I was in one of those moods. Poke the bear I think you call it, in some contortion or other.

I wandered into Captain Tony’s in the middle of the afternoon. This is neither the ‘place the to be’ nor the ‘right time’, but in I went and clung in the shadows.

Captain Tony’s is deep downtown on a street with perpetual puddles, near the harbor where the big boats stop for the day, passengers flow into town like a Pink Tide with the goals of getting sloshed and hopefully meeting Jimmy Buffett. Captain Tony’s is a clothing optional skank-dirty bar with interesting art on the walls, and from the ceiling bras dangling like drying pheasants, the stalactites of sag.

That afternoon I went into Captain Tony’s, as I said, I was in an odd mood. The bar was ringed with hunched drinkers and to the side of the open door on a stool sat a young cowboy, in a stetson and a sleeveless checked shirt. He was sweating. He was a nervous wreck. He could barely make eye contact with the room. He was between songs when he said, ‘Any requests?’

This was an opportunity, shall we say, testing ‘crowd reaction’. You know, for L.A.R.S., the Large Animal Research Station I head.

I yelled loudly, ‘Anything but Country.’ The musician did not look my way, his body stiffened. Meanwhile the patrons and the bartenders turned as one and gave me a death glare. Like a lowing herd, Heathen, heathen, heathen, I could see their thoughts in their wild eyes.

The humorless bunny struck up something definitively Country. I strolled over his way. He never looked at me. I dropped two single dollar bills in his jar and walked into the beautiful sunshine and shook that awful noise out my of head.

Town is so changed. Some favorite bars are gone, boarded up and forlorn. Musicians scattered across the country to paying gigs. We’ve lost a lot of fauna.

image by:  www.LeighVogel.com

www.leighvogel.com

When my friend Brenda found a new home in NYC I offered to help her with the move. I had a car and moving is second nature to me.

I told her to call friends and meet at her place early the following Saturday morning.

In all these years, since that first hubby, and this includes the second hubby, I have never again met a mate who said yes without hesitation.

It has been a shock.

I thought hubby was saying yes because my suggestions were superb. After all, I thought they were, else why would I proffer them? And he always said yes.

He too proposed the oddest of suggestions and I also said yes. Not to acquiesce. But because I was enthused by an original proposal. Wanna see the equator? Yes!

We moved constantly, moving into friends empty houses, in Paris, in Morocco, in Costa Rica, in Colombia, in the rural northern Virginia estate of Rudolf Nureyev. A stone house with a piano in each room.

Since I split from that first marriage I’ve encountered a couple fine men. I married one of them. But none were brave in that excitable way I had thought was universal.

It was in me. It was in my first husband. I thought this exuberance for the wild was in everyone. Turns out I was decidedly wrong.

I have known grown men who won’t go outside in the rain.

A slap in the face was to find something I took for granted was impossibly rare. Had I known would I have walked away?

I think about that.

Meanwhile, I love living alone, I love quiet. I wouldn’t share anything smaller than a castle. I love not being awaken in the morning, or afternoon. I like not answering questions. I like not having responsibilities. I don’t want anyone leaning on me. I am standing.

I would like to know more people not afraid of the rain.

www.johnmartini.com

Yes, Key West is different in a multitude of ways. Much for the better. Some is crippled.

After Hurricane Irma the population were billiard balls in all direction across the harvest felt that is the Veldt in the late summer of south east America. Some stayed while others dispersed. Some fell into trouble. We lost a fawn to the jaws of a big city. There’s plenty that will never be the same.

And then there were the ‘blessed’, those who tumbled into each other’s arms. Saving one another and, in so, heightening the senses of their romances. Flimsy foundations.

I rolled like a stone. I traveled light and I traveled solo. I did my Kerouac and every night I wrote my thoughts, my On The Road. It helped me download the stresses. 

I had experiences. I rented a dollhouse in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi with views of the Gulf of Mexico and houses swaying on stilts forty feet high. I drove the back roads to New Orleans, I heard the music. I kept a diary and I would have published it. But I lost it. You’d think it impossible these days. It’s not.

I lived in uncertainty, often in great comfort, but always distracted by my circumstances.

My travels ended six months from the night the hurricane decimated my house and things concluded oddly peacefully in a spot downtown Key West, a place I love, found by a friend. Thank you friend!

