Jeffrey Rasley's Blog, page 3
July 18, 2020
John Lewis
"Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice." RIP John Lewis
July 16, 2020
Book Review of Monsters of the Midway 1969: Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, and Football
https://www.ddsreviews.in/2020/07/spo...
Excerpt from the book:
At the end of the afternoon practice on the third day of doubles, Jack’s flat-topped ex-US Marines high-school coach lined up all the players. With spittle flying from his lips the coach stomped along the line of players growling and yelling. He punched each of the players in the stomach and shouted, “Tough as nails!” That did it for Jack. That was the moment he decided the cost wasn’t worth the benefit. It wasn’t the punch. It was the insufferable behavior of his coach. He decided he wasn’t going to put up with that kind of Fascist shit anymore. After the last practice of the preseason he quit.
Excerpt from the book:
At the end of the afternoon practice on the third day of doubles, Jack’s flat-topped ex-US Marines high-school coach lined up all the players. With spittle flying from his lips the coach stomped along the line of players growling and yelling. He punched each of the players in the stomach and shouted, “Tough as nails!” That did it for Jack. That was the moment he decided the cost wasn’t worth the benefit. It wasn’t the punch. It was the insufferable behavior of his coach. He decided he wasn’t going to put up with that kind of Fascist shit anymore. After the last practice of the preseason he quit.
June 28, 2020
Worth reading?
Does this plot interest you?
Anarchist, Republican... Assassin, a political novel, is inspired by the protests and unrest that spread across the US following the killing of George Floyd. The protagonist, Mr. Blair, is in federal custody explaining to his ACLU attorney why he committed the crime which has landed him in prison. His attorney learns that Mr. Blair is a 70 year-old retired, businessman, and Republican, who was an anarchist revolutionary for five years during his late teens and early twenties. The crime Mr. Blair is charged with committing is not revealed until near the end of the book. So that his attorney will fully understand why he committed the crime, Mr. Blair tells her his life story.
Mr. Blair was radicalized by the demonstration, which turned into a riot, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. He joined an organization dedicated to revolutionary anarchism. The organization’s primary strategy was to turn peaceful demonstrations against the Viet Nam War and for civil rights into violent clashes with cops. Blair was a true believer in the cause and was trained by the organization to engage in combat with police and bait demonstrators into fighting police, vandalizing property, and looting.
Blair began to lose faith in the organization when he was assigned to instigate racist protesters to attack innocent by-standers during the Boston schools desegregation protests in 1974. He left the organization under threat of retribution against his parents, if he ever ratted out members of the organization. Blair complied by never revealing to anyone, including his wife and two children, his involvement with the organization.
He went to college, graduated with a degree in business, joined the company owned by his fraternity brother’s father, and married the boss’s daughter. Blair rose quickly within the business, joined prestigious local clubs in Indianapolis, and established himself as a stalwart member of the social elite of the city. After thirty-five years of loving and companionable marriage, Blair’s wife died of cancer at age fifty-seven.
Blair descended into a deep depression after his wife’s death, but he climbed out of it and felt rejuvenated by joining Jeb Bush’s campaign for President in 2016. He was furious when the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump, because Blair thinks Trump is unfit to be President. Trump’s narcissistic and offensive behavior in office confirms Blair’s opinion of the 45th President. Blair is plagued by cycles of rage and depression as he witnesses Trump’s daily lies and childishness on television.
Blair is alone in his mansion during the corona virus lock-down. Trump’s daily television briefings infuriate Blair. He blames Trump for incompetently handling the pandemic. When the demonstrations and riots began after the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd, Blair experiences PTSD symptoms. Seeing images on television just like the riots he participated in from 1968 through 1974 drives him over the brink into madness. In a psychotic state Blair attempts, but fails, to assassinate President Trump. He is arrested and charged with attempting to murder the President.
The government engages in an elaborate conspiracy to cover up the attempted assassination. Media coverage of a prominent Republican driven mad by the President’s deplorable behavior is considered a threat to Trump’s reelection. What happens to Blair in prison is the denouement to his personal journey and the conspiracy to cover up the embarrassing attempted assassination.
Anarchist, Republican... Assassin, a political novel, is inspired by the protests and unrest that spread across the US following the killing of George Floyd. The protagonist, Mr. Blair, is in federal custody explaining to his ACLU attorney why he committed the crime which has landed him in prison. His attorney learns that Mr. Blair is a 70 year-old retired, businessman, and Republican, who was an anarchist revolutionary for five years during his late teens and early twenties. The crime Mr. Blair is charged with committing is not revealed until near the end of the book. So that his attorney will fully understand why he committed the crime, Mr. Blair tells her his life story.
