Flew Shot is the title of my serial posts about whatever random things a g'won. From writing about blogging to promoting my podcasting career, curating music & art to writing about sociopolitical issues, I'll create one of these at least weekly, often more. I will also sometimes use specific tags and communities for these posts.
I'm fucking posting!
Wow. A Post! Seriously. Can you believe this? I'm actually posting. I didn't even bother to check when the last time was that I posted before sitting down to pen this. There's so much. I have no idea where the hell to start.
First things first. Post Up. That's a weekly live curation podcast I've been doing on 
for, I dunno, six months maybe? 
and I started it together. I had been bothering 
, for some time, about starting Pimp Your Post Thursdays again and she gave her blessings to go ahead and start a new show on the same day and time. For some reason, 
, also gave his blessings and the green light to return to the air with . I say that half jokingly because I've been known to pull the occasional no show, up to and including last night. And over a year ago I wound up disappearing for almost a year. Long story, but if I tell you what's transpiring now you'll basically get it.
for, I dunno, six months maybe? and I started it together. I had been bothering , for some time, about starting Pimp Your Post Thursdays again and she gave her blessings to go ahead and start a new show on the same day and time. For some reason, , also gave his blessings and the green light to return to the air with . I say that half jokingly because I've been known to pull the occasional no show, up to and including last night. And over a year ago I wound up disappearing for almost a year. Long story, but if I tell you what's transpiring now you'll basically get it.
First, let me start with something I was just talking with someone about, this whole silver lining stuff that's come out of this tumultuous era mankind has dubbed a pandemic. Yes, while billions of humans are suffering around the globe, some have managed to take advantage of the forced time out to do much soul searching and path finding. Just before COVID, My family and I had been attempting to recuperate after having been separated by US marshals, when they came to the mountainside where we resided in North Carolina to pick me up on a warrant out of New Jersey for a possession charge I incurred in 2017 when I was the unlucky passenger in a vehicle which smelled like smoked cannabis.
At that time, Risso, one of my best friends and cohorts, presented me with the idea of following in his footsteps by moving to South Florida and getting involved in the marketing and content creation business with him. He had experience great success when he came to the Palm Beach area to get clean from heroin and get his proverbial shit together after a long stint with drug abuse, addiction and incarceration, all things I can relate to. And as he achieved financial freedom, he felt the need to give back to all the people who meant something to him and whom tried to help him sober up and fly straight. So there I was with my wife, Mary, and my daughters, Lily and Marley, struggling to make ends meets after a few years of living on government assistance, 2 cum laude college degrees and an extensive non violent criminal past along with almost a decade and a half of PTSD, having a pretty hard time figuring things out.
We spent a weekend at our off grid cabin in the woods in Georgia, packed whatever we though we'd need to move to Florida with no real plan and hardly any money and we drove our little Subaru Forester all the way down I95 to Delray Beach where Risso put us up in a really swanky hotel for a handful of days until we could find a place to live.
Mary and the kids and I all agreed years ago that we were going to embrace a fairly unconventional lifestyle and began to practice living frugal, thrifty, minimal, sustainable and as close to zero waste as the modern day American hustle and bustle will allow without being 100% food independent, although that is a goal which we've been studying and learning years to prepare for. So we made sure Risso understood that while we were happy to come entertain his idea of a day job and see what happens, we had no desire to return to living in cramped apartments or fixer-upper rentals that never quite feel like home. Instead, since South Florida is basically the tropics, we would look for a place to live outdoors among nature on a property where we could continue to practice our off grid life and learn permaculture and continue to work on our mental health while following our dream of building a mobile solar powered sound system with which we could travel as a family and showcase music, vend our branded goods and raise our kids to be well travelled and wealthy with culture and world views.
We wound up meeting a lady and her kid who had just bought two city buses from an auction really cheap which she planned to turn into tiny houses. She had a friend living in a big house whom she figured could use some company and help paying bills. We met her friend, Terry, and got along well. We fell in love with her dog. She lived in a very convenient area for me to get to this new day job. She gave us a pretty sweet deal on rent so we moved in, all the while planning to build some sort of tiny house and look for a more rural property to live on.
Now, for the sake of long story short, a few things happened kind of at the same time. COVID, for starters. Then lockdowns. Then work from home. Things got weird. We went from working five days a week and promoting raves, clubs and festivals each month to being on top of one another and growing frustrated to say the least. The guy I worked for decided to use COVID as an excuse to be a scumbag and short a lot of paychecks. Mine by thousands of dollars. I guess Risso felt bad since the job was his hook up, he introduced me to a business partner of his who either took a liking to me or felt really bad, I suspect the latter although I may have grown on him.
