Rant Du Jour

Screaming in the night

Screaming in the night

It was probably around 1947, and I was in the 7th grade, around twelve years old, at the time of the wreck.  Our house was on a hill and a road ran in front and down the hill to come to a T intersection with another road that ran parallel to a railroad track and both ran together the quarter mile to the right into Castor, my home town.  The road that ran in front of our house and down the hill was newly blacktopped during the War and the road that intersected from the right at the intersection was gravel.

The mail truck would come blazing down the road paralleling the track every day around noon. It was during the days before eighteen wheelers, and was more like a ten wheeler, with a big square box on back. I was in school that day and so I missed the excitement, but I could see the smoke from the high school and heard there had been a terrible wreck at that intersection just a hundred yards from my house.

A big rattletrap flatbed truck, loaded down with a rather poor family's entire possessions, with the family riding on top of all their furniture, clothes, junk, had just arrived at the top of the T of the intersection at the same time the mail truck reached that identical  spot. The mail truck simply ran over and on top of the flat bed truck and squashed it, and all the passengers.  The driver of the mail truck found himself wedged between his seat and the steering wheel with his foot lodged beneath the pedals, and couldn't get out just as both vehicles seemingly simultaneously exploded and caught fire.

I had a feeling of dread as my daddy drove me home from school, slowing for a long time, enough to see the smouldering remains of the vehicles and what seemed to be what was left of the driver.  The family, and I understand there were several including kids and uncles, were all beneath the big truck that, like a huge beast, had somehow flown on top and sat down on top of the other vehicle, family and all, who were evidently all killed instantly and cremated as well.

The driver of the mail truck simply burned to death screaming, unable to disentangle himself from the foot pedals, and finally was silenced as the blaze from both gas tanks literally reduced everything to rubble.

That night I had terrible dreams. Then for as much as two years after, though I had not heard the driver screaming as he died, I heard him in my dreams and I lived in a kind of terror of sleeping for I knew I could hear his shrieks---and something more---for as many as eight or nine others died instantly because this hot rod truck driver who constantly ran through that intersection at breakneck speed.  Rural Rigdon, who lived at the corner there at the interesection, a mail carrier himself, had complained about the speed of this driver, but it did no good. There were no markings or stop signs in those days at most intersections and people just watched out as best they could, unfortunately the family didn't watch out well enough.

And I wondered at hearing the hollering and screaming, for sometimes I heard it when I was not asleep, deep in my mind, and for years would pass that place, long after the bured rubble was removed and the grass grew back over the blackened spot, I would shudder in horror.  He may still be there, in that truck, his body immolated in the melting of the cab around him, hanging, screaming for help,  in the most horrible of ways to go. 

LDSledge

July 30, 2005

Resistance, drive Inn's,

Friends and Kin:

It's July 30, 2005. I sat in the patio briefly this morning, reading about all of the child abuse, child rapes, porn proliferation, my God!  An uncollectable eight million dollar award against the bureaucrats in our child protection agency, for ignoring months of pleas to help, resulting in the horrible death of a little girl. Those old frogs up there in those agencies whose work ethic consists of showing up and getting a check and ignoring facts. I know, I know, they are overworked, etc., but they are also abysmally stupid and mostly cretins who have been promoted far beyond their capabilities in their jobs. 

I was in an Administrative Law Hearing yesterday and realized something within me that has caused me untold worry and apprehension all of my life, but I had never realized what it was. It was resistance.  Any time I have encountered and confronted something that I disagreed with, I found myself tightening up inside, pushing away what was happening or being said, as if my internal shielding that was going up plate at a time was actually going to stop the onslaught of testimony, accusations, bad news, etc.  It was as if I was not just pushing the opposing views away but trying to destroy them with my internal resistance, squeezing myself down into a little knot, pushing, trying to make it go away---and all that did was to jam my viscera and bring all of my wards into red alert, with all the alarms jangling and cannons at ready.

Where did that get me?  Nowhere, really.  Maybe it is an atavistic survival mechanism to come screaming out of my comfort to arm myself against what may happen, but never has this knotted and clotted resistance gotten me anywhere.  Yesterday I realized the other guy is going to say what he is going to say, good or bad, and my resistance won't make a damn bit of difference out there, but on the other hand it stops my objectivity and stokes up the internal boilers to the point what I may even miss what he says.  I wish I had learned this forty three years ago before all of my many gut wrenching trials took their toll on my mind and body.

