THE KARENS & THE KEVINS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c4mamfleWs

Have you ever witnessed a Karen incident? These videos  seems to typify who and what she is. They capture what has become an archetype.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSFOHnPYUqw

I’m invariably appalled when I see these Karen videos. These women, whoever they are, seem to have a sense of entitlement, some serious mental issues, and have bought into Trump’s Big Lies about Covid, vaccines (never mind that trump and melania were both vaccinated) the election, the insurrection, and every other lie he has ever uttered.

According to FactChecker, those lies during his time in the WH add up to a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims. That’s a polite phrase for LIES.

Or, remember the Central Park Karen?

These women are embarrassments to our gender. The one entitled White Tears is especially reprehensible in her screaming tirade meltdown and the way she sinks to the floor like she has fainted. Moments later, she lifts her head from the floor and starts her tirade again. I mean, c’mon, ladies, WTF? Didn’t your mom or sister or friends or partner ofryour kids ever tell you how absurd you look acting like a Karen?

So who are Karen’s male counterparts?  Where are the Kens? No, Ken was with the Barbie doll. Let’s call these guys Kevins. The other day, I witnessed a particular archetype of   Kevin. As I turned into a convenience store lot to buy a couple of scratch-off tickets, this big white truck roared up behind me, so close to my back bumper than I could see the driver’s face in my rear view mirror.

My first thought? Uh-oh. A jerk. So I intentionally slowed down and he got angry about it and pulled in sharply to my right and parked directly in front of the store. I parked and got out and saw him hurrying into the store, a big beefy guy. My second thought: He’s a trumpie, keep your distance.

I got in line behind him and made sure I stayed 6 feet away. I was masked, he wasn’t. “Pack of Marlboro reds,” he says.

The clerk at this store is a good-natured Latina. She made some comment about “president” and Kevin’s head snapped up. “He’s not my president.”

Here it comes, I thought.

“Trump’s my president.”

I felt like tapping this big guy on the shoulder and setting him straight. But I’m 5’5″ tall, weigh 111 pounds, and I don’t know judo or karati.  I was pretty sure he was armed. So I moved back another few feet. The Latina laughed at something he said and he left with his pack of smokes, his head wrapped around the Big Lie.

I bought my scratch-offs and left. On the way home, I thought about this. A Kevin won’t melt down like a Karen. He might scream and yell, but he won’t sob like the Karen in the second video. A Kevin like this guy would just pull out a gun and start shooting.

But just as Karens don’t come in a single type, neither do Kevins. The second type is likely to be good-looking, charming, and informed. He communicates well, clearly. He might be a politician like Kevin McCarthy who tries to play both sides. He might be a Wall Street dude, a pilot, ex-military, your brother, your grandfather, a man who, to me, seems as brainwashed as any version of Karen.

But this is where we are right now as a nation. Trump’s toxicity has infected the republican party, where Karens and Kevins believe trump will be magically reinstated to the presidency when the Cyber-Ninjas finish their ridiculous recounting of ballots in Arizona and then they or their clones move on to Michigan, Georgia, and… well, you know how it goes. It’s going to happen on the date that the nutcase CEO of My Pillow says it will. I think the date now is August 15. But, well, his date is fluid.

This is how South American countries have ended up in chaos and ruin. Look at Venezuela. Or, farther back, Chile and Argentina. Or, now: look at Cuba. The autocrats in charge cleaned out the country’s bank in the name of the people and forgot a few details – like the necessities of food and medicine and, with Covid, vaccines.

The really disturbing part is that I believed democracy was in peril during trump’s years. Now I realize that was just a dry run. Trump may be more dangerous now than he was when he was president.

 

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BINX, THE SURVIVOR

 

On June 24 AT 1:25 A.M., the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, killed at least 90 people and as of July 11, 31 are still missing.

However, we learned that a black cat named Binx, who lived on the 9th floor of the condo, survived and was reunited with his owner.

