The Golden Flake Clown's Tale

Preface - The Sound of Silence

    This morning, April 26, 2023, a childhood friend told me to check out an article in today's Al.com, which used to be the Birmingham News.

Utz closing Birmingham Golden Flake factory: Beloved potato chips not going away 

Updated: Apr. 26, 2023, 10:13 a.m.|    * Published: Apr. 26, 2023, 8:23 a.m. 

By William Thornton | wthornton@al.com

Utz Brands has announced it is closing the company’s Golden Flake Birmingham manufacturing facility in July.

The decision means about 175 employees will be laid off from the 275 member workforce. About 100 will remain in distribution operations.

The company made the disclosure during an SEC filing on April 24. Pre-tax cash charges of approximately $3 million to $5 million are expected to be incurred because of the closure. 

In a statement, Utz Foods Vice President Kevin Brick said Utz “made the difficult decision to permanently close our manufacturing operations” in Birmingham.

“Notably, the Golden Flake brand remains an important part of Utz’s portfolio, and our product offerings and partnerships under this banner are not changing,” Brick said. 

We will continue to have a presence in Birmingham and will stay an active part of the community.”

Utz Quality Foods, based in Hannover, Penn., purchased Golden Enterprises, Golden Flake’s parent company, in 2016 for $141 million.

Golden Flake was founded in 1923 in the basement of a Hill’s Grocery store in north Birmingham.

In addition to flavored chips such as Sweet Heat, cheese puffs, cheese curls, tortilla chips and snack crackers are made at the historic Golden Flake factory in Birmingham. 

 

    After reading the article, I called my childhood friend and said, "Thank God Utz bought Golden Flake!"

    When I heard from another friend today about the article, I said, "The article says nothing about my father, who built Golden Flake up from almost nothing."

    When I told another friend about it, who is tuned in, I said, "Utz made its decision about the time I finished writing The Golden Flake Clown's Tale."

    The closing of the Golden Flake production facility in Birmingham was the sound of silence, as far as my father's family is concerned. As if, we never existed. But, we did exist, and I have told some of it in this book, which otherwise would be the sound of silence in its truest sense.

    Apologies to great writers, orderly writing, neat and tidy, my English teachers, law school professors, book editors, friends, family and critics. This here tale came to me in the ways it came to me, like a patchwork quilt being stitched together, a composite of many tales in a much larger tale the Golden Flake Clown actually lived. The Muse has her own ways the mind will never fathom. 

Some Little Known Golden Flake Heir History

 (not for the faint of heart)

    

    On my Great Grandfather Leopold Bashinsky's gravestone in Troy, Alabama:

"God's noblest creation is an honest man."

    The Ides of March, 2023

    My and two good friends' recent dreams, and goings on in my so-called waking life, cause me to think The Editorial Board, kinda rhymes with God, are nudging me to write about my father’s company and his family, perhaps to help me shed some bothersome weight and set straight some impressions. Quite a few times in the past, people said I reminded them of the Golden Flake clown. I sometimes wonder if my father ever regretted talking the future family black sheep and skeleton keeper into taking a typing course my first year in high school? 

    I think I’m the oldest living member of my mother’s bloodline, which wends its way up to Nashville, Tennessee and Cadiz and Hopkinsville Kentucky. 

    I know am the oldest living Bashinsky in my father’s bloodline, which wends down to Troy, Alabama and then back to Poland, or maybe Prussia-if you don’t count my older Anglo-African half-brother, Travis, of whom I learned in a dream in mid-1998. 

    My two best men friends then dreamed of Travis. 

    One friend was a New Ager in the process of being captured and harnessed by the same angels known in the Bible, who had captured and started harnessing me eleven years before. The other friend was a valued management employee of my father’s company, Golden Flake Snack Foods, which competed head-on with Frito-Lay in the southeastern states of America. He also was being harassed by the same angels.

    What my friends reported being told in dreams was, my father’s parents had black servants, who lived in servants quarters. The servants had a teenage daughter my father’s age. My father and the daughter fell in love and she got pregnant.

    My father’s father made a deal with the girl’s parents to financially support her and her child after it was born, if she would leave Alabama before the birth and never return. She accepted the deal and left Alabama carrying the child in her womb. My father deeply loved them both, and his heart was seriously broken.

    Later, it fell upon my father to keep up his father’s side of the deal. My father used people he knew in his business dealings to do it, with money he provided.

    It was not disclosed to my friends, nor to me, if my mother knew about any of that.

    Although I trusted my and my friends’ dreams, I felt the need to seek worldly proof. So, I paid my father’s older brother, Leo, a visit. 

    We did a little catching up, and then he asked why I had come to see him? 

    Leo was very direct. 

    I asked him if I had an older brother I didn’t know about?

    Leo was looking away and his head snapped around so that he looked me straight in the eye

    He said, “I don’t want anything to do with that!” 

    We talked a little while longer, and then he said, “Your father is very devious.” 

    I thanked Leo, and left.

    I sat on that for the rest of 1998 and through most of 1999. Around Christmas, I was seized to write my father a letter, in which I explained how I had learned that I might have an older half brother named Travis. I said, if Travis existed, then I would like to meet him. And if I didn’t hear back from him, I would assume Travis existed. I did not say Travis was mixed race, nor anything about his mother or her parents, nor of any deal.

    I didn’t hear back from my father, and an annual Christmas gift of corporate stock he gave to all of his children did not arrive. 

    Now, I wrote the letter, instead of speaking directly with my father, because we were not seeing each other for some time, but sometimes we wrote amicable letters to each other. I felt that was because his second wife, Joann, didn’t want me around.

    She had caused the family a lot of trouble, and I had asked my father to deal with it, and he had declined.

    She had put my father up to telling me in 1995 that he could not believe a 53-year-old man had never gotten over the death of his son, and I had told him he would never criticize me again to my face, because we would never see each other again, and it would be better for us in the afterlife.

    However, I was not able to hold to that vow. I saw him again, after my sister told me he had said he wanted to see me. We had a nice talk. Then, my sister called me really mad, wanting to know what I had done to upset my father? I had no clue what she was talking about. She said he had called Joann crying his eyes out, and Joann had called her about me causing it.

    Also in play, from early 1997 through June 1998, I was in a black night of the soul, which had come upon me in two days’ time. I knew it was not of this world. It felt like half my brain had died. The right half. I stopped dreaming. I felt completely cut off from God. 

    I was being treated by a well-meaning psychiatrist, who was clearly out of his depth, never having heard of a mere dark night of the soul, which I had endured for four years, 1991-1995, and then I had three spontaneous visions in four days’ time, and it began to lift. 

    After meeting with my father and Joann, the psychiatrist told me Joann wanted me dead.

    During the black night, my friend who had worked for my father had three dreams, which suggested I was not in nearly as much danger as I felt every day and night.

    I didn't even tell him that I was spending four hours every morning, planning how I would kill myself the next day, and after figuring that out, I relaxed knowing that day was my last. I came up with the same escape plan every morning: go somewhere alone the next day and slit my wrists with my Swiss Army knife.

    Despite my internal hell, I saw clearly what was going on around me, but I mostly kept it to myself, because I was so totally fucked up, that who was I to talk about it? And, who would listen to a crazy person, anyway?

    My 3rd wife, Deborah, made friends with my father, and they visited from time to time. Based on what she told me, she and my father really liked each other, and he was really concerned about me. I told her it would not last, Joann would end it. No way, my wife said. One day, Deborah came home heartbroken after visiting my father. Joann had ended it.

    My younger brother Major’s first wife called me around that time, to say, at a party the night before, my father’s stockbroker, whom I knew, had told her that my father had told him that he loved me, but he could not see me because I wanted him to choose between him and Joann, and he could not do that. I called my father and told him what I had been told. He said it didn’t happen.

    I felt horrible for Deborah having to endure what I was going through. Her back went out something awful. A chiropractor was not able to help her. A neurosurgeon put her in traction, in bed. I waited on her hand and foot. She only left the bed to bathe and use the toilet.

    Two weeks into that, Deborah shrieked one morning, “What’s wrong with my back?!!!” I sat on the bed beside her and said, I didn’t think we suited each other any more, it was nobody’s fault. She said she thought I was right. The next day, there was nothing wrong with her back. That was my signal to move out, but it took me two months to do it, and then the black night began to lift.

    I never put my father to choose between me and Joann. What I did was put him to deal with her, when she caused his family trouble, and he never dealt with it. 

    The irony was, back when my father told me that he wanted to marry Joann, I said that was his business, he would have to live with her. Did he love her? Yes, he said. Did he want to live out his days with her? Yes, he said. Then do it, I said.

    My father said Major didn’t want him to marry Joann. I said it was none of Major’s business. My father thanked me, and asked if I would be his best man and carry Joann’s ring at the wedding? I said, yes, I would be honored to do that.

    Thus did I unwittingly set myself up to be my father’s best man in ways neither he nor I could possibly imagine.

    My father married Joann at Mountain Brook Baptist Church, in 1968. I was his best man and carried Joann’s ring. Major was not there, he had moved to San Francisco, California.

    Years later, Major told me why he had not wanted our father to marry Joann, and why he had moved to California: my father and Joann were seeing each other while our mother was dying of cancer.

    My mother had told me she knew my father was seeing another woman. I knew they had a fight some years prior about him seeing another woman. I heard enough to be convinced my father was a womanizer before he met Joann.

    For example, the valued Golden Flake employee, who would dream of Travis and his mother and her parents and my grandfather, had told me of being with my father and other Golden Flake management men, when my father said he felt sorry for young men, who, because of AIDs, “could not have the kind of fun we once had.”

    I can’t help wondering if my father’s womanizing, alcoholism and other troubles were rooted in the loss of Travis and his mother?

    Yes, I know my going down this path will not please some, nor perhaps a lot of people. I’m sure they very much would prefer that I stick with what fell out of me in about two hours time on a public library computer in Helen, Georgia, in late August 2005.

    When I typed the last sentence on the library computer, my cell phone rang and I ran outside the library to answer a call from my father’s lawyer, John McKleroy, who had been a classmate of mine at the University of Alabama School of Law, and then we were classmates about a decade later, when the law school offered a masters in tax law program, taught two days week in Birmingham, for two years.

    John told me that he had been trying to reach me for two days, to let me know the sad news that my father had died.

    Later in this unfolding book, you can read what I wrote that day on the Helen Library computer about The Hit and Miss Club. It received kudos from every person who read it and got back to me about it.

    Meanwhile, there is much to tell, which led up to what I wrote that day in Helen, and which came after. 

    One thing that came after my father died was he started coming to me in dreams, as an ally. He sometimes still does that all these years later. However, he did not visit me in a dream last night, after the family black sheep and skeleton keeper finished writing this report.

    So, perhaps I went astray in writing all of that? Or, perhaps wrote it to show me that my father and I never got over the death of our sons, and although I gave him ample reasons to disinherit me, he didn't. If he had done it, I would have lived longer on the street, and I can't imagine I would still be alive.

How World War II launched Golden Flake Potato Chip Company, and other Sloan Bashinsky family skeletons

    Yesterday, March 13, 2023, someone told me that her son had been a Golden Flake route salesman for 20-something years, and he had really liked his job until the company was bought by Utz Quality Foods in 2016. Utz told him that he would have to buy his route truck and be responsible for its upkeep, and he declined and quit. I said I had run routes for Golden Flake, and I would have quit, if I were him. 

    She asked me to tell her how Golden Flake got started. I said that is a long story, which will have to wait for another time. I didn't think where we were was a good place to tell what I knew, and I wasn't sure she would care to hear it. Most of it was told to me by other people.

    During World War II, my father enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was sent to Boca Raton, Florida, where the Air Corps had an airbase and B-29 bombers. My father took his family with him: my mother, me, and our black maid and cook, Charlotte Washington, who had come to our home in Birmingham looking for work on the day I was born in Hillman Hospital, in Birmingham, October 7, 1942. I could not pronounce Charlotte, and simply called her, Cha, pronounced Sha, and that's what my mother and father called her, too.

    My father got his pilot wings to fly B-29s. Then, we all went with him to an Air Corps base in Iowa. My father was very good at math, and perhaps Iowa is where the Air Corps decided he would be more useful as a B-29 navigator-bombardier, than a pilot.

    After a while in Iowa, we came back to Birmingham, and my father was sent to an air base in California, I don't know exactly where, perhaps San Diego. From there, he would ship out with the Air Corps to Guam, where B-29s were based and flew night bombing missions to the Japanese isles. My mother left me and Cha with my father's parents, Leo and Cora, and went to California to see my father fly off to war.

    Cora did not like the way I ate, and she tried to force me to eat what she wanted me to eat. I was used to and loved what Cha cooked for me. To force me to eat her way, Cora banned Cha to the servant quarters in the basement. I refused to eat what Cora served me. She took me to doctors, to try to get them to make me eat what she wanted me to eat. They told her she was nuts. Cora kept tying. I still have screen memories of screaming, "I want my Cha! I want my Cha!"

    When my mother returned from California, I was skin and bones. She fetched me and Cha and took us home. Cha told my mother what had happened. My mother told Cora that she would never have a relationship with her grandchildren.

    All of that I would be told by my first wife, Dianne, who was told it by Cha.

    My mother never told me why Cora took the sons of my father's older brother Leo to the beach for two months every summer, but she never took Major or me. Instead, my mother told me that Leo's oldest son, "Little Leo", was born with a bad heart, which was true, and that's why Cora favored my cousins.

    But what does all of that have to do with how Golden Flake got started? It has everything to do with it, which I also learned from Dianne, who was told it by Cha.

    My mother wrote my father a letter describing what his mother had done to me, while his father did nothing. My mother insisted that, after the war, they would move away from Alabama, to get themselves and me away from his mother and father. 

    I don't know if my mother also said, to get herself away from her Puritan mother and father, who had let her older brother run wild, but had treated her like a convent whore nun, which had made her a prude, to the point (she much later told me), she could not walk naked before my father in their bedroom. (I loved my mother's parents, and they loved me.)

    Imagine what it was like for my father to get my mother's letter not long after he arrived at Guam and began flying night bombing missions to Japan, while Japanese anti-aircraft guns were trying to shoot down his plane. (I saw the black and white photos he took of Japanese cities on fire, and anti-aircraft flak all around his airplane.)

    I doubt my mother told my father in letters to him during the war, that she had been physically violent with me. 

    I had a spring-loaded rocking horse. I was riding it hard one day in my mother's bedroom, where she was doing something. It was making lots of noise on the wooden floor, and I was making lots of noise with my mouth. She told me to stop making so much noise. I kept at it. She yanked me off the horse and grabbed her hair brush and started hitting my fanny with her hairbrush, which broke. She yelled, "God durned you, you made me break my good nylon hairbrush and I can't get another one because of the war!!!" 

    She started raining blows down on my head and shoulders with her hands, which I tried to fend off with my hands and arms, as I kept yelling for Cha, standing in the doorway, to save me!!! I imagine if Cha had tried to intervene, she would have been fired and I would have been in far graver peril.

    My father was very good at math, electronics and mechanics. He had earned pilot wings for the B-29, and now he was a navigator-bombardier. He secured the promise of a job with an aircraft manufacturer in Ohio, Akron, I think. We would live there after the war.

    Only then did my father's father get involved. He wrote my father a letter, in which he promised that he and his brother-in-law Cyrus would buy a company in Birmingham and make my father a junior partner, if my father and his family remained in Birmingham after the war.

    My Grandfather Bashinsky and Cyrus had been in the newsprint business, and when World War II started, they converted the factory to a munitions plant, where they made 37 millimeter and smaller cannon shells for American fighter planes. (I saw some of those shells in my grandfather's home, and in the home of his mother in Troy, Alabama.)

    My father and mother accepted my Bashinsky Grandfather's offer, and he and Cyrus, whom my mother, and thus everyone else, called "Uncle Cy", went looking for a company to buy. 

    Uncle Cy had married my Bashinsky Grandfather's younger sister, Helen, who had tragically died of some kind of galloping pneumonia or tuberculosis not long after they married. 

    I much later learned, from whom, I can't recall, that my Grandfather Bashinsky had insisted Uncle Cy not remarry and dishonor Helen, and Uncle Cy complied. My mother loved Uncle Cy, I had named my Bashinsky Grandfather, Poppa Granddaddy, and that's what everyone in my family called him.

    Anyway, Leo and Cyrus found a company they liked, called Magic City Foods. It made potato chips and a few other packaged snacks, such as perhaps peanuts, popcorn, fried pork skins, peanut butter and cheese crackers. It had been established in the 1920s by people in Birmingham, Alabama, in a grocery store basement. 

    The company now had a manufacturing plant and warehouse on Lomb Avenue, in west Birmingham, near the Rickwood Field baseball park and the Alabama State Fairgrounds. The company had several routes in Birmingham, and, I think, a route or two in Montgomery and maybe one in northern Alabama. Those routes received their Golden Flake products by train.

    A deal was struck.

    I was told there was a great surprise! We were going to see it. I think by then I was 5 years old.

    My father drove. We were on the road for a while. We reached a building with a quonset hut next to it and stopped. It was a cool, cloudy day, like maybe in March. 

    I was told, this is the surprise. My father's new job. I felt awful inside. Like, doom.

    My father learned the business from the ground up. 

    He started out in the manufacturing plant, as a mechanic on the cooking and packaging machines. He got to where he could take them apart and put them back together.

    He ran a sales route for a while, I recall him coming home nights in a route truck.

    He became the potato buyer for the company. He traveled a lot to Florida, south and north Alabama and North Dakota, courting potato farmers, getting their confidence, buying their spuds. 

    He wanted to make Golden Flake grow, while his father and Cyrus wanted to keep it like it was.

    When I was in high school, my father bought out his father and Cyrus, after they had the company appraised. They did not give it to him.

    After that, Golden Flake began to grow.

    Perhaps that story is best left for another day.

    Perhaps what needs to be told now is the rest of the letter from my mother to my father in Guam story, which was provided to me by Poppa Granddaddy himself.

    I had worked summers at Golden Flake, in the plant, in the warehouse, and running vacation routes for route salesman.

    I had attended and graduated from Vanderbilt, and was in my senior (3rd) year at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.

    Dianne's and my first child died of sudden infant death syndrome.

    A law school buddy a year ahead of me, now practicing law in south Alabama with his father and his father's law partner- they were trial lawyers, meaning they got paid if they won- persuaded me to try my hand at being a country lawyer. 

    My lawyer buddy and his father loved to hunt and fish and play golf, and go down the gulf coast. As did I.

    They sent me to a very respected defense lawyer in Troy, Alabama, to have a chat. Pi Brantly had grown up with my father in Troy. Pi's son had died tragically.

    Pi had a spare law office, and a very good legal secretary. He said he was referring to other Troy lawyers the kind of cases he did not handle, and I could have the spare office, use of his legal secretary, and he would refer cases he did not handle to me.

    We walked over to the drug store on the town square, where Pi introduced me to several lawyers, who welcomed me, said they looked forward to seeing me in Troy.

    Dianne, now pregnant again, and I agreed with a developer to rent an apartment in a new apartment building under construction.

    Out of the blue, I received a letter accepting me as a member in the Troy Country Club.

    It was a done deal.

    I told my father about it. He asked why I wanted to do it? I said, I loved to fish and hunt, and go to the gulf coast and fish, and I could do lots of that, if I lived in Troy. He said that was no reason to do it.

    I told Poppa Granddaddy about it. He reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a letter my father had written to him from Guam, saying, "As things now stand, we will not live in Birmingham after the war."

    Poppa Granddaddy said my father once wanted to leave Birmingham, but he changed his mind and that turned out well. Poppa Granddaddy did not say WHY my father had changed his mind, nor what had happened to cause my father and mother to want to live somewhere else after the war ended.

    My father sent me to his and his father's lawyer, John Gillon, whom I knew somewhat. John said, let's go to the law library where there is more room. Most of the lawyers in the firm were there.

    John asked me what I knew about living in a small town? 

    I said, very little. 

    John said, "All you have to do is drive out to the golf course on Saturday night and drive around it to find out who is fucking who's wife."

    John was a devout Christian and Bible scholar, and a very smart, shrewd attorney.

    The other lawyers burst out laughing.

    The death of our baby boy had really disturbed my relationship with Dianne. I might well have been susceptible to being one of the men on the Troy golf course on Saturday nights.

    My Great Grandmother Bashinsky died and was to be buried in Troy. Dianne and I drove from Tuscaloosa to Troy. When we reached the cemetery, we saw Pi, who greeted us warmly.

    I saw my father and Poppa Granddaddy standing some distance behind Pi. I walked over to them with Pi, who offered my father his hand to shake. My father and Poppa Granddaddy turned their backs to Pi and me, and said nothing.

    I looked at Pi, he looked at me.

    I was really embarrassed.

    Dianne and I drove back to Tuscaloosa.

    My criminal law professor, himself an Alabama law graduate, who, I learned much later, had gone on to join the US Army and prosecute Nazis at Nuremberg, told me a federal judge in Birmingham had lost his law clerk and was looking for a replacement.

    I hand-wrote United States District Judge Clarence W. Allgood a letter, asking for an interview. He hand-wrote back, inviting me to come. 

    I went. 

    Mostly, we talked about hunting and fishing. He said I had the job, if I wanted it. I said, I wanted it.

    I drove to Troy and told Pi. He said he was not surprised, after how it went at the funeral. I said I felt awful. He told me not to worry. Clerking for a United States District Judge was a great honor and opportunity. 

    I clerked for Judge Allgood for a year and a half. By agreement with the other two federal judges, he presided over all criminal prosecutions in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. 

    I watched really good criminal defense lawyers and federal prosecutors lock horns in trials and in Judge Allgood's chambers. I got a priceless legal education my fellow law students at Alabama could not possibly imagine.

    About a year into the clerkship, I woke up one morning and my bowel was locked. There was no warning sign. Medicine had no answer. I lost my confidence. I went to work for Golden Flake, which felt safer.

    My bowel did not like that, either. 

    My bowel hasn't liked anything since.

Grab Your Best Hold Socially Correct People, World War II Combat Aviators, Psychiatry, Christianity and Atheists

    Since I started writing this unfolding book, my dreams have been kinda all over the place: pro, con and mixed. I get glimpses and snatches, which cause me to take a breath, step back and ponder. 

    However, a good friend, who gets talked to regularly in his dreams by angels known in the Bible, has reported dreams in which those angels are fully behind my I telling it like it was. 

    This morning, my friend reported a dream he had last night, in which I was asking angels to comment on what I'm writing here, and they were demurring. Then, Archangel Michael told my friend to tell Sloan not to use Vaseline.

    Gloria Steinem once wrote a book called, THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, BUT FIRST IT WILL PISS YOU OFF.

    As I look back over the first two chapters, all of it happened. I seek no reward, such as book sales, royalties, speaker engagements. 

    I imagine any reward will be cyber attacks and perhaps something more solid, like exploding anti-aircraft shells my father's B-29 somehow weathered during bombing runs over Japanese cities in World War II.

.................

    When I moved out of my third wife Deborah's home in June 1998, I started dreaming and the horrible 16-months black night of the soul began to lift.

    I went daily to the Downtown Birmingham YMCA, to take steam baths, to help flush out of me the chemical buildup of the lovely pills the well meaning psychiatrist had gotten me hooked on, to treat what he viewed as my psychosis and major depression. Three times I had tried to wean cold turkey from the pills, and each time I went into a horrible withdrawal, which convinced me the pills were addictive, like heroin, although the psychiatrist said that was not possible. 

    When I realized the black night was lifting, I tried a different weaning schedule, which was: for a week, I took 3/4 daily dose of the two prescriptions; and for another week, I took a 1/2 daily dose. Then, I went to see the psychiatrist for what I figured was the last time, and to thank and tell him goodbye. He had been my constant ally. I had really depended on seeing him once a week, to help me keep hanging there. 

    He had told me that he was a devout Methodist and he believed in spiritual warfare. However, believing is one thing, living in it, and knowing what it is, is something else altogether. I had lived spiritual warfare for a good while before the black night came, and I was living it again after the black night started lifting. 

    What the black night itself was, I can only guess was something I caused, or my soul needed to experience, and it was implemented from the spirit realms, of which psychiatry is somewhat unacquainted, to put it in a kind light. 

    Anyway, during what would turn out to be our last visit, I asked the psychiatrist for a weaning schedule, and he suggested the same exact weaning schedule I already had chosen. I took that as a sign from Above that I was on the right track, and to take 1/4th of a daily dose of the two prescriptions for a week, and then stop taking the pills. 

    Yet, it would take many months of steam baths, drinking spring water, eating a special diet of no fried foods and no alcohol, and drinking fresh-squeezed leafy green, carrot and beet vegetable juices, for all the pills' chemical residues to leave my body cells. I even had a dream about a rough patch of chemical detoxing headed my way. 

    Parallel, angels were doing things in me day and night, to bring me back to the land of the living, so to speak, and to fix broken things in me, and to heal me of stuff I had no clue even was broken or had happened to me in the past, and to flush the psychic toxins of all of that out of me through my eliminating organs. In all, that took about a year, and it was all I could do to hang with it.

    My New Age friend, who had dreamed of my half-Anglo-African half brother Travis, suddenly had what commonly is called audio spirit hearing. He told me two or three times a day on the telephone what he was hearing from angels about him and me. And about what angels were doing inside of me, some of which was terrifying beyond human imagination. I doubt I would have survived it psychically, or otherwise, if my friend was not on the phone talking me through it.

    He said he was told by angels that my mother had molested me many times in my crib. The angels then took me through each infraction, as part of their healing me. It took about three weeks, two terrifying beyond human imagination sessions a day. 

    So, in the midst and grip of all of that, I was sweating in the YMCA steam room one morning, when another naked fellow about a generation older started up a conversation. When I got around to telling him my name, he asked if my father was the Sloan Bashinsky in a B-29 squadron on Guam during World War II?

    I said, yes. 

    The fellow said he was there, too. And, my father kept getting his B-29 lost during flights to Japan, and he had to drop his bombs into the ocean on the way back to Guam, because it was too dangerous to land with all those live bombs aboard. 

    I was lost for words.

    The fellow said, nobody wanted my father on their B-29, and he kept getting moved from one aircraft to another. 

    I was lost for words.

    My mother had told me when I was a boy, that when my father's B-29 was returning from Japan to Guam one night, a propeller had flown off one of the right wing's engines and had soared spinning just over the fuselage (body) of the airplane and then had plunged spinning down toward the Pacific Ocean. If the spinning propeller had struck the fuselage, the plane would have plunged into the sea and all aboard probably would have died.

    My father never talked with me about his service in World War II, but, one night, he was at Dianne's and my home for dinner, and several of our friends were there, and the guys somehow got my father talking about his experiences on the B-29. My friends were fascinated, and I wondered why he had talked with them about it, but not with me? Perhaps he'd had enough to drink, to loosen him up? Perhaps something in him knew I needed to hear something about what he had experienced?

    My mother had told me that it had really bothered my father that he killed people he did not know, from a distance, by dropping bombs on them.

    Maybe a year after hearing what the man in the YMCA said about my father and his B-29, I took up with a woman, who was clearly arranged by angels to meet me. The angels took her through a searing, lightning-fast healing that blew her and me away. She emerged as an entirely different person, who was hearing from angels when she was awake and in her dreams.

    When I told her what the fellow had told me at the YMCA, she said she was hearing that my father's soul did not like killing people, and that's why he kept getting his B-29s lost over the Pacific.

    From time to time after the black night lifted, I wrote my father a letter I didn't expect to be answered. Often my letters didn't have a return address, because I was not in America, or I was homeless. 

    In one letter, I told my father, the reason he kept getting his B-29 lost during World War II, was because his soul didn't like killing people. I felt he needed to hear that from someone, before he died and took his shame for that with him into the afterlife.

    Now, I left out something about my father and the psychiatrist and my wife during the black night.

    My psychiatrist's father was a psychiatrist, who had worked at the famous Menninger (psychiatric) Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. My psychiatrist had grown up at Menninger. After medical school and his psychiatric residence, he had run Menninger's free clinic for people with little or no money.

    I think my psychiatrist knew very well that I was not getting better, and that I would not get better because of his efforts, and perhaps that is why he suggested during one of our sessions that I should go to the Menninger Clinic. He said it was a great place, I would really like it!

    I shared that with Deborah, and she told my father about it. He said he would pay for it, if it would help me. 

    I shared that with my psychiatrist during our next session. He now was very excited for me to go to Menninger. I asked him, what would Menninger do that he had not already tried? 

    After taking a short course in electro-convulsive therapy, which used to be called electro-shock therapy, he had suggested I let him do it on me. I had replied, I was not going to let me be his first experiment with electro-shock.

    I was not stupid. I still could think. But half my brain, the right side, seemed to have gone away. That's the feminine side, the dream-making side, the creative side, of the brain. The side that connects a person to angels and to God, or to whatever started everything.

    The psychiatrist was not able to tell me what Menninger would do that he could not do. Yet, he kept saying I needed to go there, and Deborah was all for it. Can't say I blamed her. I was a mess and a huge load. Can't say I blamed my father. I was pretty sure his second wife, Joann, would like to see me gone.

    My New Age friend wasn't getting many messages from above about Menninger, because he was not yet captured by angels. 

    However, my friend, who had been in top management at Golden Flake, had been harassed by angels since around 1990, and he'd had many dreams about me, and we'd had many talks about all of that.

    I told him about the Menninger thing. He asked what I was going to do? I said it was pompano season on the Gulf Coast. Nos were running close to shore. I could sight fish them off a public pier. I wanted to drive down there and stay in a motel where my Uncle Leo and I had stayed when he took me fishing for speckled trout in Phillips Inlet. And, I wanted to think about Menninger.

    I didn't have fishing tackle any more. My friend was an expert bass fisherman, and he had lots of bait-casting rods and reels. He loaned me what I needed. I would buy pompano jigs when I got to the beach.

    Leaving Birmingham on US 31 South, I stopped by an outdoors store to decide if I would buy a shotgun to off myself after I got to the beach. I stood a while looking at shotguns on racks attached to the wall, and at boxes of shotgun shells under the glass counter. I walked back to my car and drove south.

    I caught some pompano off the public pier, but nothing else happened to cause me to feel better. 

    When I returned to Birmingham, I returned my friend's fishing tackle. He said he'd had a dream.

    Grab your best hold.

    In the dream, he and I went to the Menninger Clinic. The front of it was beautiful. The reception area inside was beautiful. The doctors and staff were wonderful. While I was talking with them, my friend snuck through a door and explored the interior. He came back out and said to me, "Sloan, there's nothing back there but dungeons and padded cells. If you come here, you will never leave."

    I shared that with an older woman friend, who had been a Christian intercessor all her life. She said she was hearing, Menninger would keep me until my father quit paying for it. Then, I would be put in the Kansas state mental hospital, where I would live out my days.

    Deborah's mother was visiting us. I told them about my friend's dream. They could not take it in.

    When I saw the psychiatrist, I told him about my friend's dream. He could not take it in. I wanted to ask him, "Do you believe in God yet, Doctor?" But what I said was, I was not going to Menninger.

    I began the pill weaning schedule.

    In all fairness to Menninger Clinic, I have never been inside it, and I doubt all that's behind the front entrance is padded cells and dungeons. Angels made that dream my friend had, to tell me God had something in mind for me other than Menninger.

The Golden Flake Clown Was Really SLOW Reaching Puberty

    So, where was I?

    Oh, yeah. 

    The Golden Flake Potato Chip Company.

    Maybe when I was 10, my father started advertising Golden Flake Potato Chips on a local television station's weekday "The Benny Carl Show". Each episode hosted local kids from different grammar schools (1st-8th grade), and church Sunday school classes, and sports teams.

    When I was 12, a Little League program was started in Mt. Brook, and I tried out. I threw left-handed and batted right-handed, and played first base and pitched.

    I was a good hitter, and I became a good pitcher after my father nailed a home plate and pitching rubber 44 feet apart into our gravel driveway. Several days a week, he came home after work, got down in a crouch with a catcher's mitt, and caught my pitches for about 30 minutes. 

    I got pretty accurate, and I threw pretty fast, and right-handed and left-handed batters had never faced a left-handed pitcher.

    My father attended the first game I pitched, and whenever I threw a bad pitch, I looked at him and he frowned. The other team got ahead, and I kept looking at my father. We lost. 

    My coach asked me, who was in the stands that I kept looking at? I said, my father. The coach said my father couldn't come to any more of our games.

    I reported that during family dinner at home. It was not a happy moment.

    I then won five games in a row. 

    I was fearless, pitching, hitting and fielding.

    Then, I seemed to lose a spark. I became afraid when I was pitching, of being hammered by line drives.

    I lost two very close games. 

    5-3 record.

    Late in the season, my team was invited to be on the Benny Carl Show. We each got to say our name and what position we played. 

    When I said I am Bash Bashinsky, Benny asked if was related to Sloan Bashinsky, at Golden Flake, one of his show's sponsors? 

    I said, yes. Benny made a big deal about it. 

    I was outed. My private life was over. 

    I was short and pudgy. 

    Some of the boys in my class at Crestline Heights Elementary School liked to bully me.

    I would not eat the food served in the school cafeteria, perhaps because I was spoiled on Cha's fabulous cooking. She fixed me a sack lunch each morning. I ate it with Golden Flake potato chips each day at lunch break.

    The boys wanted my sandwiches and potato chips. They wanted the fried chicken, or the roast beef sandwich, if that was in what Cha had prepared. 

    I never gave them anything. 

    They started calling me "greasy old potato chip". 

    Then, they started calling me "Tater,' which was slang for potato.

    Some of the girls in my class started calling me, "Tater".

    I hated being called "Tater".  

    I didn't have girlfriends. I was terrified of girls. I dreaded annual cotillions, when I had to invite a girl to be my date. That got some better after I attended a ballroom dancing school across the street from the grammar school. The dance school was run by a mother of one of the girl students.

    When I was 14, my father made me work at Golden Flake during summer vacation, while some of my rich- family buddies were playing golf and cards and swimming every day at the Birmingham Country Club.

    My father bought me a set of used irons, and he held back twenty of the forty dollars he paid me from his wallet each Friday, until I had repaid him for the irons.

    Golden Flake was located on Lomb Avenue, a really long way from Mountain Brook, and the only way I could get to work was to ride there with my father, and the only way I could get home was to ride home with him.

    Except sometimes he had other things to do, and then I had to catch a city bus into Birmingham, and wait a good while for a city bus going "over the mountain" into Crestline and right by our home on Montevallo Road. I was the only white person on the bus, which carried black servants and yard workers back and forth between Birmingham and Mountain Brook.

    If it was warm weather, I got off the bus in front of the country club, and went to my father's locker in the men's locker room and opened the combination lock and put on my golf shoes and got my golf bag out of the back of the pro shop and played 9 holes. Then, I put my golf bag and shoes back where they were kept, and walked across the golf course to our home.

    Many times my father told me that golf was really important, because all business deals are made on the golf course. In his teens and early 20s, he was a scratch golfer, meaning his handicap was zero. He could have been a professional golfer, but he chose to be a businessman instead. 

    What I did at Golden Flake when I was 14 was not very exciting. I sat beside a mechanical packaging machine, using my hands to put packaged roasted peanuts into small folding yellow boxes, which were put into larger brown cardboard boxes, which I stacked on top of each other onto a metal float on wheels. 