The way of Zen?  Just confronting, while being there comfortably. It was a revelation. I could actually do it! Took me seventy years to learn that little bit of technolgy, or philosophy, or whatever it is, for it is a marvelous tool.  Watch, don't flare, don't build a palisade with bolt holes and then stand there all armed and ready---reactive and hot.  I guess that is kind of good, for it does make you more alert, but why be that way when you are not having to do the fighting---just observing?  I kind of found peace. Perhaps if I was the lawyer I may have to get up on the point but I realized I did the same thing whether I was the point man or just a casual observer.  Like reading the paper, I see something like the child porn and rapists, or some obscene political corruption, or things I really disagree with and there leap the hounds from their kennels of my mind howling at this offensive excrement.  Hell, just let it be!  Didn't John Lennon write about that and, Buddha preach it?

Read in the paper this morning about building Drive Inns in Texas.  Texas is a fun place. It hasn't lost its sense of place and time and reason, and its people are proud of it.  I wish I was a Texan. I think I am really, being from the part of Louisiana I hailed from---which should have been given back to Texas long ago for it surely has no business being in the Louisiana mix.  Anglo and stiff as compared to South Louisiana which still has whiffs of the Latin lingering among the prairies and bayous.  But Texas took the Anglo and made it proud rather than redneck---moving it a notch above the gourd dipper mentality that exists in places in North Louisiana.  However, I have to say that my little community in Castor, during the time I was growing up, had a touch of class. I'm not kidding.  We had a Principal, E.R. Minchew, whose vision was outside of the community. He had a PHD in speech, and we went to speech tournaments at different colleges around and got a look at the outside world.  He had a big influence on a segment of our school that gave a broader vision---and a dream---that's all you need to do as a real teacher---build in a dream and those who can dream with it will carry the dream on to others.

There was a Drive-Inn in Minden, and we would drive up there, smooch, smoke cigarettes, watch the movies in the privacy of the car. No air conditioning anyway, so we were used to it, and there was nothing else but smooching and I remember one little girl who could hardly catch her breath during our great smooching episode, gasp "why don't you ever let go," and I was so stupid I had no idea what she was talking about.  When you remember such things much later on, realizing what she meant, you may hurt yourself. I heard the story of a guy who was working at home, upon a ladder, remembering his trip to Paris when the cute little maid keept asking, "Is there anything else you wish, Monsoir?" When he realized what she was asking, years later, he fell off the ladder.  And I remember how the windows were steamed and we had been kissing and kissing (not much tongue---we were from WASP country you know---just lips but bruised lips) And she breathed hot in my ear, "don't you ever let go?"  Later I realized she was begging me and I felt like such a fool. If I had let go right then, knowing what I know now about that stuff, and how addicted and crazy I was when I finally did let go, I may not have ever graduated from high school because I would have become a ravenous, prancing leering goat, bleating away, tapping on their windows at midnight, slipping away behind the gym at noon, grabbing moments in closets or back seats or front seats with her or whoever, as an insatiable beast. I am lucky I didn't let go.  When I did let go, I could never find peace, for there was none except a post amorous armistace before the blood of lust began clogging my synaptic interspaces for another  hunt, kill, eat, rest.  It was a well without a bottom I finally realized. The goat still prances, after all these years.  He still lives, and I wish he would take a rest.

Well, I have certifications this morning, and it is nearly ten.  Several people are coming to be certified with my company and they will be productive until around one. I have a big day. Today my grandson Jack has a birthday party at two and after that a meeting at the mission.  Maybe tomorrow I can take off for the first time in months and see War of the Worlds.

LDS

Dandelions, JSBach, man's wars, poem

Friends and Kin:

It's July 15, 2005.  A deluge this morning for three hours . Blew my router off line. Now, at ten, it's steaming up for a suffocating July Deep South Louisiana day.  It's been such a long time since I did a Rant I have to indulge myself today for a bit before getting on with the program.

