Vulcan atop Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama
I have a woman friend who married a Frenchman and they lived and worked a good while in France and in Birmingham, Alabama. She is bilingual and has dual citizenship. I met them around 1999, when we lived in the old apartment building where she and I now live today. He died a few years later, and one night he came to her in a dream and they talked about stuff, which he hoped would help her move on. Last night, she told me that she had dreamed about her own death to help her prepare for it. She is from Long Island and she worked in New York City and is very familiar with Donald Trump. She is appalled at what America has become.
We have a mutual friend, whom I have known since childhood. A fabulous sculptress, she lived long stretches in Mexico, Canada and Europe, and she speaks their languages. She is not impressed with Donald Trump and is appalled with what America has become. She recently was commissioned to do a sculpture that might cause radical Islam to come after her the way it came after Salman Rushdie after this book The Satanic Verses was published. When I asked her if she was trying to get killed, she said everyone dies and she had heard that getting sliced up by a machete stops hurting after a while.
Both amigas urged me to get a passport so that I can leave America if it goes totally off the rails. I told them that I’m glad they can do that, but I don’t have a passport and am too old and ailing physically to make such a move, and I have two doctors who keep patching me up so I can keep peeing and shooting off my mouth and painting bullseyes on my front and back. I told the gal from Long Island last night that America is the leaky ship I’m on, and in a gallows or dark humor way, the religious freaks and the politicos left and right in America provide plenty to entertain and get me into mischief.
Yesterday, my tech friend Bob, who is the reason The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast came into existence and quite a few of my books are free reads in the internet library, archive.org, and I will live quite a while on this world after my body gives up the ghost, texted me:
Have you seen anything from a Democrat in Washington DC that accurately deals with the US Mexico border? I know nothing has been done or even given lip service by Republicans. It is very difficult to see any solutions coming from our current groups of politicians.
Around dawn today, I dreamed about a fellow named Pablo and Mexicans. Yesterday and last night, I read online and saw on TV that Donald Trump promised to shut down America’s southern border and deport a lot of Spanish people back to Mexico, if he is elected. I read online yesterday that Mexico has started stopping people from leaving Mexico for America. Pablo Escobar, the Columbian cocaine lord, and the Mexican drug cartels just naturally came to mind.
I replied to Bob this morning.
I think I dreamed about this last night. I think three things got Trump elected in 2016. The Democrats ran crooked Hillary Clinton; Trump promised America’s Christian right that he would put their ilk on the US Supreme Court; and Trump promised he would build a wall between America and Mexico, and Mexico would pay for it. Trump got some of the wall built, and it had no noticeable effect on the invasion from Mexico, and Mexico paid nothing for the wall that had no noticeable effect. President Biden and most Democrats think the more Spanish people allowed in through Mexico, the better. I think they have lost their fucking minds and are making the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels feel like they died and went to heaven. All Trump had to do when he was President to make Mexico stop the invasion, which Biden could have done, was stop Mexican manufactured products and services and fruits and vegetables from coming into America, and stop Americans from going to Mexico with their money, and stop people in America from sending money to people in Mexico, until Mexico stopped the invasion. How long with no gringo dollars before Mexico stopped the invasion? A month? That the very stable Wharton School of Finance graduate Make America Great Again geious did not do that when he was president demonstrates just how fucking dumb he really is. Or, he figured it out but didn’t want the cartels to send machetes after him. Or, his balls are so small that his dick couldn’t think about anything but the next pussy he would grab. That his adoring MAGAs didn't call him out on that speaks volumes about their grey matter and patriotism. Santa Anna is laughing his fucking ass off.
In an entirely different blacksmith humor universe, this happened yesterday at The Periodical Compass Sutstack newsletter:
The Blacksmith’s Poem
My Poems
I—a blacksmith,
Hath forged my way o’er steel and fire,
Upon beckoned hands and molten metal
I layeth down sword and shield.
I fan the flames of the furnace.
Chiseled in the ages rests my frame,
Hammering of the efforts draweth out
the iron of my life.
