Welcome to The Mystical Underground

As a Bernie supporter, I was disappointed when Clinton won the nomination. But after watching both the Republican convention ( a study in agony and disgust) and the Democratic convention, the contrast is stark and obvious. Trump presented a Dystopian view of America – Hunger Games, Fahrenheit 411,   1984 – versus Clinton’s view of America as inclusive, compassionate, progressive, where all can prosper. Think President Snow from the Hunger Games (only I can fix it, Trump said) and President Obama, the audacity of hope.

For me, this convention humanized Clinton. I learned things about her that I didn‘t know. There has never been any doubt that she’s the most qualified person for the presidency, but in the back of my mind there was always a trust issue. What I heard during this convention, though, is that she has done what Scorpios sometimes do, worked quietly and diligently behind the scenes to improve the lives of ordinary people. The character testimony about Clinton during this convention was well orchestrated, but the genuine emotional pitches were profound.

The most moving speech for me came from a Muslim couple, Khizr Khan and his wife, who talked about the death of their son, Humayun, a captain in the U.S. Army. Their appearance was a direct rebuttal to Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from the U.S. It ended with Khan pulling a pocket-sized edition of the U.S. Constitution from his coat pocket and waving it in front of the camera. “Donald Trump, let me ask you. Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.”

As the mother of a daughter, I was also moved by Chelsea Clinton’s speech about her mom. Trump’s daughter also gave a speech about him as her father, but it wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of Chelsea’s speech. After all, Chelsea’s dad has already been prez. She came of age in the White House. And now her mother is the first woman nominated by a major political party as a presidential candidate. It makes Chelsea a first, too. Dad, now Mom.

Many of the policy highlights Clinton touched on were straight out of Bernie’s platform. I don’t know if it’s enough to pull all of his 13 million supporters into the fold, particularly among millennials, but I’m hopeful. After all, the alternative is too awful to even consider and that’s why Bernie acted with such grace by endorsing her. He knows what’s at stake. He gets it.

Life under a Trump presidency would be worse than all the Dystopian novels you’ve ever read. It wouldn’t just be The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, 1984, Brave New World, The Giver, The Running Man, or The Children of Men. Life under Trump would amount to the collective conglomeration of all of these dark visions, a primal soup of disaster and misery that would propel the country and the world into a scenario that even our most gifted writers haven’t imagined yet.

November 8?  For me, the choice is obvious. I embrace hope rather than fear, optimism rather than despair.

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This clip about a psychic artist is remarkable! See what you think.

We spent our anniversary weekend in Orlando, attending a painting class that Megan taught and, afterward, a charity for cystic fibrosis to which she’d been invited. The charity was held on the shores of Lake Eola, outside World of Beer, which occupies one of the prime spots on the lake.

She was asked to set up her easel and paints outside and work on a painting that was related to Orlando, which would later be auctioned for the charity. She chose to paint the lake with one of the trademark swans as the central figure. These swans live on the lake, are cared for and fed by the city, and are an endless source of fascination for residents and tourists alike.

In the evenings, the swans are seen settling in under the trees around the lake or taking a last minute swim before the sun sets. There are white and black swans and their cute offspring. Several months back, some of the baby swans were stolen, presumably for the black market, and were never found.

She had started the painting at home and finished it over several hours as Rob and I hung out with her. She painted it from a photograph on her phone. I was fascinated by how she could create anything in a crowd like his. People came up and watched her paint, commenting on the colors and the image. Several members of the press videotaped and photographed her. Megan, a double Virgo perfectionist, kept refining the painting, adding details.

The irony, perhaps something of a trickster synchro, is this particular image has something of a history. Several years ago, Megan was walking her dog, Nika, on a leash, outside the apartment building where she lived. Nika saw a squirrel and tore away from her, into the road, and was struck by a car. Nika was flipped into the air and slammed into the road. When Megan reached her, she thought Nika was dead. She scooped her up and sped to the vet’s office. The upshot was countless tests, a $1,200 vet bill, bruises, but  no serious injuries.