    When the float was full, it was pushed by one of the black warehouse workers into the quonset hut warehouse and the packed boxes were stacked on the floor for the route salesmen to pull orders and for loading onto over the road trucks, which transported Golden Flake products to route salesmen's warehouses in other Alabama cities, such as Montgomery, Huntsville, Decatur, Tuscaloosa, etc.

    Other days, I sat at the peanut blanching machine across from the peanut packaging machine, and picked out small rocks and rotten peanuts, and peanuts that still had the red skin on them. Sometimes I left the red skin peanuts alone, because Golden Flake made a redskin product, too. Redskin peanuts were smaller and tastier than regular peanuts.

    For eight hours, each week day, I did those incredibly boring jobs, and I did a lot of daydreaming. About what, I'll let you use your imagination, if you can't guess fishing, hunting, and girls. 

    Some days, I got to stack Nabisco crackers into the peanut butter and cheese cracker making and packaging machine. I really liked that job, because time passed really fast for some reason I never understood. Whereas, the peanut detail was like time stood still.

    Sometimes, I was put in the warehouse to strip adhesive labels off empty, flattened cardboard shipping boxes, which had been returned by route salesmen. We called those boxes, "knock downs". They were reused a dozen or more times, before being sold for scrap. A great deal of Golden Flake's profit margin was in how often the knockdowns were reused.

    Many times, my father got a sad look in his eyes, and with a lamenting tone and look, told me, "Son, I built this business for you!" 

    I felt horrible each time he said that.

    Like, what was I supposed to do with it? I didn't like working there? (Understatement).

    Yet, I worked there the next summer, when I was fifteen, doing the same things I had done the year before.

    The summer I was sixteen, I was able to drive, and I was put with a route salesman, who in his youth had played for the New York Yankees. I really liked him.

    His route was in Mountain Brook. I learned it, and when he went on vacation, I ran it that week and checked about $17 short, which was considered almost scandalous.

    That was the first summer my money was held back from my paycheck, for taxes. I was enraged.  

    I told my mother that I didn't want to work at Golden Flake any more that summer, and, with her ok, I announced I was quitting. My father was not happy.

    I played a lot of golf at the country club. My handicap got down to about 2. I was shooting in the low 70s, for 18 holes. I won the annual junior golf tournament, which really pleased my father. 

    For three years, I had languished at Ramsay High School, in Birmingham. My parents had sent me there, because the classes at Shade Valley High School next to Mt. Brook Village had 40 or more students. Ramsay's classes were less than 30 students. Some of the Ramsay teachers had taught my parents.

    I did not reach puberty when I was 11, or 12, or 13, or 14, or 15. When women line and office workers at Golden Flake asked me if I had a girlfriend?, I said, no, and I didn't want one. They laughed, and said I would get over that! I said it wasn't going to happen.

    I was pretty good at football, great at basketball, and really good at baseball. But when I reached Ramsay, no way was I going out for sports and undressing in a boys's locker room.

    I became a TV couch potato, when I wasn't in school, fishing, hunting or playing golf. I was not studying well. I felt like a freak. I was in a silent, living hell. I told no one.

    Who knows. Perhaps I was late reaching puberty, because I didn't see a world I wanted to step into waiting for me?

    Perhaps it was just back luck?

    Or perhaps it was related to the truly terrifying. parts of the healing, which angels did inside of me in 1998, after I was a few months out of the black night of the soul? 

    My mother molesting me in my crib? And potty training me before I was one year old? And beating me up when my father was off at war?

    Whatever, my junior year at Ramsay, my father got me accepted at The McCallie School in Chattanooga, where he and his brother Leo had attended. 

    Shortly after that, I entered puberty, and everything changed. 

    I got a girlfriend and we were doing lots of kissing. 

    I won the junior golf tournament at the country club. My girlfriend walked the last round with me.

    I was coming into my own.

    Then, I was at McCallie, in Chattanooga. Repeating my junior year, because I was not ready to do senior high school work at McCallie.

    I was a spoiled brat. I made a fool out of myself many times. I got into a fight and got my ass kicked and my head beat on.

    My Birmingham girlfriend took up with another boy. I was really fucked up about that.

    It needed to happen. I needed to grow up, fast.

    Alas, I had been away from football, basketball and baseball for three years. I had lost much of my skills in those sports. All I had for a school sport was golf.

    Yet, I didn't even have that. Something had happened to my swing. I never knew what was going to happen when the club struck the ball. 

    I had nothing.

    So, I studied a lot harder than I had at Ramsay and made pretty good grades. 

    I got along pretty well with the other students.

    I got used to being at McCallie, away from Birmingham, away from my family and Golden Flake.

    Although my golf swing remained on the outs with me, I did pretty well my senior year at McCallie and was accepted at Vanderbilt, with the help of one of the sons of the McCallie co-founder.

    I didn't get along very well with the religious part of McCallie. 

    Today, I wrote this below on Facebook.

The other day, I accepted a Facebook friend request from someone, because his FB bio showed he and I had attended the same high school and college: The McCallie School, in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. Then, something he defended Tucker Carlson on Facebook, and I couldn't resist wading in. 

 

When I attended McCallie, it was run by hard-core Presbyterians: one of the founders and his two sons. We were required to attend chapel service every week day morning before class and every evening before dinner, and every Sunday evening. We had to attend a church service in Chattanooga on Sunday morning. We got Saturday off. We had to wear pretend military attire and march every week day carrying empty M1 garands, which we had learned to field strip and reassemble. 

 

Old Testament and New Testament were required courses. The founder taught the New Testament Course. He said he believed the Soviet Union leader, Nikita Kruschev, was the Anti-Christ, and we might be called to pick up our M1s, for which we had no ammunition, and defend America. He said he believed he was one of The Elect. He said that he and his wife of 60 years had sex three times. Twice to have children, and once for pleasure, and he had regretted the third time ever since. His poor wife. 

 

Vanderbilt was a liberal arts university with excellent engineering and medical schools, a divinity school, a lousy football team and a good basketball team. I mostly majored in my fraternity, socializing, drinking beer, playing intramural sports, and meeting and falling in love with my first wife, Dianne. I had no fucking clue what lay ahead. Had I known, I might have drank a whole lot more beer. 

 

Instead, I enrolled in the University of Alabama School of Law, in Tuscaloosa, where I would watch some very good Crimson Tide football teams led by Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, whose Sunday afternoon TV replay show was sponsored by Coca Cola and my father's Golden Flake Potato Chip Company. "Great pair, says the Bear."  

 

Little did I know what lay ahead. Had I known, I would have drunk a lot more beer and smoked a lot of marijuana.

The Golden Flake Clown chickened out of practicing law and went to work for his father, where he learned all that glitters is not gold

    Judge Allgood and some of my friends and my wife, Dianne, tried to persuade me not to go to work for my father. I heard them, but I was so hurting  in my gut, and so beaten down in my spirit, that it was all over but the shouting.

    I worked there 4 years and  was put into a number of different facets of Golden Flake's operation, including starting and building a new sales route from scratch in Louisville, Mississippi, where I spent six months, Sunday through Thursday night in a motel, and weekends at home in Birmingham, with Dianne and our daughter. 

    I was in Louisville when Dianne went into labor with our second daughter. Golden Fake had sent someone to ride with me for two weeks, to learn the route. He was leaving Louisville that morning, and I drove to the  Greyhound station and caught him just in time. Then, off to Birmingham I drove 180 miles of 2-lane roads. I reached the hospital in the nick of time.

    About a month later, Golden Flakes vice-president pulled me out of Mississippi, because, my father told me, he was afraid I would drown if I stayed there much longer. He might have been right, if I hadn't already drowned by going to work at Golden Flake.

    Although I was giving it my very best, how can you give something your very best, when you know you sold out? When you know you should have gone to Troy and tried on being a country lawyer, and if it didn't work out, you would have given Troy a chance. You wouldn't spend the rest of your life what-if-ing.

    When it got really rough while I was working for Golden Flake, I tried to get psychiatry and Valium to make me feel better. In hindsight, that was not too smart. I had caused the mess I was in. Only I could fix the mess. But that would be too simple to say. I had to turn it into a blind leading the blind field trial. 

    My third year at Golden Flake, they made me Director of Marketing and Advertising, which I figured was where lots of sons of the boss probably ended up. Yet, that was probably where I best fit in the company, perhaps because there never had been a Director of Marketing and Advertising, and that field actually interested me.

    Golden Flake's advertising was handled by The Frank Taylor Advertising Agency since before Bear Bryant came to Tuscaloosa to coach The Crimson Tide. 

    Early this year, a big Crimson Tide fan told me that someone had told him that my father and Preacher Franklin, the sales manager of the Birmingham Coca-Cola franchise, had offered Coach Bryant a lot of money and his own Sunday afternoon post-game television replay show, if he would leave Texas A & M and come to Tuscaloosa and coach the Crimson Tide.

    I told the big Crimson Tide fan that was not how it happened. It was after Coach Bryant came to Alabama that he promoted Golden Flake Potato Chips and Coca Cola on a Sunday afternoon game replay TV show. 

    I called the woman who had been Frank Taylor's girl Friday and asked her if she remembered that history. She said Frank was at Golden Flake and my father was pushing him hard to come up with something that would make more people buy Golden Flake potato chips. Frank was accustomed to leaning back and looking up and closing his eyes and getting ideas. He did that, and his eyes opened and he said, "Great pair, says the Bear - Coca Cola and Golden Flake."

    When that was pitched to Coach Bryant, he said thanks, but  he did not eat Golden Flake potato chips and he didn't see how he could promote them. Someone then got the idea to give Coach Bryant lots of Golden Flake potato chips, to put on his football team's training table in the cafeteria where they all ate. 

    The rest is history.

    As follows.

    Coach Bryant's players didn't like taking salt tablets, but if they didn't take salt tablets, they were prone to heat prostration and passing out during football practice, especially during the hot months. The players gobbled down lots of Golden Flake potato Chips, which had lots of salt, and -viola! - they didn't need salt tablets any more.

    Coach Bryant agreed to the television deal, for which he was paid something less than $100,000 a year, I think Frank's girl Friday told me. Coach Bryant told the TV audience why he was backing Golden Flake, and sales of Golden Flake potato chips soared in Alabama.

    Later, Golden Flake and Coca Cola made much the same deal with Auburn's head football coach, Ralph "Shug" Jordan (pronounced "Jerden").

    I came up with the idea of getting a pencil manufacturing company to put the Golden Flake clown's face on white school pencils, and Golden Flake manufacturing line workers put the pencils in Golden Flake potato chip twin pack bags. Kids wanted those pencils and their mammas bought Golden Flake twin packs.

    When Golden Flake started making its own corn chips to compete with Fritos, the rest of Golden Flake management must have thought, if the company route salesmen put the new corn chips onto Golden Flake racks in grocery stores and other outlets, the public would buy and try the new corn chips.

    Nope. 

    Golden Flake's new corn ships sat on the racks. And sat on the racks. 

    I suggested to the sales manager and the vice president that Golden Flake promote the new corn ships by giving a free large bag of corn chips to anyone who bought a twin pack of Golden Flake potato chips. 

    In the past, Golden Flake had promoted its potato chips by attaching helium balloons on a string to potato chip twin packs. I had done that for a week in a grocery store in west Birmingham, when I was in high school. My fingers got really sore, blowing up balloons on a helium regulator and tying the balloon's stems in a knot, and then tying balloons to a string and stapling the string  to twin packs.

    When the vice-president and I presented the buy one, get one free promotion to my father, he went kinda meld down. It would cost too much money! I didn't think to ask him how much money was it costing Golden Flake to stale out tons of out of date corn chips that were not selling?

    The vice-president, who was very tight with money himself, said he agreed with me, it needed to be done. My father capitulated. We ran the promotions. Golden Flake corn chips started selling on their own. We ran more promotions. Golden Flake corn chips sold even better. We were finally competing with Fritos, but just barely, as they still had about 95 percent of the corn chip market, I would guess.

    The thing was,100 pounds of whole potatoes yielded 11-15, or so, pounds of potato chips, because potatoes are mostly water and a very hot potato chip conveyor paddle cooker full of boiling vegetable oil drives out all of the water. Summer potatoes had less density than winter potatoes, thus a lower yield and lower profit.

    Whereas, 100 pounds of dried corn kernels yielded about 110 pounds of corn chips. 

    The early Americans learned, for corn to be edible by people, it needed to be soaked a good while in lime water. The lime breaks down the corn in protein so that the human digestive tract can use it. 

    At Golden Flake, dried corn kernels were soaked overnight in large vats containing lime water. By morning, the softened kernels were put into a machine that ground them into "masa", which is a soggy corn dough. The masa was then hand-fed into an extruder over a corn chip paddle conveyor vegetable oil cooker. The corn masa absorbed a lot of the oil, which accounted for the positive yield. 

    Potato chips accounted for about 60 percent of Golden Flake's total sales. 

    Fritos, Doritos and Tostitos accounted for about half of Frito-Lay's total sales,

    I suppose you can do the $$$ math. 

    Corn products were hugely more $$$ profitable than potato chips.

    Frito-Lay owned the lucrative corn and tortilla chips market in America and used that to out-advertise its competitors, and to buy shelf space in grocery and convenience stores where Frito-Lay had strong competition - such as Golden Flake in Alabama, middle Tennessee and the Florida panhandle.

    It sure looked like unfair competition to me, but Golden Flake's real lawyers said we could not win it in court.

    No dummy, my father bought a lot of Frito-Lay common stock, which kept going up. When Frito-Lay merged with Pepsi-Cola, my father made a lot more money off his Frito-Lay investment, As PepsiCo grew, he made even more money off that investment,

    Golden Flake had a similar advantage with its fried cheese curls, which were made from corn meal and outsold Frito-Lay's Cheetos in Golden Flake's area. Fried cheese curls made up about 10 percent of Golden Flake total sales. Golden Flake started making baked cheese curls.

    By and by, I persuaded my father, his vice-president and the sales manager to hire a market research firm in Memphis, Tennessee, named Message Factors. The owner, Ty Ragland, and I became good friends. 

    Message Factors posed questions to a lot of people, and learned that people who eat lots of potato chips do not tend to eat lots of corn chips, and vice versa. So, I got Golden Flake to start offering buy one bag of Golden Flake corn chips, and get another bag free.

    Corn chip sales reached about 10 percent of total Golden Flake sales. 

    Fried pork skins were about 10 percent of total sales.

    As I said earlier, fried cheese curls were about 10 percent of total sales, and we added baked cheese curls to the product line.

    Potato chips dropped to about 50 percent of total sales, and the rest of the sales was corn products, pork skins, peanuts, popcorn, peanut butter and cheese crackers, and jobbed products, such as fake onion rings. 

    Jobbed products were not profitable, but were carried to make Golden Flake competitive with Frito-Lay's wider product line, and with Tom's and Lance, which mostly were vending companies and/or serviced small sales outlets. 

    In addition to being vice-president of marketing and advertising, I signed the weekly pay checks for all company route salesmen. Accompanying each paycheck was a spreadsheet of a route salesman's product sales the preceding week. I could see which route salesmen were trying to sell corn ships, and which salesmen were only half-trying. I sometimes wrote notes to them about that. 

    Big Brother at headquarters. 

    Most of them knew I had run sales routes and was away from my family lots of nights. I spent time out of town riding with division and regional sales managers in their territories. I met their route salesmen and their customers. I helped them stock shelves, not just Golden Flake racks, in new grocery and convenience stores, to maintain good will with those customers.

    The sales force viewed me as their friend in the company. I had been where they were. I was trying to help their product inventory sell better, with in-store promotions and fresh TV and advertising, especially in Nashville. I took up for route salesmen, when management was being unfair with them.

    For you see, Golden Flake management, starting with my father at the top, expected every Golden Flake employee to die for the company. The company came first, always.

    Even so, the people in the Birmingham plant and warehouse saw my father every day. Most of them had known him for years. They loved and trusted him. He gave them a profit sharing plan for when they retired. They had secure jobs, if they did their part. Because of my father, they repeatedly voted not to go union. 

    The cooks and production line workers knew me from when I worked beside them during summers. I had picked bad potato chips off the conveyor, which was as boring and picking bad peanuts off a conveyor. I had worked in the warehouse, driving forklifts and physically loading over the road trucks. I had painted yellow stripes on the large asphalt parking lot in broiling summer sun. They knew me from the time I spent in the plant after I went to work there full time, when I wrote cooking procedural manuals for corn ships, popcorn and fried pork skins. They knew me from coffee breaks in the company lunchroom. 

    I was not some son of the boss, who was not getting his hands dirty. The plant, warehouse and sales force employees saw me as their future boss. They had no clue how tormented I was in my gut, and in my soul. No clue.

    We had management meetings every Monday morning, where we discussed stuff going on.

    For a few weeks, I had watched a steady decline in our fried cheese curl sales. So, at a Monday morning management meeting, I asked, "What's wrong with fried cheese curls?" 

    You'd have thought I had accused them of having sex with Frito-Lay route salesmen! 

    I said, what's going on? Look at the numbers, we all get printouts of each Friday. 

    They were big on numbers. 

    The vice-president was big on numbers. He told the production manager to monitor fried cheese curl production, to see if we were doing something there to cause fried cheese curl sales to decline so much, which was indisputable. 

    The next Monday morning, the production manager said he had watched the fried cheese curl production cycle, and it was the same as it always had been.

    Fried cheese curl sales kept declining, I kept bitching about that.

    About two months later at a Monday morning meeting, the vice-president said the production manager had something to tell us. 

    The production manager didn't look so happy. He said he had spent the night at the plant, watching the production of fried cheese curls. The night crew had increased the amount of a chemical called "C-3" in the cheese formula. Increased it by about 10 times.

    Now, we all knew C-3 was the secret ingredient in Golden Flake fried cheese curls, which caused the public to much prefer them to Frito-Lay's Cheetos. 

    We all also knew that a very little dab of C-3 was plenty, and more of it was exponentially not a good idea. 

    Yes, exponentially. 

    For, doubling the amount of C-3 increased its potency ten-fold. And, increasing C-3 ten-fold, was actually increasing its potency 100-fold.

    The first time the production manager had observed fried cheese curl production, he had only watched the morning and afternoon shifts, but not the night shift, when a great deal of fried chess curl "seasoning sauce" was made from cheddar cheese concentrate. 

    I wanted to fucking scream!

    Maybe that was the first "message" that I should leave Golden Flake and try to practice law in Birmingham?

    The perhaps second "message" came before too long.

    I was assigned to befriend Henry Holman, the son of the founder of the Jitney Jungle grocery chain headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi.

    In this way, I met Henry and a doctor friend of his shortly after my father pulled me out of Mississippi. Golden Flake flew Henry and his friend, and Golden Flake's sales manager and me to my father's lovely home at Islamorada in the Florida Keys. We fished for two days, and Henry agreed to let Golden Flake replace Wonder Potato Chips in Jitney Jungle stores,

    My next assignment with Golden Flake was to spend two weeks in Jackson, using a Golden Flake route truck to put Golden Flake products into Jitney Jungle stores. Then, I was back in Birmingham.

    From time to time, I flew to Jackson, usually on Southern Airways, to see Henry and play 4-wall handball with him at the local YMCA. Twice, I went with Henry and his doctor friend and their friends to the Louisiana gulf coast, to fish for speckled trout and redfish. When I spent the night in Jackson, I had dinner with Golden Flake's division manager stationed there.

    Henry was to be honored by being inducted into the Newcomen Society. He sent me an invitation. I flew to Jackson and attended the ceremony in the conference room of a hotel. Henry gave a remarkable speech about his and his father's company, and then I wandered around, talking with people.

    A man approached me and introduced himself as the Frito-Lay sales manager. I told him who I was, and he said he knew who I was. We chatted a little while, then he asked me how Golden Flake pork skins were selling? I was startled, because our pork skins were leaping off the racks and there was no explanation for it.

    I told him that. He said their pork skins were doing the same, which surprised me, because Golden Flake pork skins tasted better and far out-sold Frito-Lay pork skins where Golden Flake was dominant.

    The fellow said Frito-Lay did market research to see if there was a reason for the jump in pork skin sales. There was a reason. A Dr. Atkins had written a book about a low  carbohydrate fast weight loss diet. His book was leaping off book store shelves. One of the snacks he had recommended for his diet was pork skins. 

    No shit?

    No shit.

    When I reported that at the next Monday morning management meeting, it was like I had accused them of having sex with Frito-Lay route salesmen. No way a doctor's book had anything to do with it! We just had great pork skins!

    I said, well, Frito-Lay doesn't have great pork skins and theirs are leaping off the shelves, too. 

    No way, the Frito-Lay man lied, came back at me. 

    I wondered why the fuck would the Frito-Lay guy lie? And, why else would Golden Flake skins suddenly be leaping off the shelves for no obvious reason?

    In management's defense, I was a mess. My marriage was falling apart. I clearly was unhappy and stressed out. But through all of that, my mind seemed not entirely to have taken leave of its senses at Golden Flake.

    While talking with my father in his office one morning, he raised the topic of marijuana being a terrible thing, I said, I used it sometimes, and it wasn't a terrible thing, He said, that was what was wrong with me. 

    I said, not hardly. Marijuana's no more terrible than booze. For example, the screwdriver you drink driving to work every morning, and you leave the cup in the holder beside your window of the car in your private parking place, and you leave the window down, and every Golden Flake employee who passes your car smells the vodka. 

    My father said, that's just an eye-opener. I said, vodka is a drug, just like marijuana is a drug. He said vodka isn't a drug. I said, yes, it's a drug. 

    We never discussed marijuana again, but many years later, I would hear that he and his friends smoked it down at his home in Islamorada.

    That aside, we decided to open sales routes in Atlanta, about 140 miles east of Birmingham.

    Atlanta had been the Lay's Potato Chip Company headquarters. Lay's potato chips had not done all that well in Birmingham, but with Fritos, Lay's was a formidable competitor. After Lay's and Fritos merged into Frito-Lay, they were an even more formidable competitor. 

    Now it was Golden Flake's turn.

    Golden Flake already had sales routes almost to Atlanta

    The next logical step was ... Hot Lanta!

    The sales manager decided we needed a hot shot Atlanta advertising agency to help Golden Flake enter the Atlanta market. He found one, its name now escapes me, and we drove over to Atlanta to meet them.

    They seemed to fall in love with me. Like, where did this guy come from? How could he be working at Golden Flake? I liked them, too. 

    Until...

    They told us that Golden Flake's packaging was way out of date, and for us to enter the Atlanta market, we needed to have modern (fancy) packaging. 

    I thought that was dumber than dirt. 

    I thought an advertising agency was supposed to take the client where it found it, study the client and the market, and come up with something new, like Frank Taylor had repeatedly done, to cause more sales for Golden Flake.

    I told the new ad agency that Frito-Lay had tested marketed new packaging in Louisiana and Mississippi and had not liked the result. I said changing our packaging was not on the table. The sales manager agreed. The ad agency guys looked like their balloons were popped.

    They came back with another pitch. A Golden Flake Gobble Monster, like something from Sesame Street, would gobble whole packages of Golden Flake products in commercials on Atlanta television stations.

    Actually, this was an oblique attempt to get us to change our packaging, but they didn't pitch it that way.

    I drove the first Golden Flake route truck to Golden Flake's newly-rented warehouse in Atlanta. The truck was stuffed with metal sales racks, which new route salesmen would need to put Golden Flake products into smaller outlets. The grocery and convenience store chains had their own shelving.

    Before going to the warehouse, I drove the route truck to the Frito-Lay plant and circled through the parking lot out front, to fire a shot across their bow.

    The road traffic inside Atlanta was horrible even back then.

    Back in Birmingham, I said at the next Monday morning management meeting, that Atlanta road traffic was horrible.  

    Golden Flake required all its route salesmen to go to their warehouse every evening, before going home. 

    Golden Flake used 10-foot route trucks. Frito-Lay, Toms and Lance used 12-foot and 14-foot route trucks.

    I said, enduring Atlanta drive time road traffic 5 days a week to get to their warehouse is too much to ask of new Golden Flake route salesmen. They will tire of that and quit. We will be spinning our wheels over losing route salesmen. With 12-foot trucks, our route salesmen in Atlanta can get by with going to our central warehouse 2-3 times a week.

    That went over about as well as my saying management was having sex with Frito-Lay route sales men.

    I wondered how they did not see the obvious?

    About two weeks passed. I was in the assistant sales manager's office. On his desk was a requisition order for 12-foot route trucks. I asked what that was about? He said, for Atlanta. I said, but you and the others said that wasn't going to happen. He said, we always planned to use 12-foot route trucks in Atlanta.

    Chi, Ching. 

    A few days later, I went to my father's home and told him that I was sorry, but it wasn't working for me to be at Golden Flake, and I was going to resign. I didn't say, if I don't leave, I am pretty sure I will die.

    My father was not happy.

    The Atlanta advertising agency went into apoplexy and tried to talk me out of it.

    Long-time plant employees came into my office at Golden Flake, crying, begging me not to leave. 

    The Mississippi regional sales manager called me long distance, begging me not to leave. He said I was the only reason he was still with the company. 

    I told them that I was sorry, but I had to leave.

    One of the Birmingham management team came to my office and said he understood why I was leaving. I said perhaps he should leave, too.

    He had been watching and listening. He was really smart, but he had many years invested in Golden Flake, and deep down he hoped to run it some day. But he never would.

    I found a local law firm that agreed to take me on. The lawyers were from across the tracks. They cared nothing for Mt. Brook.

    The Atlanta advertising agency gave me a going away party and a Mickey Mouse pocket watch, on the back of which was engraved, "To Sloan Bashinsky on his retirement at age 33."

    Some time passed.

    My father called me about joining him and Golden Flake management and the Atlanta advertising agency for lunch at a popular Chinese restaurant in downtown Birmingham. The ad agency was going to present its Atlanta advertising program. My father said he needed to know my thoughts. I said, sure.

    The ad agency tried to wow us with its ads for Republic Airways, which had been Southern Airways. Republic had only one class of seats, whereas other airlines had first class and economy.

    Republic TV ads depicted other airlines' economy passengers as chickens stuffed in the back of an airplane, while people in first class were treated like royalty by pretty female flight attendants.

    I said, the problem with Republic's ads is, Republic treats all of its passengers like chickens. And, nobody knows when, or if, a Republic flight will even take off, and if it does take off, when it will arrive at its destination. 

    The ad agency said, yes, there are some problems with the client. I said the problem is, you ignored what the client is and does to its passengers. And, you are doing the same thing with your Golden Flake.

    Golden Flake went with the gobble monster gobbling heaps of bags of Golden Flake products on Atlanta TV stations for quite a while. Which cost Golden Flake a lot of money. 

    Then, the Atlanta ad agency did some market research, to see how the gobble monster was doing. Most of the people surveyed were familiar with the gobble monster, but they could not remember what it gobbled.

    Over lunch on a later day, my father asked me if the senior partner in my law firm was the son of the guy with all those funny ideas at the University of Alabama Medical School in Birmingham?

    The guy with the funny ideas was the dean of the medical school, who had grown it into a huge medical complex that had caused the University of Alabama in Birmingham to expand into the city's largest employer.

    I replied to my father, something like, the guy with all those funny ideas made the University of Alabama in Birmingham Golden Flake's largest Birmingham customer.

    Many years later, after I had stopped practicing law and was starting to write books, I took it upon myself to go into several Birmingham grocery stores and look at the Frito-Lay display. Specifically, I went to look at Doritos and Tostitos. Doritos were triangle shaped and Tostitos were round shaped. Otherwise, they were pretty much the same product.

    Golden Flake had decided to only make a round tortilla chip, which was selling pretty well. However, the Frito-Lay route salesmen servicing the grocery stores I surveyed, were giving Doritos 5-times more shelf facings than they were giving Tostitos. 

    I wrote up a memo to Golden Flake management, reporting what I had seen in the local grocery stores. I said Golden Flake was doing a really good job promoting and selling round tortilla chips, but the real money (market), according to the Frito-Lay displays, was in the triangle-shaped tortilla chips, and perhaps that should add that to Golden Flake's product line.

    They thanked me, and then they added a triangle-shaped tortilla chip to the product line.

    My father came to Golden Flake after his father and his father's brother-in-law bought it. 

    I almost was born into Golden Flake, and yet it was a long time before I knew how that actually came about.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you

    Sometimes when I get involved in something, or something gets me involved in it, I become aware that what is really going on is the "transaction" is a probe, and the point of the probe is to see what comes back in response. 

    The spirit world, or if you wish, angels, watch such things, even if human beings don't. What the angels do with what they see is above my pay grade. My job, although perhaps not so much as in past times, is to engage what comes my way, in ways angels trained me, and then I try to get out of the way.

    Alas, it is impossible to get all of the way out of the way when I am writing about what is in the way, and I am part of it. For example, this unfolding book, about which I dream during naps and after I turn in at night and go to sleep. Two close friends  also dream about this book, and report their dreams to me. 

    We know this book is ... different. 

    We know it will not please many people, if they read it, or only some of it. 

    We know there are forces behind the scenes - ghosts, souls, spirits, whatever - that do not care for this book.

    We sometimes feel those forces' displeasure in our dreams,  psyches, minds, emotions, bodies. 

    We understand, if I don't write this book the way it needs to be written, which has nothing to do with what other people, society, religions, etc. might or might not think, then I will pay dearly for it.

    I will pay dearly, because what needed to get out of me, stayed inside of me, and it kept poisoning me, as it had poisoned me for decades, and I am the victim of my own faltering hand and spirit. If you view that as New Age psychobabble, consider:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

– Gospel of Thomas, verse 70

    So, sallying forth again into where perhaps even angels fear to tread ...

    The law firm I joined after leaving Golden Flake was located in the City Federal Building at the intersection of 21st Street and 3rd Avenue North. 

    The firm had three lawyers. They took in another lawyer and me at the same time. 

    Right away, I made what, in retrospect, was a BIG MISTAKE.

    Golden Flake's holding company, Golden Enterprises, had acquired a real estate/mortgage company owned by very good friends of my father. The company had a large residential real estate sales force and a mortgage originating department, which "sold" new residential mortgage loans to secondary investors.

    As a new lawyer, I had no clients. No legal fees were coming in. I signed up for court appointments in criminal cases and joined the Birmingham Bar Association's Lawyer Referral Service. I hustled clients away from the law office, such as in bars, after work.

    However, the easy way was to get the real estate/mortgage company to send me residential real estate sales and mortgage loans to close. I chose the easy way, because I felt I needed to do something to bring in legal fees and carry my financial weight in the law firm.

    I went to the real estate/mortgage company and talked with the owners, who knew me very well. I met their sales manager and their mortgage loan originating officer. They started sending me some of their real estate and mortgage loan closings, and I was generating revenue for the law firm.

    I also handled other kinds of cases: criminal, wills, contracts, divorce and child custody. I felt like a lawyer when I handled those cases. I felt like a clerk, or a cop out, or a whore, when I handed referrals from the real estate/mortgage firm.

    I didn't have much money. Dianne and I were headed toward a divorce, which my senior law partner would handle. We had two young daughters. My father's father had set up a trust for each of his grandchildren, and I was getting the income from that. I gave the trust income to Dianne as child support under our divorce settlement agreement. I think it was about $1,300 per month, which was a lot of money back then.

    I was drawing enough money from the law firm each week to pay my rent, groceries, beer, meals out, car maintenance, etc., and to make deposits into a City Federal savings account. I had not made enough money before that, to save some of it. That felt good.

    My father's father had leukemia and didn't have much longer to live. I went to see him in the hospital, where my daughters were born, and where an internist friend of my father's doctor brother Leo saved my life at age 21.

    I was running a Golden Flake salesman's route in Shelby County, below Birmingham, while he was on vacation. I ate in a restaurant that carried Golden Flake products. I got infected with dysentery and was throwing up and shitting all over myself, before going to the hospital.

    My father was out of town on business. He called my hospital room when my mother was there. She answered the phone and told him what was going on and handed me the phone. My father said, "That's a really interesting way to get out of work." My mother let him know that didn't sit well with her.

    If I'd had any sense, or any wits about me, perhaps I would have taken the dysentery and my father's reaction to it as a sign from God that I was not supposed to be working for my father? 

    Hello?

    Many years later, I am in the same hospital visiting my grandfather, whose wife had caused me, my mother and my father so much trouble during World War II, and who had bought Golden Flake and made my father a junior partner.

    My grandfather says he isn't feeling too well, and I say I'm sorry. He asks me if I have anything to say to him? Looking down, not caring for that question, I say, no. He stares at me. I leave soon after that. He dies a few days later.

    In his last will and testament, he left each of his grandchildren $300,000 cash, as I recall the amount. That was a lot of money back then. My money struggles were over. Yet, something nagged the back of my mind, that I should put the inheritance away and not rely on it. I should try to make it on my own.

    Then, my grandfather's wife died, and each grandchild received about $200,000 cash, as I recall. The same nagging returned, and I ignored it again. Over the years, I sometimes wondered how my life might have gone, if I had tucked those inheritances away and tried to make my own way? 

    When my father was in his teens, an uncle died and left him and his brother Leo $8,000 each, as I recall the amount. Their father's Troy childhood friend, Frank Samford, bought Liberty National Life Insurance Company out of bankruptcy somewhere up north, and brought the company to Birmingham..

    Samford made my grandfather an outside director of Liberty National, which began to do well. My father and Leo invested the cash inheritance from their deceased uncle into Liberty National common stock, which was traded over the counter. Liberty National kept doing well, and its common stock kept rising and being split. Liberty National stock made my grandfather and his sons very rich for that day and age.

    Leo became a pediatrician, and half of his babies belonged to Mt. Brook families, who had money and could pay. The other half of Leo's families lived in Birmingham, where his doctor's office was. They were working people, who didn't have much money. Some were poor. They were Negroes, Italians, Greeks, and Lebanese. Some of them paid Leo with garden vegetables and home-cooked cakes and pies. If they couldn't pay, Leo treated their kids anyway. 

    He made house calls every day and even at night. He was a real doctor, and he was a healer. His kids often got well simply because he was their doctor. Most mother's feared or didn't like Leo, because he didn't put up with their commotion. Their babies loved him. 

    Leo relied on his inheritance to enable him to be that kind of baby doctor.

    My father earned his own way at Golden Flake and in the stock market, and later in oil and gas exploration. He sometimes used his Liberty National common stock as collateral for loans, such as to buy Golden Flake from his father and his father's brother-in-law. But, he didn't sell any of his Liberty National stock.

    When I was a boy, I asked my mother why Dr. Leo was not my father, because he loved to fish, and I loved to fish, but my father did not care about fishing? My mother said she did not know why. Later, she told me that I had really hurt my father's feelings. How'd I hurt his feelings, when I didn't say it to him and it was the God's awful truth?

    So, I had two father figures in my youth. Two very different male role models. 

    Looking back at all of that, I wonder if there was something else in play when my Bashinsky grandfather and grandmother died? 

    I did not then have a clue what my son's gift was to break me loose from all my family programming, outlooks, beliefs, etc. 

    My gut distress was ever with me when I practiced law. It affected my moods. It did not let up. 

    I took on two major federal court litigation cases, for underdogs. I felt God and the law and the facts were on my clients' side, but the judges ruled otherwise. Losing those two cases broke my spirit and killed my yearning to be a trial lawyer, instead of what I was.