From CBS online: “The Gonzalez family and several of their pets were in their ninth floor apartment in Champlain Towers South the night of June 24 when the building suddenly collapsed in the middle of the night. At least two members of the family were seriously injured in the collapse one is still missing.  Several of their pets also went missing. But on Thursday, exactly two weeks after the 12-story building fell, they were reunited with one of their pets, a small black cat named Binx.”

Binx was spotted by a volunteer, Levine Cava,  with the local animal shelter, The Kitty Campus, which posted flyers on its website about the Gonzalez family’s missing pets. The family had two dogs and two cats, including Binx. Cava found Binx near the rubble while  she was feeding stray cats.

Here’s the synchro, at least for us. In mid-June, Megan adopted a black kitten and named him Binx. There’s Megan’s Binx, eating from a bowl larger than he is, while big dude Indy stands watch.

 

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The Mystical Underground: Preston Dennett: Wondrous

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Preston Dennett: Wondrous”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Preston Dennett began investigating UFOs and the paranormal in 1986 when he discovered that his family, friends, and co-workers were having dramatic unexplained encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and investigated a wide variety of paranormal phenomena. He is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a ghost hunter, a paranormal researcher, and the author of 26 books and more than 100 articles on UFOs and the paranormal. His latest book is WONDROUS: 25 True Encounters.

www.prestondennett.weebly.com

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ANDY PAQUETTE: PRECOG DREAMER

Precognition occurs most often in dreams and may be more common than we think. The trick is remembering them and then remembering them in enough detail so you have a good idea what the dreams might be referencing.

In his book The Sense of Being Stared at And Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote that in his database of 312 cases of precognition, 76 percent concern dangers, disasters, or death. “It’s unlikely that selective memory alone can account for this predominance of dangers, deaths, and disasters in reported cases of precognition,” Sheldrake wrote. “There are strong evolutionary reasons for this bias. In people, as in animals, natural selection must have favored the ability to sense impending disasters.”

For fun, Google precognitive dreams. You’ll find the famous ones – Abe Lincoln’s dream of his own death, Mark Twain’s dream of his brother’s death, dreams of 9-11, the Titanic. You’ll find the contrasting opinions about precognitive dreams, the science, the speculation. But forget all that for now. Meet Andy Paquette, a comic book illustrator, author, and dreamer who, to date, has recorded more than 30,000 dreams, and a large percent of them are precognitive.

 

The first chapter of his book, Dreamer: 20 Years of Psychic Dreams begins with a dream he had while living in Amsterdam:

“Two people come up from behind me. One flanks me on the right, the other walks directly behind me. They want me to go into an alley with them, an alley I now seem to be less than a hundred yards away.”

From there, Paquette takes us through the detailed horror: how the men are armed and get him into the alley. He sees the the corpse of a dead man and knows these two guys are responsible. His body surrenders to terror, his knees hit the ground. The man with the gun is briefly distracted. His arm swings to his side, hand still clutching the gun but not aimed at him. Paquette seizes the moment, reaches for the man’s gun – then hesitates. That hesitation proves fatal in the dream. The man shoots him in the neck.

“The pain is intense…I want to yell but can’t…My throat doesn’t work…I know I’m dying…It takes an eternity crawl ten feet…I feel my life slipping away…”

As the dreaming Paquette dies, he thinks of his girlfriend, Kitty, and suddenly realizes he las left his body and is in her apartment in NYC, hovering near the ceiling. He notes that he’s dead -but not gone – and that she’s oblivious. Then he sees the sign for his apartment in Holland and is shocked that he’s alive, sitting upright on his cot. That night, he decided it was time for him to leave Holland and he called Kitty. They decided to get an apartment together in New York.

Two weeks later, Paquette is out and about, tying up loose ends for his trip back to the U.S. As he leaves a travel agency, he realizes he’s on the same street where his dream occurred. But he doesn’t see any alley and figures he’s safe – until a man falls into step beside him and a second man comes up behind him. And then he spots the alley.

Thanks to his dream about two weeks prior, Paquette knows when to make his move and manages to escape from the two men and race across the street to a newsstand. When he glances back, the men are running away.