While she was at the vet’s, the driver of the car, a young man, rushed into her apartment building and announced that a dog had hit his car and he wanted the owner’s name. He filed a police report and because Nika was technically leashed but running free, he sued Megan for damages to his car. He took her to court and the mediators deemed that Megan owed him $1,200, that she could repay at $100 a month.

Go figure, right? HE hit the dog, then takes her to court. Judge Judy heard about the case and invited them both on her show – all expenses paid to LA, and regardless of her final judgment, the show would pay the driver what he was owed. The driver refused to accept the invitation, probably because he knew he would look like the jerk he is. So, for eight months, Megan paid him his hundred bucks. Then, in the eighth month, he contacted her.

“You’re an artist, right? How about if you paint me something and we’ll call it even.”

This was the painting she did for him. The first time around, the swan painting goes to this jerk. The second time around, it goes to a charity auction for cystic fibrosis. From bad to beautiful.

Before the end of the charity, the organizer told Megan that they wanted to hold off on the auction until a charity  event t in December, at the Ritz Carlton golf tournament. He felt the painting would go for much more than the $100 price Megan had placed on it. Rob and I agree and I think this beautiful swan would, too.

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Shooting stars as a form of spirit contact? Well, why not? Spirits seem to use almost anything available to them to communicate with us.

Some of the most common methods are loud noises, shattered glass, music and songs, words that appear on fogged glass, objects, numbers, names, clouds, animals, birds, and even insects. In most instances of spirit contact, synchronicity is a vital component because the method a spirit uses for contact is personally meaningful and can’t be explained by cause and effect.

On July 5, 2014, Leah’s Jenkins’s husband, Todd, proposed to her, beneath a sky filled with shooting stars. “What was interesting is that after Todd proposed, we saw shooting stars that entire summer. I have never seen more shooting stars in my entire life,” writes Leah, a high school English teacher in West Virginia.

For more than a year, she didn’t see another shooting star. Then, on November 2, 2015, Leah’s father, who had been best man at her and Todd’s wedding, passed away. “And the night he died, Todd and I saw a shooting star for the first time since he had proposed. It was around 4 a.m, in Gerrardstown and  we were driving home from mom and dad’s, where he died. A shooting star literally careened out of the sky and looked as if it might hit the front end of our car.

“We pulled over because it made us veer anyway and both broke apart.  It was the weirdest thing but I swear it just shot right for the car and though it didn’t actually hit us it sure looked like it was going to.  Daddy was a massive practical joker and startling people was his favorite thing to do so we figured he got us again!

“It was incredible because we both instantly knew it was dad. As soon as we pulled over, we looked at each other and both of us said, ‘Pops!’ You could feel it in your bones that it was dad letting us know he was OK.”

I “met” Leah through Facebook, when she mentioned me in one of her posts, saying that our book on synchronicity seriously changed her life. Writers are always curious about how their books affect the people who read them, so I asked her how the book had changed her life.

“It has allowed me to find synchronicity in everything I experience. The concept and explanation has been vital in the loss of my dad. I watch for meaning in events that may seem unrelated at first, but lead to something profound.”

I asked if she’d had any other contact with her dad since he had died. She wrote: “I definitely have a few for you. The pain of losing my dad has only been assuaged by the clues he’s leaving.I have one that I’ve only told to my husband. I’m not sure if it’s a synchro story, but I’ll share it with you for your input. You may think I’m loony but I swear every word is true.”

I assured Leah that I didn’t think any of this stuff was loony and that I had seen both of my parents during a meditation class. So she told me her experience, which seemed to be an actual visitation.

“I was washing dishes and when I looked out the window, in the corner of my eye, I saw a man in a white t-shirt behind me.  What was profound is that the TV was off and my curtains are dark- it was not a reflection. I dropped the dish I was holding and started to shake. When I swung around there was no one and when I turned back the figure was gone. He died wearing a white t shirt, Trish. I know it was him – he was letting me know he’s still there. It shook me up and set me crying but brought me much comfort.”

So what began with shooting stars led to a visitation and I suspect there will be more for Leah. As she says, “Comfort comes in synchronicities as long as you’re open enough to let them.”

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CNN’s web site includes a series of articles called The Other Side.  The series is introduced this way:  Some stories blur the lines between science, spirituality and the supernatural. These are stories from “The Other Side.“

The latest in the series is about synchronicity and starts out with an incredible example.