    As the years passed, and I slowly and painfully realized I had a good legal mind, but maybe I was not going to make it as a practicing lawyer, those inheritances kept me going. 

    Interest rates went straight up and killed the residential real estate market. I no longer was making money as a real estate lawyer.

    The University of Alabama School of Law offered a Masters in Taxation program, which was taught part time for two years in Birmingham. I did that, hoping it would breathe life into my law practice.

    Probably nothing was going to do that, but I kept trying, and trying.

    The bank trustees for my grandfather's trust screwed up an investment. I called them on it and they did not like it. They had me meet with a woman in-house lawyer I had known from a small experimental church in Birmingham, called The Church of the Transfiguration, or simply, Trans Fig, and a male in-house lawyer I knew somewhat. In house meant, they worked in the bank, for the bank,.

    The male lawyer, who had never been roughed up by practicing law, tried  to play like he was a real lawyer. He argued that I was a seasoned investor, able to do my own research and make my own evaluation of the security the bank trust department had highly recommended for the trust. 

    I told the lady lawyer to get rid of the male lawyer. After he was gone, I suggested the bank take the loss, since it had made the mistake. And, if the bank wanted to be rid of me, then distribute the trust securities to me and we part ways. The bank agreed to that, and I got all the trust assets, worth about 900,000, as I recall. Most of it was greatly- appreciated Liberty National common stock.

    I lived comfortably, but not extravagantly. 

    I closed my law practice and wrote my first book, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter? I found a small local book producer, who had a very talented artist daughter. He formatted the manuscript, and she drew the wicked cartoons of sheep and wolves I saw in my mind's eye, for the front jacket of the book and for each interior chapter.

    The book wasn't long and was published as a saddle-stitched pamphlet. I got some traction with it at magazines that catered to public protection, such as Mother Earth News. Nader's Raiders gave it a nice kudos. I was selling it by mail. Sales were not brisk.

    A fellow moved to Birmingham, who was a white water paddler. As was I. He said he'd heard I wrote books. I said I wrote one book. He said he worked for a publisher in North Carolina, and he wanted to see my book. I gave him a copy. He said they wanted to republish it, if I expanded the content. I said, okay.

    He assigned an editor to me. She turned me every which-a-way but loose, upside down and inside out, in a good way. I was grateful for her help, even if my ego was black and blue. 

    Menasha Ridge Press republished HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter? in hardcover. 

    I hired a publicist in Birmingham to promote the book. She arranged in-person media interviews in Birmingham, Alabama, Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee, Louisville, Kentucky, Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia. (In hindsight, that was stupid, (because we did not have bookstore distribution.)

    The media interviews went great. During call-in radio shows, the statIon telephones never stopped ringing. 

    My white water padding friend was disturbed that the publisher and I had jumped the publicity gun. 

    That disturbance got greater after I was invited to be interviewed by Jane Pauly on the Today show. All of a sudden, I was known all over America. But there were no books in bookstores.

    Menasha asked me to write a book for home sellers, which I did. SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME. It also got me lots of media attention, but there were no books in the bookstores.

    Menasha asked me to write a book about lawyers and clients, which I started on.

    At that point, Menasha presented my writings to the New York publishing house Simon & Schuster, which agreed to take the two real estate books, and was amenable to taking the lawyer-client book, after I finished writing it.

    I finished writing Kill ALL THE LAWYER? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing and Using Lawyers. Simon & Schuster accepted the manuscript. I went to New York City to meet them. They didn't care for the title, but liked the material, which killed some but not all the lawyers, and did feature some clients no lawyer would ever want to represent.

    Simon & Schuster acquired Prentice Hall, which published legal books for lawyers. Simon & Schuster transferred my books to Prentice-Hall, which published Kill All the Lawyers?

    The co-owner of a very respected Birmingham bookstore told me it was better to have no publisher, than to have Prentice-Hall.

    Simon & Schuster was acquired by another company. 

    It was all a big mess.

    I was being interviewed by a lot of media, including in-station at CNN in Atlanta and Los Angeles, CBS Morning Show in New York, RKO in New York, and lots of radio. The Birmingham Post-Herald gave KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? a rave review. But there were no books in bookstores.

    My father had told me that a lot of people were upset about my books. I said I knew that, and I asked him how he felt? He said he told them that it looked to him that all I had done was tell the truth.

    Another time, my father had complained about how much a flats fishing guide in Islamorada was charging. Rick Ruff was a good friend of mine. I fished with him whenever I could. He was booked solid. He was educated. He was a marine biologist and President of the local Sierra Club. He testified before the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee, regarding pollution of Florida Bay and Florida Keys waters. 

    Flats guides in Islamorada charged the same rate. At that time. $200 a day. When I first fished with flats guides, they charged $40 a day. I told my father, "Rick charges $200 a day, which is $25 an hour. I charge my clients $75 an hour, and Rick's a hell of a lot better fishing guide than I am a lawyer." I did not tell my father that Rick had told me that my father was the only client he had ever fired.

    Looking back on all of that, I dunno whether I jinxed myself and the books, by spending a lot of money on publicity for the books and their author, who very much hoped the books would make him rich like his father, as well as famous? 

    Or, was I supposed to take away from how all of that went, that I was not supposed to be like my father at all? I was not supposed to be a capitalist, but an artist, a creator, whose instrument was my pen. I was supposed to write as if my very life and soul depended on it?

    What do you think I was supposed to make of the first two poems that fell out of me a few years later?

Living Poets (1991)

 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets never stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

The Mockingbird (1992)

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing his fool head off.

I asked him how and why he sang?

But all he did was look ahead,

all he did was sing.

He never turned to see if I was watching,

Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

Or asked if I liked his music,

Or expected a recording contract.

He was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

In this way I learned

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird

Enter the Golden Flake Clown’s Stepmother

I think it was after I closed my law practice for good in late 1985 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to plunge into the New Age and attend massage school and, hopefully, restart my life, that I heard about parallel universes, which seemed quite the rage for some people.

    Looking back to that time, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that my law practice straddled parallel universes, in one of which the truth and the facts were really important. In the other universe, the very opposite was true, and that universe seemed to have the upper hand.

    There was yet a third universe parallel to those two, in which I also practiced law and was paid in grief. That was the universe of my father and his second wife, Joann Linder of Nashville.

    When I was a boy, my mother told me that she had smoked 2 packs of Pall Malls a day, since she was 15, to rebel against her parents. Her bedroom and car smelled like cigarette smoke, and I imagine that is why I never smoked even one cigarette.

    When I was 14, my mother, with the help of an architect and a building contractor, started building her dream home in a remote area of south Mt. Brook. My father paid for it, but the title was in her name.

    My mother died in early 1967, during my 2nd semester of law school. Discovered late, the cancer had started in her lungs and spread, and there was nothing that could be done.

    My mother's last will and testament left her home and all its furnishings to her three children, and gave my father the right to live in the home for the rest of his life, which is called a life estate.

    In 1968, my father announced he wanted to marry a woman he had met in Nashville, Tennessee. My younger brother, Major, was very opposed to the marriage. My father asked me what I thought? 

    I asked him if he loved Joann and wanted to live out his days with her? He said, yes. I said, then I was okay with him marrying her, and it was his life or decision, and not Major's. My father thanked me and asked if I would be his best man? I said, sure.

    Major moved to California. I carried Joann's wedding ring when she and my father were married at Mountain Brook Baptist Church. (20 years later, Major told me that he moved to . California, because our father was seeing Joann during our mother's last illness.) 

    I heard stories from people who ought to know that Joann thought she was hot stuff for marrying the owner of Golden Flake, and she alienated the wives of my father's friends, all of whom had loved my mother. 

    Sometimes when I visited my father and Joann, they said a goodwill truck had come and carted off some of my mother's furnishings. Major was hearing the same thing separately, and he told his father it really upset him, because those things being given away belonged to him, me and our sister. 

    My father got upset, and Joann got really upset.

    By and by, my father told Major and me that a meeting had been arranged at his accountants' office, where a proposal would be made to buy our mother's home from us. 

    At the meeting, my father's attorney, John McKleroy, a law school classmate of mine, proposed that our father prepay three $100,000 insurance policies on his life, and give Major, me and our sister each a policy, and we deed our mother's home to my father and Joann.

    My sister was not there. 

    Major and I said we'd like to think about it and we'd get back to them. 

    I then came up with the idea that we deed the home to our father and Joann, in exchange forJoann agreeing in writing not to alter our father's estate plan, whatever it was, for we did not know. Major said he liked my idea. 

    When we met with our father, McKleroy and the accountant firm and presented our counter proposal, they seemed jolted and McKleroy said they'd have to think about it. I wondered what was to think about? We offered to give my father and Joann our mother's home for free.

    Later, my father told me that Joann got really mad, and he didn't think she would change his estate plan, about which I still knew nothing. That made no sense to me, unless Joann had something up her sleeve, but I didn't say that. There was no point. The deal was off.

    Not long after that, my father and Joann went down to Islamorada, and they invited Major and our wives to join them. Our wives went first, and they called us to tell us to get down there, because they were being given a hard time by my father and Joann. So, we flew down there the next day, as I recall.

    We all went out to dinner at a very good restaurant in Islamorada, called The Conch, which I suppose had a 5-star rating. My father was well into the sauce. The conversation turned uncomfortable. Major and I and our father went outside. My father was still carrying on. Major told him that he'd had a lot to drink. My father asked Major if he was accusing him of being drunk?  Major repeated what he had said.

    I think Major and I and our wives left for Alabama the next day.

    It was difficult enough dealing with sensitive family stuff. It was impossible dealing with someone under the influence of alcohol all the time, which our father was.

    Joann was into the sauce, too. Until, she was getting out of her car in the garage at home, and she slipped and fell under the car, and it was rolling backward toward her, and she saw the Devil causing her car to try to kill her, and when she wasn't killed, it had to have been Jesus or God that saved her, and in that moment she was born again and gave up drinking. 

    I heard that from her and from my father.

    My father kept drinking. Until, he fell in his bar and cracked his hip bone and was taken to the nearest hospital. A day or so later, he went into alcohol withdrawal and was transferred to the hospital's drug rehab unit, where he went into the worst case of DTs they had ever seen at that hospital.

    My second wife Jane heard about that from my father's brother Leo, the pediatrician, who went to see my father, and Joann tried to block him, and he walked right past her, saying he had come to see his brother. 

    Jane and I then went to see my father. Joann looked distressed to see us. I said we needed to put the past aside, and she said okay. 

    My father didn't seem to know we were there. He was talking to something he could see above him, l but we could not see it. We stayed a while, then left. 

    The rehab unit dried my father out, and he stopped drinking for a good while. Then, he started backsliding. 

    The next upheaval regarding Joann occurred during a Thanksgiving Day gathering at the home of the parents of Major's wife.

    Jane came to me after dinner and said she had overheard Joann say it wasn't right that her grandson Landon by her daughter Suzanne could not be with her over the Christmas holidays. She just knew God wanted Landon to be with his grandmother over Christmas!

    My father had legally adopted Suzanne after marrying Joann. Suzanne was a year older than my sister, and all four of them lived in my mother's home. 

    Suzanne was a physically beautiful young woman. When she was 19, she came to my home to ask for my advice. Her boyfriend's job was moving him to Colorado and he wanted her to go with him. I asked Suzanne if she loved him, and she said yes, very much. Did she want to live out her life with him? Yes. I said her mother and my father were against her moving to Colorado? Yes. I said I had let my father and his father talk me out of moving away and I wished I had not. Maybe you should go to Colorado and if it doesn't work out, come back to Alabama. Suzanne thanked me and said she was moving to Colorado. 

    But she didn't.

    She met a man named Ed Ash, who was not from Mt. Brook. They got married and had Landon. Ed seemed like a decent person to me. By the time I met him, Suzanne looked like she weighed 250 pounds.

    By and by, Suzanne and Ed separated and were getting divorced. I heard that Suzanne, Joann, my father and his law firm were trying to persuade Ed to sell Landon to them. In exchange for Ed giving up all his parental rights  I called Ed and told him what I had heard and I hoped he wouldn't go along with it. He said no way was he going along with it.

    According to Ed, under his and Suzanne's divorce agreement, which the court had approved, they were to take turns having Landon during holidays. Suzanne had Landon with her at the Thanksgiving dinner. That Christmas, Landon was supposed to be with Ed. 

    I called Ed the next day and told him what Jane had told me, and that he might wish to try to head it off.

    On Christmas Eve night, Ed called me. He was not able to pick up Landon. He was not able to reach Suzanne on the telephone. He called my father's home several times and the line was busy every time. I said I would see what I could do.

    I called my father's home and the line was busy. I drove to his home and entered through the garage into the kitchen. The phone in the kitchen was off the hook. I heard Joann, Suzanne and Landon in the playroom. In the past, I saw Joann and Suzanne in the play room, watching Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker's televangelist show.

    I walked through the house to the den where my father liked to hang out. He was sitting on his chaise lounge. I told him why I had come. He shrugged.

    I said Joann and Suzanne were violating a court order. 

    He said, all he knew was that London was happy with them. 

    I said, even so, there is a court order, and Ed is supposed to have Landon for Christmas.. 

    My father shrugged. 

    I said, "That's asshole." My father shrugged. I said, "I can't be here tomorrow for family Christmas, knowing what is going on." 

    I left and drove home. 

    I called Ed and told him what had happened. He asked me what he should do? I said, get a good lawyer. He said he didn't know any lawyers. I gave him a name of a tough divorce and child custody lawyer I had gone up against in the worst child custody case I had handled.

    The next day, my father came to my home and gave Jane and me our Christmas presents. He said I had ruined his and Joann's Christmas. 

    What about Ed Ash's Christmas?

    Ed's lawyer called me. I told him everything I knew. 

    I then wrote it all up into a memo, in which I said Jane and I were willing to testify in court. 

    I gave Ed's lawyer a copy.

    John McKleroy's law firm represented Suzanne. As far as I knew, that firm had never handled a divorce or child custody case. I was astounded they were even involved in the case.

    That all changed after I gave them my memo and Ed's lawyer filed suit against Suzanne in Domestic Relations Court. 

    My father hired Suzanne a lawyer that practiced domestic relations law. I knew him. He was a good lawyer. I mailed him a copy of my memo to make sure he knew what was in it. I didn't hear back from him.

    By and by, Ed's lawyer told me that Suzanne's lawyer was stonewalling, which I thought was bizarre, because Jane and I were Ed's star witnesses. 

    I also thought it was ludicrous, because Ed's visitation rights were crystal clear in his and Suzanne's divorce agreement, which they had both signed, and it had been approved by a domestic relations court judge and made part of their divorce agreement. 

    I told Ed's lawyer how to get Suzanne, Joann and my father to stop stonewalling: subpoena my father and Joann to the trial. Ed's lawyer said he would do that. 

    The next time I saw Ed's lawyer, he said my idea had worked. When my father and Joann were served with the subpoenas, the case (which never should have happened) was settled in Ed's favor.

    Ed was from across the tracks. He seemed decent, hardworking and a good father. He was up against a prominent, very rich Mt. Brook family. I had great respect for him, and was embarrassed to be my father's son.

    I'm pretty sure what I told in this chapter had a great deal to do with my father having John McKleroy change his estate plan, so that, hopefully, after he passed on, there would be no legal squabbles between his natural children and their children, on the one hand, and Joann, Suzanne and Landon, on the other hand.

    About graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, John McKleory and I again were classmates in a masters in taxation plan that law school taught in Birmingham twice a week for two years.

    Briefly, John set up a family holding company, into which my father transferred all of his Golden Enterprises common stock and other common stocks in which he had invested. Those securities had appreciated greatly over the years. Dividends on those securities were paid to SYB, Inc.

    Parallel, John McKlroyy created the SYB Common Stock Trust, which received the SYB, Inc. common stock. The trust beneficiaries were my father's natural children and Suzanne. 

    That was called an "Estate tax freeze" trust.

    My father paid the gift taxes due when the SYB, Inc. common stock was transferred to the family trust. Any subsequent appreciation in SYB, Inc. common stock would escape the federal estate and gift tax. 

    SYB, Inc.'s income was paid to the preferred stockholder, my father, while he was alive, and then to Joann, 40%, and 60% to the Marital Trust in my father's Last Will and Testament, if Joann outlived my father. No dividends were paid on SYB, Inc. common stock to the common stock trust, because SYB, Inc. didn't have enough income to pay all that was due on the preferred stock.

    Upon the latter of my father's death, Golden Flake being sold, or December 30, 2020, SYB, Inc. would be dissolved and its assets paid over to the common stock trust, which would be dissolved and its distributed in equal shares to my father's 4 children, my brother and sister, Suzanne and me (or our surviving children). 

    When John McKleroy set all of that up, the distribution from SYB, Inc. to the common stock trust was a non-taxable event under the Internal Revenue Code.

    That looked to sometimes tax lawyer me like a nice, neat, polite, orderly, seamless plan, and I wrote McKleroy a letter saying I thought it was a good arrangement.

The Golden Flake Clown lived of and on the street

    I was mostly homeless starting 2000 and going into 2005, because I gave a lot of money to my third wife and her son, when she and I broke up in 1995 ...

    Pressed by angels in my dreams, in 2003, I legally changed my name back to Sloan Young Bashinsky, Jr.

    My father died in late August 2005, when I was just barely not living on the street. In his Last Will and Testament, each my father's four children were to receive $1,000,000 cash. 

    I moved to Birmingham, and stayed in the home of friends. Johan McKleroy gave me a copy of my father's will, and I gave it to a lawyer buddy, read the will and told me there was a codicil (amendment) dated maybe a little under year before my father died. The codicil Joann $14,000,000 cash. 

    I told my lawyer friend that I thought my father had been an invalid for several years with round the clock in home care, mostly due to spinal degeneration, which caused a lot of pain, which was eased by a morphine pump.

    My lawyer friend said the codicil didn't smell right to him. I said it didn't smell right to me, either. 

    My father had left Joann a ton of money in the Marital Trust of his will, and when he died, she stepped into his shoes to receive SYB, Inc.'s considerable preferred stock dividends. 

    I thought my lawyer friend was just itching to challenge the codicil on the grounds of drug impairment and undue influence.

    My father came to me in a dream and said he had not had time to take care of everything he wanted to take care of. I woke up, thinking it was just like him, to make up a lame excuse, and in that way hint I should do something about the codicil.

    I stood to gain nothing from challenging the codicil. If it was voided by a court, the $14,000,000 would still be in my father's estate, and all I would get was $1,000,000. 

    I sent Joann an email, in which I pointed out that she was well provided for by my father, and his grandchildren had inherited nothing under his will. I asked Joann to give the $14,000,000 to my father's grandchildren and to Travis, equally. Joann blocked me from her email.

    Oh, well. I had tried.

    John McKleroy gave me a check for $1,000,000 on February 14, 2006- Valentine's Day. 

    I gave $200,000 to a good woman friend, who was dirt poor and had been my spirit friend since early 2005, when we met quite by accident. I bought a car and went back to the Florida Keys, and rented a trailer on Little Torch Key, which I then bought and paid way too much for it.

    I got deeply involved in Florida Keys and Key West politics, ran for county commission and then mayor of Key West, and then county commission again. That was costing some money, but I was not living extravagantly.

    My woman friend blew through what I had given her, and I was giving her more money. I made hefty donations to a family in dire need and to an outfit trying to slow down real estate development on the Florida mainland. I was the only candidate for public office in the Florida Keys trying to put Mother Nature ahead of the invasive species, humans.

    I moved back to Key West for three years, and kept running forf office. Then, I moved back to the trailer, and kept running for office. It looked nuts, I suppose, to other people, but angels were pushing to keep running for office, and to keep writing on blogs I had created: goodmorningfloridakeys.com and goomorningkeywest.com, which enjoyed a good local following.

    By 2014, I was running low on money. In a dream, my father  said his time table was different from mine. The bottom had dropped completely out of the real estate market, and I sold my land and the trailer at about a $250,000 loss. I walked away with $90,000. I gave my friend $20,000. Later, I gave my friend more money.

    I rented a room in a home in Key West, where I had rented rooms in the past. 

    I sold my car. 

    By 2016, except for a little over $800 per month Social Security benefits, I was out of money.

Excerpt from my blog, goodmorningkeywest.com (which died the next year and went somewhere):

Text of email from me to John McKleroy, attorney for my father’s estate and business affairs; John and I attended law school and tax law school together at the University of Alabama:

7/4/2016

Good afternoon, John –

Hope all okay with you.

I know you probably cannot comment on what follows.

A while back, I started receiving inquires re GE (Golden Enterprises) stock price rising. I said I knew nothing that might explain it, which was true, other than it looked to me someone was taking a position in GE common stock for reasons unknown, because the company’s profits are not going up to explain the common stock price increase.

Inquires continued coming to me, as GE common stock price kept rising, and I gave same response.

I did from time to time speak with former GF (Golden Flake) employees, who said they did not know why GE common stock price was rising.

After yet another inquiry this past Friday, re GF common stock being over $7 a share, a huge rise, relatively, since the first of the year, I called the same former GF employees. Here’s what they said they had heard on the GF grapevine (from inside GF, rank and file employees).

3 companies, Snyder, Mexico Coke and Utz, were negotiating for GE. Mexico Coke pulled out. Snyder missed the cut, got bent out of shape and stopped selling its pretzels to GF. The apparent winner Utz is trying to get more information about GF’s deals with its customers and is having trouble getting that information because GF recordkeeping not all that good. Closing expected next month. Buy out price, $16 per share GE common stock. Mark McCutcheon has negotiated a golden parachute for himself.

I told the former GF employees this is all handed down, and who knows what really is going on? However, I said, I did not think someone trying to buy GE, thus GF, would be taking a position in its common stock before the purchase, because that would be costly if the purchase did not go through. Rather, I think GE common stock price rise is due to insider trading, or insider information being leaked to people not working for GF/GE. I told the former GF employees, if they buy GF common stock now, they will be viewed as insiders doing insider trading, and they could go to prison, so don’t buy GF common stock now, and don’t tell relatives and friends to buy it.

I own no GE common stock, nor any interest in GE/GF, other than provided in my father’s estate plan. I will not be buying GE common stock. I am not telling anyone to buy it.

I suppose the GE Board of Directors needs to be apprised of what I wrote above, in case it is not old news to them.

Thanks,

Sloan

Backstory, not shared with John McKleroy:

About a month ago, my father came to me in a dream and looked me in the eye and shook my hand, and he came to me in a dream about a week ago and told me he would settle in full with me in 4 1/2 years, and I needed to talk to Joann (his 2nd wife, widow). SYB Common Stock Trust, holding stock in SYB, Inc. Common Stock Fund, which owns Golden Enterprises and other common stocks, terminates December 31, 2020, 4 1/2 years from now. Not clear yet what talking with Joann means. She is my father’s widow, his 2nd wife.

Text of John McKleory’s email to me 9 July, 2016, about Utz Snack Foods Company of Pennsylvania agreeing to buy my father’s snack foods company for $135 million; my father’s estate owns slightly over 50 percent of the Golden Enterprises common stock Utz is buying, for cash:

Sloan:

I hope you are doing well.

Attached you will find a copy of a Press Release concerning the merger of Golden Enterprises (Golden Flake) with Utz Quality Foods, Inc. of Hanover, Pennsylvania.

A Special Committee of the Board of Directors of GE consisting of Independent Directors, along with their engaged financial advisors and outside legal counsel, have been working on this matter for some time.

The Special Committee, its financial advisors and outside counsel, along with the Board of Directors of GE, believe this merger is in the best interest of the Company, its stockholders and employees.

This transaction will not affect your distribution from your father’s Marital Trust (at Joann’s death) or your distribution of one-fourth of the Common Stock of SYB, Inc.  This transaction will create more investment liquidity for SYB, Inc.

I am working on the other questions you recently put to me concerning SYB, Inc. and should have a response to you in the next few days.

Very truly,

John

Attachment:

Mark McCutcheon, CEO Golden Enterprises, Inc. One Golden Flake Drive Birmingham, AL 35205 Phone 205 323 6161 Fax 205 458 7335 Golden Enterprises, Inc.

BIRMINGHAM, AL and HANOVER, PA, July 19, 2016 / PRNewswire / — Golden Enterprises, Inc. (the “Company”) (NASDAQ: GLDC) and Utz Quality Foods, Inc. of Hanover, PA (“Utz”) announced that they entered into a definitive merger agreement on July 18, 2016, pursuant to which Utz will acquire the Company and Company stockholders will receive $12.00 per share in cash. This price represents a premium of approximately 71 percent over the Company’s 30-day average closing trading price of $7.00.

“After conducting a review of strategic alternatives by a Special Committee consisting of independent members of the Company’s Board of Directors, we believe that this is an excellent transaction for our stockholders, our customers and our employees,” said Mark McCutcheon, Chief Executive Officer of the Company. “This merger will allow the Golden Flake brand to continue to grow in our core southeastern markets, while expanding the product selections for our consumers. Utz is a very community oriented company and we look forward to the future that Utz and Golden Flake will create together.”

Utz Quality Foods, Inc. is a privately held snack food company, founded in 1921 by William and Salie Utz. They began making potato chips out of their home in Hanover, in much the same way Frank Mosher, Mose Lischkoff and Helen Freidman began Golden Flake in 1923. The Bashinsky family began their snack food legacy when they purchased the business in 1946. During their tenure the Company grew from a small local operation to the multi-state corporation it is today.

“We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Golden Flake,” said Dylan Lissette, Chief Executive Officer of Utz. “The two companies are very similar both in mission and values, and each has a team of dedicated associates. Golden Flake’s product line, market coverage, and manufacturing facilities blend well with Utz’s desire to expand and grow our markets in the south.” Both management teams recognize the value of the “plus one strength” gained from the synergies of each company. The Golden Flake product lines and production capabilities will complement the Utz product portfolio, which includes Utz, Zapps, “Dirty”, Bachman, Wachusett, Snikiddy and Good Health.

“Our company has viewed Golden Flake as a leader in the industry. Their culture, quality line of products, and dedicated people, through the vision and leadership that Mr. Bashinsky established, is a wonderful fit within our company,” said Mr. Lissette. Golden Flake will operate as a separate subsidiary under the leadership of its current management team and continue to be an important part of Birmingham as “The South’s Original Potato Chip!”

Subject to antitrust approval and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2016. Following the execution of the merger agreement, stockholders representing a majority of the voting shares of Golden Enterprises delivered a written consent approving and adopting the merger agreement. The merger agreement includes a three-day period during which the Company’s Board can consider an unsolicited alternative proposal that it concludes in good faith (after consultation with outside legal counsel and the financial advisor) is more favorable from a financial point of view to the stockholders of the Company than the transaction contemplated by the merger agreement.

North Point Advisors, LLC acted as financial advisor to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Golden Enterprises. Sirote & Permutt, PC acted as legal counsel to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Golden Enterprises. Sandler O’Neill acted as financial advisor to Utz. Cozen O’Connor acted as legal counsel to Utz.

NOTE: This press release contains forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events or our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements include the possible benefits of the proposed Golden Enterprises acquisition to the Utz business. Readers are directed to Golden Enterprises’ periodic and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a description of such risks and uncertainties. Neither Golden Enterprises nor Utz undertakes any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. 

    I tried to persuade John McKleroy, and his client, Joann Bashinsky, to use the very large sum of money SYB, Inc. had received from the Utz purchase, to pay dividends on SYB, Inc.'s common stock. 

    My brother Major and my stepsister Suzanne had died in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and their children had stepped into their shoes as beneficiaries of SYB Common Stock Trust. My sister and I were the other trust beneficiaries.

    McKleroy replied that they were going to keep all the Utz money in SYB, Inc. and invest it. 

    I ran out of money and was homeless, again.

    A friend took me into his home on Cudjoe Key. During  that time, Key West Transit Authority ran buses up US 1 to Marathon and back to Key West, and that's how I got to Key West every day and back to my friend's home at night.

    I hung out most days at Sippin' Internet Cafe and Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. At Sippin', I wrote my daily blog. At Fort Zach, I laid back, took naps and watched sea and land birds. Whenever I saw a man o' war bird, also known as the frigate bird, I knew I soon would be spiritually attacked.

    After maybe 2 months of living in my friend's home, I felt it was time to suck it up and stay nights in Key West's homeless shelter on Stock Island, the next island up US 1. 

    After about three months of that, friends, who published boat-rocking Key West the Newspaper, aka The Blue Paper, let me live for free in an efficiency in their home.

    After a year, they told me they needed their flat for something else, and I had to leave. By then, I was banned from the homeless shelter for life, because of what I had written on my blog about the shelter and homeless people.

    I went to a city commission meeting, and during closing citizen comments I told the mayor and city commissioners, who knew me pretty well, what was going on. I said I was headed to the Key West police station, to try to sleep there, or be put in the county jail on Stock Island, because it was illegal to sleep outside at night. 

    Perhaps the city attorney, whom I knew and liked, or the commissioner, who was my attorney and friend, called or emailed the police station  to let me sleep there at night. Else, I might sue them in federal court.

    Back in 2004, when I was homeless, my attorney friend and I had convinced the city government, if its police continued arresting and jailing homeless people for sleeping outside at night, we would put them in federal court under what was known as "the Pottinger case", in which a federal judge had stopped the city of Miami from using its police to put homeless people in jail for sleeping outside. The same federal court had jurisdiction over Key West, and there was a federal courthouse in Key West. I would have been the plaintiff in that case. The city caved and built the homeless shelter on Stock Island.

    Back to 2016, where I was banned for life from the homeless shelter I was 50 percent responsible for being built.

    The Key West Citizen published an article, in which the city's official spokesperson was quoted as saying, if Sloan is banned from the shelter, the city has to let him sleep somewhere, at the police station, on a park bench, etc.

    My friend in whose home I had lived, bought me a foam sleeping mat to put between my body and the hard, steel bench in the police station lobby. 

    After about 2 weeks, they locked the bathrooms in the front lobby at night. When I woke up needing to pee, I got up and walked over to nearby mangrove bushes and relieved myself. Fortunately, I never woke up needing to poop.

    People came there at all hours of the night with some kind of problem.

    The only money I had coming in was my Social Security, about    $875 per month. I used almost all of it to buy food. A friend in Key West let me store my belongings on his front porch. He gave me money to buy a fleece sleeping bag for cold nights. He bought me a year's pass to Fort Zach, where Key West police didn't go. And, he gave me money to buy a hammock to use at Fort Zach.

    In August 2017, I had dreams that caused me to approach John McKleroy about loaning-advancing me $500,000 of a second $1,000,000 inheritance my father had left to his children at Joann's death. I hired a lawyer, with whom I had practiced law for a while. When he stopped communicating with me, I dealt directly with John and his law firm. 

    Finally, they offered to loan me $3,000 a month, bearing interest, against my second $1,000,000 inheritance, in exchange for my agreeing in writing to never write about Joann Bashinsky again, and to never to get involved in any way in any litigation in which she was a party, and if I breached the agreement, the loan and interest on it would become immediately due and payable, and I would receive no more money. 

    I agreed to those terms and soon I had enough money coming in to rent the flat in my blue paper friends' home and buy food and other things I needed, and save money. 

    After running for mayor of Key West the next year, 2018, the sixth time I had run, I moved back to Alabama, prelude to the grand finale in my father's estate plan.

The Golden Flake Clown’s younger brother, R.I.P.

    A nap dream today, March 31, 2023, had me in some kind of facility looking down at a pretty lake with trees alongside. I said in the dream that had been there before. I woke up wondering what that was about? I got busy and forgot the dream. 

    Then, I remembered the dream and thought, hmmm, that lake kinda looked like where my younger brother Major's body was found in early 2010. I thought maybe I need to delve into that, since Golden Flake was involved.

    I had an apartment just off Duval Street in Key West. After rising each morning and having breakfast, I walked a few blocks to Sippin' Internet Cafe on Fleming Street, where I wrote posts for goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, which had pretty good local reader numbers.

    One morning in my apartment, I received a phone call from a fellow named Herman, who had worked most, perhaps all of his adult life for Golden Flake. 

    Herman said it was all over the local radio and TV news that Major had gone missing. Had I heard that? I said, no. Herman said it's also in the news that there is a typed note that got left at different places, including Golden Flake, accusing management of sucking the company dry, and if that did not stop, more action would be taken. 

    Wow. Thanks for letting me know.

    Herman's territory was Montgomery and everything close around to it. I spent a week riding with him, after I was brought back to Birmingham from Louisville, Mississippi.

    Herman had gotten a grocery store owner in Prattville to agree to let him replace Frito-Lay's racks with a Golden Flake rack. He drove us to that grocery store and dismantled a large half-empty Frito-Lay rack. Half-empty, because of purchases by the grocery store's customers and the Frito-Lay salesman was not due back until the next day. 

    We pulled the Frito-Lay rack into an aisle and assembled a Golden Flake rack and put it where the Frito-Lay rack had been We filled the Golden-Flake rack to the brim with Golden Flake products, and put the Frito Lay rack around the corner of the gondola, behind the Golden Flake rack, and left the store, laughing our asses off.

    Years later, Golden Flake moved Herman to Birmingham, to be the sales manager for all of the company. Herman had a great life in Montgomery. His wife and his home were there. He had rental property there. He was happy as a clam there, lord of his own jungle. He would have made a great sales manager, if Golden Flathead had let him stay in Montgomery. But that was not how Golden Flake did things. Company first, always. 

    Herman made a lot of money off Golden Flake common stock. He still had friends in the Birmingham office - female office workers. He heard things from them and told me what he had heard. 

    Like, my father's widow Joann had her own Golden Flake employee, a financial person, a spy, reporting directly to her. 

    Like, Golden Flake's management and board of directors and Joann were making so much money that they were crippling the company and hurting rank and file employee morale.

    A few minutes after Herman called, my cell phone rang. A childhood friend asking if I'd heard Major was missing? I said, yes, from Herman just a little while ago. My childhood friend knew Herman somewhat.

    I got ready to go to Sippin'

    My cell phone rang again.

    My childhood friend said he'd just been called by a Birmingham News award-winning business journalist, whom he knew. The journalist wanted to know if I might let him interview me? I said, sure, but I want to see the typed note that is going around, before he calls me. 

    My friend called back, saying the journalist had a copy of the note and would FAX it. I said, give the journalist my phone number. When I get to Sippin', I will get their FAX number and call it into you to pass to the journalist. After he sends the FAX, he can call me.

    As I walked to Sippin', it came to me from out of the blue, it came strong, that Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder.

    I reached Sippin', got its FAX number and called my childhood friend and gave it to him, to give to the journalist. I soon received a FAX containing the typed note. 

    The typed note was short, perhaps 5 lines. I was well written. Whoever wrote it, knew Golden Flake.

    The journalist called. He began by asking if I had any thoughts on what was going on with Major?

    I said Major is an estate lawyer and has a tax law degree. He is a wizard with computers. He built a telephone company from scratch and sold it for a really good profit. He knows how to set up an offshore account and disappear.

    The journalist asked me about the note. I said, I could have written it, for I agreed with it. And in past years, Major and I were in agreement about Golden Flake .

    The journalist asked me about Golden Flake, and I gave him some history, and that I was the son of the boss that had worked there full time, while Major had worked there very little.

    I told the journalist that I would like to see what he wrote for his article, which came from me, to make sure it was accurate. He said he would send me a copy. 

    He asked me if I had any other thoughts about what might have happened to Major? 