Mr. Blair was radicalized by the demonstration, which turned into a riot, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. He joined an organization dedicated to revolutionary anarchism. The organization’s primary strategy was to turn peaceful demonstrations against the Viet Nam War and for civil rights into violent clashes with cops. Blair was a true believer in the cause and was trained by the organization to engage in combat with police and bait demonstrators into fighting police, vandalizing property, and looting.
Blair began to lose faith in the organization when he was assigned to instigate racist protesters to attack innocent by-standers during the Boston schools desegregation protests in 1974. He left the organization under threat of retribution against his parents, if he ever ratted out members of the organization. Blair complied by never revealing to anyone, including his wife and two children, his involvement with the organization.
He went to college, graduated with a degree in business, joined the company owned by his fraternity brother’s father, and married the boss’s daughter. Blair rose quickly within the business, joined prestigious local clubs in Indianapolis, and established himself as a stalwart member of the social elite of the city. After thirty-five years of loving and companionable marriage, Blair’s wife died of cancer at age fifty-seven.
Blair descended into a deep depression after his wife’s death, but he climbed out of it and felt rejuvenated by joining Jeb Bush’s campaign for President in 2016. He was furious when the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump, because Blair thinks Trump is unfit to be President. Trump’s narcissistic and offensive behavior in office confirms Blair’s opinion of the 45th President. Blair is plagued by cycles of rage and depression as he witnesses Trump’s daily lies and childishness on television.
Blair is alone in his mansion during the corona virus lock-down. Trump’s daily television briefings infuriate Blair. He blames Trump for incompetently handling the pandemic. When the demonstrations and riots began after the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd, Blair experiences PTSD symptoms. Seeing images on television just like the riots he participated in from 1968 through 1974 drives him over the brink into madness. In a psychotic state Blair attempts, but fails, to assassinate President Trump. He is arrested and charged with attempting to murder the President.
The government engages in an elaborate conspiracy to cover up the attempted assassination. Media coverage of a prominent Republican driven mad by the President’s deplorable behavior is considered a threat to Trump’s reelection. What happens to Blair in prison is the denouement to his personal journey and the conspiracy to cover up the embarrassing attempted assassination.
June 14, 2020
NPR-WFYI Guest Appearance
I discussed You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found with Matt Pelsor, host of the show All IN, and related the story of Basa Village, Nepal.
https://www.wfyi.org/programs/all-in/...
https://www.wfyi.org/programs/all-in/...
June 9, 2020
Podcast about travel, memoir, and fiction writing
This is a podcast with Jackie Schwabe on PressPlay Lifestyle Inspired Podcast that starts off about the love of travel, but shifts to a discussion about writing coaching, how to focus and inspire the creative writing process, the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, and the "writing life".
https://anchor.fm/pressplayinspired/e...
https://anchor.fm/pressplayinspired/e...
April 14, 2020
Review of Hero's Journey by Rita Kohn, Nuvo
I met Jeff Rasley, who respectfully backed away to the steps. He left a bag with four books. I said, “I’ll read soonest, or then again I might stay up half the night compelled to read.” We laughed.
It was four a.m. when I limped to bed, wrung out from front to back cover of the compelled-to-read “Hero’s Journey: John Ritter, the Chip Hilton of Goshen, Indiana.” The title brought several strands of my memory into play. What was this about the long forgotten Chip Hilton, the hero of the benignly imperative’ ‘50s, ’60s, 70’s Boys Sports Series written by Clair Bee, the winning Long Island University basketball coach, and game play innovator? What possibly could be the connection with the incoming 1969 freshman IU Basketball trinity of Indiana High School All-Stars: John Ritter, George McGinnis, Steve Downing, somehow doomed by The Fates in a tumultuous turnover of coaches leading to the Bob Knight era?
The pages turned. Rasley tags this story “A Memoir.” In the wee hours of Easter Monday 2020, I was in his parable of small-town hero-worship, a mortal hoisted atop a pedestal wrought by tight-fisted hands. Rasley’s prose is infused with the deftness of his law training and the seeing-eye of a mystic. This is his memory, looking back on the unfolding ingratitude of citizens within the confines of Goshen, Indiana —the city proper with its delineated socio-economic strata of neighborhoods and its suspect outskirts, when—in the waning 20th Century— their hero stepped off their mandated pedestal and asked for human-inspired help.Rasley builds his case so readers become the jury, compelled to search within and admit, as he does, ‘I am complicit in the denial of helping when asked. I am stiff-necked in my personal and community righteous meting out of hero worship without committing to give as much as I/we took.’