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Thanks to digital technology, writers can now enjoy a reality where their out of print books from mainstream publishers never go out of print because they can become ebooks.

In the 1980s I wrote a series of 10 novels that featured Quin and Mike McCleary, married private eyes who plied their trade in South Florida. Back then, private eye novels were popular; nowadays, any private eyes that exist probably do most of their work on computers. The era of Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie has been rendered obsolete, except in the pages of fiction.

Ballantine was beautifully cooperative about reverting the rights for the seven titles they had published, but the last three titles with Hyperion were problematic. In the years since I had published the end of the series with Hyperion – a Disney company – they had sold their fiction imprint to Warner. Once I finally got an actual name to write for reversion of rights, I got a massive runaround from four or five people in the company.

Finally, something happened with the Department of Justice and an investigation into price fixing between Apple and mainstream publishers and Amazon. The behemoth – Amazon – published the names and email addressers of the CEOs involved in the investigation. And I found the name of the CEO for Warner’s. On a Friday, I emailed him a scathing letter about my three books that had been out of print for years and how I had requested a reversion of rights several times and been rebuffed. That Monday, I received a gracious letter of apology from him and a promise that my rights would be reverted. A week later, the rights to my three books were reverted, from the same woman who had given me the run around earlier.

I then turned over the three books to David Wilson at Crossroad Press.   

Storm Surge, above, was the first of the three, and David Dodd designed a cool cover.

Since 2009,Crossroad  has been doing something unique in publishing. They have been tracking down authors whose books are out of print and offering them an opportunity to bring their books back into print through ebooks, print, and audio, at no cost to the author. Other outfits that do this charge authors an exorbitant amount of money. But the Crossroad business model is vastly different. Even the royalty split is unheard of – 80 percent of the book’s price for the author, 20 percent for Crossroad. The typical publishing royalty split is 15 percent of cover price for hardcovers, 10 percent for paperbacks.

There is no advance, but the advantage is that from the sale of the first book, the author earns something. There’s no fancy accounting, either, and Crossroad pays each month rather than every six months, like mainstream publishers. Another benefit is that David Dodd, the illustrator, asks you for ideas about the covers. For an author, this is huge.

So many times over the years, an editor would send me the idea for a cover and ask me what I thought. And when I gagged, it didn’t matter. That idea became the cover. But David Dodd doesn’t rest until the author loves the illustration. And his partner David Wilson doesn’t stop until all of your backlist is back in print, each book priced reasonably – ebooks usually at $3.99

Rob and I have written several original books for Crossroad – novels and non-fiction.

So far, the books haven’t been picked up by Barnes & Noble because of their policies, but it hasn’t mattered. If you have a hook, late night radio shows are eager for guests and many of their listeners are book buyers.

In other words, the entire landscape of publishing is changing. And it’s publishers like Crossroad who are making the difference. I mean, think about it. If Crossroad and this technology had existed in the sixties, maybe Richard Brautigan wouldn’t have killed himself because he could no longer get published. Maybe his book Trout Fishing in America, which initially captured the revolutionary spirit of the 60s, would have been followed by Marlin Fishing in the 70s or Shark Fishing in the 80s or…. Well, you get the idea.

Sixteen years into the 21^st century, no author has to commit suicide because he or she can’t get published. You still have to figure out how to market your stuff, get reviews, and do the usual stuff, but the point is that your creativity has a public venue.

I suspect that the Crossroad Press business model really is the wave of the future in publishing. Thanks to David Wilson and David Dodd!

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Rob turned on the news this evening to check on the Republican convention. I listened to some of it from my office, but couldn’t bring myself to actually watch much of it because it made me want to gag. What I heard confirms several things for me:

The Republican memory is short. They talk about small government, yet under W Bush, the federal government exploded with the creation of Homeland Security, the TSA, unprecedented surveillance on the American people, two wars that were never formally declared by Congress, and the defense budget bloomed. Small government, uh-huh.