    I paused. Then, I said, I have experiences that I don't' talk much about around most people, but  since you asked ... As I walked to this coffee shop, it came to me out of the blue that Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder.

    The journalist said cold chills were running up and down his spine, the same thought had come to him right before he called me.

    Chi ching.

    Later that morning, the journalist emailed the portion of his article that was based on what I had told him. Nothing in it about Major killing himself, but otherwise accurate. 

    I called him and said I was good with it. He said it would run the next morning. 

    I reported all of that in that day's blog posts.

    I emailed John McKleroy that the Birmingham News had interviewed me about Major and Golden Flake and the article would run the next day. 

    The article didn't run the next day.

    I called the journalist.

    He said something about higher ups ...

    He sounded weird ...

    I called my childhood friend and told him what the journalist had told me.I said the News had caved to Joann Bashinsky and Golden Flake management.

    My friend became indignant, said, no way the Birmingham News did that! 

    I said there was no other explanation.

    I published that at my blog.

    Alabama people got wind of my blog and its readership exploded.

    The Starbucks in Fire Pants South was reported as saying Major was a regular customer and he was in there the afternoon of the day he went missing.

    It was reported that someone fitting Major's description was in Five Points Hardware the afternoon of the day he went missing, buying rope and duct tape.

    Major's daughter by his first wife found his car near Five Points South. In the car was a flash drive, on which was a draft of the typed note critical of Golden Flake management and directors and threatening further action. 

    I wrote about Major for two weeks, interacting with Birmingham people who had emailed me. I published texts of their emails. I made some new friends. I made some enemies. 

    I offered myself to Birmingham law enforcement and the FBI, as someone who knew Major. No takers.

    The Birmingham News had an article nearly every day about Major. His second wife was interviewed in their home by a local TV station.

    A different Birmingham TV station did an audio interview of me, in which I talked about Major and me growing up and later, and about Golden Flake. I said nothing about Major having killed himself.

    About 2 weeks after Major went missing, his body was discovered floating in a public golf course pond adjacent to Highland Avenue. 

    Early in my law practice, I lived in an apartment building above the golf club's pro shop and  tennis shop and tennis courts. 

    My apartment had a clear view of the pond.

    Major met his first wife at the tennis courts, she was the tennis pro.

    Major met his second wife at the tennis courts, she was the tennis pro.

    Major's mouth had an empty Golden Flake potato chip bag in it. 

    His mouth was taped shut with duct tape, which was wrapped around his head.

    His upper torso was wrapped with rope tied with knots. His arms and hands had some free range of motion.

    There was a bullet hole in Major's left temple. He was right-handed.

    Law enforcement divers found a pistol on the bottom of the pond, under Major's body.

    All of that the Birmingham News reported.

    My childhood friend told me that someone he knew in the FBI said not to expect a happy result.

    About two weeks after Major's body was found, the Birmingham News reported the findings of the Jefferson County (Birmingham) Medical Examiner and the Birmingham Police Department detective assigned to investigate Major's death: suicide made to look like murder.

    That was the last thing the Birmingham News reported about Major's death.

    There was a great commotion in Alabama on Facebook and at a blog operated by someone in Birmingham. 

    People who didn't know Major, who had never laid eyes on him, were saying no way Major killed himself! He was murdered! Plain and simple! 

    Major's first wife and their daughter, who had found his car, told me that they thought he had killed himself.  

    The Alabama blogger suggested I may have been in on Major's murder. He seemed to get some traction on that with his readers.

    I had not seen or spoken with Major since just after our father's memorial service in early September 2005. I had nothing whatsoever to gain from Major dying. I had no motive.

    The next year, I had a dream that caused me to write to the FBI and request a copy of their file on Major's death. The person who responded didn't sound inclined. I replied that I was the oldest of my father''s bloodline and the family still had questions. I then received a large paper file, with many names and addresses lined through with thick black ink - redacted.

    There were two very interesting things in the FBI file, which the Birmingham News had not reported.

    A surveillance photo negative of a man standing at the sales counter in Five Points Hardware, dated the day Major went missing. The photo was taken from the man's right side. Major and I and our father had similar postures. There was zero doubt in my mind it was Major in the surveillance photo. Zero doubt.

    The gun found in the pond under Major's body was a Browning .32 automatic. A rare gun. A collector's gun. A similar gun was in a plastic display case in Joann Bashinsky's home. I thought it would have been just like Major to see that gun at his father's home and find himself one just like it.

    Back to the Birmingham blogger.

    He published that there was no stippling at the gunshot wound on Major's left temple, therefore it was not possible that Major shot himself.

    Stippling is a powder burn pattern on the flash caused by a gun fired close to the skin.

    The Medical Examiner's report stated there was stippling at the gunshot wound.

    Years later, I met someone, who said he started following my blog when Major went missing, and had followed it ever since.

    He said he knew something about guns and he knew a  Birmingham gun dealer, who probably was the only person that could find a Browning .32 automatic. So, he drove to Birmingham and went to see that gun dealer, 

    The gun dealer told him that Major wanted the same gun his father had, and he was willing to pay a lot to have it, and the gun dealer found it for him.

    I did more digging, which I reported from time to time on my blogs. 

   People contacted me, who knew things that were not in the FBI report. 

    The empty Golden Flake potato chip wrapper in Major's taped-shut mouth always puzzled me.

    I truly hope he Major is doing well in the afterlife, because he really struggled in this life.

Post-Script:

    My friend who came to Birmingham and talked with the gun dealer that found the .32 Browning pistol for Major, helped me do a podcast about Major, in which I said much the same that I wrote above. My friend created The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast in 2022. We started out on YouTube, then we switched to the Torrent system, which is more oriented to free speech and different ideas.

    Maybe 10 days after the podcast went public in the Torrent system, which welcomes different, even controversial material, if it is free and does not promote or solicit anything, my friend told me about a dream he had about Major. I asked my friend to write up the dream and email it to me, Here's what he wrote:

Had a dream that Major looked much younger and much healthier. His hair was a little longer and his smile was more genuine. He said that he felt that finally someone had done him some justice with the podcast. All these years and only his brother and maybe one more ever considered what the burden of Golden Flake placed on the family, and how it silenced all the “Golden Flake” children. He was in a place now much happier, much freer, and where he could be himself without worry for image or keeping up appearances. He was down on Islamorada except it was like Islamorada of the late 70’s at most.  

I asked him,  

"Are you upset at Sloan?'

'Lawhd no, son. Bash has to tell the truth. It's who he's representing. He can't suborn perjury.'

'Who is he representing as a client ?'

'God. Attorney client privilege. Sloan's client is God and God won't let him lie.' 

"Before he walked off into the aethers, Major said in the afterlife he had learned it is better to live your truth and freedom rather than construct a facade which would collapse with a whisper.

"As I finished up writing this for Sloan, the following came to me:

'Death and how a man dies? It frees up a man to actually live and speak as he so wished in the world of people who are only lying to themselves that they are living a life true to themselves and free.'

    Perhaps some context for my friend's dream: Major was bisexual, in the closet. Someone knew it and was threatening to out him and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

    The last paragraph of what my friend wrote reminded me of a poem that fell out of me as fast as I could write it in May 2003. I was sleeping nights in a small tent in the wetlands near the Key West airport, not yet aware that I had contracted life-threatening MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, and two local doctors and the local hospital and the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition homeless shelter would save my life.

“I AM A MAN”

 

I am a man.

I said,

I am a man! 

 

What means it,

being a man?

A man is a warrior:

he lives by a code of honor,

his word is reliable,

his actions confirm his words,

his commitment is holiness,

his enemies are welcome at his hearth,

he fears but moves forward,

he cries and gets up again,

he hates but forgives,

he loves and let’s go,

he doubts but trusts God,

he’s a good friend,

he seeks resolutions,

he demands nothing,

he risks everything,

he regrets his mistakes,

he seeks to make amends,

he puts others’ welfare first,

he accepts apologies truly made,

he expects nothing back,

he lives ready to die,

he laughs when he “should” scream,

he screams when he “should” laugh,

he sings just because,

he shrugs off insults,

he learns from misfortune,

he cusses God for making him,

he wishes he was done,

he loves children and animals,

he relishes a woman’s scent,

he smiles when he’s content,

he knows God’s his master,

he walks in rainbows,

his garden is the world,

his way is nature,

he loves fishing,

his wife is his soul,

his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy.

(2003)

2d Post-Script

    About two weeks after I wrote the above, I received a Facebook friend request from a young woman showing a middle name of Hazelrig. I asked her via private messenger if she was related to Chip Hazelrig, and she said he was her father. We had further discussion.

Me

I know he went through a rough patch some years ago, and hope he's doing better. Please tell him that for me. As for the friend request you sent to me, do you know anything about me? Your Dad knows I'm ... different. But probably not just how different. I'm writing a book about my father's family and his company Golden Flake, which might, or might not interest your Dad. I'm the keeper of the family skeletons.

Her

Thanks for the kind wishes. He has a tough row to hoe these days…but he manages better than I would under those circumstances! I remember your Daddy’s kindnesses to our family. One year when I was in college, we stayed at his place in Islamorada. I can remember seeing the tiny baby sharks off the dock first thing in the morning. Families are complicated. I’d love to read your book when it’s done. I’ve always been interested in Birmingham history. Golden Flake has always been an iconic brand in my book.

Me

I think most people would find my the book challenging, or off-putting. If you give me your email address, I'll send you the chapter about how my famight got involved with Golden Flake,and in that way you will see what I mean.

Her

That would be great. XXXXXXXX@gmail.com

History is challenging in that way. Most people want it sanitized to be more palatable, but it doesn’t change what actually happened. The truth is refreshing.

Me

be careful what you ask for. 

I emailed you that chapter.

Her

Thanks! I’ll check it out.

Her

I really enjoyed reading the chapter. And I am so sorry to hear about your child. I couldn’t imagine showing up to law school.

 

Me

If he had lived, I doubt I would have become a writer, I doubt I would have lived past 50.

Her

I just watched Tiny Beautiful Things on Hulu based on the book of the same name. There was a line of dialogue you reminded me of. Basically how we have all these parallel lives depending on how certain things would have turned out differently. I am butchering it, but you would perhaps enjoy it.

Me

Parallel universes, that was talked about a lot back in the late 1980s, around when I started to live in different universes on this planet, and by now I suppose I've lived in over a dozen different universes on this planet, or, if you wish, a dozen different ives. If you like different, check out The Redneck Mystic Lawyer podcast at YouTube, and my first novel, which now can be read for free at archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/kundalina

Her

Cool, I will! Thanks.

Me

I will send you what I wrote this morning about meeting your Dad in Key West shortly after my younger brother Major went missing in early 2010. You will find it interesting, and there's stuff, which later happened, that your father might also find interesting. 

 

So, in early 2010, my younger brother Major was missing for maybe a week. I'm living in an apartment in the back of a building, the front of which faces Duval Street in Key West. I'm writing about Major every day at goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com. As is the Birmingham News. I'm getting a whole lot of page views in Alabama, and am hearing from people there I know and don't know.

My cell phone rings, I answer. A man asks if this is Sloan Bashinsky? I say, yes. He says he is Chip Hazelrig. I have heard of Chip, as having had oil and gas investment dealings with my father. but that's all I know about Chip. 

He says he came down from Ft. Lauderdale (I think) to Key West on a boat with a friend, who likes to fish, and he got worn out fishing, and, since he had heard I live in Key West, he thought he would try to find me.

I ask how he got my cell phone number? He says he went into a bar on Duval Street and asked a man sitting at the bar if he knew me? The man said, yes. He asked the man if he had my phone number? The man said, no, but the fellow sitting next to him did. 

I didn't say that I could not imagine how anyone in a bar in Key West knew my phone number. In the context of Major being missing, I figured it was arranged by God, regardless.

I ask Chip if he knows where Sloppy Joe's Bar is on Duval Street? He says yes. I suggest we meet around the corner at the steps of Old City Hall, where we can be away from the Duval noise and in the shade. He agrees.

I hop on my bicycle and am there in a few minutes, greet Chip, shake his hand, and lead him around the east side of Old City Hall, where there are railroad ties we can sit on in the shade and talk.

First, we talked about Major. What was going on with him? I said I really didn't know. Maybe I also said, right after I learned from Birmingham friends that Major had gone missing, it came to me from out of the blue that he killed himself and tried to make it look like murder; and when I shared that with a Birmingham News award-winning business journalist, after he called me about an hour later to interview me, the journalist said cold chills were running up and down his spine, because the same thing had occurred to him right before he called me. 

I had published that on my blogs the same day.

Chip said, what he really wanted to talk with me about was my father, whom he loved, and a lawsuit that my father's widow Joann and my father's estate had filed against Chip and his partner and their oil & gas investment company. 

My recollection all these years later was the lawsuit claimed Chip and his partner owed my father's estate money, or at the very least, a better accounting of his money and investments with them.

The lawsuit had dragged on, and finally it was settled by Chip and his partner paying a sum that covered the fees of the law firm that was representing Joann and my father's estate. I think that law firm was Spain & Gillon, which had represented my father and his father and Golden Flake all along. 

Chip said he had a very low opinion of the law firm. I said I did, too. I don't recall if I told any of my reasons.

Chip told a story that cracked me up, which had preceded and probably caused the lawsuit to happen after my father died.

Joann and the law firm and the fellow running Golden Flake, under whom I had worked when I waw there, demanded a meeting with my father and Chip and his business partner. I think the meeting occurred at Golden Flake. After a lot was said by Joann and the law firm, about Chip and his business partner and their and my father's oil and gas investments, my father said, "This is how it is. You folks run the potato chip company, I will run the oil and gas company."

I thought it was hilarious. I laughed, said, that sounds just like my father! 

Chip and I talked for maybe an hour, then said goodbye, and I left on my bicycle.

I reported that on my blogs the next morning.

A blog in Birmingham, named Legal Schnauzer, picked that up. 

First I'd heard of that blog. 

The blogger was making claims about Chip being in on something shady in Alabama, but I don't now recall what.

The blogger had gone after, or would go after, Alabama Governor Bob Riley and his family. 

After Major's body was found in the Highland Park golf course pond next to Highland Avenue, the blogger insinuated I might have been in on it. Maybe the blogger insinuated Chip might have been in on it, too?

The blogger kept that up after the Birmingham News reported that the Birmingham Police Department detective assiged to the case, and the Jefferson County Medical Examiner (Coroner) both had concluded it was suicide made to look like murder.

The News reported nothing else on Major, but I kept writing about him on my blogs.

I later had a number of rows with the Birmingham blogger over his claim that Major was murdered and I might have been in on it. 

I had no motive. I stood to receive nothing if Major died, and I received nothing from his estate. 

I had not seen or spoken with Major since our father died in August 2005. I knew nothing about his comings and goings.

I had lived in the Florida Keys all that time, about 950 miles away.

Then, the blogger published that there was no stippling at the gunshot wound on the left side of Major's head. 

Stippling is a powder burn pattern caused by a gun barrel pressed to the skin or very close to the skin when the gun is fired. 

If there was no stippling, someone other than Major obviously fired the pistol.

At Legal Schnauzer, I made a comment that the Medical Examiner's report said there was stippling at the gunshot wound.

After a while, the blogger said I was correct, but it was an honest mistake on his part. One of his readers agreed with him.

I think I replied, it was not an honest mistake. The ME's report was a public document. The argument that there was no stippling at the wound was made for the sole purpose of disproving it was suicide.

I don't know how it went with your father and that blogger, but perhaps Chip would like to see what I have written to you here, and perhaps he would like to see the chapter in the new book, where I wrote about Major's suicide, without mentioning the blogger, with whom I later had more dealings about other matters that involved me, which I probably will not go into in the new book.

However, one thing your father might find interesting regards the blogger getting put in the Shelby County jail by a judge, because the blogger would not remove from his blog what he had published about Bob Riley and his family. That made national news, and lots of people were really mad about the blogger's right to free speech and free press being squashed by the judge.

I emailed the blogger's wife, and I told her that the public was not going to forget what her husband had published, so why didn't she take the Riley stuff down from the blog. She replied that  her husband had his password and she couldn't take it down. I said, then tell him what I said, and for him to give you the password so you can take the Riley stuff down and the judge would release your husband from jail. She said she would take it up with her husband.

Not long after that, the blogger was out of jail.

I never got a thank you. I did get a lot more grief from that blogger. Then, based on what I heard from various corners of here and there, the blogger's life went to shit, because the blogger kept shitting in places that shit back.

The sins of the fathers and their lawyers

    A lawyer I once knew was brought to me in a dream last night. 

    My second wife Jane's first cousin, Sandy. 

    When I closed my law practice, Sandy took over a couple of lawsuits I had filed for clients and became their lawyer. Later, Sandy joined the Spain & Gillon law firm, where my father's attorney, John McKleroy, worked. 

    John and I were classmates at the University of Alabama School of Law. After graduating, John went to work for Spain, Gillon, Riley, Tate and Ansley, in Birmingham. John Gillon represented my father, Golden Flake, and my father's father. John Gillon groomed John McKleroy to replace him as my father and Golden Flake's lawyer.

    Many years prior, my Grandfather Bashinsky's childhood friend Frank Samford bought the Liberty National Life Insurance company out of bankruptcy and made my grandfather a member of the company's board of directors. Liberty National did really well and its common stock increased greatly in value and became the basis of the Bashinsky family's wealth. 

    When I was a boy, John Gillon set up trusts for all my Grandfather Bashinsky's grandchildren. Our grandfather funded the trusts with shares of Liberty National common stock. 

    At the direction of our grandfather, John Gillon wrote into the trusts for my sister and the daughter of my father's brother, Leo, that no marketable securities held by those trusts could be sold without the approval of the oldest living male Bashinsky.

    Move forward to 1994, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, and my Grandfather Bashinsky was dead and buried almost 20 years. 

    My sister had minor children. She was not happy with the provision in her trust described above. She wanted to have it removed. I told her that I was behind her all the way. 

    Removing the provision from the trust required a court order that amended the trust. To get such an order required convincing a judge that the provision was evil, unconscionable, deranged, unduly onerous, etc.

    My sister asked me to recommend a lawyer. I recommended Sandy. Why not? Many years prior, the provision in her trust had been put there by one of Sandy's senior law partners. 

    Sandy filed a court action to have the trust amended and the provision removed. The judge appointed prominent Birmingham lawyers as guardian ad litems, whose duty was to protect my sister's minor children.

    The lawyers came to my sister's home and treated her like she was trying to steal all the family jewels, heirlooms, gold and silver. My sister was really upset. I told her to hang tight, she was doing the right thing. 

    The wolves, er, lawyers finally realized my sister was simply trying to get the same trust her brothers and male cousins had gotten from our Grandfather Bashinsky. 

    Where the lawyers got the idea that my sister was  trying to get her hands on the trust and abscond with it, I cannot imagine - 

    Unless

the Devil made them do it

    And/or

they were as racially prejudiced against women as my Grandfather Bashinsky

    My father watched all of that unfold.

    That was around when he and his second wife, Joann, had Golden Flake declare a special dividend, over half of which they got, instead of giving Golden Flake's line employees promised raises.

    By then, Joann was super righteous redone saved by Jesus, who had said in the Gospels, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and:

Matthew 6:24-26

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."

    Perhaps that double whammy was too much for my father to bear? 

    He suddenly had severe pain in his spine. 

    A doctor put my father on oral narcotic pain killers. 

    I suppose my father kept drinking vodka.

    The judge sided with my sister and removed the male chauvinist pig provision from her trust and awarded guardian ad litem fees to the prominent lawyers, to be paid from the trust. 

    Perhaps the judge awarded a fee to Spain, Gillon from the trust, or Spain, Gillon billed my sister for their fee.

    I called Sandy and congratulated him for winning the case. Then, I said: Spain, Gillon should not take a few for fixing the trust its senior partner John Gillon had created many years prior. 

    Sandy seemed a bit at loss for words. But not completely. The fee was not waived.

    That struck me as just plain evil, unconscionable, deranged and unduly onerous, etc. 

    Double that, considering John Gillon, Sandy and John McKleroy were devout Bible-reading Christians, who had to know what Jesus said about lawyers in the Gospels:

Luke 11:

42 “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.

43 “Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces.

44 “Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it.”

45 One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.”

46 Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”

    When people sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," I wondered if they paid any attention to what the Bible tells them about Jesus.

    I wondered that a lot more after I moved back to Birmingham from Key West in November 2018, and all hell broke loose in my father's legal universe, and I started wanting to kill some lawyers.

All that glitter is not gold, and how to kill all the lawyers legally

    What follows is my best recollection of time, people, places and events, in which I participated in person, on the telephone, by email, in zoom meetings and conference calls, and so forth. Any errors in my recollection are unintentional.

    After moving back to Alabama in late 2018, I asked John McKleroy to write me a new will, because he knew my father's estate plan.

    After we talked about that, John said there was something he needed to tell me, as follows. 

    John and the accountant, who had served my father and his second wife, Joann, had filed an action in the Jefferson County, Alabama Probate Court in Birmingham, asking for a guardian and a conservator to be appointed, to protect Joann from her grandson, Landon, whose mother, Suzanne had died in 2011. Suzanne was Joann's only child.

    The lawsuit alleged that over some years Joann loaned Landon many millions of dollars and he kept coming back for more loans. At the rate Joann was lending to Landon, she might run out of money, there might be severe tax consequences, and charitable bequests in her Last Will and Testament might not be funded.

    John had drawn up Joann's Last Will and Testament.

    John said he drew up the promissory notes for Landon to sign each time he got more money from Joann. 

    John said he tried to persuade Joann to stop loaning Landon money, but she kept loaning him money. 

    John said he and the accountant felt they had to file the lawsuit to protect Joann, and if they did not file it, they could be held liable for not protecting her. 

    I told John that I thought he and the account should waive any fees Joann owed them, so it would look like they had filed the probate case solely to protect Joann. John said he would consider that. Later, he told me that his lawyers said to hold that in reserve, something to negotiate later.

    It was reported in the news media that Joann's will contained bequests to John and the accountant. 

    John told me that he and the accountant did work for Joann, for which they were not paid, and they would do more work for Joann, and the bequests to them in her will were to compensate them for that work.

    Joann fired John and the accountant and had a new will written, which did not include John and the account, and I think some of the charities were left out, too.

    A lawyer in the law firm representing John and the accountant told me that efforts were being made to locate distant relatives of Joann, to contest her second will, and to reach out to charities, which were beneficiaries under Joann's 1st will, about contesting Joann's new will.

    Joann, John and the accountant constituted the Board of Directors of SYB, Inc., which John had set up for my father in 1981, as I recall. SYB, Inc. was a private holding company. Its assets were marketable securities and cash.  

    John was the Trustee of SYB Common Stock Trust, whose beneficiaries were my father's children: me, my younger brother and sister, and Suzanne, whom my father had adopted. After Suzanne died, Landon replaced her as a beneficiary of the trust, which owned SYB, inc.'s common stock.

    John was the Trustee of the Marital Trust of my father's Last Will and Testament, under which she was the income beneficiary. The Marital Trust owned 40 percent of SYB, Inc.'s preferred stock, and Joann owned the other 60 percent, which she had inherited from my father.

    At Joann's death, the Marital Trust would pay $1,000,000 to each of my father's 4 children. There were specific dollar bequests to some colleges and a local non-profit. The rest would go to whomever Joann appointed in her Last Will and Testament. Joann appointed Suzanne, who was succeeded by  Landon.

    Accompanied by lawyers representing Landon, Joann attended a hearing before the probate judge. The judge disqualified Landon's lawyers, because of conflict of interest. The judge did not allow, nor ask, Joann to speak or testify.

    The probate judge appointed a local lawyer as guardian ad litem, to look out for Joann. The judge appointed another local lawyer as conservator, to preserve Joann's assets. I don't know the precise amount, but I think it was around $180,000,000, and consisted of what my father had given Joann outright and the Marital Trust.

    Joann obtained independent legal counsel, who filed a mandamus appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. The guardian at litem was a solo practitioner attorney and was not able to keep up with the many pleadings filed by Joann's attorneys. He asked to be relieved, and the judge granted his request and appointed another local lawyer as guardian ad litem.

    Months passed. The Alabama Supreme Court issued an order ripping the probate judge to shreds, for denying Joann due process of law: by not letting Joann speak or testify in court; by not allowing Joann to waive the conflict of interest; and by not giving Joann time to hire new legal counsel. The Supreme Court ordered the probate judge to explain himself, and ordered the conservator to do likewise.

    All of the above was reported and widely read in the Birmingham News and a smaller media outlet called Yellow Hammer. (The Alabama state bird is the yellow hammer.) I asked around and heard people paid Yellow Hammer to publish what they wanted published.

    Yellow Hammer called Joann the Golden Flake heiress and the Golden Flake Queen, and described her beautiful home filled with antiques, and how much she was worth. 

    I commented under that article.

    I said I was my father's oldest living child. When I was growing up, the Golden Flake Queen was my mother. She, an architect and a contractor built the home, in which Joann now lived. My mother owned the home. In her Last Will and Testament, she gave my father the right to live in the home for the rest of his life. When he died, the home would belong to her children. Some years after she died, our father bought the home from my brother and sister and me.

    I also said in my comment, that my father's blood children first learned of the probate action after it was filed, and we had nothing to do with it, and If my father were here now, I think his concern would be for Joann's financial  security in her remaining years.

    The probate judge was vilified online. John McKleroy and the accountant and their lawyers were accused of trying to steal Joann's money.

    The probate judge abruptly retired. The case was reassigned to a probate judge in Jasper, about 35 miles west of Birmingham. The extensive legal wrangling and intrigue is a matter of public record in that probate court. 

    I did not follow it closely. What I did hear caused me to think it was something John Grisham, William Faulkner and Stephen might have joined forces and conjured.

    While all that was going on, a lawyer representing John McKleroy, as Trustee of SYB Common Stock Trust, sent an email to all of my father's heirs about winding down SYB, Inc. and SYB Common Stock Trust. 

    There were numerous conference calls, in which I participated pro se (representing myself). My sister's lawyer participated. Lawyers for my deceased brother's second wife and their minor children participated. A lawyer for my brother's son by his first wife participated. A lawyer for the husband of my brother's daughter by his first wife participated. Joann and Landon and their lawyers participated. John McKleroy and the accountant and their lawyers participated. Landon changed lawyers several times. 

    It looked to me like a legion of lawyers' wet dreams come true. Financed entirely by my father's money. I said so numerous times, but left out wet.

    Landon and Joann wanted to keep SYB, Inc. and its assets, which were marketable securities, and they would buy out the other heirs. Some of the securities were highly-appreciated and their sale would trigger large income taxes due and payable by SYB, inc.

    Covid-19 had shut down America. I did not think President Donald Trump was dealing well with Covid-19. I thought the securities markets might plunge. In emails to ALL, I asked that my portion of SYB, Inc.'s assets be set apart and sold. I also  asked that puts be bought on SYB, Inc.'s securities, to hedge against decrease in value. I didn't get a reply.

    The securities went down in value. If puts had been purchased, SYB, Inc. would have done very well. (Eventually, the securities would regain their value and go even higher, so SYB, Inc. did better than I had thought it would.)

    One morning, Joann's personal lawyer called me to say she had really sad news. Mrs. Bashinsky had not been feeling well and she was taken to a hospital where she had a massive heart attack and died. I said that really was sad news.

    The news media reported a massive heart attack as the cause of death. However, Joann's death certificate listed the cause of death: (a) covid 19 pneumonia, and (b) NSTEMI. I looked up NISTEMI and learned it is a seldom-fatal kind of heart attack.

    Joann had round-the-clock in home care, as my father had had. I wondered how she caught Covid-19? I wondered why what was on her death certificate as cause of death was not reported by the news media?

    A former respected employee of Golden Flake, whom I had known, was chosen to replace Joann, as the third member of SYB, Inc.'s Board of Directors.

    Most of the Marital Trust, after federal and state taxes, legal, accounting and probate costs, would go to Landon. Landon also would receive 1/4th of the Golden Flack Common Stock Trust, after SYB, Inc. was dissolved and its assets, after taxes and administration costs, were distributed to the trust.

    My estimate was Landon would receive, including the gifts-loans from Joann, maybe 8 times more than each of my father's three natural children, or their heirs, would receive. I had no problem with that. It was what my father had created, with John McKleroy's help. 

    Landon offered to buy us all out and he would get SYB, Inc. I said I was okay with that, if he could come up with the money. More than anything, I wanted it over for me and for my children. Landon said he would take him about month to come up with the money,

    My sister's lawyer told me that my sister was not okay with SYB, Inc. continuing. She wanted it all to end, and we go our way, and Landon goes his way. I said I agreed with her. That ended the discussion of Landon buying us all out.

    During all of that, John McKleroy's lawyer filed an action in probate court for John, as Trustee of SYB Common Stock Trust, to have the trust wound down and its assets distributed to the trust beneficiaries. 

    The action was filed under seal, because some of the parties in interest were Major's minor children by his second wife. Under seal means, not for public eyes. The news media and the public did not see the pleadings or attend court hearings. 

    I'm writing about that case now, here, because the case is over. And because, I'm not telling anything about the minor children by Major's second wife. And because, I was an involuntary defendant to the case. And because, I have first-hand knowledge. And because, I know of no law or rule that says involuntary parties to sealed cases cannot speak publicly about what happened during the case, which affected them. And because, if I do not tell what I know, a great disturbance in the FORCE will continue reverberating in the dark.

    The same lawyer that filed the action under seal for SYB Common Stock Trust Trustee John McKleroy, initiated the winding down and dissolution of SYB, Inc., which was a Delaware Corporation, as had been Golden Flake.

    Mediation was ordered by the probate judge presiding over the sealed action filed by John McKleroy, as Trustee of SYB Common Stock Trust. We agreed on a mediator, a retired lawyer, who became an esteemed district court judge in Birmingham. I knew and respected him when I practiced law in Birmingham. 

    At the beginning of the first mediation meeting, the mediator said there were a lot of lawyers and he was concerned about the legal expense my father's estate would bear.

    What goes on in mediation cannot be discussed by anyone who participated, and I will say not more about what went on in mediation.

    What I will say is, after the probate judge ordered mediation, John McKleroy, the trustee of SYB, Common Stock Trust, and the accountant retained legal counsel, who sued Landon for defamation and for hiring a private company that stalked them in Birmingham.  McKleroy and the accountant sought large compensatory damages and punitive damages.

    The law firm that filed the lawsuit already represented my brother Major's second wife in all matters regarding my father's affairs.

    I was enraged, because I saw no way McKleroy and the accountant's lawsuit against Landon, for heaps of money damages, would not queer the meditation. 

    I saw no way Landon would mediate the case under seal, while that lawsuit was pending.

    I saw no way the probate judge presiding over the case under seal would have ordered mediation, if the McKleroy and the accountant's  damages lawsuit had been filed before mediation was ordered. 

    I thought the damages lawsuit was contemptuous of the judge, the court, the legal process, the trust beneficiaries and my father, who had trusted John McKleroy, who had gotten rich from representing my father.

    More egregious, John McKleroy was the trustee of the SYB Common Stock Trust, which he was litigating under seal, where the media and the public would never see what was going on. 

    John had a blatant conflict of interest, which he never revealed to the probate judge presiding over the SYB Common Stock Trust winding down case, which he had filed. 

    As trustee of SYB Common Stock Trust, John had a fiduciary duty to put the interest of the trust beneficiaries ahead of his own interests. 

    Yet, John put his own interests ahead of the interests of the trust beneficiaries. 

    A fiduciary duty is the highest duty under the law. Breach of fiduciary duty carries compensatory and punitive damages. 

    Twice when I was in John's law office to discuss my own estate plan, he told me that "they", I assumed Joann and Landon, had filed a grievance against him with the Alabama Bar. 

   I told John to tell the Alabama Bar that, if he had not filed the probate case to protect Joann from Landon, that might have been grounds for a bar grievance against him and also a legal malpractice lawsuit.

    Might.

    In the bigger scheme, Landon was Joann's only heir. In the end, Landon would end up with all Joann had. If she gave him all of it before she died, then John McKleory and the accountant would inherit nothing from her.

    I don't think I told John that he waited too long to file the probate lawsuit to protect Joann.

    Several times during lawyer meetings regarding SYB, Inc. and SYB Common S/tock Trust, I said McKeroy's damages lawsuit against Landon was a breach of fiduciary duty and conflict of interest.

    Several times, I said, if the case goes to trial, I will call John , Landon, and their and Joann's lawyers as witnesses to testify. Calling opposing counsel to testify is never done, but it can be done, and it really screws up everything. :-)

    I kept wondering how my father was coping with all of that from where he was?

    After several  meetings, the mediator and the lawyers and their clients and I agreed the mediation had failed. The mediator notified the probate judge in a written report. The report did not mention the defamation and stalking lawsuit filed by the SYB Common Stock Trust trustee, John McKleroy, against SYB Common StockTrust beneficiary Landon Ash.

    Joann's personal lawyer, and a lawyer, who was the personal representative of Joann's estate, and Landon had accused John McKleroy, the accountant and SYB, Inc.'s board of directors of wrong actions and had threatened legal action against them. For that reason, John insisted on a large escrow being held back by SYB Common Stock Trust, until all claims against him and the accountant were dropped or were ruled void by a court.

    There was other litigation between Joann's estate and John McKleroy and SYB, Inc. directors, which John insisted be resolved, in his favor, before the escrow was released..

    John McKleroy insisted that $2,500,000 of what each child branch was due from the trust would be retained in escrow until all claims against him, the accountant and SYB, Inc. directors and officers were resolved or ruled invalid against by a court. 

    During all of that, the judge presiding over the Common Stock Trust case, recused. A judge in Prattville, above Montgomery, was assigned to take over the case. She ordered a zoom hearing.

    A new lawyer for Landon was at the zoom hearing. The crowd of other lawyers present were familiar.

    Landon's new lawyer argued for Landon getting all of his part of SYB Common Stock Trust, without any escrow hold back. I thought that was ludicrous, because Landon had done things that got him sued by John McKleroy and the content.

    However, what I said to the judge was, I didn't think it was fair for Landon to get all of his share of SYB Common Stock trust, when the other three branches of the trust had agreed to a $2,500,000 escrow. The new judge ruled against Landon.

    After the hearing, I sent an email to the new judge's judicial assistant, copied to all parties' lawyers. My email unveiled the elephant in the living room nobody had mentioned during the zoom hearing. 

    The elephant was John McKleroy and the accountant's defamation and stalking lawsuit against Landon, who wasn't agreeing to anything as long as that lawsuit was pending against him.

    The new probate judge wrote an order that reminded me of orders written by federal judges back when I clerked for a federal judge in Birmingham.

    The new judge made it crystal clear that she would not tolerate any games by the lawyers and their clients. 

    I thought, Hallelujah Jesus! Finally, we have a real judge!

    Landon eventually agreed to the $2,500,000 escrow, which cleared the way for all four branches of SYB Common Stock Trust receiving most of what was due them.

    When John McKleroy created SYB Common Stock Trust and SYB, Inc., future dissolution of SYB, Inc. was a non-taxable event. Later, Congress made it taxable.

    SYB, Inc. Common Stock Trust wound down and the four beneficiary branches received all but the $2,500,000 escrow.

    Later, the claims against John McKleroy and SYB, Inc. directors were resolved in their favor, and the trust branches received their $2,500,000 escrow.

