THANK YOU GOD FOR FREEING EVAN GERSHKOVICH and:

PAUL WHELAN, a former U.S. MARINE, and the Russian dissident Ilya Yashin!!

Dear God,

(Or whatever UNIVERSAL ENERGY FIELD we as PEOPLE EVERYWHERE can agree to respect and accept.

Please let us, as these UNITED (STATES) people

and PEOPLE all over the GLOBE Unite today in saying a prayer of THANK YOU GOD THANK YOU GOD for the multi-country prisoner exchange with the WEST that according to Turkish officials has resulted FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY in

FREEDOM FOR

EVAN GERSHKOVICH, a Wall Street Journal reporter,

PAUL WHELAN, a former U.S. MARINE,

and the Russian dissident Ilya Yashin

among others.

Thank you God for ending their unspeakable suffering in the

HELL holes THAT ARE RUSSIAN JAIL CELLS

which my mind, even as I am constantly prone to spinning endless endless fictions recoils from imagining.

As Evan, Paul and Ilya are FINALLY FINALLY free today, let us —

PEOPLE WHO ARE FREE EVERYDAY,

let us STAND UNITED AS AMERICANS WHO

sometimes can’t begin to understand the suffering of those others who are not free, those others who are jailed, those others who are homeless, those others who are starving, those others who have no clean food or water. Or those who are sick or suffering in any way physical, mental or emotional.

Please carry the hearts — of EVAN Gershkovich ❤️🙏💜❤️— PAUL Whelan ❤️🙏💜❤️🙏 — Ilya Yashin ❤️🙏💜❤️

and the 💕 ❤️🙏💜❤️ of those mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and all who love them and who have also suffered so terribly.

Please let us carry them in our hearts, 💕 ❤️🙏💜❤️

Please give them whatever strength they need as they start down the long and sometimes frightening, the complex road of healing.❤️💜🙏💕🤩

💓 Thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God

THANK YOU UNIVERSE for

making it possible that RUSSIAN torturers would release these innocent souls

would let these people GO FREE because so many many others — most notably

Alexei Navalny may he rest in Peace —

so many many innocent people have been tortured and murdered by the likes of the PUTRID Putin machine.

Vladimir Putin, who, of course is considered

A GOOD PAL by NONE OTHER THAN

dare I use his real name no, I’ll call him what he is:

THE DUMP, drooling racism and mysogyny and other polluted filth,

like a foul, chemically-smelly landfill, like those many many landfills that I traipsed around for months and months in Chicago and environs as a “cub” reporter working for the Chicago Sun-Times on a series of stories that was promoted heavily by the newspaper, and was, nominated by said newspaper for a Pulitzer. And helped me become a staff writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal.

I didn’t know Evan Gershkovich, of course, as he is a young man in his thirties. I worked at The Wall Street Journal when I too was in my thirties, but that way back from 1982 to 1984. What does time really matter though, when it comes to our memories? Often memories, including the oldest ones, can feel so very real. I remember exactly what it felt like to wear my navy blue Brooks Brothers suit (jacket and skirt with a little pink bow tie!) as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. They made us work on backwards technology, i.e. old-fashioned typewriters, when I had been used to writing effortlessly on a desk top computer back in Chicago. It was frustrating, to say the least, and I threw out many many many hundreds no thousands of pieces of paper. All of them balled up in the waste basket beside my desk that was emptied every evening.

I remember too walking the narrow streets of lower Manhattan looking for a good tuna sandwich at lunchtime! And sometimes sitting at the top floor of WSJ headquarters, with countless other new reporters and WSJ editors and publishers because I think they were grooming us to be even better WSJ reporters. Enuf of that.

Unlike Evan Gershkovich, I wasn’t a foreign correspondent and never would have been. But had circumstances in life been different, had I been him, in a different body and mind and experience, well, then, perhaps that’s why I wrote Evan Gershkovich a letter in jail. I wasn’t sure exactly what to say to him. Basically, I told him, don’t lose hope! Because I learned that lesson so well in 2002 and 2003 when I had (and was cured of) cancer.

I wrote to Evan, like millions of others wrote, because his family and his friends and his supporters and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS never ever gave up asking everybody to write, to pressure legislators, and to

PRAY.

Most importantly those fighting on his behalf including our amazing PRESIDENT JOSEPH RABINETTE Jr and his administration

never gave up trying to pressure the goddamn Russian bastards

into

LETTING MY PEOPLE GO!