My day consists of getting up around six thirty or seven, coming downstairs to get a cup of coffee--check my mail---stretch and exercise a few minutes to get the stuff running and then bathe---and send mail to my originators and people I feel should be informed of this business. Then I want to get out and see and be seen. It's interesting reinventing onesself at this age.  People see you as one thing and not as the new thing, so you have to re-sell yourself as that beingness and doingness.  I am hoping to have staying power to be able to last until this thing gets traction and takes off.  It will, just have to be plant the seeds, be patient, stay at it, and allow things to grow as I tend my business garden.  It is actually fun, and it will work. Anything that helps people like this and is this sweet a deal for them has to work.

I read Keillor's The Writer's Almanac every morning, and the little things he calls poems are more like prose written like poetry. They all have a little poignancy, a little thing that kind of burrows under the skin  just deep enough to itch my mind and they usually create a visual or sensual image of some kind, like a scent that follows you as you walk through a rose garden or the smell of peanut butter or popcorn or that perfume she used to wear that brings her back for a moment.

I steal these poems and put them in this blog, and maybe Keillor will hear about it and give me a phone call and tell me to stop. I would really like to talk to him---he is the master story teller---the Will Rogers of our day.  But he will probably have his lawyer's clerk call, if he notices at all, and the clerk will be a jerk about it and demand that I stop and I will tell him to screw himself---sue me, I need the publicity.  I can only hope.

So here's a great little poem about the spring and winter of our lives.  I just hope that any spoor or track I leave will make somebody smile either with or at me, whatever---. Anything is better than being forgotten, a part of the dumb down crowd---or mediocre.   Not having lived across a generation, able to see and remember the beginning and ending of any one's individual life, from early childhood through the passing of years watching the aging of the body and spirit until the wrinkled husk tumbles and becomes earth again---one can think in terms of Dandelions.

Poem: "Dandelions" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Dandelions

These golden heads, these common suns
Only less multitudinous
Than grass itself that gluts
The market of the world with green,
They shine as lovely as they're mean,
Fine as the daughters of the poor
Who go proudly in spangles of brass;
Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.

Inside a week they will be seen
Stricken and old, ghosts in the field
To be picked up at the lightest breath,
With brazen tops all shrunken in
And swollen green gone withered white.
You'll say it's nature's price for beauty
That goes cheap; that being light
Is justly what makes girls grow heavy;
And that the wind, bearing their death,
Whispers the second kingdom come.
— You'll say, the fool of piety,
By resignations hanging on
Until, still justified, you drop.
But surely the thing is sorrowful,
At evening when the light goes out
Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters,
All down the field their ghostly hair,
Dry sinners waiting in the valley
For the last word and the next life
And the liberation from the lion's mouth.

-------------------------

And here's another that interested me because it heralded and biographed JS Bach.  If he drank 36 cups of coffee a day, no wonder his hair looked like that. And no wonder he stayed away from the house that much---just went home to eat and sleep with his wife long enough to make another baby and then back to the hide out with his organ or whatever and scribble notes as prolifically as his libido.

Poem: "At the Children's Violin Concert" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: Selected Poems of Susan Cataldo 19791999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission.

At the Children's Violin Concert

          Firmly bowed
strands of horse hair
          tightened or
gathered up by
          a small hand to play
          a piece by J.S. Bach
who drank 36 cups of coffee every day.

   I like him because he was
   inspired by his belief in God
    & he played the organ in a church
   in Leipzig & he walked on
   cobblestone streets to his home
   every evening where he fathered
   many children & wrote music
   for his wife to clean house by.
   He worked hard all his life
    & when he died, he left us
   all the little notes he made
   for himself while he was alone.