    I pre-paid the taxes due on my portion and put the rest in F.D.I.C backed securities and U.S. Treasury obligations. The accounts are payable at my death to people I designated. None of it will pass under my last will and testament, be overseen by a court, or touched by a lawyer. 

    There were plenty of interesting, intriguing and maddening sideshows, which raged for a good while, some of which infuriated me, others of which were somewhat entertaining, but right now I don't see any reason to go into that.

    For some reason I may never understand, I reactivated my Alabama law license, by paying a small sum to the Alabama Bar, which, amazingly, did not require me to catch up on any continuing legal election. 

    I was ready, armed and dangerous to any clients I might represent, and to society. 

    The only client I got was one of the lawyers in that saga, who seemed pleased with my wacky advice. More than that, I cannot say- lawyer-client privilege.

    What I can say is, the only way to kill all the lawyers is stop using lawyers and starve them to death

The Hit and Miss Club

    I spent the summer of 2005 in Helen, Georgia, where I had spent two earlier summers.  

    I was living barely off the street and looking forward to more of that and living on the street. 

      One afternoon in the Helen Public Library, using one of their desktop computers, I typed very quickly something about my father and me. As I typed the last sentence and period, my cell phone rang. It was John McKleroy, calling to say he had tried to reach me for 2 days, to tell me my father had passed away.

(I imagine now that John was my father's ally and adviser regarding my attempts to renounce my inheritances. I imagine John advised my father to ignore me.)

    John offered to get me to Birmingham, but I had a friend in Helen, who said he would drive me to Birmingham. A friend in Birmingham let me stay in a spare bedroom in his home. He loaned me an old pickup truck he had revived.

    I attended my father's memorial at Mt. Brook Baptist Church, where my father and I had attended Sunday school for years when I was a boy. 

    The minister, who was not there back then, carried on about my father's success in business and giving a lot of money to various charities. 

    My 3rd wife, Deborah, who had suffered my black night of the soul, sat beside me. She blanched and hissed, not entirely under her breath, "You cannot served God and mammon." 

    The minister was preaching to Joann. 

    The minister said my father was awarded many medals during World War II.

    That was news to me, and would have been news to my mother and to my father.

    A few days later, I went back to Mountain Brook Baptist Church and gave the minister a copy of what I had written in Helen. 

    A codicil to my father's Last Will and Testament instructed that his ashes spread on the grounds of Mt. Brook Baptist Church, and if any of his heirs contested that, they forfeited all inheritances from him. 

    John McKleroy advanced me $10,000 of the $1,000,000, which I had inherited under my father's will. 

    I mostly hung out in Birmingham until my father's estate settled and John wrote me a check for the rest of the $1,000,000 on February 14, 2006. 

    I bought a used Toyota Highlander and drove back down to Key West, where money my father had made the old-fashioned way enabled me to live comfortably and try to save the Florida Keys from developers and their lawyers and their captured county and city commissions, and to rock the so-called "Paradise" status quo boat generally, for a decade.

    Here's what fell out of me in the Helen Library about as fast as I could type it.

THE HIT AND MISS CLUB

              IT’S AUGUST 3, 2005. I was involved in something for a few years that did not turn out very well (in my estimation), and I was beating myself up about it and wondering what I was going to do instead. Then came a series of dreams last night. In the last two dreams, my oldest daughter, Nelle, takes me by the hand and leads me away from something toward something else; then my father’s wife, Joann, is a legal secretary who hands me a case file I do not have in a bundle of other files I’m already carrying. I wake up about sunrise, knowing there is something I have missed or do not yet know about. Then I find myself thinking about a hunting club that went by the name of “The Hit and Miss Club”. Now why, I ask myself, am I thinking about that?

              In 1964, my father purchased a membership in this club, which mostly was for quail hunting, while I was still in my senior year at Vanderbilt. He was not a hunter but in those days hunting was a pretty big deal for me, and he did it for me. We went down there together, and sometimes I went with friends. What I remembered this morning, after waking up and thinking of this place, was when my father and I were coming back to Birmingham after hunting over the weekend, and I was driving and we were talking about different things. I was going to leave Birmingham and return to Vanderbilt that night. It was good between us; it felt tight. About halfway home he said he liked me driving, he felt safe, which he said he did not usually feel when he rode with other people. Maybe he felt safe because I drove a lot like he did, which some people in those days told me made them a bit nervous when they were riding with me. Well, maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just one of those things that happened on that day but might not have happened the next day.

              Another thing that came to me this morning was that a lot of what I seem to be given to do, and a lot of my life before I got into this way of living, has had a lot of hit and miss in it. Maybe more miss than hit. In baseball, if you bat .333, that is, you get a hit one in every three at bats, that’s considered very good. You might even win a league batting crown with that percentage, but certainly you will be a star and maybe play in the All Star Game and will get well paid for hitting so well, and with a life-time batting average that high, well, maybe Ted Williams and a few others would be higher up the ladder but you would be way up there yourself, too. Maybe that was God’s way, this morning, of telling me to stop beating myself about not hitting a home run with every job assignment, or even a triple, or even a double, or even a single, or even just getting a walk or hit by a pitched ball.

              Darn, I’m about to have myself a big conniption here, if I’m not careful. Why that is, is that for a very long time now, it has seemed to me that heaven has had me on a training regimen that is all or nothing. I do assignments perfectly, or it’s judged for naught. I bat 1.000, or I bat 0. And even if I bat 1.000, if my playing partners don’t also step up to the plate, then it’s as if I did not step up to the plate, too. I heard a few times in dreams that this is what has been going on, so for me it’s not mere conjecture. I told a friend after I got up this morning that this whole thing was driving me nuts, feeling that I have to do everything just in a certain way, or I get plastered afterwards. Jesus surely made mistakes, I said. How could he not have made them? He was human.

              The Job assignment that had not gone well came to a head out of nowhere, like I had stepped unexpectedly on a covey of quail I did not see hidden on the ground in plain view right under my very eyes and the darn things suddenly erupted with all of their unnerving flapping wing-noise right from underneath my startled feet and swarmed up and all around me in various trajectories and directions designed to get me to shoot at holes in the air and run out of shells as they frantically dove for safety, and maybe I got one or even two of them but I didn’t shoot the whole damn convey out of the sky and maybe I didn’t hit even one of them. Hit or miss, that’s what bird shooting is. That’s what life is. Despite Jesus saying in Matthew 5:38 et. Seq., for his disciples to be perfect, even as their Father in heaven was perfect, that dog simply doesn’t hunt, at least not on this world.

              After God has gotten ahold of someone real good and that has gone on for a while, the aholdee starts to see things both from the perspective of both a human being and an angel. However, this is not the same perspective that just being an angel enjoys. An angel doesn’t have to mess around with and put up with the human being messing up what the angel is doing. An angel can just be an angel. But a human being can’t just be an angel. A human being has to mess around with and put up with being a human being, too. It’s a serious problem; maybe it’s a kind of multiple personality disorder: a perfect angel yoked to a perfect donkey, or something like that.

              I probably could say that my father was a perfectionist and his father was a perfectionist and his father also was a perfectionist and so I am a perfectionist therefore. Perhaps there is some truth in that. But then, I said, perhaps it is fucking impossible to be a perfectionist, because it is fucking impossible to be perfect. However and despite all of that, I told John that I now find myself thinking of some perfect moments I had with my father, and that drive home from the Hit and Miss Club was one. Maybe just a small one, but it was one. My father knew how much I loved to hunt, and he didn’t care that much for it yet he made it possible for me to have that experience. I had some very good times down there with college and law school buddies, and our wives. I don’t care to hunt now, but that doesn’t take away what it was for me then.

              I remember when my fourteenth birthday came, and my mom and dad asked me what I wanted for a birthday present, and I said I wanted to go to Destin to fish in the Rodeo. I’d heard about the Destin Fishing Rodeo, that it was the best fishing time of the year. My birthday was in October, in the peak of the Rodeo. So my father came and got me out of school on Friday and off we went to Destin, five hours away, before I had learned to drive in the way my father drove, all rather exciting for me, but he seemed blessed with a sixth sense and we arrived safely and a bit early, as I recall, at the Silver Beach Motel, which you might still be able to find today underneath all the high rise condominiums down there.

              I remember a few years before that fishing trip, the last day we were to be there that summer vacation, we were staying at the Old Miramar Hotel in Ft. Walton, which is about twelve miles west of Destin. In those days, there were no motels and no anything else on that beautiful beach lying east of Destin, and my father and brother and I went out there to swim, and it was one of those magic moments, like I had died and gone to heaven, but was still on this world, and I really didn’t want to leave that beach that day, I wanted to stay there forever actually, just us, no one else was there. I asked Daddy why it felt so good that day and he said it was because it was our last day down there. I think it might have been because of this day, too. My tears say it is so.

              Anyway, when we got up on Saturday morning, it was raining and the seas were stirred up. We had a boat chartered for that afternoon and the next morning, but nobody went out in this sort of weather. Over breakfast in the Silver Beach Motel restaurant, I don’t think I was drinking the water but only milk, because the water from under the ground there is full of sulfur, Daddy said we could stay and try to fish tomorrow, if the weather let up, or we could go home and come back the next weekend and fish. I chose to go home and come back, and when we came back the next weekend the weather was perfect the first day and we caught a lot of nice king mackerel that first afternoon, after fishing on Crystal Beach pier that morning. The wind had shifted by the next morning, a cold front coming in. The kings were not biting so we went bottom fishing and caught a bunch of nice red snapper. We took it all home. It was the best birthday present I think I ever had.

              Many years later, my father started taking me into the Florida Keys to fish there, for bonefish mostly. This is not something rookies can do very well, as you have to learn the flats and tides, see the fish, stalk them, and so forth. It’s a cross between hunting and fishing and finding and stalking the fish is similar to using bird dogs to find quail, which bird hunters feel is as important as, if even more important, than actually shooting. Most people who don’t know how to do it already use flat guides; and most people do it out of skiffs to cover more territory, although wading works very well if you know where a good wading flat is. I fell so in to love with bonefishing that there are no words to describe it. When my father bought a nice home on Lower Matecumbe Key, about Mile marker 76, I really got to do a lot of bonefishing.

              I went down there a lot with the family, and with my wives and friends. It was Paradise. It made me want to live in the Keys. It seemed when I left the Keys headed back to Alabama, that my soul stayed behind, and when I went back down there and reached the Overseas Highway, just below Homestead, my soul was there waiting for me. I could literally feel my soul greet me when I left the mainland. It’s still like that, and I am having these big raindrops falling out of my eyes right now over this. My father loved it down there, and I felt awful when I learned he had finally sold his beautiful home on the Atlantic, because I knew how much he loved it. But, I was told he had not been up to going down there for a few years, and so it was sold.

               My father once told me that he didn’t go down and live there all the time because he was afraid he would find out just how sorry he was. But I tell you truly, when I learned he had sold it, I wept, because I could not imagine him being more happy than down there; but he had all sort of things in Birmingham that were important and close by that he was involved in, and he let go of what I once told him was the only thing he had that I really wanted: The Fish House. I didn’t feel that way when I later learned it was gone, but I felt that way when I said it, and it looked to me that it sort of got to him that I said it, because it sort of looked to me that he saw that I really meant it.

              Most likely, I would have lived in the caretaker’s cottage, gotten guide papers and fished the flats with clients, and rented out The Fish House, when it wasn’t being used by folks who had fallen in to love with it too. For my father let many people use it: family, friends, business customers. Beside the front door, as I recall, was a sign on which was printed: “Welcome to my home, please treat it as you would your own.” Somewhere inside, as I recall, was another sign saying, “Some guests please us in their coming, others in their leaving.” And over the toilet in downstairs bath was a drawing of Bear Jesus, er Bear Bryant walking on water, and underneath were these words: “I Believe!” Coach Bryant spent some serious time down there with my father and other close friends of theirs, and in the Green Turtle Inn still hung, last time I looked, a pair of old white tennis shoes in a plastic bag, with some sort of card or sign hanging off them, saying “Bear Bryant’s Booties.”

              I caught a passel of bonefish wading that flat out in front of The Fish House, and I caught another passel of them in the little Boston Whaler my father bought when he got the place back in 1963. I fished those flats hard, got really sunburned chasing those grey ghosts hither and yonder. And then, as had already happened with hunting, which I had come to love after I had fallen in to love with fishing, it went away. I no longer wanted to fish for sport, and I really didn’t even care much to fish for the skillet either, even though I might do that sometimes.

              The changes started in early 1987. I felt it, like a great shadow coming over the land. I felt it over me, against me, and inside me. There really is no describing it, but I knew it was going to be very different. Very different. Then an odd thing happened: I saw that I was still fishing, but it was a different kind of fishing. Very different. I still used what I had learned on the flats, and before that at Destin, and fishing lakes and ponds and streams near Birmingham: cane pole, bait casting, spinning and fly, but invisible. In this moment, I have no doubt that my father’s spirit was there with me all along, and my son’s, we three were fishing together. We three are fishing together now.

              My father was fishing when I was twelve and it was early spring and baseball was warming up and there would be a Little League in our community that year. We made up a pitcher’s rubber and a home plate in the gravel drive behind our home. He bought a catcher’s mitt and came home after work every day, and I threw until his knees wore out from stooping in the catcher’s position. I got to where I could get it over the plate pretty well and could hit different spots in the strike zone. I didn’t have any stuff on the ball, no curve, no knuckleball, but I had zip, and I was left-handed, and that was unusual for a pitcher in those days and batters were not used to it coming from that side, and I got on a good team and I was one of the pitchers, all because my father and I had gone into the zone together those many afternoons after he came home from work.

              He had season box tickets behind the visitor’s dugout at Rickwood Field, where the Barons played. We went a couple of nights a week. I’d get in the back seat and go to sleep on the way home. Jimmy Piersall played one year, before he went up to the majors. He hit a lot of game-winning home runs, to the opposite field (he was right-handed), in the bottom of the ninth, as I recall. In those days, baseball was the most important American sport to me, although football would take its place one day. In football, winning is everything, or so said The Bear. I suppose it is, but it has killed me, trying for perfect records every day of my life.

              I made a lot of bad casts to bonefish, but I caught my fair share. I wrote a number of very good books, non-fiction, novels, and verse. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a lot of good books wrote themselves, using me, as I had no clue where it was coming from, just as I have no clue where these stories here are coming from, before they come from wherever they are coming from. Yet by the measures of this world, those books were inconsequential. How they were sold in heaven, I cannot say, because I have not been told. The best novel I may ever write was written right here in Helen, Georgia, 2001, perhaps on this same library computer.

              And I just now received a phone call from John McKleroy, my father’s lawyer, to tell me that my father passed away in his sleep yesterday morning…

              Maybe I need to stop writing, for now...

Next morning epilogue…

              I burst into tears when John McKleroy called yesterday afternoon, because, I said, I had not gotten to see my father before he left. John said I would see him soon, and I said, yes, but still my tears were because I had not seen him here, in this world, before he left. I said I see him often in my dreams; it is good for us.

              The night before John called, I also was told in dreams why my father and I were not seeing each other: it wasn’t anyone’s fault and was just one of those things I would never have known if it had not been revealed to me. Then I got up and went to the library and I wrote yesterday’s story. Then John called to say he had not been able to reach me the day before yesterday, to tell me that my father had gotten up that morning in his home and had breakfast, then said he wanted to take a nap and thanked everyone there for helping him.

              About four months ago I was told in a dream that something undefined would change by August 2. A friend has offered to drive me over to Birmingham this afternoon so that I can attend the memorial service tomorrow. John McKleroy has offered to get me a rental car and place to stay. Friends in Birmingham have offered me their home, for a place to stay, and I will take John up on the rental car. Dreams last night were encouraging. It did not turn out as I had hoped, but then, maybe that’s why I awoke yesterday morning thinking of the Hit and Miss Club. Maybe some things just turn out the way they turn out and that’s a good enough batting average.

The church of the Golden Flake Clown’s mother

    My grandparents on both sides were southern Baptists. They attended Southside Baptist Church in the Five Points part of Birmingham. My grandfathers were deacons in the church. 

    My mother and father attended that church in their youth. 

    My mother didn't care for the Baptists, and she stopped attending church. 

    I was maybe 10 when Mt. Brook Baptist church was built near our home on Montevallo Road. 

    My father and I had a Sunday morning ritual. 

    He drove us to a local drugstore, where I got a soda fountain Pepsi Cola, and then we took a drive. 

    Then, he drove us to Mt. Brook Baptist Church, where he attended a Sunday School class for men and I attended a boys class.

    I really liked the teacher and the students.

    Driving home from the church, my father and I talked about what was discussed in my class. 

    I seldom attended church services. The sermons went on and on, and bored the shit out of me. And, tortured me.

    A young Episcopal priest named Lee Graham started a parish church in an old farm house across the street from the Mountain Brook Fire Department, Police Station and City Hall. My mother started attending Sunday services at St. Luke's. She really liked what the minister was saying. His name was Lee Graham. 

    My mother told my father, if he didn't get serious about church, she was taking their children to St. Luke's. My father and I kept up our Sunday morning ritual. My mother decided that wasn't good enough.

    She took me with her to St. Luke's, and made me sit through morning worship services, which consisted of songs, recitations from a prayer book, chants, long boring sermons, songs, communion, which I could not take, because I was not confirmed, more chanting and song. 

    I went places in my imagination.

    My grandparents on both sides and their minister at Southside Baptist went haywire. 

    My mother held her ground.

    One Sunday night, my father asked me what that day's sermon was about? What could I say? I had no clue, because I had not listened to the sermon. 

    My father gave my mother the look, 

    My mother gave me a much worse look. 

    I supposed she had hoped I would prove to my father and their parents that she had done the right thing by joining St. Luke's and taking her children there with her.

    It apparently didn't occur to them that I should be in a Sunday school class with my peers, instead of attending church services;

    When I was 12, my mother enrolled me in confirmation class, so I could be confirmed by the bishop and take communion. 

    Every Saturday afternoon, for 2 hours, I endured confirmation class, while being forced by my mother at home to memorize the Ten Commandment and a lot of stuff from the prayer book, including the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. 

    I hated grammar school, viewed it as prison. Saturday's were my days out of jail. Now I was in a different jail for two hours every Saturday afternoon.

    I completed the confirmation training. 

    The Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to St. Luke's to confirm our class at a Sunday service. My mother and father and their parents were there.

    The bishop spoke a while, about what, I doubt I remembered much. 

    Our confirmation class all went to the rail and knelt. 

    The Bishop passed by us one at a time, putting in our cupped, open palms a thin, white, wheat wafer, the body of Christ, for use to lap up with our tongues and hold in our mouths until it dissolved and we swallowed it. 

    The bishop returned with a silver chalice filled about half way with red port wine. He offered us the chalice and helped us tip it up so we could take a sip.

    My first sip ever of alcohol, which the bishop had called the blood of Christ, went down my throat wrong. 

    It burned, and it was all I could muster to pretend all was great and wonderful. 

    I felt like I was choking to death, and needed to gag and throw up. 

    Summoning every ounce of my will, I shakily walked back to the pew and pulled down the padded knee rest and kneeled with my eyes closed, begging God to save me. 

    It passed, but it did not seem God had anything to do with it.

    I didn't tell anyone. 

    When I was 14, my mother pushed me to become an acolyte, and wear a white robe and carry a gold cross on a pole and a silver candelabra to light candles in the church nave during Sunday services. 

    I was not interested, and she kept pushing, and I was not interested. 

    At church one Sunday, my mother asked the curate to persuade me to become an acolyte. He faced me, saw my pleading eyes and head shaking, and told my mother I didn't want to do it.

    Time passed, and I grew resistant to attending church. 

    I much preferred playing golf, fishing, or anything, to attending church. 

    That really upset my mother, and I felt guilty. 

    Maybe I was going to hell, but I didn't want to go to church much.

    Over the years, I went back to attending church for a while. I was sincere, but it didn't stick.

    At Vanderbilt, my sweetheart, Dianne, and I consulted with a school chaplain, who was an Episcopal priest, and he told us to get married, if we wished. 

    We already were doing everything married men and women do, but live together. 

    After my son died of crib death when I was in law school, Dianne and I attended a little Episcopal church for a while, but it didn't stick for me.

    When it got rough for Dianne and me, we attended a small Episcopal Church called The Church of the Transfiguration, or, Trans Fig. 

    It was a pretty far out church, even for Episcopal. 

    Then, I didn't attend church much.

    After I tried out the New Age, which was interesting but didn't fix anything, angels got a hold of me, and turned me every which-a-way but loose, and that's when I started wondering when was I never not in church?

    I attended churches sometimes, but it was not the me who had attended church in the past. I didn't fit in. I said things that were not always well received. 

    I stopped attending church.

    During the black night early 1987- June 1998, I attended SouthSide Baptist Church, and was baptized, again. I attended a progressive Sunday school class, which I liked.

    The minister's wife asked me to speak with him. We met privately. I took him into a soul alchemy ritual. He said he saw eagles. He was moved. His wife said she hoped I would keep meeting with him.

    By then, I was so down that I quit attending that church.

    I began hanging out weekday afternoons in St. Luke's nave, hoping for a miracle. 

    The black workers, who kept the church clean, seemed to grasp I was in a horrible soul struggle. When I fell asleep sitting or lying on a pew seat, they left me alone, until it was time to close the church. The white people in the church never approached me.

    I started attending Sunday Services at St. Luke's. I met a man in the congregation, who was fascinated in mystics, but himself had not, to his knowledge, had a mystical experience. 

    He was fascinated by my personal pre-black night experiences. He offered me a bedroom in his home, if I felt I needed to leave my wife, Deborah.

    When I left her, the black night began to lift. I took him up on his offer. 

    I kept attending Sunday services at St. Luke's. 

    One Sunday before the morning service began, a woman in the foyer outside the nave called out, "Sloan, is that you?" I didn't recognize her.

    She introduced herself, said her and my children had once played together. I remembered her then. We sat together during the service. After it was over, I asked her if she would like to go somewhere for lunch? She said, yes.

    Over lunch, I told her a little about what I had been through and was coming out of. I told some of my mother and St. Luke's. 

    My lunch "date" said she was raised Southern Baptist and had come to view that as too severe and judgmental. 

    I said I might still be really messed up, l but I knew the hand of God in something, when I saw it.

    Really?

    Yeah, really. 

    Where it went from there for us is a l-o-n-g story, which I have told elsewhere, but do not know if it's to be part of this tale. 

    Suffice to say, it was by far the most physically passionate and unearthly romance I had experienced (or would experience). 

    But, she was so sure she would die and burn in hell if she did not attend church every Sunday...

    And she was so just as sure I had to be a successful capitalist to be her man...

    And she just as so sure kept ignoring, or forgetting, God, she said, repeatedly telling her to leave me alone about that, I was doing God's work...

    Until, finally, God told her in her sleep, lying beside me on my bed in my apartment, "You are not the one."

     And she woke up terrified, and fled.

    On the refrigerator in her kitchen was a "We Plan, God laughs!" magnet.

    I had told her a few times that was a message from God to her, and she had agreed.

    I didn't hear any laughing after she fled, only my heart and guts wrenching and angels weeping.

    When I was homeless, mostly, 2000-2005, I went into quite a few churches, and often I realized I was encountering the devil where most Christians never would think to look.

    When I addressed what was in front of me, unseen and unfelt, it seemed, by any one else, it was not welcomed with smiles.

    When I was in Birmingham after my father died, I dreamed of my old St. Luke's girlfriend one Saturday night, and I went to St. Luke's the next morning, and there she was, sitting in the same part of the same pew where we sat the first time.

    I said it was good to see her, I hoped she was doing well. 

    She said I was looking well, and she was not interested. 

    I said, ok, I didn't wish to cause her discomfort. 

    I got up and left the nave, and my mother's church.

    What seemed the trigger for our break up had come at St. Luke's in the summer of 1999.

    The priest preached hard for and vestrymen then got up and begged the congregation to give St. Luke's more money, because it was struggling financially.

    They quoted Jesus in the Gospels, "Be a generous giver, good measure pressed down." 

    But Jesus had meant, give to people in need.

    My girlfriend already had concluded, if the church was doing God's work, then God would provide what money the church needed. 

    I had been told in a dream a year earlier, that I had two adversaries with her: the Baptist and the capitalists, and the capitalists were the tougher adversary.

    A budding anti-capitalist, I suppose I had no chance, even though she made very good money.

    She had really a good salary with a tech company, and had really good benefits. She was doing well in the stock market.

    I told her to ask God for investment tips. She blanched, and I said, just do it and see what happens.

    She asked, received investment tips from the ethers, and the stocks she bought went up nicely, quickly.

    But I wasn't a capitalist.

    Nor, according to my mother, was Lee Graham.

    My mother told me that Lee refused to use sermons to try to raise money for St. Luke's. Only once a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required it, did Lee give a tithing sermon, and he clearly did to like doing it.

    My mother also told me, that during the time of the troubles, when Birmingham Blacks sought the same rights, privileges and treatment that Whites enjoyed, Blacks started pop-calling at White churches, to worship. That caused quite a stir.

    At a St. Luke's Vestry meeting, the vestrymen (deacons) discussed that situation and decided to hire off-duty Mt. Brook police officers to stand guard at St. Luke's on Sunday mornings, and turn away any Blacks who come there to worship.

    As the vestrymen adjourned the meeting, Lee asked them if they wanted to hear what he thought about what they had decided? 

    Oh, well, er, yes. What do you think, Reverend Graham?

    Reverend Graham said he had built St. Luke's from scratch, it was its pastor, and if Blacks came to St. Lukes and were turned away, he would end the service and close the church.

    Chi-ching.

    No Blacks ever came to St. Luke's to worship during that time. Mt. Brook was all-white, except for Black servants and yard workers.

    Not long after that, Lee told my mother that his work at St. Luke's was done, and he was taking a small parish outside of Tallahassee, Florida. 

    After my mother died in early 1967, my father sent his company plane to bring Lee to say last words over my mother's casket at Elmwood Cemetery, where my son would be laid to rest the next year, on September 12, 1968.

    Lee's eulogy for my mother was brief, as if she had not had a life, or he knew what kind of life she'd had and didn't go into it. Lee walked down the family line, shaking hands with my father and my brother, I was looking down and he passed me by.

    I think Lee served that small Florida parish until he passed on. He is one of six people memorialized in A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN. A free read at https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210 

    If asked what I would say today over my mother's casket ...

    I would say she loved life and had more friends than anyone I knew. All my friends and my brother's and my sister's friends loved her and being in our home, and they called her Nelle, and she loved them. She was devoted to her children and loyal to her friends. She and my wife, Dianne, loved each other like older sister and younger sister. She was devoted to St. Luke's Episcopal church and its pastor, Lee Graham. She withstood horrible firestorms from her parents and in-laws and their Southside Baptist Church minister for switching to St. Luke's and taking her children with her. She was a saint for not divorcing her womanizing husband, and she told me the reason she didn't was because her mother told her, "If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me!" So, she got a divorce from her mother and my father, and here we are, telling her goodbye.

    I don't think my mother wanted me to work for Golden Flake, and perhaps if she had not died, she would have helped me find enough spine to practice law in Troy, Alabama. She and my Great Grandmother Bashinsky were very close. But then, perhaps I would not even exist, if she had not written my father a letter when he was at Princeton, telling him, if he didn't leave Princeton and come home and marry her and save her from her parents, she would marry the first man who would have her.

    She told me that, too.

    In the mid-1980s, I was moving toward not practicing law. My father and I had lunch in local restaurants about twice a month.

    During one of those lunches, I asked him if the reason he pushed himself so hard in business and investing was to make it up to his father for dropping out of Princeton to marry my mother?

    My father said, "You know me pretty well."

    His father graduated from Princeton, and from all I could tell, that was his  crowning life achievement. 

    His father tried several times to persuade me to go to Princeton, and he would pay for it. It didn't feel right to me, and I declined. 

    Much later, Major told me that our Grandfather Bashinsky made him the same offer. Even later, I learned the same offer was made to the male children of my father's brother Leo.

    None of us went to Princeton.

Flash backs …

The next pieces of this patchwork quilt fell out of me in 2022 and got stashed away. I felt they were part of a larger body of work, and as I look back, I think the larger was waiting on my father's estate to wind down and for me to move into the next phase of my life, whatever that would be.

My Mamma Figured I Would Be a Lawyer

    When I started my freshman year in public high school, my father said I should take a typing class. He knew how to touch type and said it would be a valuable skill.

    The typing class was me and another guy and about 30 girls. I got up to about 40 not entirely accurate words a minute by the end of the first semester, and made a B. I did not improve the second semester, and made a D. 

    I can imagine there were people over the years who would have been much happier if I had not learned touch typing😄.

*************************

    I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1942. I grew up in the upscale white over the mountain community Mountain Brook, sometimes called The Tiny Kingdom.

     During my childhood, I mostly felt I didn't belong on this planet. My favorite novels were science fiction. I was convinced people lived on other planets and some of them traveled in space. 

    I viewed grammar school as being sent to jail. I liked play periods and weekends, holidays and summer vacation. I viewed church services as being sent to jail. I liked Sunday school. I hated yard work.

    I loved to fish and came to love to hunt. I was pretty good at football, basketball and baseball, and became pretty good at golf, which was my father's sport. He was very good when he was young, a scratch player - at or below par. He could have turned pro, but he went into business after navigating B-29 bombers from Guam to Japan in World War II. He told me golf is really important, because all business deals are made on the golf course.

    I made fair grades in grammar school, and usually got C in conduct. For talking too much. The first report card in 7th grade was all Cs and a D in conduct. My father blamed the Cs on the D. Said I would be sent to a local private boys school if I made another D in conduct. The next 6 weeks report card was all As and Bs and a D in conduct.

    One day my mother accused me of doing something I said I had not done. We went back and forth for a while. Yes, you did do it, she said. No, I didn't do it, I said. Finally, she said she had the memory of a camel - she never forgot. I said camels go for a long time without water, elephants never forget. End of argument. She retold that story many times. 

    I didn't reach puberty when I was supposed to. I quit all sports that involved locker rooms. I was doing poorly in public high school. I felt like I was the only person ever who never reached puberty. I was in a living hell. My father enrolled me in the private high school he had attended in another state. I went into puberty soon after that, the middle of my 16th year. Whew!

    The private school was run by Presbyterians who were convinced Nikita Kruschev was the AntiChrist, they were the Elect, Christ would return in their lifetimes. The 80-year-old founder told us in New Testament class that he and his wife had only had sex three times, twice to have children, once for pleasure, and he regretted the third time ever since.

    I got born again, briefly. Then, I quit standing up or raising my hand in daily convocations, when we were asked if we were saved, or wanted to be saved. I had no problem with God and Jesus, who intimidated me. I had a problem with the people running the school. But they helped me get into Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

    I joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which still lived in the Confederate uniform and flag era, even though it had maybe a dozen brothers from way north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Interestingly, the "mystic goodies", revealed during the secret initiation, were based on the Holy Grail. The fraternity's creed was Dieu et les dames. God and the women. I met my future wife, Dianne, on a blind date at a KA party. We were married on July 4, 1964, before my senior year. I graduated the next year. Thus ended the happiest years of my life, and since.

    Not caring to watch more Vanderbilt football, and not knowing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and since my father had often told me that he wished he had gone to law school, because knowledge of the law was really important in business, I enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, about 60 miles southwest of Birmingham. My bride and I moved to Tuscaloosa. We were financially supported by inheritances from my father and his uncle-in-law, Cyrus Case.

    I watched Alabama Crimson Tide football games, and thanks to my father's business relationship with Paul "Bear" Bryant", I was at a lot of afternoon fall football practices near the law school. 

    My father owned Golden Flake, which he had bought from his father and Cyrus. They had bought the company from its founders to lure my father back to Birmingham after World War II, in which he was an Army Air Corps Pacific Theater combat aviator. 

    My father learned the business from the ground up. Golden Flake competed head-on with Frito-Lay. Coach Bryant promoted Golden Flake potato chips and Coca-Cola on his Sunday afternoon TV show after each Saturday football game. "Great pair, says the Bear," meant Golden Flake and Coca-Cola throughout Alabama.

    I attended summer law school to graduate early.

    My mother, who had more friends than anyone I knew, died of cancer during my second year in law school. My friends and my brother and sister's friends were in shock. I was numb, never grieved. She was miserable for a long time. Was going to file for a divorce from my father until her mother said, if she divorced my father, it would kill her. Years later, I would think my mother died and divorced my father and her mother.

    My Vanderbilt sweetheart became pregnant and bore a beautiful baby boy in July 1967. She was worn out. I got up in the wee hours and brought our baby to her, to nurse. I then changed his diapers and put him back in his crib and my wife went back to sleep. I washed out his diapers in the toilet and went back to sleep.

    I felt like I was in paradise, literally. 

    For seven weeks.

    Dianne and I had a terrible argument about whether she would take our baby to her hometown to see her brother off to Thailand with the U.S. Air Force, where he would service American bombers during the Vietnam war.

    The argument really scared me. I agreed to the trip, drove them to the Tuscaloosa airport and watched them board a Southern Airways DC-3, and went home. Two days later, a fellow law student who lived nearby came to my home to tell me that Diannel had called and asked him to come to tell me that our baby had died in his sleep. She wanted someone to be there with me, when I Iearned of it. 

    I was devastated. And, I was wrecked by recurring thoughts that my son would still be alive if his mother had not made that trip to her hometown. I wept a lot. I was furious a lot.

    The Vietnam war was revving up. Two of my law school classmates were in the military and they were called up. Students with deferments were drafted when they graduated. Married men were being drafted. Fathers were not being drafted. I had lost my father deferment. 

    I roiled for a few weeks between enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps.and fighting in Vietnam, and enlisting in the U.S. Army and hoping to get into the Judge Advocate General Corps and being a military lawyer and avoiding combat. If I elected for a student deferment, I was assured of completing law school.

    I drove to the Draft Board in Birmingham and filled out an application for that deferment and drove back to Tuscaloosa. About a week later, my wife learned she was pregnant again. I drove back to the Draft Board and told the same lady clerk who had taken my deferment application what had happened. She said she was sorry, the deferment I had applied for was irrevocable. She said she would show me the application.

    She walked to a green filing cabinet and pulled out a file and looked in it and said there had been some mistake. I asked what mistake? She said I filled out the wrong form and would have to apply again. I said, no thanks, I'll go with a father deferment. I left feeling as if the weight of the world had been lifted off me, and God had done it.

    In January 1968, I left law school with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree and would spend the next three months studying for the Alabama Bar exam.

    My beloved black nanny died.

    A law school buddy a year ahead of me had moved back to his small south Alabama hometown and was practicing law with his father and his father's law partner. An esteemed lawyer in my father and his father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, offered me the spare office in his law firm and the use of his secretary. He had lost his own son many years before.

    My father and his father were against it, and I chickened out  after being offered a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham. His law clerk had quit in the middle of his clerkship to practice law with his father in Birmingham.

    About a year into my clerkship with Judge Allgood, I woke up one morning and my bowel was jammed. There were no prior symptoms. My internist couldn't figure it out. It scared the shit out of me. I lost confidence. Judge Algood advised me against going to work for Golden Flake, which seemed safer to me. Judge Allgood offered me another year working for him. I felt I needed to move on and went work for Golden Flake. 

