than my pets, I have a purpose. I appreciate your kindness. I have met so many wonderful people on here.
Sloan Bashinsky
Everyone has a purpose imprinted in their soul, and this world is where it is tested and refined, or dodged or smothered, and, fortunately, Jesus spoke twice with his disciples in the Gospels of past lives, thus, there are future lives here, or somewhere, as well:-), yet good luck getting Christendom to admit Jesus and his disciples discussed that, and besides, today, and doing the next thing before us, and the next thing after that, is the work, the the grain mill, the alchemy furnace, the poem, the painting, the sculpture, unfolding, unless we just give up and get another chance, and another chance after that.
And then consider something that fell out of me about a year and a half before “Sacred Prism”
“Rainbows” (fragment of original poem)
Rainbows know no master.
Fueled by Father Sun
They touch Misty Earth
Only Heaven knows where.
Rainbows are more shiny than silver
and more brilliant than gold,
More valuable than diamonds
and more precious than pearls.
Rainbows paint heavens beautiful,
Make angels sing.
Rainbows are you, and me,
Full spectrums of Infinity
blazing across Eternity.
Rainbows are now.
The Chaos Trials
You are a beautiful soul.
Sloan Bashinsky
At times, but after those lovely poems came, I got to see lots more parts of myself in mirrors I did not order, to go on top of earlier mirrors iI did not order, well, not knowingly :-)
Paul Wittenberger
Paul’s Substack
Wonderful essay full of heartbreak and perseverance! I never heard of an Accabadora before, either! I’m glad you’re still with us.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks, sometimes I’m glad, sometimes not :-)Free Radio Rulo
As the late great John Prine said: "When your dead, your a dead peckerhead". God bless
Sloan Bashinsky
So, that is the goal of dying, to be a dead peckerhead? :-), Hee Haw!
Free Radio Rulo
John Prine - When I Get To Heaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0EiV423j0M
Sloan Bashinsky
That will be a sight to see, vodka and cigarettes in heaven. Dead peckerhead, indeed :-)
Richard Blaisdell
Richard’s Substack
Native Americans ancient elders chose to go to a sacred mountain space greet the universe and die on their own. Return to freed the earth elements. Their last choice.
Sloan Bashinsky
I have heard of that, or they went into the wild and let the animals have them.
Huge indu$tries depend on people living as long as possible and then being mummified or turned into ashes, instead of feeding the planet on which they depended to live.
Richard Blaisdell
Monopolies are “funeral homes “ unregulated. One mega company owns many different entities. Now possible to be composted instead of injected with preservatives to body and buried. Cremation still a polluting choice. But regulations often prevent last wishes of ashes tossed to the wind or put in wild lakes an steams. Many patients in hospitals or hospice care given assist of morphine to see the ‘ascent’ from body.
Sloan Bashinsky
I much prefer getting the morphine at time of my choosing and $tiffing the lawyer$ and medical indu$trial complex and attending buzzard$
Sloan Bashinsky today
A dear friend of mine in Key West, Patrick, died and his brother in Pacific Northwest America was making arrangements for his ashes to be interred in a tomb in the Key West cemetery for homeless people who had died there. Partick was not homeless, but he only had Social Security disability and lived in a subsidized housing project. He was a fabulous chess player, and at one time had made a lot of what looked like Buddhist mandala art pieces, which, along with his very gentle but wise manner, caused me to think he had been a lama in a past lifetime.
When he was 18, Patrick was put in a federal prison because he would not submit to being drafted and fighting in Vietnam. The prison chess club discovered he was a chess master and protected him for the time he was in here. He said he never lost a game. Upon release, Patrick got a girlfriend and one day they got drunk by a river and went swimming and were caught in a hydraulic (whirlpool) below a rapids and she drowned and he was sucked to the bottom and a voice told him to go with the flow and he was pushed downstream by the bottom current and came up choking and gasping for breath. He then drifted, playing chess for money and booze and drugs wherever he was, until he ended up in Key West.
