I suppose when you are raised by alcoholocis, you follow suit or you don't. You learn something, or you don’t. You recognize bull shit, or you don’t. You become free, or you don’t.
The Twelve Steps1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
When I lived in a halfway house in Key West, all residents were required to attend 12-Step meetings daily, whether we drank or were drug addicts, or not. That’s when angels applied the 12 Steps to me, and although I was not an addict, it was no damn fun, and I learned, if you substitute “our ego” for “alcohol", the 12 Steps are a genuine way for anyone to move closer to God by whatever named called.
I imagine if angels made Joe Biden and Donald Trump do the 12 Steps for one year, they would emerge entirely different men- born again in the sense Jesus actually meant in the Gospels.
Meanwhile, this arrived in my email account this morning:
To The Ghost of Jim Morrison
By: Vampyre Mike Kassel
Jim,you were right to take that header in the bathtub.If you had lived, they would have made youbetter.They would havetossed you into Betty Ford,force fed you Antabuse,bathed you in healthy thoughts,made you jog.They would have dressed you in athree piece black leather business suitand taught you about real estate.They would have made youcrawl across the pages of People magazine,write autobiographies,hug Phil Donahue.They would have made yousuck big Jesus dick,do benefits for the Cirrhosis Foundation,kiss the patent leather hoovesof Madd Mothersand Parents' Music Resource Harpies.They would have made youeat wheat germ and shit,judge poetry contests,talk at high schools.They would have made youlive in a better house and garden,save a rain forest,sing a duet with Linda Ronstadt.They would have made you writethree thousand times on the blackboard of your soul:"I WAS A BAD LIZARD."They're beating on the walls of my bunker, Jim,shouting:"Ecstasy can be cured!""You're not living up to your endof the social contract!""Do you know what that cigarette isdoing to your lungs?"There's cracks in the walls.The Good Health Policeand Citizens for a Sane and Sober Societyhave broken out the stun guns.They're shouting something about safe sex and crack babies.They want to help me, Jim.Splash over one side, there,I'm climbing in.This bath tub hasa familiar ring.Sloan BashinskyI agree with the sarcasm toward the rescuers and their values.However…My father and mother sipped vodka from rising to turning in at night, and I suppose they cured me of being a drunk, and I suppose my mother smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day is why I never smoked a cigarette.Even so, I lived on and just off the street for 5 years, and later for 2 years, and I spent a lot of time with long term homeless people in Key West.All but a very few got up drinking and drank through the day until turning in at night in their hidey holes.When they found out I had practiced law, they tried to get me to sue the city for selectively enforcing its open container law only against homeless people.They used their government checks for booze and tobacco. They sold their food stamp allowances to buy booze and tobacco. They panhandled for money to buy booze and tobacco. They ate in soup kitchens and got food from food pantries.They got mad at me when I declined to sue the city for selective enforcement of the open container law.They found themselves a young lawyer, who took interest in their plight, and told me of a meeting they would have with him and for me to join them, which I did. And that’s how I met Sam Kaufman.After he had met with them, we walked a while together and he asked me what I thought? I said I had clerked for a federal judge and had practiced law, and I thought he had a good case, but if it was me, i could not ask a federal judge to rule homeless people have a constitutional right to drink themselves to death. Sam said that was a good point, and he let it go.Sam was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, a half-way house for recovering street addicts, run by Father Steven Braddock, who many years later told me that he once had run a security company in New York City, and Donald Trump was one of his clients. I asked Steve if Trump had paid him what he was due, and Steve smiled, and said yes.A few years after Sam and I met with the homeless people. a federal judge in Miami, in what became known as The Pottinger Case, stopped Miami from using its police to prevent the city’s homeless people from sleeping outside, relieving themselves outside, and cooking food outside, if there was no place for them to do that inside.Sam and I convinced Key West's city officials that we would file a Pottinger case against the city in federal court in Key West, if city police kept doing what Miami’s police did. Key West’s police backed off.That led to the city building an overnight shelter for its homeless people, where they slept under cover at night, and then they roamed city streets and parks during the day. Not all homeless people used the shelter, but most of them did.I had a blog that had a pretty good local following, and I wrote daily about a lot of things,, including what I experienced with the city’s homeless people and police, and with homeless people at the shelter, and with the people running the shelter, where I slept nights.After I published that I thought homeless addicts would be better off dead, than continuing to booze and drug, the shelter banned me for life, because I had threatened to kill homeless people.Having no place to sleep nights without being arrested by city police and taken to the county jail where I would stay 30 days and be released, then I would be arrested again for another 30 days, etc.,I went to a city commission meeting and told the mayor and city commissioners what had happened -, all of them knew me very well, Sam Kaurman was one of the commissioners- and that i was leaving the commission meeting to go to the police station to sleep in its front lobby, which was not inclosed, or be arrested and taken to jail.When I rode my conch cruiser bicycle to the police station, a lieutenant came out and said I could sleep there at night. That made the front page in the Key West Citizen.I slept months of nights in the staton’s front lobby, until my father’s estate learned of it and helped me get inside.During that time living on the street, I met a really interesting, some would say weird, or wyrd, homeless woman some years younger than me, who had been banned from the shelter for life and was repeatedly put in jail for 30 days for hanging out around shopping centers during the day and sleeping outside at night in her hidey hole..We became an item, and I wrote often at my blog about her and my adventures on the streets of Key West, aka Key Weird, where the weird go pro.If Kari had given up vodka and cigarettes, we might have had a great life together. Even so, we had a really interesting time, until she had a massive seizure and died in her mother’s home, where I had gotten her on Greyhound with some of the money from my father’s estate.A friend of mine does the tech work and chimes in with me at The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, which can be watched at YouTube and at Torrent platforms. The podcast we did on Kari now has around 500,000 complete watches at Torrent platforms.Homeless outlaw cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurricane Irma obliteration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0Dc03eksU&t=923s
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