Shouldering the community-conferred-upon hero-status, sports hero John Ritter walked aloof from what we determine as a normal growing up curve. Gift-endowed in athletics and scholarship, he had the adult-fixated attributes of the fictional Chip Hilton, but with an essential missing component—camaraderie with a “gang.” Coach/author Clair Bee endowed his fictional perfect protagonist with the very human quality of empathy. Chip, amazingly, had no chip on his shoulder. He got along, went along, acting out the role of absent father. Chip always found a way to win the game, bring glory and pride to his hometown. The very human John Ritter did not/could not pull that off. He won, yet he disappointed. He made adult choices in a teen-age body; it just didn’t square with being a kid. Reading into the dawn, it seemed as though John Ritter made people cheer but not smile. My heart ached for him.
The child Jeff Rasley grew up in Goshen, Indiana, in the era of the real-life John Ritter luster, abetted by worshipful reading of book after book of the fictional Chip Hilton’s heroics on and off the court or field, depending on the topic of the story. One fed upon the other in Rasley’s push to teen-hood. “Hero’s Journey” really is Rasley’s latent coming-of-age memoir. Interestingly, in his looking back, the fictional Chip is described with more dimensionality than is the real-life John. It is late in the narrative that the very human life of John Ritter unfolds within Rasley’s Homeric complexity of what truly marks ascendancy to epic hero status, and why it is ‘we the people’ who stumble through life with feet of clay, our smallish smugness withholding a helping hand because we feel betrayed.
Rasley takes us through Ritter’s post-IU basketball era, with its immediate disappointments of not getting a professional basketball bid, and ensuing decades of misfortune tied to downright bad choices, leading to a fall from hometown grace. Then Rasley turns the woeful tide to confront us with John Ritter as a rightful hero, pulling himself up from depths of doom, with no help from those who doled out ‘worship’ while withholding caring embrace. Rasley unfolds a community of people who, in looking up, failed to look within a multi-gifted child/teen/young adult to learn his human needs, to welcome him into a hug, to ask, ‘hey, kid, are you o.k.’
“As Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other scholars and sages have shown, the Hero fulfills a psychic need for individuals and a cultural need of communities,” summarizes Rasley. “Heroes are needed to push us and pull us toward our better selves and stronger communities—we need our heroes to serve as guides who point us in the right way.”
Odysseys/Ulysses found his way home, cites Rasley, as a hero who had undergone fall and ultimately rise, by dint of his strength of character. “John Ritter has made a hero’s journey,” concludes Rasley, to gain a different kind of success after decades of wanderings and tests to his inherent character, not unlike what Odysseys/Ulysses went through. “I hope the community leaders of Goshen will act with wisdom, courage, and compassion and recognize that John Ritter still has value to offer us as a local hero. And, I hope John will accept the honors that are due him. John Ritter has made a hero’s journey.”
Skimming through the other books in the bag, it’s clear they feed into Rasley’s own quest of personhood through his own journeys across continents, most fortunately afforded the embrace of people who cared to ask ‘are you o.k.’ and offer a helping hand. In due time, I’ll report on them.
It was four a.m. when I limped to bed, wrung out from front to back cover of the compelled-to-read “Hero’s Journey: John Ritter, the Chip Hilton of Goshen, Indiana.” The title brought several strands of my memory into play. What was this about the long forgotten Chip Hilton, the hero of the benignly imperative’ ‘50s, ’60s, 70’s Boys Sports Series written by Clair Bee, the winning Long Island University basketball coach, and game play innovator? What possibly could be the connection with the incoming 1969 freshman IU Basketball trinity of Indiana High School All-Stars: John Ritter, George McGinnis, Steve Downing, somehow doomed by The Fates in a tumultuous turnover of coaches leading to the Bob Knight era?
The pages turned. Rasley tags this story “A Memoir.” In the wee hours of Easter Monday 2020, I was in his parable of small-town hero-worship, a mortal hoisted atop a pedestal wrought by tight-fisted hands. Rasley’s prose is infused with the deftness of his law training and the seeing-eye of a mystic. This is his memory, looking back on the unfolding ingratitude of citizens within the confines of Goshen, Indiana —the city proper with its delineated socio-economic strata of neighborhoods and its suspect outskirts, when—in the waning 20th Century— their hero stepped off their mandated pedestal and asked for human-inspired help.Rasley builds his case so readers become the jury, compelled to search within and admit, as he does, ‘I am complicit in the denial of helping when asked. I am stiff-necked in my personal and community righteous meting out of hero worship without committing to give as much as I/we took.’