    Judge Allgood is the first person portrayed in a little book that fell out of me in the fall of 2004, which can be read for free by clicking on either of these links.

    https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/

https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210

    Then came five more exceptional Alabama people, who greatly influenced me in my youth, but it took a bit longer for me to realize how much they truly had influenced me. The 2nd of those five was the daughter of African slaves, who came to my parents' home looking for work around the day I was born. She loved and raised me as one of her own. The third person is my father's older brother, Leo, the pediatrician and fisherman. The fourth person is my father's grandfather Leopold, who brought his Jewish bloodline from Eastern Europe to Troy, Alabama. The fifth person is Lee Graham, the minister of my mother's Episcopal church in the Tiny Kingdom. The sixth person is my father's original shrewd, crusty lawyer, John Gillon.

    I worked at Golden Flake during summer vacations before I attended law school. Often my father had said of Golden Flake, "Son I built this business for you!" I felt awful every time he said that. Perhaps working for my father full time might have gone differently, if first I had gone into the practice of law and tried that for a while.

    After four years, hoping to save my life and my soul, I left Golden Flake to go into the practice of law in Birmingham with a small law firm that had nothing to do with my upbringing in Mountain Brook. 

    My physical health had been horrible since I was with Judge Allgood. It was amazing that I gutted out practicing law, feeling every day like I was dying from cancer in my gut. 

    My 1st marriage had somehow survived losing our infant son, who was named after me, who was named after my father. The just as sudden illness that came after I chickened out about being a country lawyer in my father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, was almost more than I could bear. 

    The illness laughed at doctors and natural cures and healers. If I found something that seemed to be helping me feel a little better, suddenly everything got a lot worse, until I quit using what had made me feel a little better. I came to think the illness was intelligent and wanted me to leave it alone.

    Dianne and I now had two beautiful daughters, whom she mostly raised with the help of a wonderful black woman who worked for us several days a week. As I struggled  to work for my father, and then to be a lawyer. I did a lot of practicing on clients, and some clients I actually helped. 

    I think the straw that.broke this camel's back was our older daughter was hit on her bicycle by a slow moving Volkswagen in front of our home and she nearly lost a lower leg and foot. It was not the 90-year-old driver's fault. Our daughter had darted out in front of the Volkswagen. 

    I had my senior law partner sue the driver anyway. It was a weak case, the settlement was small. By then, my wife and I were separated. I gave her the settlement. After a while, she moved back to Tuscaloosa with our daughters. 

    I remarried. Jane was a watercolor artist, no longer painting after she borrowed $3,000 from a son of another boss in the Tiny Kingdom, in exchange for him getting her next two paintings. 

    Upon learning of that, I went to my bank and got a cashier's check for $3,000 made out to the other son of the boss and gave it to Jane and told her to take it to him and get herself out of jail, which she did. Yet, she did not want to paint, even though she had more talent in her right hand than I had ever seen.

    Finally, Jane decided she would like to teach young children how to draw and paint, and she found a place to rent in English Village, adjacent to Mountain Brook, and I gave her the money to open her school, which she seemed to enjoy, and her students seemed to like being there.

    Perhaps part of that was compensation for my not wanting to have any more children, and birth control methods were not working for either of us and she got pregnant twice and had two abortions that really traumatized her, and so I got a vasectomy, which really traumatized her, and it traumatized me.

    By and by, I met a fellow teaching a survivalist adult education class at UAB (University of Alabama, in Birmingham). By then, I had become an avid vegetable gardener in my backyard. The survivalist lived out in the country west of Birmingham. He had a bunch of rare breed chickens that laid different colored eggs, and a large vegetable garden.

    He was the Executive Director of the local Planned Parenthood, which was receiving death threats from right wing Christians. He asked me to provide legal advice, which I did pro bono. I was not a strong abortion rights person. I knew a bit about abortion by then. I knew the damage Jane suffered. However, I didn't see any pro-lifers offering to adopt unwanted babies, or paying mothers of unwanted babies to raise their unwanted babies. 

    By then, I had persuaded Jane to start painting again, if I wouldn't push her to try to sell her paintings. That went okay for about a year, when I persuaded her to put her paintings in a gallery owned by a woman whose husband was a lawyer I knew. Among artists, the gallery owner was not popular. She and Jane came at odds over a gallery showing. I told Jane, if I got into it, all hell might break loose. I got into it and all hell broke loose. The owner kicked Jame out of the gallery.

    The angel of starving artists must have been on the job. The gallery owner had advertised a show in the Birmingham Post-Herald, and the showing artists were named. The owner invited Jane to bring her paintings back to the gallery. 

   The other artists' paintings were hung and there was no wall space, so the owner stood Jane's paintings on the floor, leaning against the baseboard. A Birmingham newspaper's review of the show praised Jane Shea's paintings, but said they were hard to find on the floor.

    Heh.

    I obtained a Masters in Tax Law from the University of Alabama School of Law. I hoped that would energize my law practice, but it didn't. I then went out on my own for a few years.

    Jane drove down to Pensacola for its annual public art show in a city park. She won first prize in water color. A couple of years later, she drove down to Orlando and won first prize  for water color in the Disney World art show and was given the blue ribbon by Mickey Mouse. 

    My law practice had dwindled down to a leaky faucet in output. 

    I wrote three books, which did not make the residential real estate and legal industries particularly happy with me. My artist wife was my Muse. 

    The books received good reviews and got me lots of media interviews but did not make me much money, because I was impatient and paid a publicist to promote the books before they were in bookstores. 

    HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?

    SELLING YOUR HOME $SWEET HOME

    KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers

    The Prentice-Hall Division of Simon & Schuster ended up with all three books. 

        Jane Pauley interviewed me on The Today Show about the homebuyers book. Also there was the General Counsel of the National Association of Realtors. We discussed real estate brokers and agents trying to represent both sides - conflict of interest. The General Counsel didn’t think it was a conflict of interest.

    I hardly killed all the lawyers in the 3rd book, but I heard some Birmingham lawyers were upset- perhaps they thought they saw themselves in the book? 

    One chapter, "Don't Kill Your Lawyer!", was about clients no lawyer ever wanted to have as a client. 

    I had not yet arrived at the notion that the only way to kill all the lawyers was, people stop using lawyers, which would result in pandemonium, given how deeply embedded lawyers are in American society, and elsewhere.

    An artist son of another boss, who was a good friend of Jane, had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, where he was doing well as an artist, subsidized by his father. They invited us out to stay in their guest cottage. We stayed two months in the summer of 1985. 

    By then, I was interested in what looked to me like not of this world phenomenon. It was not a religious interest. I had grown up in Christendom and attended its churches. What I was interested in was something else altogether - or so I thought at that time.

    I saw a lot of interest in that something else in Santa Fe. Decided I wanted to move there. Invited Jane to move there with me. It was an artist's heaven. 

    I had a pretty good amount of money from various inheritances. That’s how we got by.

    Jane still lives in Santa Fe. 

    I now live in the Birmingham Southside apartment building, in which I lived two other times after I quit running away from home. 

    I can't imagine much interest in what all happened to me when I was a runaway, but some of it might bear telling again.

The Law Is a Jealous Mistress

    A dream around dawn left me thinking my Senior Law Partners, whom I sometimes call angels, want me to fill in some blanks today about my legal training at the University of Alabama School of Law, which I entered in the fall of 1965. 

    The dream included an Alabama Crimson Tide star running back, Major Olgovie. My younger brother was named Major, which was my mother’s maiden name. Major was an Alabama undergraduate when I was in law school, and we attended some Crimson Tide fall football practices together, using passes Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant gave our father to give to us. As I wrote in the Introduction, Coach Bryant’s Sunday show after each Saturday game was sponsored by Golden Flake and Coca Cola - “Great pair, says the Bear.”
    Anyway, I woke up from the dream around dawn thinking I was supposed to play a little football in today’s writing, and the way to do that was to go back in time and fetch something I wrote in 2019 about a southern lawyer who became a mystic.

…………………….

    A few nights ago, I was told in a dream. “Life began on Hackberry Lane.” The University of Alabama School of Law was on Hackberry Lane in Tuscaloosa, when I attended that law school.

    I well recall my first day in class. The professor told us to look to our left, then to our right. Two of us would not be around by graduation time. That would prove out. My recollection is that professor was Clinton McGee.

    Professor McGee taught criminal law. It was said, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, Professor McGee had entered the U.S. Military and was sent overseas to defend accused Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It was said he was getting them off, so he was made a prosecutor, and the ones he prosecuted did not get off. Professor McGhee didn’t deal out a lot of As and Bs. He gave me a C. I deserved it.

    Some years later, a law student named Roy Moore got nicknamed “Fruit Cake” by Professor McGee. Many years later, Moore got elected to the Alabama Supreme Court and then got removed because he put the Ten Commandments in the Supreme Court building and would not take them down. Moore got elected again to the Supreme Court and got removed again because of his religious fervor.

    We had a law professor affectionately called “Hatchet Harry Cohen”, because he gave lots of low grades on final exams. He taught a real property course, based on a textbook he had written. I was assigned to a different section under a different law professor. I thought I was not learning anything, so I sat in on Professor Cohen’s classes in the other section. I memorized his textbook and made an A on the final exam. I had Professor Cohen for negligence torts the next semester. I fed back on the final exam what he had said in class. I made an A. Professor Cohen often talked in class about the difference between being a “legal monk” (law professor), and being a real lawyer.

    We had a law professor affectionately called “Black Jack Payne”, because he was a legal scholar and wore a green visor when he researched ancient legal history in the law library, and he dealt out final exam scores of 21 to graduating seniors. He taught negligence torts, and arcane real estate law, and I was darn glad I didn’t get assigned to his negligence torts section, but was assigned to Professor Cohen’s section. (Many years later, my oldest daughter married Professor Cohen’s son. I told my son-in-law a few law school stories about his father.)

    We had a law professor named “Bad Sam Beatty,” who had a PhD in law, and would drill into us that the Law is a Jealous Mistress. The first day of class, Doctor Beatty looked down at his roll sheet and said, “Bashinnnsky! I like that name, Bashinnnsky. Is Mr. Bashinsky here today?” I stood up, as required when a law professor called on us.

    Doctor Beatty said, “Mr. Bashinsky, what’s the first thing you do when a client comes into your office?” There was nothing about that in the reading assignment for the first class. I said, “I suppose you ask him why he came to see you.” Doctor Beatty said, “Sit down, Mr. Bashinsky, you will never make it as a lawyer!”

    Doctor Beatty asked if anyone knew what is the first thing you do when a client comes into your office? A fellow somewhat older than the rest of us, Billy Church, who had been a Baptist preacher, raised his hand and rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb. “Correct, Mr. Church”, Doctor Beatty said. “You get paid.”

    Up the road in Birmingham, was Samford University, a private Baptist school, to which my Baptist Grandfather Bashinsky had given a great deal of money. Attached to Samford was Cumberland School of Law. The tuition there was much higher than at Alabama. Most of the Cumberland students  graduated. 50-percent of them flunked the state bar exam. 95-percent of my graduating class passed it. Before the bar exam, I spent several months studying my law school class notes. I think that’s why I passed.

    But I skipped over a few other interesting things about Doctor Beatty.

    It was said that when he was a new lawyer, Sam Beatty had represented a black man accused of a crime against a white person. Beatty was convinced his client was framed. The white jury decided otherwise. The white Alabama appellate courts agreed with the white jury. Beatty told the appellate justices that he would never practice law before them again. He quit. He got his advanced law degrees and became a law professor.

    Doctor Beatty had a good friend named Ryan deGraffenried, who was a rising political star in Alabama, a good and decent man, who could have changed the course of history in Alabama, if he had been elected governor. If the small airplane in which he was traveling had not crashed and killed him. Doctor Beatty told us a little about his departed friend, what a great loss for the State of Alabama! Doctor Beatty said he was too upset to continue. Class dismissed.

    The current law school dean, also a law professor, resigned being dean, he just wanted to teach. Doctor Beatty wanted to be dean. He was not selected. A law professor from up north was brought in to be dean. He instituted mandatory class attendance, which was really dumb, I thought. Alabama did not want lawyers, who had to be made to attend class. It wanted lawyers who were dedicated to the law. I said as much during a feedback meeting the new dean held.

    Doctor Beatty announced he had taken a job teaching at the Cincinnati School of Law. His last class would be Uniform Commercial Code that summer. He was teaching Judicial Remedies. About ancient legal remedies, still part of Alabama law. Instead of his usual mostly low grades, he gave out only As, Bs and Cs. I got a C, and I was grateful.

    Thinking Doctor Beatty was making a statement to the law school bosses, and he would do it again in his summer Uniform Commercial Code class, a lot of graduating seniors signed up for that class. I signed up for the class. I studied my ass off. The final grade sheet had 3 As, 5Bs, perhaps 10 Cs, and about as many Ds and Fs. I got one of the Bs. By then, Doctor Beatty had moved to Cincinnati.

    We started hearing rumors of how it was going in Cincinnati. Doctor Beatty was making his students stand up when he called on them. They were not used to that. He was disturbing their comfort zones in other ways. He was teaching Uniform Commercial Code. We liked hearing that. 

    A letter came from Doctor Beatty’s students, asking for a copy of his final exam in Uniform Commercial Code. A genius among us, not I, sent them a copy of Dr. Beatty's UCC final exam grade sheet, on which was scrawled, “Suck wind, Yankee Bastards!” We heard Bad Sam really liked that letter.

    Later, I heard Doctor Beatty left Cincinnati to teach at Mercer Law School in Macon Georgia. Then, I heard he was working in a Macon bank’s trust department. I worried he was in a soul crisis.

    Then, I heard Doctor Beatty was back in Tuscaloosa, practicing law.

    Then, he ran for the Alabama Supreme Court, and got elected. I went before him on an appeal from a case I had lost on the pleadings in the Birmingham courts. He and the other justices ruled against me.

    I dedicated KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? : “To my Law Professor Sam Beatty, who taught me how to think.”

    Many years later, as I was emerging from the black night (1999), Doctor Beatty called me from Tuscaloosa, said he was coming to Birmingham to have lunch with a friend at The Club, he’d like for me to join them. I was, well, flabbergasted, but there was no way I would not be there.

    It was a fairly low-key lunch and discussion, but some deep currents were touched. Three men, who had seen plenty, who recognized we were a bit different.

    I told Doctor Beatty that I had long wondered something. He asked me what it was? “You sometimes gave me a really hard time in law school.” He smiled, said, “Because I really liked you, Sloan!”

    I don’t know if Doctor Beatty read any of my books. I don’t know why he called and invited me to join him and his friend that day. I had no further contact with him in this life. But then, maybe he was who told me in my sleep recently, “Life began on Hackberry Lane”?

    There was yet another The Club event when I was coming out of the black night. A law school reunion, during which I learned a classmate named Billy Scruggs had become the president of the Alabama Bar Association.

    In law school, Billy had teamed up with Billy Church during the moot court competition, and they gave me and my moot court partners fits.

    Billy was a great banjo picker. He worked at a fishing and hunting shop in Tuscaloosa. He and Billy Church did pro bono apprentice legal work in the local courts, and gave local lawyers fits.

    After law school, Billy Scruggs went back to Fort Payne, his hometown in north Alabama, to be a country lawyer, fish and hunt, and keep playing his banjo. He jammed with a group of musicians he had grown up with. In time they became known as the band, Alabama. Billy became their lawyer. He helped them and himself make a whole lot of money, in Sweet Home Alabama, which was not one of their songs, but maybe it should have been.

    About a year ago, I traveled through Fort Payne and stopped for lunch at a diner and struck up a conversation with a local at the counter bar. I asked him if he had known Billy Scruggs? Yes, he had known MR. SCRUGGS. Then came stories that left me thinking Billy was a giant among men in his hometown.

    Billy Church practiced law in Birmingham, and eventually ended up in a small town east of Birmingham, where he was a country lawyer of some renown, and took up and played a lot of golf, I heard.

    I never became a country lawyer, and I didn’t do all that great as a city lawyer, but I did write some interesting books based on my time as a city lawyer. Four novels were a trip. Two were not published, two were. KUNDALINI, ALABAMA and HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale. 

    KUNDALINA, by "Jake Carruthers", is a romp about a young man whose deceased Pleiadean human father wanted him to be a lawyer, but his lady love, who turns out to be a shaman in  disguise, and the Cosmos have other notions. Now KUNDALINA a free read at archive.org, https://archive.org/details/kundalina/page/68/mode/2up

    HEAVY WAIT is a romp about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer, whose lady love Fate deals a really bad hand, and then he is given a new lady love, and they and a lot of other people are turned upside down and inside out and every which-a-way but loose. HEAVY WAIT died and went to heaven, or somewhere. Then it got resurrected and is a free read at archive.org, https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212

We Plan, God Laughs!

    After writing "The Law Is a Jealous Mistress", I thought perhaps I might go back to the end of “My Mamma Knew I Would be a Lawyer”, and tell a bit about what happened after my artist wife and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where there was lots of interest in other world phenomenon, in which I was very interested. However, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for this chapter, which kept growing as I kept dreaming about it.

**************************

    For about two weeks, I found myself thinking about when I moved from Santa Fe to Boulder, Colorado in the fall of 1987, and of the first time I drove back down to Santa Fe to visit friends. As I entered the Arkansas River Valley in central Colorado, and Mts. Harvard, Yale and Princeton came into view, I had a vision that I would write a book about practicing law in a new way. I started writing right away, and turned out reams of garbage. Finally, I stopped trying. 

    Some time passed. 

    A woman called me from a small town in Maine. She said she had found KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? in her local library, and I was the only lawyer who could help her! I asked how she had found my phone number. She said she had gotten it from the Alabama Bar. I said I didn't practice law that way any more. She said she didn't know what she would do. Perhaps she would see a spiritual adviser. I said I sometimes did spiritual counseling, did she want to try that approach with her legal problem? She said, yes. I asked her to tell me about her legal problem.

    It was a scrape with her ex-husband. 

    As if a light switch was thrown, I suddenly saw her situation differently. I told her that, and asked who her ex reminded her of, and who another person involved reminded her of, and who the judge reminded her of? It was other people very important to her, with whom she had deep unresolved issues. She was blown away. I was blown away. I suggested she get to work in her relationships with the other people and try to cool down about what was going on with her ex.

    That was how the writing of the new book began. 

    More people showed up looking for legal help they did not yet know they were seeking. They became part of the new book. 

    A fellow at least a generation above me called from the American Midwest and said he had read KILL ALL THE LAWYERS?, and I was the only lawyer who could help him. He proceeded to tell a long tale of lawyers and judges not treating him right. I saidI didn't practice law the regular way anymore and now I approached legal problems as spiritual issues. He asked me how old I was and said he was an elder in his church. My age had not been relevant when he told me I was the only lawyer who could help him.

    A fellow where I was living had heard about me and called all upset about a defective part in Volkswagen Beetles. I asked if he had a Beatle himself? No, he said. He kept ranting about the defect. He dropped that he was a recovering alcoholic and had been sober many years and went to lots of meetings. I asked him if he'd ever heard of "the rescue syndrome?" He said he had. I suggested he talk with his AA friends about his beef about the defect part in Volkswagen Beetles. He grumbled that he would never have imagined calling a spiritual lawyer, who would talk to him about the rescue syndrome.

    For two years, the evolving manuscript and my ego suffered heavy editing by angels and people angels put in my path. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspectives of myself and my ways of thinking and behaving changed dramatically. 

    I was taken back into some of my own brushes with the law, including getting my senior law partner to sue the 90-year-old woman driving a Volkswagen Beetle in front of which my older daughter darted her bicycle. What was I thinking, suing that elderly woman and causing her even more distress over something she could not have prevented?

    Even more troubling, after I started clerking for the federal judge, I spent a lot of time in the downtown YMCA playing 4-wall handball, which I had picked up after moving back to Birmingham from Tuscaloosa. I was spending so much time in the Y playing handball that this happened in my front yard when my older daughter was about 2 years old.

    Our next door neighbors asked my daughter what her name was, and she said it and they said that was so good! They asked her what her daddy's name was, and she said, "Daddy named handball." They gave me the look.

    The day after my daughter was run over by the Volkswagen, instead of going to the hospital at lunch time to be with her, I went to the Y and got into a 4-man handball game, 2 against 2, which I seldom did. Mostly, I played singles games. 

    I was playing very well, and when I backed up and set to take a right-handed shot out of the air as the ball came off a side wall (I was ambidextrous in handball), it felt like someone stepped on the back of my right ankle and I went down in horrible pain. I turned around and no one was behind me.

    I limped back to my law office and the next morning was in the office of the same orthopedic surgeon who had sewed my daughter's leg back together the day before. He said I had ruptured my right Achilles tendon and it would have been better for me if it had snapped in two, which he could have sewed back together. He said my daughter would walk before I would. He proved right.

    My older daughter had serious difficulties in her teens and twenties, and I felt a great deal of that was rooted in my being off in my own world when he was young. She fought her way through it, but it was not easy and I still feel responsible for most of it.

    There was something else in my fathering past.

    After several weeks in1988 of going to my son's unmarked grave at the foot of my mothers grave stone and bawling my heart and guts out until I had run out of tears and snot, I had a marker put on his unmarked grave, on which was engraved, "Infant son: He opened our hearts and set us on our journey."

    It took me longer to come around to being able to think the terrible argument my 1st wife and I had about her taking our infant son out of town was so traumatic for his soul that he decided to leave. It took me even longer to understand that his death had messed me up so bad that it became impossible for me to fit into my father and his father's plans for me.

    Toward the end of writing the book about practicing law in a new way, I was told in my sleep, "This book is your son." There was a sense in the dream that I would not get too attached to how he (the book) did and I would let it find its own way.

    THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems (1990), was dedicated "To my son, who died for me." I still see the book offered at online book stores.

    After the book was published and had gotten some publicity, a woman called me from Southern California. She said she had lived with a man for quite a while and had decided she needed to leave him, but she was afraid he might hurt her if she tried to leave. As we talked further, she said her brother was a local police officer. 

    The light switch was thrown. I told her this is how she should proceed. 

    Tell her brother her concern and ask him to have two of his fellow officers come to her home on the day she wants to move and they hang out inside with her while the moving occurs and they escort her to her new home. Her brother should not be there, because he is too close to it. 

    She seemed hesitant. I said this will really help you, if you do it. She said okay, and thanked me.

    She called perhaps three months later and thanked me. It had worked. The boyfriend was upended and docile. The move out to a new apartment was seamless. She was changed. A new person.

    Some years later, I came across The Christian Legal Society chapter in Birmingham and attended a workshop they hosted, where I posed the question from the audience: How do Christians square turn the other cheek with plaintiff lawsuits? Thereafter, I had some visits with some of the members, who agreed that was a tough issue, but there had to be some circumstance when Jesus would approve of plaintiff litigation. I suggested they get out their Bibles and read up on Jesus in the Gospels.

    Meanwhile, I was last licensed to practice law in Alabama in 2000. Because of recent dreams and waking life signals, I called the Alabama Bar last week and learned all I need to reactivate my law license is update my personal information with the Bar and send the Bar a check for one year’s membership, $325, and catch up the annual dues for the Client Security Fund, which was created in 2012 - $25 per year, $225. The fund protects clients from their lawyer’s stealing their money.

    Imagine a lawyer retiring for over twenty years and then being able to pick up where he left off by paying $550. No catching up on Continuing Legal Education. No proof the lawyer remembers anything he used to know about practicing law.

    I mailed two checks to the Alabama Bar, to become an active    lawyer in Sweet Home Alabama again. 

    I don’t charge for spiritual counseling, but I might charge for human legal advice, if a client can afford it.

At this stage, I don't know if I will open a law office. 

    In the computer and internet age, with an iPhone and Apple laptop, I can meet clients face to face remotely. I can work out of my home and car, in coffee shops, libraries, public parks, etc..

    I once trained in and did mediation and can do that.

    After I stopped practicing law, I sometimes was asked what kind of law I had practiced in Birmingham? I stole a line I had heard somewhere and said, "Threshold law." When asked what that meant?, I said, "Whatever walked over the threshold into my law office."

    Although I do not know if I will do litigation, a few years ago I qualified to e-file court pleadings in Alabama and Florida. How that came about doesn't seem on my Mamma and Jealous Mistress agenda today.

Is Booze God's Back Up Plan For Healing All the Lawyers Jesus Could Not Save?

    Something about writing a book without a plan is, I have no clue where it is going and how it might end up. Yet, isn't that how life works? For sure, the 22-year-old who entered the University of Alabama School of Law in September 1965, would have freaked out if he knew what lay ahead of him, and if he had known, well, he might have taken vows and joined a monastery. 

    I majored in Economics and minored in Business Administration at Vanderbilt, because those arenas were related to my father's line of work and I didn't have a clue what else I might want to get involved in after I graduated from college. However, I took several English courses, and by the time I reached my senior year, I had completed most of my required major courses and I filled in my first semester curriculum with a course in the English novel, and in the second semester a course in the American novel. By the time I graduated, I nearly had enough credits for a major in English, and I had a romantic notion of wanting to be a writer. Emphasis on romantic, since there was no way in heaven or hell the Golden Flake heir apparent was going to be another Ernest Hemingway, for example.

    Now some students of English writing might say there is a run-on sentence in the previous paragraph, but I might ask them if they ever read William Faulkner's novels, in which some of his sentences run a page or longer? Hemingway would not have been caught dead writing like Faulkner. But then, why should they write alike, when they were two entirely different men from two entirely different backgrounds? Faulkner, from Mississippi; Hemingway, from Illinois. Between Faulkner and Hemingway, I preferred the latter's novels, because I liked reading war stories, and I loved fishing and hunting, which were Hemingway's passions.

    When I was a boy, my mother gave me the serial installments of The Old Man and the Sea, which I think were published in Life Magazine? I didn't know anything about Hemingway, had never heard of him, when my mother gave me those installments to read. She didn't know why I loved to fish, but she knew that if I didn't get to fish, that would be really bad for me. I did not yet know the lakes and streams where I fished were churches, and the fish were God, and when the fish had taught me how to fish, they would send me forth to fish for souls.

    I reread The Old Man and the Sea during the American novels course at Vanderbilt. I took copious notes to feed back to the professor on the final exam, but I didn't need any notes to remember he said that you know who the bad guy is in a Hemingway novel, because he does not drink. I drank a bit back then. All my friends drank a bit. Sometimes we drank too much, but it didn't take us over like it took over Hemingway. 

    My senior year in law school, I volunteered to acquire the booze and ice and cups for the traditional 8 a.m. homecoming party in the law school rotunda, with a rock and roll band. All but one law student were male, and the tradition was we all wore morning suits and our wives or girlfriends wore evening gowns. 

    I drank maybe a half gallon of Bloody Mary's before the party ended and we adjourned to hop onto flatbed trailers pulled by over the road trucks. At the head of the lead trailer sat the law school's sexton before his pump organ, playing what all he knew how to play, That was the law school's contribution to the homecoming parade. That, and the law school's traditional cheers.

    "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ...10!"

    And, "Hidja, hidja! How'd ya like to bite my ... ass?!"

    Hidja had gotten banned the year before by the university administration. However, being clever lawyers to be, we simply chanted "Hidja" up to the last word, which we silently mouthed. 

    We Hdja'd real good Alabama's governor George Wallace that day. I was on the ground, walking with a couple of other really drunk male law students in morning suits, strutting about and leading cheers, until -

    A huge paw grabbed my right shoulder and I turned around and looked up at a giant Alabama State Trooper, who said, "Son, do you want to see that  football game today?" I said, "Yes, Sir." I didn't dare not say, "Sir." He said, "Then, get on that trailer!" 

    I climbed up on the trailer with the other drunk future lawyers of Alabama and their ladies, and all of a sudden the tractors revved their engines, left the parade, and led by a state trooper car with red lights flashing and siren wailing, we were escorted about 50 mph back to the law school, hanging onto each other and the floorboard of the trailer for dear life- there were no side rails, nor anything else to grab.

    As if God desired more sport to banish care, the trucks stopped across from a grassy quadrangle where the visiting Mississippi State Bulldogs marching band and majorettes were warming up. Well, what a wonderful opportunity! A few of us really drunk future lawyers of Alabama wandered ourselves right into the midst of those pretty majorettes and were prancing ourselves with them to their band's music. Until -

    From across the street came what looked like the entire Alabama Crimson Tide marching band, tubas and saxophones swinging back and forth, to protect the honor of the visiting band and its majorettes from the obnoxiously drunk and presumed highly dangerous future lawyers of Alabama, who immediately turned tail and fled with our ladies to the nearby football stadium. 

    Now it was long the custom for the law school students to sit on the 50 yard-line in the student section, starting at ground level and going upward. Except, when we arrived at our hallowed reserved seats, there were signs saying, "Reserved for band." Our longstanding legal easement had been stolen without due process. So, what did we do? Possession being 9/10ths of the law, we sat down in our purloined seats and - fine point of law, Hidja had only been banned from the parade. We started chanting Hidja really loud, and we did not omit to say "ass" at the end, which we very definitely wanted the school administration to bite, and we were certain beyond any reasonable doubt that we were really funny and cute. 

    Then, through the ground entrance of the stadium marched the Alabama band with its tubas and saxes waving back and forth. They marched right to where now about 100 drunk law students and their ladies sat, and in solidarity we law students crossed our arms and did not budge, and that went on a while, and then more drunk law students and their ladies showed up, and we took over the entire reserved band section, and the band about faced and marched toward the end zone and up into empty seats there.

    By halftime, I was barely able to sit up straight and my wife drove me home. The next day was not a good day. Then followed several days of my stomach muscles cramping because of drinking way too much tomato juice. I wasn't much of a Bloody Mary fan after that.

    The only other time I got that drunk in law school was after a last final exam. I prepared for finals by reading my class notes through three times. The night before a final exam, my wife and I went out for dinner and a couple of beers. I got up the next morning and went to the law school and took that day's exam and came home and started studying again.

    There was a bar in Tuscaloosa called The Tide. Some of the Alabama football team star players liked to hang out there, drink beer, play the pinball machines. Kenny Stabler, who would go on to become a star professional football quarterback After the last final exam, me and a law school buddy, who was an Auburn graduate, liked to sit in the Tide and drink beer and talk with the star football players. Until we were smozzled. Then, our wives came and got us and took us home.

    Perhaps if I had drunk more beer and whiskey at Vanderbilt and in law school at Alabama, I would have been a lot more successful lawyer, and later as a writer? I wonder, because later in my lawyer life, I attended a few Birmingham Bar Association parties and saw some of that city's finest lawyers drinking as if there was no tomorrow, and I went on some so-called continuing legal education ski junkets out west, and I saw plenty of booze flowing, but by then my gut was ailing so bad, I was only a shadow of my former law school booze guzzling self.

    While in law school, I read Carlos Baker's book about Ernest Hemingway. That's how I learned Hemingway had ended up blowing out his brains with his favorite double-barreled shotgun, to save himself from being locked up on a psych ward and dying of brain cancer there. All things considered, I thought Hemingway took the noble way out.

    Baker came out with a second book, which contained a collection of Hemingway's handwritten letters. One letter to Hemingway's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner & Sons, remains with me to this day. Hemingway was not happy that William Faulkner was getting so much attention. Another letter that remains with me to this day, was Hemingway was adamant that his latest manuscript was perfect. Every word, every comma, every period, was perfect. It should ot be changed in any way. Several other letters caused me to tell my Vanderbilt sweetheart that Hemingway was an asshole. I lost interest in him. It never occurred to me that he and I might be somewhat alike.

    During the latter stages of writing THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems, I hired a book editor in Birmingham, who also was a published author. She helped me organize the book somewhat better and also write better. She told me about an upcoming writer's conference at Birmingham Southern College, which had a stellar arts and sciences reputation. She asked if I would like to be one of the presenters, since I already had three books published? HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?; SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME; and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers?.  Editors had helped me improve those books. I said, yes, even though I didn't have a clue what I might present at the conference. I had attended a short story fiction writing course in Birmingham before writing the three books, which some people tried to pretend were fiction.

    I was living in Boulder, Colorado then. In my living room one day, I wondered out loud to myself what I had signed myself up for? What would I talk about at the writers conference? Out of the blue, Writing as a mystical experience came into my thoughts. Neat, I thought. That's right up the new book's alley. The new book still being written and refined with the editor's help. But, I wondered out loud, what would I actually talk about? Then, as if a light switch was thrown, I was looking at The Old Man and the Sea in a very different way. 

    The old man was Hemingway far along in years. The boy was the young Hemingway, who had not spent much time with his father, and did not get invited to go out fishing with the old man that day in Cuba. The great blue marlin the old man hooked into with a dead fish for bait using a handline supported by a windlass mounted in the boat was the manhood Hemingway still was trying to prove to himself, thus to his father. The sharks that came to the old man's boat and started chomping away at the great fish lashed to the side of the old man's boat were his rejected feminine, his yin, getting her revenge by leaving uneaten only the head and the tail of the fish, and its skeleton. The last novel Hemingway completed, The Old Man and the Sea was his unconscious suicide note.

    The first day of the writer's conference I was assigned a classroom and about 10 people showed up. They seemed to have no interest in my presentation outlined above. Nor in my suggesting that what an author writes about, first is about the author, whether the author believes it or not. The next day, I was assigned the main auditorium and had all the participants in the workshop in front of me. Again, there seemed to be no interest in my topic and The Old Man and the Sea analogy. I was stumped. Then, someone in the audience asked me what I did about writer's block? I said I didn't get writer's block. When I had something to write, I had to write it. When I didn't have something to write, I did something else. Maybe I could have heard a pin drop. I asked if they had read books about writing, in which they were told to sit in front of their typewriter so many hours a day, no matter if they wrote nothing? Some nodded, yes. 

    A fellow up in the back of the auditorium, with whom I had gone to high school, who did well in an English literature course and was a Golden Gloves champion and later became a lawyer, gave me a thumbs up. When I moved back to Birmingham in 1995, after the Boulder adventure played out and left me a bit disheveled, I reconnected with that fellow. We had a few visits. He had remarried and was still pushing himself hard. I gave him a copy of THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD, which led to some discussions. I finally suggested he try to go more with the flow and less with trying to make things happen. I didn't see or hear of him for a long while. 

    My life changed dramatically, because I ran out of money, which might, or might not, be another story to tell in this book. The novel, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale fell out of me in about six weeks' time, after I had a dream in Key West of a street performer I had met there, which suggested I was going to be doing some kind of street performance. A few days later, I met that street performer again, in Helen, Georgia, where he lived and worked during the warm months. Upon learning I had written books, he asked if I had ever written a novel? I said I had written three novels. He said he had long had a great idea for a novel, did I want to hear it? I said, yes. He told me his idea and asked if I could write that novel? I said, sure, I had lived half of the story the year before. But I had no computer. He said the Helen Library had computers. 

    We went to the library and I was given permission to write the novel on one of their computers. A story about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer fate dealt a really bad hand, and he got so drunk on tequila that he became catatonic and ended up on a psych ward, and then God, or Something, came along and turned that lawyer (and some other people) upside down and inside out and every which a way but loose in ways I doubt Mississippi lawyer/novelist John Grisham could ever imagine before or after he was born again.

    Around the time I finished writing HEAVY WAIT, I met a man living in Helen, who turned out to be an old friend of my brother Major, who also went to law school and later tried his hand at practicing law. I told my new acquaintance about the novel, which I felt God wrote and I went along for the ride. My new acquaintance said he wanted to read the manuscript. I gave him a disk holding the manuscript and he copied the disk and printed out the manuscript and read it and said he really liked the story. 