-------

The following is an exchange between brother Charles Hatcher, a great friend and soul mate. I had received a little video snippet from my bud Max LaBranche called "incredible shooting," which videoed a sniper---evidently somewhere in the Afghanistan (spelling?)  mountains, picking off guys at like a couple of miles with this incredible weapon that would simply send body parts flying a hundred feet in all directions. It was gruesome, and fortunately you couldn't see the details but you got the picture. One was of a body flipping high in the air,  like a rag doll, at two miles distance. With these people arming themselves with bombs to blow themselves up to kill babies, children, women, men, with the totally insane idea they are going to heaven for it, is just about the most perverted mentality I can imagine. So I have no quarrel with some of this, but how have we managed to find ourselves in this situation?  I sent this to Charles, he replied and I answered:

=======

----- Original Message -----

From: "Charles Hatcher" <CHatcher@osfa.state.la.us>

To: <ldsledgemortgage@bellsouth.net>

Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 8:28 AM

Subject: Re: Fw: some incredible shooting

> It is a sad commentary on the state of mankind when we have to perfect
> technology which enables us to destroy one another more effectively and
> efficiently.  It's ashame we can't utilize technology which would "set
> off" electronice explosive devices within a 10 mile radius...I actually
> read the treatise of a retired navy seal a few years ago and he said
> they had actually developed an electronic device (after so many of our
> Marines were killed in Beirut) which utilized a mechanism which
> alternated radio wave frequencies which would send out electronic pulses
> which would then 'trigger' electronic devices. In a nutshell, it would
> send out the same pulse as a signal to trigger a bomb like the terrorist
> use. It would just send out an alternating pulse at randsom rotating
> frequencies to set off the explosives before a terrorist could get close
> to their intended targets...Guess what, the technology was PANNED and
> taken off the proverbial table by US Beauracrats who said that the
> implementation of that technology would cause , and I quote, "innocent
> civilians to be harmed" ..by our randomly setting off radio controlled
> explosive devices before they could reach US Military Personnel...This
> was in a book by Capt (Retired) Richard Marcinko...I'm for the terrorist
> being foiled and "taken out" by any means necessary...
> "Brotha"  Chas

Chas

My answer:

The polarization of entire populations continues.  During my 69 years 357 days on this planet this round, I have witnessed nothing but plague, war, death and misery, and some peaceful moments in the country when I had no access to the news of the day and out of the mainstream of human misery. There was the depression, WWII, the cold war and the nuclear era (still is but muffled), Korea, Vietnam, AIDS, the Drug Culture (legal drugs) resulting in hypnotic populations, 9/11 and now terrorism.  That is nearly 70 years. There never has been anything else on this planet but this kind of news and livingness. Perhaps some quiet places were out of the loop, being away from areas where those who could create chaos felt were unworthy, but this has been the fare of humanity since time began.

Nothing happens by accident. There are men who want chaos for they operate and profit in the midst of confusion.  Follow the money. Follow the resulting power. Man is capable of creating exquisite beauty and still create horror.  Some of the most wonderful art came from those very men who are blowing themselves up, the Samauri had wondrous teaparties and quiet beauty in art and were the most brutal of warriors.  Man is not an animal. He is an immortal spiritual being with beauty and love in his heart, but a part of hismind operates reactively and he then becomes those images that lurk in there hidden away that some time take over and rule his actions. They become mob actions. The evil men in the east send their messengers out loaded with bombs with promises of heaven as reward, and man wants to believe something so strongly that he will fall for it and end his stupid life.  And the same kind of evil men stop what you were saying could have been used to detect and reduce the bombers and consequent damage. I am no longer nonplussed or mystified, just saddened.

These guys have been crazy for centuries, have been doing this to each other, bedouin tribe to tribe, killing each other, and now we have drawn their attention to us as the evil enemy and it seems to be no end. I wonder if Bush had not started his war if this would have happened, and what hismotivation was---I still think it was oil for his cronies---now gone totally awry.  I was guest on Louisiana Live, a state wide call in talk show many times before we invaded, and I questioned the WMD and where were they, and they had none and that was the justification in invasion---to stop these weapons.  I was reviled for having such a "liberal" and radical viewpoint as to question our need to invade.  I just wanted to know what we would be doing there, for stirring those guys up who loved to die was setting something in motion that would drain our money and kill our sons---and for what?  There was, and still is no answer. The party line is to stop terrorism here. Maybe so.  Maybe they have dispersed it to the extent is now only sporadic spots where these crazies blow themselves and others up. But we have relinquished our constitution and rights and still have the problem, and if it has reduced maybe it is worth it, but has it reduced it?