For the ‘panic romances’, those I watched from afar, I wondered which would gel. One could have. I watched it from start to teetering end. It began in a syrupy swirl, she’d saved him, she flew him out of danger, and it might have worked. But six months later and they were done. 

‘You owe me’ she wheedled, playing a weak hand.

‘I owe you nothing’ he trumped, and he was free.

Hurricane Irma shifted everyone’s life. Mine for the better. Check the weather and pray for luck.

www.susansugar.net

Everyday I hear our ochre leader compared to a pig. I’ve heard it here and seen it on placards welcoming him abroad.

I have had enough. 

I must speak up in defense of pigs. The pig is essential, thoughtful and multi-purpose and to compare ‘them apples’ to an orange does everyone a disservice.

I am partial to pigs for a variety of reasons starting with the fact that bacon tastes good. Which leads me to a quick segue because as much as generally speaking I love the porcine it tastes too good and few are giving it up anytime soon.

The pig has this curious karmic fate of being too succulent not to be on the food chain and also trans-metaphored as the symbol of all that is bad.

The pig is family oriented and protective and make good pets, and even guards.

Furthermore my ancestor, George Petrovic, was a pig trader. He was a Serb and came from a region where boar ran wild in the Poplar forests and stuffed themselves on acorns so it was natural to bag ‘em and trade with the Austrians to the north across the river who were big on eating pig.

I come from a family of pig farmers. So humble, the salt of the earth, but consider this, the Serbs’ overlords were Muslim. And Muslims fear the pig. How multi-beneficial to have a trade that is not only free to the trader meanwhile the commodity is the enemy of his enemy, those Turks, thanks to their religious proclivities, are repelled by piggies.

George Petrovic, better known as Karageorge, was a pig trader who would rather die than tolerate Turkish rule. Not your average peasant he got cannons and rebel forces and in 1804 kicked those MOFOs out. Karageorge is the liberator of Serbia and revered to this day. He was also Napoleon’s hero. That’s another, longer story. 

Don’t malign pigs and please enjoy your bacon.

Over the years I’ve lost a few books. Books I’ve written.

The third book I lost is the true story of LA’s biggest ever cocaine distributor, ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross. His biography, which I recorded in a Phoenix Federal Penitentiary jives perfectly time wise with everything going on in the news those days. The moving of cocaine from Nicaragua and through Honduras to South Central LA effectively hand delivered by Oliver North and Reagan.

Marko Miladinović©️

Middle of the afternoon it was by chance I saw my friend Blues Man as I was walking by The Bull so I went in and sat beside him. He is old and gets around on a tricycle. I like asking him about music, he is our Ray Charles and has a terrific voice. He frequently sits in with this band and that band. He knows all the hound dog bar musicians and they call upon him occasionally. He’s more talented than most everyone in town, but familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, and has made a ghost of him.

www.CarolMunder.com

All this time I thought he was psychic. Turns out he’s a psychopath. Now, I go over everything he ever said to me. I unpack the prisms. And I shudder at the things I’ve done and repeated, instructions from the wacko.

I’ve hurt people I have lashed I have  wounded and I have laughed in their faces as they cried. When I reported my triumphs I was rewarded. And so a cult of two began.

I know he is calculating and greedy to a degree rarely seen. He worships objects. Now he is old and he is frail and he can hardly carry the stuff around. He points at things with his cane and orders his housekeeper about. Endlessly set designing. Rearranging. Fresh orchids. Entertainment. Attention. Adulation.

Almost daily friends are dying. Friends kill themselves. The playing field, and the numbers, and the game itself continually changes.

Now when I look back on what I thought was good advice, helpful and getting me somewhere I realize it did. It got me to a point where I am free. I don’t regret letting him use me. He had some enemies he managed to wreak revenge on through me. He used me. But I allowed it.

I always suspected he had evil in him. I overlooked it because it suited me. And I thought if it’s true, still it didn’t affect me. I was wrong. How could it not affect me. Secondhand smoke. Last we spoke I heard the evil in his voice over a matter that had nothing to do with me or him. But I heard the worst of mankind, our proclivity for sadism. I heard it loud as crystal cracking. There’s no going back. 

I was a teenager the first time I encountered evil and it broke my heart. The rest of my life has been a series of meetings with similarly doubtful moments. Little further proofs.

Get away from toxic. Stay in the light.