Patrick sobered up in the local AA chapter house, where he tended the coffee bar for cash wages, until that AA house decided to get grants to fund itself, which was not how AA chapter houses fund themselves. Members fund the chapter house. Because of the grant, they had to start paying Patrick by check, and fearing that would cause him to lose his disability payments, he quit his job and went back to drinking, and despite my efforts, and a long stint in a hospital after he caught pneumonia and was dried out, he drank until he died.
I told Patrick's brother to let Patrick’s Key West friends spread his ashes in the ocean off the big Higgs Beach public pier in Key West, and in that way create a homeopathic remedy of Patrick, which would spread around the world and infect it with his beautiful soul, and that’s what we did :-).
My last will and testament at that time provided for my ashes to be spread in various parts of the Florida Keys, which I had loved since I was 15 years old. But after I moved back to my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, I changed my will to say my ashes would be spread in the public park across the street from where I live in an old apartment building, where I lived two other times after I stopped running away from home. The park has an earth energy vortex, which I enjoy along with the energy of the beautiful old trees and a pair of owls that make the park their home.
Key West has a similar vortex, like the one at Stonehenge, and the one in Sedona, Arizona and in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado and New Mexico, and in Tibet and the Andes, but it seemed the Key West vortex might spin backward, given it did not attract spiritual pilgrims, but spiritual runaways, refugees who had run away from home, or from something :-)
If there was no booze in Key West, it might dry up and blow away :-)
I never drank enough to become an addict, but I learned in Key West that even one glass of wine over dinner with friends made my liver howl the next day, and I stopped drinking altogether.
In early 2005, a familiar voice told me in a dream that I should learn how to play chess. I woke up, rattled. Chess had long intimidated me. I knew the moves, but otherwise, I was an idiot at the game.
I had watched Patrick and other men play many games at Sippin’ Internet Cafe in Key West, and at the Anchor’s Away (AA) house, but was too timid to play myself. So, that’s where I started playing chess, and I lost a lot of games and remained intimidated, but I kept playing and came to love the game, even though I wasn’t worth a shit at it.
In the hundreds of chess games we played, I beat Patrick once, when he dozed off and got his queen trapped and he laughed and resigned.
I played a lot of chess with a lawyer friend in Key West, who had lived a while in an ashram in India before he became a Buddhist. He represented an American, who became a Sikh and then became a Buddhist and then became a mega real estate developer in Key West and the Florida Keys.
The lawyer was a good chess player and maybe I won two games against him. I introduced him to Patrick, who demolished him. Later, the lawyer told another friend of ours that, even drunk, Patrick was a chess master.
Over dinner one evening with the lawyer and our other friend, the lawyer said he would prove to me that his Buddhist developer client was not possessed by Lucifer, which I had published on my blog that he was. I invited the lawyer to put on his case.
The lawyer said his client was brilliant, in that he could get anyone to see what he wanted them to see and not see what he didn’t want them to see.
I said, “That’s how Lucifer sells, I rest my case."
By then, I understood that life is poetry, yet much of it also is a chess game, and that is why Archangel Michael told me to learn how to play chess.
There was another reason. Chess stimulates the brain like Nothing else and helps stave off senility. Whereas, booze destroys brain cells.
Richard Blaisdell
Key West vortex drifts me down to dives in the keys like dry tortugas reef places where antler and brain corals grew. Chess pieces move on boards like you and me knight - shift transients but I found in the game I never planned that far ahead. Went with the vortex flow, held my breath and came up for air. Alive to play another game.Sloan Bashinsky
Amazing... coincidence?
If you believe in such...
:-)Richard BlaisdellThere are no coincidences. Just repetition expressed experiences that appear in random thoughts sometimes tossed around in dreams and you are left wondering deja vu? My oldest brother was a chess master in NY. His life dedicated to pursuit of winning. I only played him for my own amusement. He was one that believed in treasure hunting. Did metal detecting. Played the lottery. Lost more than he won. Lost his mind at end. Kept up laughing even tho he was dying, but didn’t realize death was at his door.Sloan Bashinsky
Fuck all, dang if you don't have an outlook and a wit that I can only imagine make angels guffaw and sing!
Yeah, grew. Lots of the corals died, some suspect killed by the invasive species- humans.
Last, but hardly least:
Homeless outlaw cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurricane Irma obliteration
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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