    He made more copies and sent one to a Jewish fellow in Birmingham, with whom I went to grammar school. He and other boys in my class had teased and sometimes hazed me. Much later, he became an evangelical Christian. He told Major's old friend to tell me that he really regretted being so mean to me, and I told Major's old friend to tell him that I said he would have to apologize to Jesus about that, after he died and went to heaven.

    Major's old friend found me one day and said the Jewish evangelical couldn't relate to the novel and gave the manuscript to a lawyer friend, who happened to be my old high school friend, who became a lawyer and gave me a thumbs up at the Birmingham Southern writers conference. Major's old friend said my old high school friend was boxing at a gym in Birmingham and his much younger sparring partner hit him hard in his heart. His doctor told him to take it easy and let his heart heal, but he went to the YMCA and got on the running track and had a heart attack and died and left his new wife and their new baby behind. I asked Major's old friend if maybe I should not share HEAVY WAIT with anyone else? He seemed a bit spooked. Hell, I was spooked.

    What was it Jesus said in the Gospels about lawyers?

 

Luke 11:52

“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.

    I wonder right now if booze was God's back up plan for killing all the lawyers Jesus could not heal?

    As for the writer's haven Key West, when I lived there, I wrote a lot on blogs and had some truly exciting poetry fall out of me, but I never wrote a book there. I grew totally intolerant to booze there. One glass of red wine over dinner made my liver howl the next day and my gut behaved like it hated me. So, my drinking days ended in a city where boozing is the national pastime.

    An annual celebration in Key West, called Hemingway Days, consists of lots of old white men with white Hemingway-ish beards, wearing fancy fishing outfits, drinking a whole lot of booze, hoping to win the Hemingway look-alike contest. Sometimes people told me I should enter the contest, I might win. I said that wasn't going to happen. Because, I did not drink, and I knew how to fish and write, and the Hemingway wannabes did not.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But

 

                    Judge Judy

Matthew 34

33 “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ 34 But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God,35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

**********************

    After I started practicing law, I learned the hard way something that was not taught or even discussed in law school. It was, after a new client with a contested legal matter came to see me, I should very definitely talk with everyone else who might be involved - the other side, the other side's lawyer, the potential witnesses - because nearly every time there was more to the story than my new client had told me, and there was more to the story than what the other side and the other side's lawyer had told me. The very last place a lawyer's client wants the whole truth to come out is during a trial, and the whole truth is not favorable to the client. 

    Something else I learned after I started practicing law, which was not taught in law school, was that when a client came to me, I had to get the client and me on the same page, otherwise some popular acronyms were very likely: WTF, SNAFU, FUBAR

    In that vein, this happened after I accepted Facebook's invitation to boost this on a new Facebook page I had created for this unfolding book, and in that way received the first legal case arranged for me by God after I reactivated my Alabama law license recently:

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer · 
I am writing a new book at its own blog - free read, no ads,  - about my early upbringing and a becoming a lawyer, and my slow migration to preferring an internal (yin) approach to legal approach to legal problems over the external (yang) approach

yinandyangofthelaw.blogspot.com 

 

Joseph

Can you make a chapter catalog how an attorney takes 4500 dollars from me a client after 14 months does nothing in court but watch me be destroyed. Threw me out the window found no defense and did nothing to counter the prosecution

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer

A few times, when I felt someone who asked me to investigate their lawyer had been misrepresented in a civil legal matter, I referred the person to the state bar association to file grievance complaint against their lawyer, and the lawyer didn’t like how that went.

My question to you is, were you innocent and wrongly convicted? That happens sometimes, unfortunately.

I once had quite a few inmate pen pals, because of two books I wrote. Of them, I felt one was set up and framed. He was trying very hard to get closer to God, but not in a religious way. After he was released, he dedicated his time to trying to help inmates who had poor legal representation. His name was David Norman.

Joseph

The problem I have is I paid this guy to represent me. In 14 months he literally did nothing. I was found guilty without testifying because my lawyer told me not to. So a black judge with a alleged black victim had a field day laughing and joking at my expense. I was convicted of a misdemeanor for criminal damage. My attorney told me for 6 months he intended to file a motion to force the victim to not testify. I was assaulted by the victim because he claimed I scratched his car. There are no witnesses just him and me. He attacked me 4 times. My lawyer did nothing regarding filing any charge after the victim testified he shoved me to the ground repeatedly. His excuse was well we failed to in not getting him to testify. Meantime he tried some dumb rule 20 motion the judge denied. All this after he insisted I not testify. I am innocent I was not represented in my best interest. I never got the chance to defend myself. He never he tried to challenge the 911 call. I called the police because I was being attacked.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer

Your accuser attacked you 4 times for no reason? Did you file assault charges against him after he assaulted you 4 times? If not, why not? Every lawyer and judge I have known would wonder and ask that. And, was there a police report? If so, did it say anything about a scratch on your accuser's car?

I know of no legal way your lawyer could have forced your accuser not to testify. When your accuser testified, did he show the judge a photo of the damage he claimed you did to his car? If he did not present a photo of the damage to his car, which he claimed you caused, any judge I knew when I practiced law would have ruled against him. If there was no photo of the damage in evidence, I think that should be reviewed by your state judicial board, and you could file a complaint with them, but they might be skittish, if you did not file assault charges against your accuser. 

I cannot imagine why your lawyer did not put you on the witness stand and have you tell the judge your side of it. Where I practiced law, judges and lawyers viewed swearing matches as "dog falls", and judges left the parties where they found them - no relief to either side.

I have some friends who might suggest you hire someone to break your lawyer's knee caps. However, that could cause you a lot more trouble. Assuming you did not damage your accuser's car and did nothing to provoke him to attack you, you could file a bar grievance complaint with your state bar association against your lawyer and ask that he be disciplined for lousy representation and he return your $4,500. 

 

Joseph
The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer there is a police report. I was cited for criminal damage. Only problem is the car is so weather beaten the paint stained white salt Marks all over there is no telling if that scratch was there all ready or not. There are no witnesses. Just me and him in the dark very dark parking area. He even told the police he heard a noise that sounded like scratching on his car. He thought it was a bird. I tried to tell him I was wiping off the bird mess on his trunk but he attacked me shoved me to the ground 4 times. I was hurt bleeding concussion my right knee twisted badly under me yet I got cited. Which was dropped originally then refiled to a more serious charge.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Was what all he did to you in the police report? How long ago did this happen?

Joseph
The court hearing was last week. The incident happened 14 months ago.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Again, was what the guy did to you in the police report? Was what he did to you put into evidence by your lawyer during the trial? Your lawyer did not call you to the witness stand? For real?

Joseph
The police reports showed he attacked me repeatedly. The body cam which was never entered into evidence showed my injuries. The police explained to me after it took them 22 minutes to show up he had every right to defend his property. I explained my position and why I went behind his car. The black cop only heard what he wanted to hear from the black victim. The original charge from that night was dropped. 2 weeks later it was refiled to a more severe charge. Somehow the victim claims it will take 2000 dollars to paint the scratch out of the trunk. My lawyer specifically told me to not to testify. He stated it would do me much harm. I protested but to no avail. The judge never heard my side ,now I cannot get him to return my calls. I want to file an appeal and cannot get that done either.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Who will not return your call?

Joseph
My lawyer. So far I have called twice no return calls.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
If you don’t have a copy of the body cam videos, go to the police station and get them. Do this asap. Hopefully the cams have not been destroyed

Joseph
The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer I dont know if the body cams are still available without a subpoena. My lawyer never introduced them despite me asking. They played a copy of the 911 call in which you can hear me yelling and being threatened repeatedly by the victim and 2 others. All I am trying to do is file an appeal. Writing to the judge is useless. She is black and I am not.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Your lawyer did not get copies of the body cam?
I’m having a really hard time understanding why the other guy attacked you four times.

Joseph
He did not get copies If he did he never presented them in court. The victim claims I scratched his car so he was justified in attacking me. Sadly he never saw me scratch his car only heard what he thought was scratching sounds. I tried to explain to him what I was doing. There was a large crow on the back of his car digging at something. I tried to chase it away and clean up the bird mess. He testified that he heard what he thought sounded like a bird scratching his car.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Joseph Inserra The law does not allow the degree of force you have described to defend a motor vehicle under the circumstances you have described to me. I think you should write all of this down in time order it happened and present it to the chief judge of your local courts, the local chief of police, the local elected district attorney, in some states called the state attorney, your state bar association, your state judicial commission, the FBI, the local US Attorney, the ACLU, showing copies to all of them, and state you have not shown it to the news media - yet. You may state in what you write that you were advised to do that by an attorney you met on Facebook, to whom you described it. If you go at it in that way, and based on what you have told me, your life and your loved ones lives may be put at risk, and you should ask both federal and local law enforcement for protection.  

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
If you wish, you can use your and my discussion here in presenting your case to whomever you wish to present it. If they want to know who I am, I'm Sloan Bashinsky. I live in Birmingham, Alabama. I am licensed to practice law in Alabama. I'm still having a really hard time understanding why you were attacked 4 times, and you stuck around; and I'm having a hard time understanding why the cops did not charge the other guy with assault and battery.  

 

Joseph
Thank you for all your help. I texted my attorney today got no response. Now I will complain to the top 2 lawyers. Mayes and Tellez. I am the one who called the police. I had to stick around because I was on the phone with the 911 operator. It took the cops 22 minutes before they found us. In that time frame the 911 operator and the call you can hear alot of screaming and shouting. You can hear me being threatened by one of the tournament directors I was hurt. Bleeding from both hands and arms. Concussion from hitting my head on the ground my right knee was swelled up twice its normal size. I stayed in my car until they finally showed up. The black cop went to the black victim. I talked to the mexican female and the white cop. Some how the black cop came back to me and stated he the victim had every right to attack me because he was defending his property. So I got cited for criminal damage. This is the one that got dropped but was later refiled at a worse charge meantime I am having knee problems I have scars on both hands and arms and yet I am the bad guy. The victim did not get charged because of what the cop told me. Again there are no witnesses. My word against his. I am at a loss as to why I had to take a conviction with so much doubt involved the judge never heard my side of things. I don't know what to do to get an appeal and get this lawyer off his behind.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
You're welcome. And yet, all of the above said and considered, this boosted post to which you responded and the new book I am writing at yinandyangoflaw.com are about taking a departure from the traditional outward (yang) approach to legal conflict, and turning inward and taking a yin approach. So please try to bear with me while I try to answer your last question: Why you are at loss...

First though, what kind of tournament? Did I miss that before?

Now consider the approach that legal conflict contains spiritual messages-lessons for the person enduring the legal conflict, and if that is not addressed, then the messages-lessons are usually missed. If you think karma actually exists, which it very much does, then if the messages-lessons are missed, they will present themselves again, and again, until they are addressed and embraced. Either in this life, on this world, or in the next life on this world, or somewhere in time and space.

The case you have described to me is really bizarre and I'm sure has and will continue to cause you a great deal of anguish.

I remain puzzled why you did not file assault and battery charges against your assailant. You do not need a lawyer to do that. You ask the police department to do it. You ask the district attorney to do it. You do not go get a lawyer to do it. You at least try to stand up for yourself on your own two feet. Unless perhaps, deep down inside, that is not what your soul wants you to do. It wants you to learn something you need to learn. But what could that be?

The crow shitting on your assailant's car is a very important character in this story. For throughout the ages in traditions that have not lost entirely their connection to God, or whatever started everything, the crow is a messenger from above, from the gods, from the spirit realms. So, a crow shitting on your assailants car was a very serious spiritual message-lesson for your assailant, and yet, that still looks outward, away from you, and misses the message-lesson meant for you from your soul, God, the Spirit Realm.

So, I wonder how your assailant, the police, your lawyer and the judge, who all seem against you, are trying to tell you something about you, which you really do need to figure out somehow and deal with, and it probably will not be any fun for you, but if you don't do it, then, it will come back around in some way shape and form and time and space. You can count on that.

So, I wonder again what caused your assailant to attack you four times?

More deeply, I wonder how these people who are against you might represent people in your past, who were against you and you did not resolve that satisfactory for your soul then?

I wonder if each of those people represent aspects of yourself, which you do not recognize yet, or want to recognize?

Jesus in the Gospels said something profoundly important: First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you wil see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Jesus also said to turn the other cheek, and perhaps if you simply do that in your case, in some mysterious way you will make a spiritual leap your soul wants you to make.

Yet, the way I came to understand this yin way of dealing with legal conflict, more is needed. It is important to delve into ourselves and our history and come to terms with all the characters in ourselves, who are represented by the people causing us grief.

That is what the new book is about, and if you look at other people's comments to this boosted post, you see there doesn't seem to be much interest in that approach, even though here are the words in the "teaser" for the post:
"I am writing a new book at its own blog - free read, no ads, - about my early upbringing and a becoming a lawyer, and my slow migration to preferring an internal (yin) approach to legal approach to legal problems over the external (yang) approach."

If you wish to speak with me on the telephone, thus privately, then send me an email and I will send you my phone number. I do not charge for spiritual counseling. I think what you have endured so far is the basis and opportunity for a very large spiritual shift for you, but what that is, how it might play out, I cannot say. That is something that will reveal itself in time, if you are willing to give it an opportunity to do that. sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Joseph
I did not think to file charges on my own. My lawyer had this grandiose idea that he would file a motion at the last minute against the victim claiming that If he testifies he would have to admit in assaulting me. Then he asked to have a public defender available to advise him not to testify. That failed as well he testified anyway. 
We both are baseball umpires. We were working a kids baseball tournament Martin Luther weekend 
My email is ...............@yahoo.com I feel like I got cheated now a conviction as my attorney failed repeatedly.

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Well, did your lawyer ask him if he assaulted you? If so, what happened next? This telling gets stranger and stranger. From traditional law perspective, I think you need a new lawyer in a different law practice, which will cost you more money. I think you need to report your current lawyer to your state bar. I don't know enough about the trial to advise about the judge that presided. I still don't now why, or how, your assailant attacked you 4 times. What were you doing that allowed that to happen? I would have gotten into my car and locked the doors after the first assault, if I intended to wait on the police to arrive.

 

Joseph

My lawyer did not ask him if he assaulted me. He asked if he pushed down. How many times? The victim lied but was never forced to admit assaulting me. I tried to make it back to my car each time I got up off the ground no easy feat he attacked me again and again. I called him a few choice words tried to calm the situation but he just kept coming until I could not get up any more. 

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
You have photos of your injuries? Were you treated medically and do you have those reports? If so, did your lawyer put those photos and reports into evidence during the trial?
How long after the assault did you hire the lawyer?

 

Joseph

I met with the firm the next day. They took many photos that were never presented. I did not get medical reports as I had to wait to see the doctor. 

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer

The law firm did not tell you to go straight to the police chief and the district attorney? And to a hospital ER ? File a bar complaint. Did you file a complaint with your umpiring association? The assailant is still umpiring kids baseball? 

 

Joseph

Yes he is and I got fired from that association. Part of the personal Injury law suit I am trying to file but cannot get anyone to listen or represent me. The attorney took pictures but nothing else except want 2000 dollars up front. I tried to get into the e r twice but was told to make and appointment because of covid. I ended up seeing doctor friend of mine who treated the cuts bruises and the lumps. He wants to do stem cell on my knee soon from the damage. The concussion healed on it's own. 

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer

You got beaten up and were fired from umpiring? Pardon my French, your case reminds me of the military phrase, FUBAR. I don't see how you can win a civil damage lawsuit after losing the case you have described to me. How did your assailant convince the judge that you had damaged his car? Were photos of the damage introduced into evidence? If so, who took the photos? Did you get blamed for one scratch, two scratches, three, all the scratches and dings on the car? Did your assailant file an insurance claim? Have you considered moving somewhere else? 

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer

All that you told me about your case set me to ruminating last night. Yours is the first legal case to come my way after I reactivated my Alabama law license. So, in my way of perceiving, your case is a message to me from God. If all you told me is true, then you have described a case that is possessed by the Devi, literally. The more you fight it, the more increasing risk to possession you are. I think the safe approach for you is to start at the beginning and write the entire story down, print it out on paper, sign it before a Notary Public, make copies of that and save it on thumb drives, and make it part of a bar complaint against your lawyer and present it to the chief judge in your local court, if that is a different judge from the judge who presided over your case, and file it with your state judicial commission, and with your local district attorney, and you try to get on with you life.  

I boosted this post as a test partly, to see what kind of traffic that might bring to the new blog where I am writing chapter at a time, The Yin and the Yang of the Law - legal conflict is spiritual message. There has been very little traffic at that blog, which tells me there is very little interest in that approach, so far. That yours was the first legal case God arranged for me to take on after I reactivated my law license is a message from God about just how tangled with the Devil the American legal system is. I saw that first hand in a case involving my father's affairs, which dragged on for three years and still drags on, although I was let out of it recently. I saw the same thing in other legal disputes I was dragged into since 2000, which involved other people, and sometimes me, too. I seemed to be their legal counsel provided to represent them in God's Courtroom, where everyone involved, including me, was on trial. No human law license is required to do that kind of legal work, and while it helps to have practiced law, it is not required.

    Now in case someone might wonder if I got the entire story about Joseph and his lawyer and the other umpire, what hangs it all up for me is what provoked the other umpire so much that he attacked Joseph four times? I can't imagine Joseph trying to wash crow shit off the other umpire's car caused four attacks. 

    And in case someone might wonder if I got lots of kudos for boosting this new book on Facebook, the answer is I got lots of angry comments about putting spam on people's Facebook feeds. 

For example:

Mark

Why the fuck is this shit on my feed?

Anomalous-unusual happenings 

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law - the Unicorn and the lawyer 

Well, I put this post on this FB page and FB invited me to pay it money to boost the post, so I paid FB money to boost the post and its algorithm chose people to receive it. It's been my experience with FB that its algorithm chooses what appears on my personal FB feed and that could be viewed as spam, since I didn't ask for it to be posted in my feed. 

 

    On the Alabama Bar exam, we were asked to discuss: “Smut is a tough legal nut to crack.” That was a 1st Amendment question I had studied in law school. A U.S. Supreme Court Justice had written in an opinion that he knew pronography when he saw it. I wonder what it would be like for him to return from the dead and spend a little while on Facebook and watching Hollywood, Prime and Netflix movies?

    However, all was not dreadful at the boosted post, such as:

Erin
How interesting you answered a question back with a question?
I love legalese...so , tell me true without any poo..how do you do the magic, that you do?
Uncle rothie stacks at your front , and your back ?
And do you propound that" selective incorporation " is yin or yang to the judiciary gang...?
That makes their pockets jingle, like ' ol Kris kringle?
I'm just the " Thorn" presenting, from the bottom representing ...

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Alas -
The Facebook AI pretends it's human.
Your question, did not I see.
Please resubmit,
Perhaps AI defenders will let it pass
through its immortal coil,
and I will try to answer,

Erin
Hmmm, I made a poem about selective incorporation and no they don't like me, it's not you...

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Ah, so,
how many times the Mother Ship snatched me,
kept me a while,
poked and prodded my being,
scanned my mind, thoughts, dreams, memories -
then wondered why they'd done that again?
and beamed me back down.
Wonder what court would hear that soap opera?

     Such as:

Petera

Good luck!

The Yin and the Yang of the Law- the unicorn and the lawyer
Gracias, and perhaps I should be careful what I ask for? 

The Unicorn and the Lawyer (and the Phoenix and Pegasus)

    After THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems was self-published in early September 1990, I hired a New Age publicist to try to get the book some attention. She introduced me to Gloria Riser, who published a monthly printed newsletter, Intuitive Explorations. Gloria told her readers about the book and I started contributing articles and comments to her newsletter. Gloria and I became friends and we kept in touch over the years. She posted on her Facebook timeline yesterday:

Gloria Resier

 

The Yin and the Yang of the Law...

Way back before the internet became a thing, some of my (now) Facebook friends were involved in publishing hard copy newsletters. Others were subscribers  and contributors to various newsletters.  During part of the 80's  and all of the 90's, I published three newsletters:  "Intuitive Explorations,"  "Tarot News," and "Somnial Times" (Somnial Times, being a zine all about dreams, dreaming, and related states).  Catherine Groves published and still publishes "Christian*New Age Quarterly" (remind me to resubscribe).  Another friend published "Total Eclipse,"  and there were others.  

Sloan Bashinsky  was a frequent contributor to "Intuitive Explorations."   He was a former Alabama practicing attorney and published author of three legal consumer books, when he had a vision in 1987 that he would write a book about practicing law in a new way - which was to recognize legal conflict contains serious spiritual messages/lessons that are missed if the traditional external approach is used. He wrote a book about that, published in 1990: THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems. 

Sloan is writing a new book, THE YIN AND THE YANG OF THE LAW, which is being published as it is written, a free read, at yinandyangoflaw.blogspot.com. The blog is part memoir, tales of a boy growing up and becoming a man during the 1940's - 1960's, in "Sweet Home Alabama."   Becoming a Lawyer.  Becoming a writer.  Becoming a Mystic, and, oh Lord! A Unicorn.. Where he's been and where he may or may not be going next with his life and his life's work. The stories he tells are ... memorable.

Sloan has long relied on his dreams to steer him, and his and my and other people's dreams foretold he would begin this new book, and he would reactivate his law license in Alabama and be a lawyer again, but probably not much like when he practiced law there before.

https://yinandyangoflaw.blogspot.com/

Sloan Bashinsky

Something must have grabbed ahold of Gloria.

Gloria Reiser

 

Eeeegads! While talking with Sloan just now, the King of Rods from a tarot deck just jumped off of my desk and onto the floor. The King of Rods (when a person) represents a man who has achieved his goals and dreams through long hard effort. Oh, but, Sloan was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Don't assume a silver spoon is the best thing to wish for. 

    Meanwhile, I posted at a foolsworkneverends.blogspot.com:

I called the Alabama State Bar yesterday, April 2, and was told that just the day before they had made it official that I am licensed to practice law in Alabama, again. I asked about annual Continuing Legal Education (CLE) requirements, and was told, since I'm over 65, I'm exempt. It's been 22 years since I had an active law license in Alabama. 23 years since I did any CLE. A friend told me yesterday that Alabama is a great place for people to get licensed to practice law 😂.

While I might dream that being a lawyer again makes it easier to sally forth like Don Quixote toward near and distant windmills, hoping to right perceived wrongs and make things better, I think I'd be nuts to actually believe that 😎. Perhaps there might be small victories, but holding my breath for more might cause my demise.

I talked last night with a good friend, who has become active in his home state, about one of its members of Congress I keep wondering why lightning has not struck and gotten his undivided attention, after the first lightning strike (a bad car wreck) seemed to be wasted electricity. 

I told my friend, all I have been reading and seeing in the news and on social media and in face to face conversations with other people, leaves me convinced America and humanity are working hard on relocating their head to their ass. 

As for my friend and me, we are perfect in every way😇, and we hope you will vote for us when we run for president in 2024 on the Unicorn ticket. We will toss a coin to see which of us is the sacrificial V.P. 

Gloria Reiser responded to that nonsense:

OMG, this is hilarious. If you tire of lawyering, you'd make a great stand up comedy act. 

Though you might also be a storyteller like Garrison Keillor, maybe even Mark Twain. 

    Gloria lives near Hannibal, Missouri, where Samuel Clements (Mark Twain) originated. She emailed early this morning:

I didn't fall asleep until after 1am. Just woke from a dream and a separate spoken message that woke me.  

In the dream, I was attending a presentation by you in which you were teaching/coaching attendees in not only learning to seek out, identify and work with the spiritual lessons/ messages associated with legal situations, but life situations in general. The presentation was very interactive with participates questioning and then discussing their insights. Much learning/awareness taking place. 

As that dream faded, I heard a voice telling me:  "You (me) entered life as a Phoenix Rising, but are near earning Pegasus status." 

I am fluent in tales of the Phoenix and spiritual meanings thereof. Not really Pegasus except recalling old gas station signs with the flying horse. While they always stood out to me, grabbed my attention, I haven't considered the symbology.

The phoenix is an immortal bird associated with Greek mythology that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor. Wikipedia

Pegasus is a mythical winged divine horse, and one of the most recognized creatures in Greek mythology. Usually he is depicted as pure white. Myths about him vary as the Greek myths evolve and reflect progression through successive generations of deities. Wikipedia

    I replied to Gloria:

My recollection is the Phoenix, to rise, is roasted in the flames, which in my experience is the ego and the mind and habits and ways of seeing and hearing get burned to a crisp and then burned into ash, and it's a whole lot of no fun, because it absolutely obliterates my illusions and delusions and just about everything else I hold dear and want, I suppose because I am blind, deaf and dumb, or just plain stupid, and ignorant, too. But I didn't find much interest in that explanation during my wanderings. Perhaps most everyone wants to be a Pegasus without being burned at the stake, so to speak. 

 

    South Alabama belle Maudlin Muse wrote to me:

Congratulations on officially having a license to practice law. Yesterday is ashes, tomorrow but wood. The fire of now has you lit.

    Heh, I feel on fire inside today and wonder what all I might have gone and gotten myself into?

    Meanwhile, someone posted today at a Reddit spirituality group claiming 265,000 members:

Does anyone else feel like they are not from this world?

I've always felt like I'm not from this world. Like I'm just visiting it. Like l've come from somewhere else, l just can't seem to remember where and why l've decided to come here ...does anyone feel like this?

    I wondered - Duh! - why it had not occurred already to publish in that group some of the new writing with links?

    I replied to the Reddit poster:

For all my life, I have felt I am from somewhere else and was stranded here by the Mothership. So, here I am, dealing ongoing with what all life on this very backward world (due to its so-called dominant species) serves up day after day, week after week, etc. Hopefully, I'm learning some new things and discarding some old backward habits and ways of thinking and seeing and hearing and doing. Otherwise, I might have to do this all over again. 

 

Meanwhile, I'm writing a new book on a new blog, The Yin and the Yang of the Law, a free read, about my early life and becoming a lawyer and then slowly and not much fun coming to view legal problems, and any problems, as spiritual messages-lessons, which tend to be missed, if the traditional outward (yang) approach is used, instead of the usually less popular inward (yin) approach. Here's a link to to the blogspot where I am writing that book..

https://yinandyangoflaw.blogspot.com

    The response to my comment at Reddit was the sound of one hand clapping, 

 sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Inward Approach to the Law for Beginners

 

Quan Yin

    Quan Yin (Kuan Yin or Guan Yin) is the bodhisattva of great compassion. A bodhisattva is a human being that has made a vow to dedicate all of their lifetimes to the enlightenment of all humankind. Bodhisattvas continue to reincarnate and return to the world to help guide others to enlightenment

    During law school, it was drilled into our heads by what sometimes are called “legal monks” - law school professors, who never or only somewhat had practiced law, and spent a great deal of time studying and teaching law students the law - that a lawyer’s duty is to do all allowed by the law to help his client.

    Note the pronoun. 

………………….

    I told the only young woman student during my three years in law school that she should be doing something more ladylike than preparing to be a lawyer. 

    She went on to open a civil rights law practice with a fellow in Birmingham, and she married another of my law school classmates, who went on to become a respected trial lawyer for a prominent law firm in Birmingham. 

    His wife did very well as a civil rights attorney. She eventually reminded me of what a jerk I was in law school, and I agreed, apologized, and congratulated her civil rights legal career.

    I got around to entering the practice of law in Birmingham six years after I graduated from law school. I signed up to represent indigent criminal defendants at a much reduced fee.

    Birmingham did didn’t have a Public Defender and new lawyers, mainly, filled that void in the way described, even though we had no trial experience and probably didn't know all that much about criminal law, either.

    The first criminal case I was appointed involved a man accused of rape. He was locked up in the county jail, waiting on his trial. I walked to the jail from my law office and met him and asked him to tell me his side of the story. He said he didn’t rape her. She was his girlfriend for quite a while. She had been lots of men’s girlfriends in his rural community. She had a terrible reputation. 

    It did not occur to me to ask him if he had a terrible reputation in his community? Hold that thought.

    The trial was set. 

    Since I had never tried a case, my senior law partner, who had defended many criminal cases, said he would help me defend the case. 

    Some years prior, he had observed a man snatch a woman’s purse and run down an alley with it, and he chased the man down and apprehended him, which got fairly sensational coverage in the local news media. My senior partner spent a lot of time in the nearby YMCA working out and playing pick-up basketball, and was in good shape, and the fleeing thief didn’t have a chance to escape.

    The District Attorney's office must have expected me to try the case alone, as the young black male assistant district attorney seeme surprised when I didn't show up alone.

    After opening arguments, which sometimes do and sometimes don't have much to do with the facts, the assistant district attorney put my white male client’s white girlfriend on the witness stand and had her tell the white judge and the white jury what my client had done to her.

    Then, it was my turn to examine her. 

    Not having cross-examined a witness outside of one moot court case in law school, which did not go well for my practice client, I didn’t have a clue how to go about cross-examining the victim.

    After I stumbled around a while, my senior law partner started telling me what to ask the victim.

    My questions and her answers then went something like:

    Did you and my client ever live together?

    Yes.

    How long?

    About a year.

    Did you live in that community now?

    No.

    Where do you live now?

    She gave the location.

    Do you live alone?

    No.

    Who do you live with?

    A man.

    Now, did I forget to say here that the judge had only recently been elected to the bench and this was his first case? He had been an elected member of the Alabama Legislature, and he had been an attorney in a government office. He also was the half brother of the famous surreal novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

    Now did I also forget to say that in rape cases, the defendant has to deny having sex with the victim, or he has to claim sex with the victim was consensual, and neither the judge nor the prosecutor required me and my client to make that choice?

    And did I also forget to say that my senior partner examined my client’s sister, and asked her if her brother and the victim had been an item?

    Yes, they were seen all over the community together.

    My senior partner asked my client's sister if she knew the victim's general reputation in her community?

    Yes.

    Was that general reputation good or bad?

    Bad.

    Did I forget to say that such character evidence is not admissible in a rape case, and neither the judge nor the assistant prosecutor objected?

    Did I also forget to say the assistant prosecutor cross-examined my client’s sister and asked her if she knew my client's general reputation in his community? 

    Yes.

    Was that general reputation good or bad?

    Bad.

    My seasoned senior partner asked the law enforcement officer in that community if he knew the reputation of the victim in her community? (After my seasoned senior partner had during a recess asked the local law enforcement if he had had sex with the victim? the law enforcement officer suddenly became very cooperative).

    The law enforcement office said, yes.

    My seasoned senior partner asked the law enforcement officer if the victim's general reputation was good or bad?

    Bad.

    The assistant prosecutor asked the law enforcement officer if he had dated the victim? The law enforcement officer walked back his earlier testimony.

    I didn't put my client on the witness stand.

    After the assistant prosecutor made his closing argument, I rose from my chair at the defense table and walked before the jury. Feeling a bit shaky, I rested my fanny on a table and told the jury this was the first case I ever tried and please don't hold against my client anything I did wrong. I told them they had heard all the witnesses and, given all the evidence, and unless they believed beyond a reasonable doubt that my client was guilty of rape, they should bring back a not guilty verdict.

    The judge instructed the jury on the law and the jury retired to deliberate.

    All the while, the victim had stood just inside the door to the courtroom, observing, or she was just outside. I felt she might not have done that, if she was lying.

    I walked back to my law office to close a real estate deal I stupidly had scheduled after 5 p.m. to generate a fee and carry my share of the law firm expenses. 

    After the closing, I walked back to the courthouse and punched the button for the elevator. When the door opened, about half the jury was on it. I asked what was their verdict? A male juror said, not guilty. I took the elevator upstairs and met with my client and my senior law partner. Then, I walked back to my car and drove home feeling on top of the world.

    Members of my client's community began using me for their lawyer. 

    My client’s mother started calling me from time to time, just to talk.

    My client called me one day from the county jail, where he was again, this time for theft. 

    I walked down to the jail to see him. He saId, as he was running away, he was apprehended by two sheriff deputies, who had him lie facedown on the ground. One deputy’s .357 magnum went off and the bullet hit my client in the right rear cheek.

    I walked back to my law office and called the sheriff, whom I knew somewhat. Back in those ays, sheriffs answered calls from lawyers. 

    I told the sheriff that I didn’t like making the call. I related what my client had told me. The sheriff sighed, said he would have someone call me.

    In a little while, I received a call from an assistant district attorney, who had never lost a criminal prosecution. He had skinned me alive in a preliminary hearing involving my second appointed criminal defendant. 

    He had skinned me alive in a racketball court at the YMCA. I was a pretty good 4-wall handball player and had stupidly ass-u-me-d that would translate to racketball.

    The assistant district attorney, who had never lost a case, said here's the deal. My client will do a little more  time in the county jail and then be on probation for a while.

    I said, here’s the deal. Drop the burglary charges and my client won't sue our friend the sheriff for his deputy shooting my client in the butt with a .357 after he had surrendered and lay face down on the ground.

    Silence.

    I waited.
    Expletive!

    I waited.

    I’ll draw up something for your client to sigh, the assistant district attorney said.

    My client’s mother loved me all the more.

    She kept calling me, just to talk.

    Then one day she called to say her son was visiting a woman at her home while her husband was away at work. The husband came home just as my client was leaving. The husband got his shotgun and shot and killed her son. 

    I said I was so sorry for her. 

    In Alabama, it was legal for a husband, or a wife, to shoot and kill someone they caught having sex with their spouse. It was legal to kill the spouse, too. In the heat of passion, it was called. 

    I think that still is the law in Alabama.

    I’m reminded of the saying, “Three strikes and you’re out.” 

    God certainly gave my client plenty of opportunity to mend his ways. 

    His mother kept calling me from time to time, just to talk.

    God would give me lots more opportunities to mend my ways.

    Along the way, the assistant district attorney, who never lost a criminal prosecution, went into private practice and became a well-known, successful trial lawyer. We became good friends and for a couple of short spells, I worked in his law firm. That’s another story, which might be told, or not.

    Would I have accepted the rape case today? Probably not. 

    If I did accept it, I first would do a lot of soul searching for the spiritual messages mirrored back to me, about me. 

    After roasting in those flames a while, I would have some prayer meetings with my client, and if I was not satisfied with how that went, I would ask the judge to let me out of the case and appoint a different lawyer to represent the accused.

    This chapter is about the inward approach to legal conflict for beginners. Including lawyers, who are beginners to that approach.

    The girlfriend who charged my client with rape did not get a fair shake from the black assistant prosecutor, the novice judge, and the jury. 

    I can’t imagine the not so nice karma I unwittingly created for myself, which came home to roost later in my life and I had no clue it had anything to do with that case.

    I bet if I had told the female civil rights lawyer from my law school class about that rape prosecution and how the trial went, she would have skinned me alive and boiled my remains, and the assistant prosecutor and the novice judge, too.

    Although justice is supposed to be blind, the operating human factors have their sway.

    Once upon a time, I read that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was asked when she thought there would be enough women on the Supreme Court? She said something like, "When there are nine. For a long time there were nine men, and nobody said anything about that.”

    I imagine Justice Bader would have skinned me alive and boiled my remains, and the assistant prosecutor and the novice judge, too, for how the rape case my senior law partner and I defended went.

    If someone asks me today what I think is wrong with the law, or with politics, or with America, or with humanity, I say, destruction of the feminine - way too much yang, not nearly enough yin, and I am pretty sure we have religion to thank for that.

