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Part I.
As of today we have seven weeks until the election and thirteen weeks until the End of Time according to the Mayan calendar. What a contrast? Seven like the seven sacred days of creation, or the light. Or thirteen like the superstitious and foreboding number of the dark.
So I am going to tell you
about my newest book that is a work in progress in hopes it gives you something
new to consider while distracting you from the lies and deception in everyday
life which none of us needs.
By the way, don't bother
trying to buy it yet because I can't finish it until we survive the End Times
in 13 weeks. I'm really quite tired of
sequels.
Instead we spend a
lifetime getting beaten down, educated I guess they call it, tricked, fooled,
disappointed and occasionally, well, we might even find a moment to get happy.
That is not to say
everyone is that way but now that I am much older and wiser I have noticed there
are fewer and fewer happy people.
But who am I to talk? The title of this article, "Left
Handed, Four Eyed, Small
Town
Most autobiographies are about
famous people so I certainly don't expect this book to ever be on the New York
Times best seller list. I mean I'm just
a Hayseed from Iowa
How many people do you
know that start life with four strikes against them? You see, I would have been most fortunate if
those were the only strikes against me in life.
But no, my role as entertainer to the gods or archangels or whatever
celestial beings needed comic relief was far more endowed with strikes against
me than being merely left handed, four eyed, small town and Catholic.
My maternal side of the
family, the Campbell
One might say I was
genetically manufactured with the best and worst of Scotland ,
Ireland
Then there was the
paternal side, the Putnam clan, mostly English aristocrats with a touch of
German engineering and inventiveness, and pretty much at odds with everything
from the whimsical and magical world of my mother's ancestors. They were the aristocratic ancestry leading
to various figures of nobility I dare not mention lest I sully their memories
in the history books we read.
Why my father's non-Catholic
ancestors even had their own big church near London
shortly after the English drove the Catholics out of Britain ,
meaning back when my father's side in jolly old England drove my mother's side from their ancient homes in the Scottish Highlands to Ireland and eventually to land here in America
I don't know a lot about
DNA and genetic coding but if we are the product of our parents and ancestors
combined DNA then I must have lived in a constant state of revolution and never
known who I could trust from my own family.
However, I cannot afford
to believe in the children inheriting the sins of their fathers or mothers or
ancestors. From the little genealogy I
have dared to research about my family the burden of sins like those are of
such tremendous magnitude that us siblings haven't got a chance in Hell of
living normal lives.
That sucks...
When I get to the Pearly
Gates and confront St. Peter I expect he will not find my name on the
invitation list. And based on the sins
of my families my judgment was a foregone conclusion long before I even died.
Still I am a writer and
storyteller by birthright, ancestry and intuitive expectation and I am an
occasional believer, when it suits my purpose, that we can create our own
reality so don't be surprised that at the moment of my birth I had the dreadful
realization that a very serious mistake had been made.
It was a dread that would
haunt me through my life. You see, I
just knew there was a serious mix up at God's baby processing facility in
Heaven and some absent-minded angel had sent me to the wrong family on earth.
Over time it was to become
obvious.
I was supposed to be born
a Rothschild in the legendary House of Rothschild in London Europe and the world.
My real family owned
nations, kings, diamonds, gold, banks and politicians. Though my palate back in Iowa
I did the best I could in
a world without soufflé.
Of course, there were
serious sacrifices. I expected armies
of servants, limos and trillions of dollars, but I had to settle for an
apartment in small town Iowa
So very reluctantly I was
forced to accept the cards I had been dealt in life and rest assured it was the
last time I ever trusted a card dealer.
However, I never let go of
the hope that one day when the baby factory in Heaven was audited they would
find and rectify the fatal mistake that made a potential Rothschild prodigy
into a cursed Campbell-Putnam ancestor.
I really don't like all
that "sins of the father" talk, it hits far too close to home.
Go back to the 1600's,
just after the age of my favorite Queen of England, Elizabeth, the Virgin
Queen. During her reign she did her best to prevent
her father's (Henry the VIII no less her mother having been beheaded by old
Henry) orders to persecute the Catholics by forcing them to renounce their
Catholic faith or drive them from Britain
It just so happens that
one of the most powerful Catholic clans in Scotland
was the Campbell
Of course it was the same
English rule that the non-Catholic Putnam family in London Elizabeth 's
death at the turn of the 17th century the rule was finally enforced and the Campbell clan was given a choice, denounce your Catholic
faith or go to Ireland
What a choice. Give up all ancestral religion, rights,
titles and property under Great Britain
or go to Ireland Ireland
Well my family had been
Irish more recently than we were English so we knew the deceitful Brits were
lying about Ireland
Needless to say my
ancestors held to their conviction and were thus banished from their homeland,
estates and titles. After a few
generations in Ireland the Campbell family then migrated to America
Once the Putnam's got the
Campbell and other Catholics out of England
they then migrated to America
as well, arriving sometime earlier than the Campbell
Specifically the Putnam's
arrived in New England and some chose to settle in a Puritan place called Salem , Massachusetts
Here it gets quite
complicated. Just take a look at the
court transcripts of that fateful and tragic trial in the 1690's.
You see, there was a
Puritan Putnam family who spent years creating a safe and isolated haven to
protect the "witches" from harm by the village church fanatics.
Then into the story comes
a young Putnam girl named Anne, but not from the Putnam family creating the safe haven, rather she was the
minister's daughter from town. She told
her preacher father she had been possessed by the witches and made to do things
against her will.
A bunch of other local
kids joined the chorus and all those witches being protected by one Putnam
family were arrested and tried for practicing Black Magic on those poor
innocent children of the villagers by the other Putnam family.
You probably heard the
rest. A couple of dozen witches were
burned or hanged to death, later the kids admitted they made up the story, and
thus began the curse of the Salem witches cast upon the immediate and all
future Putnam descendants until the blood line was wiped out.
It was as good a curse as
any ancient Egyptian curse (King Tut) or Medieval curse from the Spanish
Inquisition.
At any rate I would not
have thought much about the curse except one day I was reading about Amelia
Earnhardt, the world famous airplane pilot, and I realized that Amelia married
a certain George Putnam of the New England Putnam family when she was 33 years
old, and six years later she disappeared off the face of the earth.
Well, so goes the story of
my ancestry as passed down from generations of Celtic and thus Irish
storytellers. My Irish grandfather on
the Campbell
But I can tell you this. Where I was born, Iowa City, Iowa, was home to the University of Iowa Scottish Highlanders Marching band, one of the most famous bagpipe bands in the world. Why were they also found far from the magical land of the Loch Ness monster in the same town where I lived in Iowa?
Here are the Highlanders performing as I used to see them when I went to the stadium to watch them practice.
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