This experience is the kind that turns atheists into believers. It no longer matters what the experts and scientists and skeptics think because you know what you’ve experienced. To date, Paquette has more than 30,000 recorded dreams, many of them precognitive, meticulously arranged I a database he has created.

I think it’s time for science to study someone like Paquette. Calling Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Bruce Lipton, and well, why not the  spirit of Carl Jung as well?

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11:11 and Coming Face to Face

Sometimes when we repeat the same experience over and over, day after day, it starts to feel repetitious, like you’re on a treadmill. In this case, I actually was on a treadmill in the gym. Because of my knee issues, I don’t run anymore, so I walk, and walk and walk.

In order to deal with the boredom, I usually watch what’s on  the TV screen attached to the treadmill. On this particular day it was tuned to Fox News and I said to myself, Well, I’m not going to watch that. So I started going through the channels as I kept walking and walking. I would  pause on a station, feet still moving, and watch a bit one program, then move on to another.

Finally, I  reached The History Channel and just as I did, what appeared to be a promo ad for Expeditions Unknown came on. But immediately afterwards, an episode of the show began.  I thought this will keep me entertained while I walk, and I was hoping for a new episode, or an old one that I hadn’t already seen.

No such luck. Instead, the episode that came on was one that I’d not only seen, but I was actually in it.  And my part was right at the beginning. So within seconds, there I was on the treadmill watching myself talk about the Bermuda Triangle to the big guy, Josh Gates, who investigates mysteries and legends.

On one hand, it was surprising. I mean, what are the chances?  But on the other hand, I’d seen it, of course, so in a sense it was more repetition. But no matter how many I’ve seen the beginning segment, I do like watching the part where lightning bolts come out of my fingertips as I physically defined the Bermuda Triangle for Josh.

I watched a few minutes of the show until my time on the treadmill was over. On the way home, I saw something else that is somewhat repetitious in my life–the numbers 11:11. I seem to catch those numbers all the time, and this time they were in large numerals on the sign outside of Wellington High School as I drove by. Usually, there’s a message about something related to the school, but this time, oddly enough, the sign was a huge digital clock. And yes, it was 11:11.

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Remember Babe the Pig?

In the mid-1990s, a book packager named Marty Greenberg, since deceased, asked if I would be interested in working on a book with Jamie Cromwell, star of the then recently released movie, Babe the Pig. Both Megan and I had loved the movie, so of course I said sure.

Jamie, I was told, had a cool story about UFOs and contact. Even better. Marty put us in touch and one day Cromwell landed in West Palm Beach and we picked him up and brought him back to our place. Megan, of course, was thrilled. Wow, the Babe the Pig guy was staying at her house. We shared that sentiment.

Jamie was a personable man, an Aquarian who didn’t think like other people. He’d spent time in the desert with UFO groups, had traveled worldwide, had unusual ideas and beliefs.  And he had a solid idea for a novel about UFOs. We spent most of our time talking about the plot and characters he perceived for his novel.

One night, we went out to dinner – an Italian restaurant, I don’t recall exactly where.  Several servers came up to him and asked for tips about how to break into movies. Others asked for autographs. Since Babe, his roles have been different and always terrific.  I was and still am a fan.

When he left after those several days of brainstorming, I emailed Marty and told him the meet and greet had gone well. Marty started putting the contract together and actually found a publisher offering a $30,000 advance before anything had been written.

I made the mistake of starting the book before the contact had been signed and sent a couple of chapters to Cromwell. He called me and wasn’t happy. “I don’t like that sex scene,” he said. “It’s not how I make love to my wife.”

Well, what do you say to that? “Then write it yourself.”

“I’d like to return to Florida and sit next to  you as you write my book,” he said.

I felt like laughing. Really? Sit next to me? Scrutinize my every word? Paragraph? Page? I used to work in the Florida prison system, as a librarian and Spanish teacher, and at the time his suggestion struck me as a kind of creative prison. “Forget that,” I replied.

“Then my wife and I will write the book,” he said.

During this phone call, I tossed an I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination system with which Jamie was familiar.

I got Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart. I told Jamie. We both knew what it meant.