This guy was a all about the Monday to Friday nine-to-five grind, and a family man with a wife and two boys similar ages to my girls. His plan was to run a marketing company targeting people in need of durable medical equipment. It doesn't sound particularly exciting, it's certainly not a scheme I would have ever imagined myself taking on, but it is a good legitimate hustle and can be quite lucrative I must admit.
For a while, Billy had me come in five days a week even if he didn't really have much for me to do, and paid me for it. I spent some of the time doing a lot of meditating and research and thinking about how my family would realize our dreams in what was becoming clear was a completely different world than the one we lived in just months ago.
Due to our collective anxieties and depressions, the pandemic, our waxing and waning financial stability, the relationship we had with our landlady began to deteriorate as did our collective mental health. Fortunately, we had met a business owner when we first moved here who has a five acre plot of land in a more rural part of Palm Beach County. We had an arrangement with him which allowed us to use about a quarter of the property, a lovely little slice of a Florida swamp nestled in a cove of very tall palm and pine trees. We started to build an 8 x 4 trailer and installed solar power. We began to lay out our plan for a return to nature. We needed it fast and our poor landlady had more than enough.
That brings us more or less up to date, except for one thing. We've been living in this little nook we call home now for some months. Here, we really don't feel the isolation. If there were lockdowns, not much would change for us at this point. We have everything we need. Clean water, electricity, high speed internet, supermarkets and stores just a few minute drive as well as public transportation nearby. We managed to sink a bunch of money into car repairs finally and got this Forester running well. I can't tell you what a relief THAT has been.
The job with Billy was going well, but as I had warned Risso early on, I wasn't long for the office life. See, you have to understand something about Mary and I. I spent my life in and out of apartments and rental houses in inner cities and suburbs. And from my love of all things outdoorsy, I learned that spending too much time indoors exacerbates my asthma. And since having been diagnosed with PTSD fifteen years ago, I also recognize that being outdoors and among nature, doing hippy shit like earthing, I feel so much better. That and the occasional psychedelic reset works wonders for me.
Mary suffers from epilepsy and an often debilitating anxiety disorder. Being inside an enclosed building with electrical wires humming through the walls and bright artificial lighting gives her headaches and makes her pretty miserable.
Fortunately, both of our children also love the great outdoors. As a family, we have always enjoyed camping and hiking, spending entire days in national parks doing things like foraging and tracking wild animals. And since we unschool and peaceful parent our children, we include them in our important family decisions.
Now here's the kind of fucked up thing. As I stated above, back in 2017 I was the passenger in a friend's car that got pulled over smelling like cannabis. I was arrested and charged with possession. Because I have a history with the criminal justice system for the act of self medicating, the state of New Jersey has attempted to keep a short leash on me by sentencing me to two years probation for the 2017 possession charges. And since COVID has seriously slowed down the court systems, it took until just weeks ago to finalize the deal and process the paperwork.
🙏🏼
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Ocean County, New Jersey was aware that I moved to Florida from day one. There was nothing they could do to stop me pretrial since I had yet to be convicted of a crime or sentenced. Now they're job was to submit a request to the Florida adult supervision office asking to accept me as one of their supervisees. The probation officer in Florida did an intake with me about 2 weeks ago. A few days later, she did the routine home visit to verify that I do indeed live where I say. Two days ago, I received a phone call from the probation officer in New Jersey. Turns out Florida does not believe we live in what they consider stable housing, therefore have denied my request for a transfer of supervision.
I was told my options are to move into a house or apartment or move in with family, or come back to New Jersey, where I would be homeless in the middle of a brutal winter with no job and not much in the way of support. I guess they figured I would choose to uproot or even abandon my family. I told the officer there was no way I was doing either. And that if marshals come for me I would initiate hunger strike. Yesterday I sat down and wrote an email to Officer Marshall. I broke things down to him in a way that I believe not only forced him to see a supervisee from a perspective he may not have before and must have tugged on his heart strings. We spoke on the phone at length. He explained that he would go to bat for me as much as he can in his position, but that eventually his hands would be tied and his superiors would expect him to do his job and write a violation which would likely result in a bench warrant being issued for my arrest. He advised me of some other options which now require me to cross some critical T's and dot some I's. Needless to say, I'm on it.
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