Shouldering the community-conferred-upon hero-status, sports hero John Ritter walked aloof from what we determine as a normal growing up curve. Gift-endowed in athletics and scholarship, he had the adult-fixated attributes of the fictional Chip Hilton, but with an essential missing component—camaraderie with a “gang.” Coach/author Clair Bee endowed his fictional perfect protagonist with the very human quality of empathy. Chip, amazingly, had no chip on his shoulder. He got along, went along, acting out the role of absent father. Chip always found a way to win the game, bring glory and pride to his hometown. The very human John Ritter did not/could not pull that off. He won, yet he disappointed. He made adult choices in a teen-age body; it just didn’t square with being a kid. Reading into the dawn, it seemed as though John Ritter made people cheer but not smile. My heart ached for him.
The child Jeff Rasley grew up in Goshen, Indiana, in the era of the real-life John Ritter luster, abetted by worshipful reading of book after book of the fictional Chip Hilton’s heroics on and off the court or field, depending on the topic of the story. One fed upon the other in Rasley’s push to teen-hood. “Hero’s Journey” really is Rasley’s latent coming-of-age memoir. Interestingly, in his looking back, the fictional Chip is described with more dimensionality than is the real-life John. It is late in the narrative that the very human life of John Ritter unfolds within Rasley’s Homeric complexity of what truly marks ascendancy to epic hero status, and why it is ‘we the people’ who stumble through life with feet of clay, our smallish smugness withholding a helping hand because we feel betrayed.
Rasley takes us through Ritter’s post-IU basketball era, with its immediate disappointments of not getting a professional basketball bid, and ensuing decades of misfortune tied to downright bad choices, leading to a fall from hometown grace. Then Rasley turns the woeful tide to confront us with John Ritter as a rightful hero, pulling himself up from depths of doom, with no help from those who doled out ‘worship’ while withholding caring embrace. Rasley unfolds a community of people who, in looking up, failed to look within a multi-gifted child/teen/young adult to learn his human needs, to welcome him into a hug, to ask, ‘hey, kid, are you o.k.’
“As Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other scholars and sages have shown, the Hero fulfills a psychic need for individuals and a cultural need of communities,” summarizes Rasley. “Heroes are needed to push us and pull us toward our better selves and stronger communities—we need our heroes to serve as guides who point us in the right way.”
Odysseys/Ulysses found his way home, cites Rasley, as a hero who had undergone fall and ultimately rise, by dint of his strength of character. “John Ritter has made a hero’s journey,” concludes Rasley, to gain a different kind of success after decades of wanderings and tests to his inherent character, not unlike what Odysseys/Ulysses went through. “I hope the community leaders of Goshen will act with wisdom, courage, and compassion and recognize that John Ritter still has value to offer us as a local hero. And, I hope John will accept the honors that are due him. John Ritter has made a hero’s journey.”
Skimming through the other books in the bag, it’s clear they feed into Rasley’s own quest of personhood through his own journeys across continents, most fortunately afforded the embrace of people who cared to ask ‘are you o.k.’ and offer a helping hand. In due time, I’ll report on them.
October 15, 2019
Finished!
Midsummer Books just published You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found: A Memoir of Suffering, Grit, and Love of the Himalayas and Basa Village.
And I'm glad it's done. 555 pages and many pictures taken in the Nepal Himalayas beginning with my first Himalayan expedition in 1995.
It's about changing direction in life after finding new meaning in middle age working with the remote village of Basa in the Nepal Himalayas. It's also an adventure travelogue through the Himalayan region of Southeast Asia. There are many photos of the Himalayas, mountain climbing, local people and indigenous cultures.
There are more pictures in the e-book, and they are all color photos. The cost of printing so many color photos in a paperback was too great, so there are fewer photos and they are b/w.
And I'm glad it's done. 555 pages and many pictures taken in the Nepal Himalayas beginning with my first Himalayan expedition in 1995.
It's about changing direction in life after finding new meaning in middle age working with the remote village of Basa in the Nepal Himalayas. It's also an adventure travelogue through the Himalayan region of Southeast Asia. There are many photos of the Himalayas, mountain climbing, local people and indigenous cultures.
There are more pictures in the e-book, and they are all color photos. The cost of printing so many color photos in a paperback was too great, so there are fewer photos and they are b/w.
May 2, 2019
"You have to get lost before you can be found," Farewell to the Himalayas
I'm making slow but steady progress on my "last book" about the Himalayas. These are a few of the topics: "i) What does it feel like to get altitude sickness, and how can it be avoided on a Himalayan trek? j) Are Sherpas the best mountain climbers in the world; if so, why? k) What is a sadhu, why do yaks only live in the high Himalayas, and do yetis really roam the Himalayan Mountains? l) How in the hell can Nepalese porters carry such incredibly heavy loads in wicker baskets strapped to their heads, and what do they think about while they’re carrying those loads?"