The Republican platform is about them against us. Pick your them – it doesn’t matter what name you give them, what religion they abide by, what country they come from. We’ve heard Trump tirades about Mexicans, Muslims, women, blacks, Hispanics from any country, it doesn’t matter. If you are non-white, a woman of any color, and DON’T believe we must be the world cop and invade any country that pisses us off, then you are part of THEM.

The Republican Party is in its death throes, but the death may be long and prolonged and could take us through four years of a Trump presidency, through four years of something that smacks of Fascism, of a kind of concentration camp mentality. Imagine it: a first lady who has posed nude in her fashion career; a president with orange hair who has declared bankruptcy four times and yet calls himself a business whiz; a president who will throw a temper tantrum worthy of a two-year-old if he doesn’t get his way… well, I could go on.   The list is long.

Right now, his wife is speaking on his behalf. Donald, she claims, is for all Americans, rich and poor and middle class; Muslim and Asian, Hispanic and blacks, young and old and everything in between. Yes siree, the Donald is America’s savior because he LOVES this country and will KEEP AMERICA SAFE, something no Democratic has ever done.

Again, selective memory: 911 happened under the watch of W Bush, Republican.

Trump’s entire platform for this convention is based on Richard Nixon’s – be afraid of everything in the world and rest assured that I will keep you safe. In fact, fear was the theme of the first day of the convention. Be afraid, be very afraid because things are crazy out there. Black Lives Matter and Islamic terrorism all rolled into one. But help is on the way: Trump will be the law and order president.

Until this moment, I wasn’t going to vote for Clinton because I don’t trust her. Never have. She’s a hawk and my gut tells me that even though she has adopted some of the points in Bernie’s platform that galvanized millions of young people, it may be just rhetoric.

Now I don‘t see any choice but to vote for her because it’s obvious that Trump isn’t just suffering from narcissism and megalomania, he and his supporters live in an alternate universe, where the 1950s never ended. If you’re different than the norm of that era – gay, a black married to a white, an atheist, a woman who seeks to end a pregnancy, someone who doesn’t cheer war, invasion, and hatred of people whose religious beliefs are different than yours – then you’re suspect. In 2005, I think it was, we were in the Dominican Republican, sitting at breakfast. A French man at the next table turned to us and said, “What’s wrong with you Americans? How could you elect W Bush?”

“We didn’t vote for him,” I snapped back.

I can imagine similar questions would be tossed our way if we traveled overseas under a Trump candidacy. Trump’s campaign promise of sending 11 million illegals back to Mexico and barring Muslims from entering the country excite his base, but are stupid and impractical ideas. How do tell someone is a Muslim? There are Christians in every Muslim country in the world. How are the border guards going to know one from the other? It’s like the right’s argument about guns: Take away the guns and only the criminals will have guns. Block all Muslims from entering the country and only the terrorists will enter the country by hiding under the veil of Christianity.

Stupid ideas. Schizoid ideas. But, bottom line, these are the kinds of ideas entertained by the deranged in padded cells.

Now, excuse me while I go sob.

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Jim Moseley, who died in 2012, was an old time ufologist who started a magazine called Flying Saucer News in the 1950s that reported sightings. Later, he changed the title to Saucer Smear and reported on the sociology of ufology with a lot of tongue in cheek humor. He went after debunkers and believers alike with equal glee. He especially took to task those who were full of themselves as experts on a subject that floats between reality and the absurd. Needless to say, Jim tended to annoy a lot of people who were serious about their exploration, their investigations,  their debunking, or whatever. The Amazing Randi threatened to sue him more than once.

We knew Jim since the 1980s, stayed once at Rose Lane Villas that he owned for years his Key West and we also saw him shortly before his death when he lived in a drab room on the outskirts of Old Town. We had a couple of adventures with Jim running into the Amazing Randi once with him in Fort Lauderdale, and another time venturing into the attic of an old house near Rose Lane Villas that used to be a Ford plant in the 1920s, where we found a casket and skeleton. Yikes! We left quickly.

This April, I noticed that the Saucer Smear web site still existed. So I left him a message:

Hi Jim, How are things on the Other Side? Mixing it with the alien presence? Glad we had a chance to have one last dinner in Key West before you moved on. Hey, it was time to get out of that dumpy room, right? Catch you later. Rob MacGregor

This morning, July 13, I got a response of sorts. On the side of my FB home page in the advertising column, this image popped up:

Thanks, Jim.

