Welcome to Tonya Harding Shot JFK.com. I am your host 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 private eye and soldier of fortune. He keeps showing up in unexpected places.
About 1987 I was visiting my mother's house in Buena Park, California. She was dismantling a still life picture while we were sitting at the dining room table. She wanted to dump the art but keep the frame. As she removed the cardboard and turned it over, we discovered that the board was 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 trying to kick the French out of Syria. Yes, kind of like helping al-Qaeda.
I got the poster reframed and it now hangs in my Vacaville, California home.
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, I would have been someone different than me.) I prefer to think of Bogart as my spiritual father.
Am I following in the footsteps of Bogie, even taking the path of gun-runner Harry Smith? Perhaps. Some articles on this site may give ammunition to al-Qaeda. Like Smith, I may one day have to choose between "sex and the city" and "doing the right thing." Some viewers of Sirocco may think Smith made the wrong choice. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. After all, you came here to learn about Tonya Harding.
Tonya Harding Shot JFK.com is a journal of news, opinion and religious expression. Established in April 2001. Watch for new and revised articles. Latest update: August 19, 2008. E-mail.