Anyway, this is almost a rant. Don't get me started.

ld

-------------------------------

On an up note, after all the gloom and crap,

Here's one of mine:

Living With The Shade

I looked the Shade

        Right in the eye

I said to him

        “I don’t care if I die.”

You’ll always be there

        right by my side

While on this earth

        I still abide.

And I’ll live right on

        Until it’s over

And I’ll laugh and hoot

        And roll in the clover

I know you are there

        All day long

But so is life

        And laugh and song

So I’ll play it out

        For a few more years

And you’ll have to wait

        I have no fears

For it’s a good old day

        And a good old night

I see you are laughing

        That I got it right

You know that I know

        It’s one and the same

Living and dying

        Are just part of the game

And  the one who wins

        When the time has run

Is the one who  has had

        The best and most fun.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Have a great, unserious day today and every day. It just ain't worth it to be serious.

LDS

To Kill An American

Remembering a dark eyed girl

Friends and Kin:

It's July 7, 2005. Another steamy South Louisiana day in the offing.  I have no idea how I was able to live here before air conditioning.  My company's VP, Larry Firebaugh, flew into Baton Rouge two weeks ago and, accustomed to the mile high city of Denver, almost panted by the time he got to my office. He smokes  a lot, so he spent some time outside in the steamy mornings and afternoons talking on his phone and puffing away. I should talk, because I spent thirty years puffing on cigars, pipes, cigarettes, roll you owns, doing snuff and chewing tobacco. I couldn't get enough, and gradually, as I hit my late forties and fifties, the stuff started reacting as a poison to me and would make my head feel weird and it just finally wasn't worth it---particularly since it would kill you.  But I still love the taste of it.

This morning's The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor, had this wistful and sweet little poem that brought back memories to me. I may be getting in trouble by reprinting it without his or the Author's permission, so sue me.  I am not getting paid for it, but am spreading the poet's joy a little more.

Poem: "The Exchange" by Ron Rash from Among the Believers. © Iris Press, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Reprinted with permission.

The Exchange

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a dougle-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, insidev the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

====================

Daddy had a big general merchandise store in Castor, Louisiana, a little village (hamlet?) in the dry hills and woods about fifty miles south of Shreveport, LA for fifty years. I grew up in that store and worked there as a teenager until I went off to LSU in 1953 when I was seventeen. Until then, I was in the store every day of my life.  Before they moved the big old building over to make way for the big, new cinder block store with it's colored cement floors, the store was a two story structure sitting on the corner across from the depot, a service station and a barber shop up the street. Castor had five general merchandise stores, a hotel, two filling stations, a barber shop and a butcher shop and when I was very young there was an honest to goodness blacksmith shop with hammer and anvil to shoe horses, etc.

The reason this poem hits me is that I remember a dark eyed girl. I can never forget her. I was probably in the fifth grade. Daddy would make me study when I came in from school. I would walk to the store from school which was maybe four hundred yards down the road and across the railroad track from the store. I was sitting cross legged on top of one of the counters that particular afternoon, studying my multiplication tables, when out of nowhere appeared this girl who was about my age. I had never seen her before. This was a very small town, and there were few strangers who came through. It was a year or so after WWII, and many vets were coming home trying to get settled and adjust their lives to civilian living, so it wasn't that unusual to see new people. Until then there was literally nobody new. But here was this bold, dark eyed girl who was so like someone I should know, who simply walked up and began talking about things that were terribly interesting and I was so comfortable and yet fascinated and I remember my heart nearly jumping out of my chest as we talked.  We talked for a while and I remember the sadness when she was called away, her turning and giving a little wave and then was gone. Gone forever this lifetime and yet her image is indelibly imprinted in my memory and she still impinges and I long after her after sixty years.  I knew her. I wanted her then and want her now as a desirable thing that I did have for a moment and then lost. At least I had her for a moment.  It is a dream-like memory, almost unreal, but I know it happened, and I feel that there was someone with whom I connected, again, having been intimate somewhere in the long lost past.  And here I am, approaching the three score and ten milestone on the 22nd of this month, still thinking of that dream girl I knew so well, but did not know.