Copper, Silver, and Gold composeth
the whole alloy of mine own spine.
The Lord hath quenched my flame,
and again I am aflame anew,
Casting aside all doubt,
tempering each shaping
of mine own life.
I—a blacksmith,
Hath forged my way.
Sloan Bashinsky | Substack
In the spring of 1995, this poem fell out of me in my home in Boulder, Colorado:
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…
A few months passed and I dreamed of a huge, black, ominous storm headed toward me. On waking, I went into a trance and was lying on my back on a huge black anvil under a huge black blacksmith pounding me with his huge black hammer in his red hot forge. I came out of the trance and this poem leaped out of me.
I am the blacksmith
This storm is my forge
You are my carbon gemsteel
I hammer into my black diamond lasersword
to cut lightning and thunder into stars and gold
and slice hail and snow into diamonds and rainbows
A few months later, my marriage suddenly ended.
I went to Nepal, after the travel agent said good luck getting a flight on such short notice, and I asked her to look anyway, and she was astonished to find a flight out in a few days.
I took a bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara, to trek up to Annapurna Base camp. I was really out of shape, and I was traveling alone and moving very slowly.
Exhausted, wet from rain, cold from altitude, emotionally wrecked, flooded with dreams, visions and revelations that could not have come from anything Carl Jung would have recognized, I went to sleep in a lodge where I had stopped and had a hot shower, a 1-gallon metal bucket of hot water for 50 cents, to use to soap down head to foot and put the bucket above my head and rinse my hair and body. I ate dinner, decided to give up and head back to Pokhara, and went to sleep.
I dreamed of riding my bicycle where I had lived before flying to Nepal up the road from Homewood past the statue of Vulcan the Blacksmith on Red Mountain overlooking Birmingham, my hometown. Half way up the grade, I gave up and turned the bicycle back down toward Homewood and lost control of the bicycle and was headed into a wreck off the road when I woke up.
I decided to keep trekking up to Annapurna Base Camp, which is where mountain climbers staged before climbing huge peaks that dwarfed the Colorado Rockies. The next morning, the rain was gone, the sun warmed me up and I felt reborn and resumed the trek upward.
On my right side was Fishtail Mountain, its peak looked like a whale’s tail. It was said the gods lived there and people not from Nepal were not allowed on it.
I spent some time beside a beautiful whitewater river, which my canoe, kayak, C-1 and C-2 river rat friends and I would have loved to paddle back when I was a river rat. I was exhausted and I said out loud that I never wanted to climb another mountain.
When I reached Annapurna Base Camp and checked into the lodge, the sky was clear. I took my 50-cent shower and had my 1 dollar meal, dal bhat, which all the sherpas, porters and trek guides took at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day. I went to bed with the other trekkers, looking forward to getting up to see the sun come up over Fishtail and light up the towering peaks across from it.
The next day was foggy, and trekkers from all over the world and I hung out in the lodge drinking tea, sharing stories, playing cards, and eating meals. Same the next day. The next morning was clear, and we walked up a hill behind the lodge to watch the sunrise.
As the sun cleared Fishtail and lit up the towering peaks, I saw the blacksmith in front of the peaks, as tall as they were. I went down onto one knee, thinking I would hear, “The father and I are one.” Instead, I heard, “The son and I are one. The son and I are one.” I was trembling, holding back tears, wondering what that meant?
I walked down to the lodge, paid my bill, and headed back down, having no clue how many more mountains I would climb, how many more whitewater rivers I would paddle, how many more furnaces I would be in- not imagining the hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis I would be in- nor how many cobras and black widows would bite me, nor how many lions, tigers, bears, great white sharks, orcas, crocodiles and T-Rexes would eat me. And, I would somehow survive.
It would be years before my addled mind realized the blacksmith was the Christ, who would be joined by Melchizedek, and later by Kali, and they all had at me in their forges over and over and over again. I take no credit for any of it, except I didn’t kill myself, and for all know, something stayed my hand.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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