33 years.

That’s nearly half my life.

On July 16, 1983 at 12:30 P.M., Rob and I stood in my parent’s living room and were married by an Episcopalian minister. I think that was his denomination, but regardless, he was a well-intentioned man, my compromise with my mother to have some religious figure marry us.

My sister was my maid of honor, and I think Rob’s best guy was her husband. There were maybe 30 people in the living room, including Rob’s parents, sister, nephew, and a few friends. At the party afterward, at a country club where my parents belonged, there were several times that.

I remember feeling awkward at that party, where a lot of my parents’ friends, people I didn’t really know, congratulated us. I was eager to get moving on the honeymoon part of the whole thing, where we were going to Ecuador and Chile for six weeks, an adventure that spoke to some deeper part of me, of him, of us.

We made that trip on Ladeco Airlines, a new airline with an unbelievable deal –$250 per person round trip, I think it was, their celebratory intro to the airline world. Ladeco went under years ago, but their service was first class. Synchronicity was our companion on that trip. We happened to sit next to a Chilean woman and when I asked her where in Chile we would find myths, lore, mystery, she said, “Chiloe. That island is incredible.” Ghost ships, she said. Mermaids.

It sounded like our kind of place.

What I didn’t realize then is the way the texture of certain events at pivotal moments in our lives continue to impact us long afterward. The strange mysteries Rob and I experienced during those six weeks of our honeymoon have been with us ever since. They have helped to define our passions – what we write about, research, explore, the very nature of our creative thrusts in this lifetime.
When Megan joined our little clan six years later, in 1989, we didn’t understand how she would expand our passions and our creativity with her own perceptions. We’re seeing it now in her artistic pursuits.

So, once again, I am left with a big fat question: Who orchestrates this stuff?

Happy 33rd, Rob, and may we continue to delve into and write about the real mysteries!

Okay, this is a weird synchronicity but a good one.

On Rob’s birthday, we were in Orlando to celebrate and went out to dinner with our daughter to a place called Hawker’s. The idea here is that you order a number of tapas that everyone at your table can share. One of our platters included shrimp, and Rob helped himself to a single shrimp. Twice in the past three years, he has developed a swollen second toe after eating shrimp, a condition that was initially diagnosed as gout.

Since that first flare-up, he avoids shrimp. I no longer buy it when I grocery shop. But on this particular night, it being his birthday and all, he helped himself to a single shrimp. The next day, he flew to Minneapolis to start cleaning out his mother’s house to put it on the market because she recently went into an assisted living facility. On his second day there, his second toe started swelling.

Two weeks later, the toe was still swollen, red, deformed. He hobbled when he walked. It was difficult to do certain yoga positions when he taught his classes. We had done the Google research on gout and discovered which foods should be avoided. We had talked to other people who suffered flareups of gout and knew which drugs helped. I suggested we hit Whole Foods and see what holistic remedies they carried for gout.

I love our Whole Foods. Even though many – but not all – of their items are more expensive than our local Publix, I find that their employees actually know what they’re talking about. I went into the vitamin area and asked an employee what remedies they had for gout.

“Right over here,” she said, leading me up an aisle. “My husband has occasional flare-ups and we have a product that works for him every time.”

The product, Gouch, was priced at 23 bucks and change. “He’s in the midst of a flare-up,” I told her. “What dosage do you recommend?”

“It says two capsules, but when my husband has a flare-up, he takes three or four. This stuff works. After the flare-up is gone, he stops taking it.”

Into my basket it went.

That day, Rob took 4 capsules. By the next morning, the redness was gone, he could move his toe more freely. It still looked malformed, grotesque, a hunchback from another star system, but it no longer hurt and it didn’t feel hot to the touch. Today, it’s even better.

So here’s the synchronicity. We went to Whole Foods looking for a holistic remedy for gout. The first employee I asked not only knew the remedy, but her husband had used it for flare-ups and it had worked. I remarked that it was a beneficial synchro and Rob’s response was that it was a synchro only if it worked for him. Well, Rob, it appears to be working for you. Can we now call it a synchro?

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