Jamie and his wife never wrote the book. This is one of the  real perils of ghostwriting. Someone has a great idea, a fantastic outline, compelling characters. They’re  wedded to a sequence of events that work great in an outline, but not in the actual writing of the novel. An outline of characters and events is helpful, but there’s something that happens in the actual writing that dictates what works – and what doesn’t. It’s that creative element when the characters take over  and become living beings.

Novels are about actions and reactions, actions and reactions, over and over again, seen and experienced through your point of view characters. So even though outlines are helpful, they must be malleable.

I haven’t seen Jamie in anything recently. I hope he has experienced his UFO idea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Mystical Underground: Sky Nelson-Isaacs: The Science In Synchronicity

A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Sky Nelson-Isaacs: The Science In Synchronicity”:

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Sky Nelson-Isaacs, a physics educator, speaker, author, and musician. Discovering an early fascination with holograms and some of the most fundamental questions in physics, he has sought for over two decades to establish a connection between synchronicity, physics, and real-life using research and original ideas. His most recent research has been published in the scientific journal Quantum Reports. Sky is the author of “Living in Flow: The Science of Synchronicity and How Your Choices Shape Your World” and most recently “Leap to Wholeness: How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt.”
In addition, Sky is a multi-instrumentalist and professional performer of award-winning original musical compositions.

https://synchronicityinstitute.com

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A Weird Sign

 

Recently, our daughter, Megan, went to a playhouse in Orlando. She texted us the sign outside the women’s restroom. It’s not a synchronicity, but it’s clever and made me laugh when I saw it.

 

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The Odd Thought

 

While shopping at our local Publix yesterday, pushing my cart up and down the aisles, I suddenly wondered what I would do if someone came into the store with a weapon – and started shooting. I would run, of course, but where would I hide?

I kept thinking about this as I passed the meat and the fresh fish section, which are at the back of the store. Also back here are  the doors that lead into the employee areas and eventually outside. That was where I would hide if…

But suppose I was at the front of the store when the shooting started? Where was there to hide up front? Restrooms, but the shooter could just burst through the door. The pharmacy? Maybe. I could throw myself to the floor behind the shelves of medical supplies and drugs. Not an ideal spot. Maybe one of the employee offices or behind the front desk. Not ideal, either, unless the employee offices can be locked.  Behind the bakery counter? Maybe, but again,  not ideal.

This was around 11:30 AM June 9.

This morning, June 10, at 11:30 AM – just 24 hours later – there was a shooting at a Publix a couple miles from the one we use. A man who had posted a message on his facebook page that he would like to kill a child, had done exactly that. The boy was about a year old. His 69-year-old grandmother tried to fight off the shooter, but he killed her, and then himself.

From a friend, I later learned the grandmother had been the head nurse in a local VA hospital.

The 2nd amendment from 1769 says, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Does that include nut cases? Does that exclude background checks? Does that mean we can all carry AK4 7s? The world in 2021 is vastly changed from the world 252 years ago. Why doesn’t the 2nd amendment reflect that change?

 

 

 

 

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The Dog Park Encounter

Nigel – pooped from the heat, but ready to chase a ball!

For most of the summer, our dog park has been empty of dogs and people. except for a small group of us whose dogs can tell time. Between 2:20 – and 3 p.m., they’re ready to hit the dog park.

The other day, Rob and I and Nigel, Nika, and Abby were the only ones at the park. Then a couple came in with a dog and joined us in the shadiest spot.

Mark Konkol and his partner, Sasha Weinert,  were on a road trip from Chicago, with their  dog, Nelson. It’s their  way of celebrating the end of a 15-month lock down.  Mark is a journalist in Chicago- and Pulitzer-prize winner for local reporting!  – and in the link, explains that he and Sasha were in Wellington, looking for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who owns an estate here. They never found the governor, so we were the lucky ones to meet them.

From Wellington, they headed to Orlando, where this picture was taken.  And here’s the link to Mark’s terrific piece in patch.com

Even Nigel is mentioned!

Safe travels, you two!

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