Following in the footsteps of Bogie
Welcome to Tonya Harding Shot JFK. I am your editor and spiritual detective, Robert Urbanek. Through dreams, symbols and synchronicity, I reveal the secrets of the cosmos and the destiny of myself and humanity.
I don't carry a Holy Book in my trench coat. I'm packing heat and brass knuckles. The God I'm looking for runs a sleazy casino (Earth) in a bad part of town (The Milky Way). The wheels are rigged and the decks are cold. Einstein said God does not play dice with the universe. Yes, He does and the dice are loaded. God leaves little to chance. You may call it Intelligent Design. I call it Cheating.
I don't have faith; I have reasonable suspicion. I picked up that attitude from my mentor, a certain hardboiled gumshoe and soldier of fortune. He keeps showing up in unexpected places.
About 1987 I was visiting my mother's house in Buena Park, California. As we sat at the dining room table, she began dismantling a still life picture. She wanted to dump the art but keep the frame. As she removed the cardboard backing and turned it over, we discovered a 14 by 17 inch poster for a 1951 Humphrey Bogart movie, Sirocco. The poster proclaims "Bogart's Socko in Sirocco" and shows Bogart in a trench coat, Lee J. Cobb in a tussle with Marta Toren, and a belly dancer with two fez-wearing musicians. In the film, Bogie, as Harry Smith, is selling weapons to terrorists who are fighting the French occupiers in Syria. Yes, kind of like helping al-Qaeda.
I got the poster reframed and it now hangs in my home.
Spiritual father Back in the 1940s, my mother was a real “looker.” She worked at Ontra Cafeteria in Hollywood. People suggested she become a model. She once had a date with actor Howard Duff. About three months before she died, she told me her friends had offered to set her up on a date with Bogart but she turned them down because "he had too many girlfriends." My jaw dropped. If things had worked out, my dad could have been Bogie, not the loser she married. Of course, that would have been a different "me." I now think of Bogart as my spiritual father, a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi who occasionally visits the Dark Side.
One Bogart movie, The Maltese Falcon, led me to a parallel universe. I have also followed in Harry Smith's footsteps by writing articles on this site which give theological ammunition to Hamas and jihadists. Why would I do something like that? God told me to. Or, if you want a more nuanced explanation, I was moved by the Holy Spirit. Not that I had any real choice. The Game of Life is rigged. God is the House and, in the long run, the House always wins.
My future may not be written on the wall but it is hanging on the wall, in the pictures in my house.
Truth is a dark goddess dancing in the shadows. She wears a thousand veils and whispers in metaphors. I am the Light that reveals her secrets.
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