Breaking News

Email today, May 24, 2022, from a compadre who created and found homes on Torrent platforms for The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, and homes for several of my digitized books at on Torrent platforms and at archive.org, which also accepted the podcast, which averages about 80,000 complete watches per episode, which makes us a “mega-church”, if you factor in we don’t know when we are ever not in church.

Sloan:

If you want it to look like that and you want to add your art in, I can do that and publish it through Kindle Direct Publishing. You choose a price $2.99 to $9.99

If you want to add your drawings or paintings that is the way to do it. I can add them at the end, I will just need you to email them to me and the poetry. I will add them with your page numbering continued or you can do it, I will do the Kindle Direct Publishing part. If we go this route, you can also add your poetry.

Otherwise you have to have every picture removed, and you need to have it all size 12 and Times New Roman. 

I know eight people in publishing and they have said that the material, if sent to a conventional agent and is examined by the agent and the editor, they would be compelled to have social services have elder care to evaluate you for mental illness and your ability to manage your own affairs, and they would make a recommendation that you would (1)be sent for treatment (2) have the treatment monitored- which is to say the psychiatrist and geriatric and aging specialist would perform urine analysis to make sure you are compliant with your medical dosing regime.   

I did not violate your privacy, I did not violate your work-product security. 

I listed the mysticism elements, I gave author approximate age 75-82 male, and I was told that unless you wanted to have your independence violated in the manner directed above, then pursue it as Kindle Direct Publishing. If you go to any literary agent and potentially any publishing house- one thing that gets an automatic rejection is if the material has been released freely, it eliminates any profit motive to anyone except for Kindle Direct Publishing.

If you go the route of Kindle Direct Publishing you have to take down the blog, no torrenting, no "free read" element.

When you tell an agent that an individual believes in his direct contact with biblical figures via dreams or direct contact, the next question is as follows(this is boiler plate):

HAS(HAVE) THE AUTHOR OR AUTHOR(S) ADJUDICATED AS A MENTAL DEFECTIVE OR COMMITTED TO A MENTAL INSTITUTION THROUGH THEIR OWN PERSONAL CHOICE OR ADJUDICATED ?

Any person who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or “committed to a mental institution” is required to be referred to a mental health professional, social services, and geriatric welfare services if their material exhibits delusional thought which could result in the agency being held liable in a civil court for failing to notify the relevant agencies;

A person is "mentally defective" or "delusional" if they have been previously diagnosed with a mental illness or meet one of the following criteria:

A person is “adjudicated as a mental defective” if a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority has made

a determination that a person, as a result of marked set of delusionals, subnormal intelligence, mental illness, incompetency, condition,

or disease:

™ Is a danger to himself or to others;

 Is not compliant with a treatment plan set out by a mental health professional

™ Lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs;

™ Is found insane by a court in a criminal case or a mental health professional or social services or a medical professional;

™ Is found incompetent to stand trial, or not guilty by reason of lack of mental responsibility or disability

 by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority or alternately a medical professional or agent of social services or mental health professional.

 The authorial party has served a term includes a voluntary or involuntary commitment:

™ To a mental institution;

™ For mental defectiveness or mental illness; or

™ For other reasons, such as for drug use; inability to discern reality from delusion, inability to control cycle moods or ideation that is potentially harmful to themselves or others

The term “lawful authority” means an entity having legal authority to make adjudications or commitments- a social worker, geriatric authority, a board certified physician, a magistrate, or a judge of law.

I replied to my compadre:

Don't know whether to laugh or shit and go blind :-). 

I feel like I was released from a prison.

I bet Archangel Michael is laughing his ass off :-). 

Don't think the kindle option is right for this book, given how difficult it is to get people to read self-published kindle books, and given how favorably we have been treated by Torrent and archive.com, and the "reputation" we already have there world wide. 

So, I think that leaves torrent and archive.com, and the blog version, which I can promote in podcasts. I also can use Facebook to promote. I have a lot of new Facebook friends who live in Alabama or have Alabama roots. It's possible the title of the book might create some interest in Alabama.

I wanted to put more material in this book, but wondered if it might be even more “overkill” for book agents and publishers. I didn't care about making money off the book, if that happened, I would give the money away. But more people might read the book, if a publisher liked and promoted it. I wanted to put more material in this book, but wondered if it might be even more “overkill” for book agents and publishers.

So, with that illusion out of the way…

A Crazy Person’s Bible

I've been wondering if this book should have a chapter for some of the poems that fell out of me. Looking in my Yahoo email account today, April 9, 2023, for something else in the past, I stumbled across something I had sent out in an email blast from afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com.

March 17, 2017

A Crazy Person’s Bible

The other night a woman suggested in a dream that I write a book about my life. I replied that I had written many books about my life, each was one of a kind. I realized that didn’t satisfy her, and she said it again. Not a long book, a summary. I awoke, clueless. I was publishing vigorously, nearly daily, to my websites since 2007. My life was being recorded there, too. I didn’t want to write another story of my life. 

Yet the dream nagged, and then I realized two days after the dream, after asking for clarity, that it was to be a collection of poems I had saved, either in print or through memory. Only a few of hundreds of poems that had started bursting out of me, starting in 1991, at age 49. Some truly stunning verses, most of which I put into little anonymous books and saddle-stitch pamphlets and gave away by the hundreds. Nay, by the thousands. The rush of verses then slowed down, but did not stop altogether. 

    The poems included here plot a journey I never heard or read of except in my own personal experiences, in spirit and on this world. Today, the two are inseparable: I live in both realms at the same time, awake and asleep. I sometimes describe myself as a donkey lured by a carrot and driven by a stick, headed to where he knows not. He has no choice but to head to wherever it is, because the consequences of revolt have proven over and over to be most unpleasant. You don’t want to know just how unpleasant it sometimes was following a revolt. You don’t want to know. Be darn glad this doesn’t happen to you. Be darn glad. 

"Living Poets" 

 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets never stop singing it 

 

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life 

 

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself  

 

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will  

 (1991)

  

 

"The Mockingbird" 

 

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing its fool head off –

I asked it how and why it sang?

But all it did was look ahead,

all it did was sing.

It never turned to see if I was watching,

or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

or asked if I liked its music,

or expected a recording contract –

It was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

(1992)

 

 

“Black Diamond, Yellow Rose” 

 

Black Diamond, Yellow Rose,

Odd couple until inside I see,

Black Diamond feeds Yellow Rose,

Yellow Rose loves Black Diamond,

Will and Heart,

Heart and Will,

Black Diamond, Yellow Rose

(1993) 

 

“Rainbow Fusion” 

 

Black is white,

White is black,

When they fuse,

Rainbows bloom.

(1993) 

 

“Rainbows” (fragment of original poem) 

 

Rainbows know no master.

Fueled by Father Sun

They touch Misty Earth

Only Heaven knows where.

Rainbows are more shiny than silver

and more brilliant than gold,

More valuable than diamonds

and more precious than pearls.

Rainbows paint heavens beautiful,

Make angels sing.

Rainbows are you, and me,

Full spectrums of Infinity

blazing across Eternity.

Rainbows are now.

(1993) 

“God’s Gifts” 

 

God’s gifts are not for sale, but are given freely to angels, saints, sinners, devils and fools alike, because all are God’s children.

(1993) 

 

“Crooked Hose” 

 

He is but a crooked hose through which living water flows, first to straighten him out, then to water a few other birds of the air and some lilies of the field.”

(1994) 

“The Poet”

He is the paper, the ink his blood, the pen his soul, and the poet is God.”

(1994) 

 

“Rules” 

 

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Yes, who invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn’t the maker of the first stone — otherwise there’d be no stone to break all those slaving rules!  

(1994) 

 

“The Pearl” 

 

He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow. She clings to him like fine silk, precious oil. She feels solid, compressed, like . . . a black pearl, growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life. (1994)

 

“Rosa Mystica” 

 

Rosa Mystica,

Sweet Mystery,

Bride of Christ,

Living Water

without which

God is dead

and there are no rainbows.

(1994) 

 

“Sacred Prism” 

 

Earth,

The sacred prism

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

Purified in Holy Fire,

The one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

Simply because they are all

Unique Emanations of God,

Evolving . . .

(1994)  

“Tree of Life” 

 

The Tree of Life grows not

on the battleground of good and evil,

But in a quiet meadow

beneath a beautiful rainbow

that knows not right or wrong.

(1994) 

 

“Mission Nearly Impossible” 

 

Only fools rush in

where angels fear to tread,

But if there were no fools,

Who’d lead the angels?

(1994) 

 

“Initiation” 

 

Shaman you now are.

Angels walk beside you

and call you their brother,

Even as you curse the heavens

for making you one who wields the lightning.

Be kind to your brothers and sisters,

But take no prisoners –

Kill them all in my name,

As I have killed you,

So you and they might live.

(1995) 

 

“Love and Truth” 

 

Love without truth is weak,

Truth without love is harsh,

Two side of the same coin,

They live together,

Or die.

(1995) 

 

“Paradise”

All fig leaves burn

All ugly seen

All pain loved

All truth beauty

All people one

All time now

(2000) 

 

“The World's Greatest Failure” 

 

I know what it is 

to love fully,

have my heart broken by death

and by loved ones’ rejections,

Over and over again,

So I can love even more. 

 

I know what it is 

to be engulfed in pain,

Awash in evil,

Terrified, enraged, despaired,

Believing God has again forsaken me,

Then be given the truth

that again makes me free 

 

I know what it is 

to doubt,

Be lost and wandering

time and time again,

Then be rescued yet again

and my faith grows deeper. 

 

I know what it is 

to blindly trust,

Then be destroyed by betrayed

time and time again,

Until I trust only God. 

 

I know what it is

to have much

and be completely of this world,

Then have it all taken away

and be in the world but not of it. 

 

I know what it is 

to fail in this world,

And fail and fail and fail:

The world’s greatest failure,

I can serve only God. 

 

I know what it is 

to give and give and give and give;

I cannot stop giving

because giving is receiving. 

 

I know what it is 

to explain God

time after time after time again. 

Something demands I keep explaining:

Maybe someone will listen, 

 

Maybe me.

 

“I AM A MAN” 

 

I am a man. 

 

I said,

I am a man! 

 

What means it, 

being a man?   

 

A man is a warrior:

he lives by a code of honor,

his word is reliable,

his actions confirm his words,

his commitment is holiness,

his enemies are welcome at his hearth,

he fears but moves forward,

he cries and gets up again,

he hates but forgives,

he loves and let’s go,

he doubts but trusts God,

he’s a good friend,

he seeks resolutions,

he demands nothing,

he risks everything,

he regrets his mistakes,

he seeks to make amends,

he puts others’ welfare first,

he accepts apologies truly made,

he expects nothing back,

he lives ready to die,

he laughs when he “should” scream,

he screams when he “should” laugh,

he sings just because,

he shrugs off insults,

he learns from misfortune,

he cusses God for making him,

he wishes he was done,

he loves children and animals,

he relishes a woman’s scent,

he smiles when he’s content,

he knows God’s his master,

he walks in rainbows,

his garden is the world,

his way is nature,

he loves fishing,

his wife is his soul,

his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy.

(2003) 

 

“SHANGHAIED” 

 

A calling to serve carries its own wisdom,

which legitimates both the calling and the serving

so that the two are one:

Only the one called to serve

can know this wisdom,

and for some who are called

the knowing comes easily,

while for others the knowing is a fiery baptism.

Each calling is different,

and while some callings can be declined,

others cannot,

and those whose calling is without repentance

know they are in it for the duration of the calling,

and while others may try to persuade them out of it,

the calling for ones such as these always prevails;

thus is it advised to all called for keeps

that they view their calling as a blessing

even when it seems at times to be a curse,

and that they try to reconcile the loss of their captain status

and allow the Spirit of God to man the helm of their ship

and be glad and willing crew members thereon,

knowing that all sailing ships of souls

need a crew as well as a captain

to maintain and navigate the ship through

seas of many tones, depths and flavors;

so consider each league sailed

as part of the overall journey

going to where the captain deigns to go

by using whatever winds and sea currents available

to navigate the ship to the experiences

this ship and crew need to have

in order to fulfill their calling and its wisdom

revealed by the journey of many leagues,

many known only to the ship and its crew,

all of whom come to know,

some sooner than others,

that once conscripted

there is no safe jumping ship.

(2004)

"Bi Polar" 

 

the world's favorite

mood disorder

the cause of all

human ails,

including wars,

if the demons aren't counted 

 

bi polar disorder,

the destruction of the

south pole,

the feminine,

the north pole,

he ain't been

right in the head

since she's been gone

(2017) 

 

“Slam Poetry”

I don’t like it.

"Eve's Answer"

April Fool

Vexing Truth

Life is Poetry,

Poetry is Life,

There's no more to say,

but that would 

make God

a really dull boy,

now wouldn't it,

Eve?

So, Eve,

What say you?

After all,

You have been,

still are, blamed,

for everything that went wrong with

hu - MAN - i - ty.

Well, do you really want to hear

what I gotta say?

Is this one of those

be careful what you ask for

pregnancies?

Well, is it?

Probably, but say

what you wish -

I s'pect you need

to be heard.

Heard?

Funny you mention ears.

Yes, ears.

Such important receptacles.

Yet filled with concrete, 

shit, propaganda, beliefs,

certainties, well,

let's not leave out

SUPERSTITION

and

RELIGION,

should we?

By the way,

where do ya

suppose

God came from?

Or, out of?

And, 

why do ya s'pose

I made Eve

in my own 

IMAGE?

'Cause Adam was

so bored and dull -

so ... predictable

He was BORING!!!

the shit outta me!!!

That's why.

Now

    Shusssssh -

Don't go round quoting me on

any of that -

I've had quite enough of

the religious right

ta last me 

the rest of forever

(2018) 

    I sensed from the beginning that the verses coming through me were something I would live, and that often scared the hell out of me. The same sinking sensation arose with wacky novels that fell out of me, which actually were poems but I called them novels because they were mostly prose. Jolting experiences, snap endings, surprise, suspense and cosmic jokes seem very important to God, perhaps to keep God awake and interested; and perhaps to keep me a bit loose, so I’m easier to work with and change, which I’m not when I’m all comfy and sure of myself. Then, it sometimes takes a sledgehammer to get my attention. Or dynamite. Or an earthquake. You get the drift. When awake, I see whatever happens to me as a poem or part of one. From that I can only conclude God is a poet, and from the way my life goes, I can only further conclude God is crazy and the only way for me to truly love God is to be crazy, too.

Spirit Medicine for children (and adults)

 I don't know why I was slow seeing it, but when when I saw it, I had zero doubt it was true.

    The ongoing shooting and killing American school children, while national, state and local officials do nothing to prevent it, is destroying America.

    With absolute certainty, the rest of the world knows America is not "one nation, under God", because America does nothing to stop the massacres.

    It is crystal clear the so-called American "adults" are only capable of talking and sticking their heads in the sand and, basically, jerking off. 

    My dreams last night, April 13, 2023, pointed me toward giving American children, and all children, stuff they can use to help themselves, 

    So, I begin with simple prayer any child can make to God, or to whatever a child hopes or thinks started everything:  

    "I ask for protection."

    There is a soul alchemy ritual any child (or adult) can use. 

    Close your eyes, focus on what most concerns you, and ask for "spirit medicine" for that concern. 

    That's it. The medicine will come. What the medicine will be is unknown.

    Perhaps a child is delivered from an up close physical threat. 

    Perhaps a child is taken from this life, because there is no longer reason for the child to be alive on this planet.

    Perhaps a child's soul is taken and a different soul arrives, because it needs to experience what the departing soul did not need to experience.

    Perhaps no perhaps - those three actions already are implemented for American school children, because they are innocent and their parents and governments have not taken steps to prevent them from being massacred at their schools.

Matthew 18:3

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

Matthew 19:13,14

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

    In the Gospels, Jesus told his disciples that he taught the masses in parables, but he taught them in secret the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, which wise men and kings would give all they had to posses. 

    What did Jesus teach the disciples in secret? 

    Who knows, who was not with them?

    In early June 1995, my complete being lived three parables as they came into me. 

    A young budding New Age healer suggested that I let her take me into a past life regression, which hopefully would help me come out of a 4-year-dark night of the soul, which had onset in 1981 after I was told in a dream, "With respect to St. John of the Cross, you haven't seen anything yet." Then, I was swathed with pure, raw Evil, and I woke up, gagging and choking, trying to get the Evil off of me.

    The details of the dark night might interest some people, but I think that would distract from school children in America being massacred. 

    So, back to the young budding New Age healer, who had a way of leading people into closing their eyes and imagining they were and walking down some steps into a cellar, where the show would begin. 

    I was used to working inside, by using the soul alchemy ritual describe above, which is not inclined to conform to anything dreamed up or invented by human beings.

    As the young budding New Age healer led me down to the cellar, I went into a trance, and very slowly, I had an experience that caused my heart to heave and oceans of tears to flow out of my eyes and rivers of snot out of my nose.

    The young budding New Age healer said it was a past life experience, and she hoped I would start to feel better. I told her it was not a past life regression, but was something else. She seemed skeptical. 

    I wrote it down, verbatim, and it is the first vision reported down below: "of men, wolves and angels." 

    The next day, I met with the young budding New Age healer, and she started me down the steps into the cellar, and I had another vision, which had the same effect on me as the first vision. 

The young budding New Age healer said this was a second past-life regression, and I said it was something else. That vision was written down and is included down below: "something about lions"

Two days later, alone in my home. lying on my wife's my bed, I went inside and had a third vision, which had the same effect on me as the two prior visions. I wrote it down, and it, too, can be read by children and used by them: "the gift"

About a week later, the 4-year dark night began to lift.

Here are the three soul alchemy visions, which contain universal principles and energy, which can be absorbed by children and also by some adults.

of men, wolves and eagles … 

    Once upon a time there lived a man named Joseph, who grew tired of living with people and left his village and went into the woods to live. 

    By and by, a wolf pack discovered Joseph and over time got to know him and that he was not like other men, and eventually they took him into their pack. The leader of the pack was a red wolf named David, and soon David and Joseph became fast friends, and they hunted and played and slept together like . . . wolves. 

    Then one day, the men in the village where Joseph had lived learned from hunters that Joseph was living with wolves. The men decided it was not right for a man to go off and live in the woods and run with with wolves, so they got their guns and set off to find Joseph and bring him back to the village, to live like a man. 

    The men came upon the wolf pack sleeping in the sun next to a bluff. The wind was blowing off the bluff, away from the wolf pack toward the men, which prevented the pack from scenting the men as they approached. By the time the wolf pack realized the men were there, the men had the pack surrounded, pinned against the bluff. 

    David wanted to order the pack to attack, but Joseph said, “No, I am a man, they will listen to reason, let me go and speak with them.” Although David did not like this idea, he agreed to it because Joseph was a man. But the men would not listen to reason and they shot and killed the entire pack and took Joseph heartbroken back to the village. 

    Joseph languished in the village for many weeks, blaming himself for the death of his pack. 

    Then, Joseph has a dream, in which he sees David’s face. David is angry, but says nothing, just stares.          Finally, Joseph blurts out that he did the best he knew how to do, and he’s so sorry for the way it turned out! David says, “Better that we attacked and died like wolves, than be slaughtered like sheep!” 

    Then, Joseph is back with the pack, against the bluff, surrounded by the men. David says he wants the pack to attack. Joseph says, “And I will lead the charge!”    Then, they hear a voice, the whole pack hears it, say, “There is another way, ask for another way.” Never before have Joseph, David or the pack had such a thing happen, but Joseph asks for another way. 

    Suddenly, a great bolt of lightning strikes the ground between the pack and the men, stirring up a huge cloud of dust. As the the dust begins to settle, it begins to take the shape of something huge. The wolves and Joseph then see a pair of golden eyes peering from the bushes behind the men. Then a second pair of golden eyes. Then a third pair. Then ten pair. Then a hundred pair. Then a legion of . . . wolves’ eyes. The men are moved by some force to turn around and see what the now delirious pack already see. 

    The men turn back around and find themselves face to face with a great towering eagle, whose piercing golden eyes penetrate their hearts. Then, they hear, “These are my battle angels. You may leave this place and go back to your village, taking your guns with you, on condition that you tell everyone what has happened here today.” 

    To this condition the men readily agree, and they return to their village and tell everyone what happened, and they go to nearby villages and tell it.

something about lions …

    Once upon a time there lived a woman named Alya. She was the medicine woman in her tribe, using herbs and poultices and spirit ways to help her people. Yet she had one flaw: she hated lions, because a lion had killed her father. Her hatred caused her to cast spells against lions, which caused her husband great concern. He often told Alya that her war with lions was going to get her into big trouble, but she was a medicine woman, she knew the ways of the spirits, and she did not listen to her husband. 

    One day while Alya was out gathering herbs, she spotted a lion sunning himself in tall grasses on the savannah. She hatched a scheme in her mind to sneak up on the lion and cast a spell on him, which would enable her to steal his spirit and have it for herself. As she crept closer to the lion, she began chanting softly and seeing in her mind’s eye her spell taking over the lion. However, she was so focused on what she was doing, that she did not see in her mind’s eye the lion’s mate returning from hunting. Nor did she see the lioness catch her sent, drop her kill from her mouth to the ground and circle around behind. Too late, Alya realized her peril, just as the lioness took her from behind.

    Next thing Alya knows, she is in the spirit world, standing before the Lion Spirit. Trembling with terror, Alya wants to run away, but the Lion Spirit speaks to her heart, says, “There is something you do not yet know.” 

Then, Alya is back on the savannah, watching a hunter from her tribe sneaking up on a nest of lion cubs, whose parents are away hunting. The hunter has a twisted spirit, and decides to kill the lion cubs just for the fun of doing it, even though killing any animal just for sport is taboo in his tribe, which worships the Lion Spirit. On returning to his village, the hunter tells no one what he has done. 

    When the lion and lioness return to their nest and find their dead cubs, they are enraged. They catch the hunter’s scent and track him back to the edge of the village, where the lion hides in a thicket and begins roaring and bellowing out his rage over what has happened. The hunter knows why the lion is there, doing that, but still he tells no one. 

    Alya’s father, the tribe’s leader, prepares to go out and face and kill the lion, because it his duty to protect his tribe from marauding lions. And so he sets out to face the lion, even as the hunter lets him go without saying what has happened to bring this about, and that a lioness is also out there with the lion. 

    Alya’s father quickly finds and confronts the lion, and is preparing to kill it with his spear, when he is taken from behind by the lioness. In her horror, Alya helplessly watches on, even as she now realizes that her hatred of lions was completely misplaced. She feels awful. 

    Then suddenly Alya is back on the savannah, stalking the lion whose spirit she once wanted to steal for herself. The lion looks up, stares into Alya’s eyes. She shakes all over, is terrified, but does not look away. Then something takes hold of her, she says to the lion, “I have lost my father and you have lost your cubs. I will be your cub.” The lion looks deep into Alya’s spirit, nods, says, “And I will be your father, and will always protect your front.” Then beside the lion is the lioness, who says to Alya, “And I will be your mother and will always protect your back.”

the gift …

    A sleeping man dreams he sees the back of a young yogi meditating in the lotus position. Before the young yogi appear two cobras, raised up, hoods flared. One cobra is pure white, the other pure black. Both beautiful. The white cobra says to the young yogi, “We came to you once before because you were innocent, and you knew we brought a gift and you believed you had to chose one of us and you chose me.” The black cobra says, “We come before you again because you now are wise.” The yogi, now very advanced in years, weeps, chooses them both. The sleeping man, now an old man, awakens, crying.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

    In September 2002, a longtime friend dreamed I was in Key West painting a beautiful mandala on a water color pad, and then I was painting more mandalas and and people were coming to me and paying me $20 for them and later they came back and paid me more money. I was nearly out of money, looking at living on the street again, and I hoped her dream came true.

    I had no artist training and did not draw or paint. Even so, I went to a CVS and bought a box of Crayola watercolor markers, a mechanical lead pencil, and a fine black ink roller ball pen. I scavenged for discarded cardboard boxes and tore off the ears for canvasses and started making very abstract "paintings". 

    I set up where a real street sidewalk artist displayed his wares, and presented what I called "soul drawings. 

    Day after day, I set up, and there were no buyers. I kept at it.

    A woman I loved came to me in a dream and said, "Sloan, you married Kali!" I woke up in shock. Kali is the Hindu Goddess of destruction (death) and reconstruction (resurrection).

    Based on this well-known art, where Kali has one foot on Shiva's chest, Kali and her army of women don't care for how men think.

    I rode my bicycle to the Ben Franklin store on North Roosevelt Blvd and bought a pad of 11x14 130# acid-free watercolor paper. 

    I drew several stunning Kali pieces, which looked nothing like the art above.

    My soul drawings morphed from pure abstract to something almost recognizable. 

    Still, no buyers. 

    I set up alone on Duval street. 

    Still no buyers. 

    My soul drawings became erotic. A man suggested I send them to Playboy. I didn't do that. Maybe if I had done it, Playboy would have bought them and I would have lived on the street for a while?

    I set up on Duval Street with a fellow who weaved hats and other things from green coconut palm leave strips. No one even looked at my art. I got the message and quit displaying the soul drawings in public..

    More time passed. 

    I must have done several hundred soul drawings, and I sold only one of the smaller ones for $20. The buyer said he could pay more, but I had maybe $1,500 in my checking account, I was living on the street, and I said I was okay. Probably pretty stupid. Perhaps something would have shifted, if I had let him give me more money.    

    I burned some of the soul drawings and threw away or gave away most of the others. 

    A Key West city commissioner had one of the cardboard box top drawings hanging on a doorknob in his law office, and a friend in Helen, Georgia had another of the box top drawings.

    I inherited the first $1,000,000 and was living inside again. I began a new genre of soul drawings.

    By and by, I bicycled to Office Max on North Roosevelt Blvd in Key West, and paid them to copy some of my favorite pieces on their color copier and put them into a jpg file and email them to. me. I think some of the originals are in the attic of a friend who lives near Key West.

    Like the early soul drawings, these below are more than they appear to be. They are living essences beyond the mind's comprehension. 

    After drawing them, something shifted in my life.

    Call them spirit medicine, if you wish.

Mustang Sally

Devil or Angel

Cross Pollination

Dark Horse

Feather Talk

Abracadabra

Mary Poppins

Beloved

Lollipop

Welcome back, Kali, I hope

Dragon Woman

Volleyball

Street Performer

Clown

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

    Perhaps something that fell out of me in the fall of 1993, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado and was well into a 4-year dark night of the soul, explains the difference between human currency and spirit currency?

God's gifts are not for sale, but are freely given to angels, saints, sinners, devils and fools alike, because all are God's children

Post Mortem Appendix: The Golden Flake Clown debates his younger brother Major Bashinsky's suicide made to look like murder with a murder conspiracist

    A while back, I published on Facebook a link to The Golden Flake Clown's Younger Brother, R.I.P. chapter in The Golden Flake Clown's Tale about my brother's suicide made to look like murder, which can be read for free by clicking this link.

https://goldenflakeclowntale.blogspot.com/2023/07/post-mortem-appendix-golden-flake-clown.html

    Although the local medical examiner, police department and FBI concluded Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder, many people in Alabama believed he was murdered.

    Recently, one such person, who viewed Major as his best friend since childhood, responded on Facebook.

    Jack and Major were 4 years younger than me. I knew Jack pretty well from his spending a lot of time in our home. 

    I heard nothing from Jack for almost 6 decades, when he sent me a message on Facebook after I moved back to Alabama in late 2018. Our discussion was brief, and although I suggested sometimes that we meet for a meal somewhere, that has not happened. 

    After Jack's and my discussion below about Major, dreams caused me to add this appendix chapter to The Golden Flake Clown's Tale.

Jack July 11, 2023

Major was my best friend. It hurt. Found computor chip on his belt. Our Hoover dive team found him. FBI visited was President of City Council. Almost on our Wed anniversary He flew plane down to look for Dr Wood. Killed by druggies. Loved Bashinskys. All were great to me

Me

I know you and my family were very close. Much of the book is about their relationship to each other. Do you know if anything was found on The computer chip? The FBI declined to talk with me, who perhaps knew Major better than anyone.

Jack
The chip (Golden Flake) had the bogus.threat.to GF. And family

Makes me sick

Thanks.for.being.a friend

You are a great person. And I value your friendship for 60 years. Not as smart, but loyal

Our divers found Major. Was site of first murder in Bham. My wife had dream..he was in water.

Me

His daughter Sloan found his car and in it was a flash drive, or something, containing a draft of the threat letter. So, it seems Major wrote the threat letter. I read it the day I learned he had gone missing. It summed up pretty well how Golden Flake was being run. Major and I had discussed that in the past. 

Jack

It implied the family was threatened. Recall. Forbes list. It bothered him. Had Bud can he never drank Bud. 

 

[In 1986, my father was on the front cover of Forbes, sitting in a pile of Golden Flake potato chips, said by Forbes to be worth $100,000,000. I called my father and told him that I hoped my children were not kidnapped for ransom.]  

 

Me

Major was missing when that threat letter showed up several places. My recollect is the letter indicated further action if Golden Flake management and directors didn’t stop bleeding the company. Are you saying Major didn’t kill himself?

Jack

Have one theory. Maybe not.

Me

Major was on the surveillance camera at the checkout counter in 5 Points Hardware after he left Starbucks same day he went missing. The rare pistol in the pond was the same type as a pistol in the den of my father’s home. I got that from the FBI report. I didn’t see that reported anywhere except my blog, and in the clown’s tale. Someone in the FBI told a good friend of mine not to expect a comfortable finding, and then the Medical Examiner and Birmingham Police Department’s findings were made public. The ME was a good friend of the pathologist husband of Major’s first wife, Gail. The two doctors were talking. Gail and Sloan told me they thought Major killed himself. I think they knew him better than anyone, but me. He let people see what he wanted them to see. Living with him was different. Knowing him since he was born was different.

Jack

Major was sick from 10 businesses, most failed. He was trying to beat that 2m Check Sloan Sr had on his bar. I sold Major a bunch of ins. Loved you all. You have been great. Your Mom and Dad were super to me. Remember flying as copilot to Nassau with him. He tried hard!

I tried to be his Thomas. Char. [our nanny, Charlotte] Guess I missed it. Had key to Major's appt Tuscaloosa. Loved seeing Coach B. On Sundays. [Golden Flake and Coca Cola sponsored replay of Saturday's football game] Do anything to help you folks.

Your Dad was a great ally. Your Mom too. Thank you

My best line in the eulogy. Was Nelle's [our mother] blond hair blowing in the wind. Going to. First Bear Bryant Show!

Me

Major did try very hard at business, and it was as if he was snakebit in that arena, like me, perhaps because business was so important to our father and his own father. There is a lot you may not know, which I learned from Major's first wife and their daughter named after me and my father. I didn't tell any of that in the book.

And am not inclined to tell anyone.

Jack

No need

Still love you folks. If I can help let me know.

Me

Thanks, do you know a veterinarian who puts down old ailing humans to put them out of their misery?

Jack

Not off hand!

You ok?

Me

Do you know any 81-year-old who is okay?

Jack

At 76 going down hill

Me

Why ask question when you know answer?

Jack

Ha ha better to be seen than viewed

Re Major

Possible side motive??

No time to text it.

How and way would he park off Highland behind Temple E. Walk to Hardware. Walk to Highlands. With bag full of stuff. Must be 30 blocks. He was not gunny like us. Your Dad showed us the pistols years ago. I guess Nazi. Ok

He was a very moderate beer drinker. Always Schlitz. Never Bud.

He got a Bad phone call and left office. Brooks wasn't ok

Me

You know very little about any of that. I will fill you in on that, and a whole lot more you don't seem to know. 

Brooks was never okay. On that day Major went missing, Brooks had caused Gail to think he might be suicidal. Major had spent a lot of money bailing Brooks out. The back story is, Major had used Brooks' athletic ability to make Major feel better about Major. Major got banned from watching Brooks play basketball - Major told me that. Major kept pushing and bragging on Brooks. Finally Brooks rebelled, and you saw what the rebellion looked like. When Brooks was about 12, Major beat him up. Sloan saw it. W/hen Gail saw the bruises all over Brooks' body, and he would not tell her why, Sloan told her. 

Major was doing the same Little League thing with Holt. On Major's website after he went missing in early 2010, it was Holt this, Holt that. When I wrote at my blog that Major was doing with Holt, as he had done with Books, that part of Major's website was taken down. A Birmingham woman emailed me that she knew Major and Brooks through her daughter, who was on the Birmingham Country Club swim team with Brooks. In her dream, Major was pacing the wall above the swimming pool. Recall your wife's premonition about Major being in water. 

After the ME and BPD issued their finding, suicide made to look like murder, I wrote at my blog, regardless of everything else, Major could not be allowed to destroy another son, so Major had to leave.

As for the actual mechanics, your divers did not discover Major's body. Golfers reported it and then law enforcement got involved. 

Someone who knows a lot about guns figured after I learned about the 2 .32 Brownings, that he knew the Alabama gun dealer who had sold Major the Browning .32 found in the golf course pond. He met with the dealer, who told how much Major wanted a pistol like his father's, and he bragged about how he had played Major and got a lot more money from Major than the gun was worth. 

A while after the Coroner and BPD published their findings, a woman emailed me that her co-worker, a gay man, had taken her to a private party of a club of gay men in Birmingham, and her co-worker pointed out Major to her and told her his name for that club of gay men. Major was standing before a mirror, admiring himself.

The same person who found the gun dealer, found gay men in Birmingham, who knew Major well. Given his promise not to make trouble for them, they told him about Major's very active gay life in Birmingham, until they didn't see him much anymore. One of the men said he became concerned about Major and went to see him, and Major was really stressed out and upset over Brooks and that someone was about to out him for being gay and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Major said he didn't know how the news had gotten out, perhaps it was done by the young gay man he was seeing privately. Or maybe it was someone else. 

Major was with that young gay man in Starbucks the day he was caught on the surveillance video at the checkout counter at Five Points Hardware. Perhaps the young gay man took Major to the pond. Perhaps the young gay man helped Major tie himself up and wrap ducttape around his mouth and head. Perhaps the young gay man helped Major shoot himself.

If you were Major's best friend, you knew his image was more important to him than anything. Gail and Sloan and I knew it, we talked about it. Major, made it a lot worse than it already was, by leaving the impression he was murdered. Many people like you didn't and still don't believe the ME and BPD rand FBI findings. You and they made it worse than Major made it.  

When Major's and my stepmother Joann died, her grandson and lawyer claimed she had a massive heart attack. Her grandson blamed it on everyone, including me, but himself. Yet, the death certificate said she died of Covid-19 pneumonia. And she also had a mild heart attack, which seldom is fatal.

I don't expect any of what I wrote above to cause you to see Major's death differently. What you have done is convince me you barely knew Major. You barely knew my father and my mother. You live in a reality that no one in my family lived in. 

If someone at Golden Flake or its board of directors wanted someone dead, it would have been me. The Clown's Tale explains why.

Jack

 

 

Me 

Major's daughter Sloan by Gail told me that Major's 2nd wife got all that life insurance you sold Major. Major met both of his wives at the Highland Tennis Club. They were the club tennis pro and women's state tennis champion. He definitely intended to send them both a message by killing himself in the golf course pond below the tennis courts.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com