A Birmingham lawyer, whom I got to know when my first wife and I lived across the street from him and his wife in upscale white Mountain Brook aka The Tiny Kingdom suburb over the mountain from Birmingham, Alabama, replied to yesterday’s post Alabama trust fund baby’s been rich and homeless and rich still ornery enough to make waves and sometimes enjoy it.
Did you draw your Don Quixote cartoon on your post?
The phrase “tilting at windmills” comes from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. It refers to attacking imaginary enemies or fighting unwinnable battles. In the story, Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants and attempts to joust with them, believing he is engaging in a noble quest12.
It looks like you on top of the dragon😉
If so, I will share one of mine- I had a mild aspiration to become a political cartoonist as late as law school (where I hid solely to stay out of Vietnam).
Errata' , if you are interested I will share the daily betting odds posted by my sports broker "JJ" on his betting site for the Presidential race, which were down to "dead even" as of yesterday, and I hope will tilt toward Harris when she makes her VP selection.
I replied:
When I read your Don Quixote cartoon question, I was on my iPhone and did not see anything but your question, did I draw it? I don’t know if my answer reached you, it was drawn by a cartoonist working for the Key West Citizen. It was featured on the Citizen’s editorial page a few days after a candidate forum for which I was one of the county commission candidates, the only Independent. The steed is an iguana, the three windmills and “The Gang of Three” were the target of my answer to a question put to all candidates. The question was, “What do you think are the three greatest threats to the Florida Keys?” I was the last candidate to answer.Three county commissioners had become known as “The Gang of Three,” because they got in bed with a marina on the ropes and had the county buy it and it turned out very badly, and they were in bed with real estate developers in other ways,” Two were up for reelection that year and were on either side of me. So, when I was had handed the mic by my good friend Todd German, who hosted such forums for Hometown! PAC, a non-profit, I said to the question, “The Gang of Three”, and handed Todd the mic. He handed it back and asked me to say it louder, because he didn’t think everyone in the audience heard me. So, I said it louder. The oxygen left the assembly.Todd was on the Citizen’s Editoral Board and he told me a couple of days later that somehting was coming. The cartoon, it turned out.I lived in his home several months when I was homeless, stretched over two different times, but it was a work assignment, and I needed to live on the street to be able to engage it in the way only living on the street would allow, and I was writing about it every day at this same blog after the goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningflforidakeys.com blogs died and went to internet heaven in early 2017, which is a much, much longer story.Around 2002, I met a fellow onine who started calling me Don Quixote, and so I started calling him Sancho Panza. He lived in New York City. We must have exchanged a thousand emails over the years, until he voted for Donald Trump in 2016, because he was fed with the Democrats and he hoped Trump would really screw up things in D.C., which pretty much happened there and elsewhere.Thank you for putting me jn your betting pool. I might chime in time to time.Sloan
BL replied:
Some of the "common threads" in that group are an Indian Springs connection, a mostly "progressive" bias, and/or interests in gambling/investing and college football (with only a smattering of doctors and lawyers). Among the latter you of course know B, A (he served on the ISS board), T and C, and D is a former Springs classmate who is a semi-retired lawyer and a "smart cookie" (he taught himself conversational German). A is interesting; a classmate of ours from Springville, Alabama who still teaches math at a college in California, and is virtually a second citizen of Romania-spends up to a month there annually and is plugged into the government there as well as their EXPat communities in the US and Canada. And my wife of course knows them all, since we were dating for 3 of my 4 years at ISS.So it's something of a melting pot, but probably nothing to touch Key West.
Indian Springs School is a private boarding school in Shelby County south of Jefferson County, in which Birmingham lies. I attended public schools in Birmingham, where I did poorly. I then attended two years at The McCallie School in Chattanooga, where my father attended high school. McCallie got me into Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
I was an Alabama Crimson Tide fan, and Vanderbilt’s football team went 0-10 my senior year. I never considered applying to Vanderbilt law school, and entered the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, September 1965. After graduating, I clerked a year and a half for United States District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham, who presided over every federal criminal prosecution in north Alabama
I replied to BL:
Key West indeed is a melting pot, an international city, lots of foreign people with visas, 20+% of the city is LBGTQ. In partisan elections, Democrat candidates got more votes, and Republican candidates got more votes up the Keys.
I ran 6 times for mayor of KW, 3 times for county commission, and one time for school board, and thankfully never came close to winning. I imagine I spoke a couple of thousand times during city and county commission, school board and other public meetings. Always against the grain, out of the box.
I detested politics. Still do. I never had a campaign manager or team. I did no advertising except for my free blogs and speaking at public meetings and candidate forums and media interviews.
One Key West Citizen article said I had a slightly unsettling way of speaking uncomfortable truths.
If I had my way, it would be illegal for anyone to run for public office. Candidates would be drafted via write in process.
I blame Judge Allgood for me getting into politics.
In mid-December, I rode Greyhound from Los Angeles to Key West. As the bus entered Tallahassee, I fell asleep. In a dream, Judge Allgood told me he was thinking about getting into politics, and I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, but knowing him, he would do it. I woke up in shock.
I arrived in Key West the next day with $75 to my name, and spent the first night on the sidewalk beside the Pegasus Hotel on Duval Street. I knew no one in Key West. I learned the first day of a soup kitchen at a nearby Catholic Church and a food pantry at another church. A Birkenstock store on Duval Street, from which I once bought two pairs of shoes at different times, gave me a pair of used sandals to replace the shoes a friend bought for me at a thrift store in Los Angeles, which were too small and hurt my feet to walk in them very far.
After about a week, I found the public library, which had several online computers anyone could use for one hour. I started writing one page articles every morning except Sunday, which simply came to me as fast as I typed them. I printed a copy and made 9 more copies on the copying machine, 10 cents a copy, and dropped them off at different places, including the mayor’s office. Each article began with “The pen is mightier than the sword, thus the sword defends the pen.” The articles were anonymous.
A person I met gave me a used bicycle and I was able to get around better.
A church pastor let me sleep nights in an out building meeting room until the church fired her. Several years later that church’s main building was flattened by Hurricane Wilma.
Meanwhile, I slept nights in what homeless people called “hidey holes”, and on piers and beaches, and in business doorways, which the police then allowed, but after 9/11 sleeping nights outside in Old Town was not allowed.
You perhaps can imagine living in the “sewer” changed my perspective of society and its religion whose savior was homeless, but good luck getting that acknowledged.
Back to the future.
Since I’m a trust fund baby, I have a different perspective of Donald Trump. What I see is a rich pampered spoiled white brat, who never grew out of it. He and his daddy were white supremacists. In 2016, he was infiltrated and enhanced by a demon, maybe the same demon that infiltrated and enhanced Adolph Hitler, which is reported in The Spear of Destiny, by Trevor Ravenscroft. As happened in Germany, the demon infiltrated anyone who supported Trump.
Very abbreviated synopsis of a man who openly has admired Hitler, and Putin, and the men leading Red China, North Korea and Hungary.
But it goes back to and is rooted in Trump being a rich white pampered spoiled brat, who never grew out of it.The same or a different demon infiltrated Joe Biden and his supporters, but that is not as far progressed as with Trump and his supporters, and Biden is leaving the White House. Hopefully Harris will beat Trump. Hopefully, Biden and Harris will not via Israel start World War III. Ditto, if Trump is elected in November.
BL to me:
Thanks for the bio. Quite a tilt from our early fishing days to Islamorada (and Lower Matacumbie Key and the Golden Flake house with the only freshwater pool in the Keys).
Me to BL:
There were a few other freshwater pools in the Keys, but yes, quite a tilt.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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