I am one of the lucky ones who was raised in the real country before TV and computer games and Nintendo, HIV, ADD, and  Ritalin (which I am sure some crazy teacher today would try to get me to take so I would be stupid and dull and calm like the rest of her leveled off drugged class). It didn't matter where you lived, if you walked three minutes you were in the woods.  There was a cotton gin and a sawmill in Roytown just three miles south of town. You could always hear the whine of the big saws and the clacking of lumber being stacked.  From September through the fall you could hear the thump thump thump of the cotton gin's big engine as it separated the seeds from the cotton and packed the cotton into those big burlap bales with the metal straps.  Cotton was strewn all along the roads leading into town in the fall, hanging in the bushes along the road, having dropped from the many mule pulled wagons and trucks filled to overflowing with white boles headed to the gin.

We sold everything: feed for livestock, hay, building materials and hardware, dresses, shoes, flour and meal, sugar and salt, canned goods, flyswatters,  cigarettes, chewing tobacco and snuff, cold drinks and candy, peanuts, pickled pigs feet, and like Keillor's "Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," of Lake Woebegon, Minn., if we didn't have it you didn't need it anyway.  There was a big iron stove in the center of the store sitting on a bed of sand which was in a big wooden frame on the floor. I guess the sand was to catch any sparks and to catch any of the tobacco spit by the old men who sat around the stove in the winter chewing tobacco, spitting on the red hot stove to hear the sizzle, and tell lies and stories.  I sat and listened.  It was a warm and cozy life.

My grandfather, Dr. Chester Sledge, had a dental office in the corner next to the street, across a small hallway leading out the back across from the flour room. I remembered it as being larger, but before they tore the old building down a few years ago I went back there and took a picture of the cluttered old boarded up room, and it was no more than ten feet by twelve feet.  In the summer he would pull a tooth and flip it out of the low windows behind him. Those men standing alongside the building outside the windows would move aside to let the tooth come by to come to rest on the tooth graveled drive behind.  My granddaddy kept a cigar stub in his mouth and would turn to spit out of the window from time to time and the dental observers, who were watching the dental proceedings while they talked to granddaddy, would then move aside to allow the spit to sail by.  Granddaddy pulled teeth and made dentures by making a plaster-type impression, sending it off and the teeth would come back, and sometimes we would deliver the teeth in a box, along with the other groceries, to the patient who couldn't come into town. He or she would fit them in and clack them together, smiling with pleasure.

I wrote a little story called "A Good Day," about three little black children coming into town on the top of a wagon loaded with cotton in 1942. If anyone reading this wants a copy I would be happy to send it.  I also wrote a short story called "Callin' Mary," about an old man living down the hill from me whose wife had died and how he sang every evening while he sat on the porch and called out for her.  And there is another story called "My Southern Belle," about a young boy (me) standing by the track at midnight as the big freight rushed by. It was published in "The Dead Mule," an online publishing journal. There are several poems and other things published in "The Spillway Review," another online publisher. 

Have a great day everyone.

LDSledge

I would love to continue this Rant but I have to get on with my day. 

Explanation of my disbarment

I promised in my last Blog to tell of my disbarment, giving names and events.  I wrote 22 double spaced pages, doing just that. I spent almost a week writing it. I vented my spleen and wanted to kinda sorta pull myself by my bootstraps out of the mud of disgrace arising from my disbarment which was a complete injustice.  I wanted to point to those who started this and give the full story.  I had a double motivation and the first was to provide a full explanation for my grandchildren who may want to know how their crazy old grandpa got into such a mess.  Second was to make public just who did what to whom.  I sent a query to two of my trusted friends, to get an opinion whether I should put this on a blog or not, and Max LaBranche, savant, attorney, friend, whose opinion I trust, sent this answer, and I respect it. Therefore I will NOT publish my diatribe for this reason and he is entirely correct. Thank you Max for not allowing me to make a fool of myself, again.

So I sent it to my sisters and some relatives for their records, and for the records of my curious progeny and will return to normal and continue my rants.

L.D.

      I understand why you might think about doing this.   It is quite natural.   Nevertheless,  I do not recommend doing what you suggest.  Ask yourself, "  What would it accomplish ?".   If doing so would, likea magic bullet,create  a reasonable opportunity to overturn the LA Supreme Court's decision and get your license back, I would say. " Go ahead ", but that is not the case here.    Publicly keelhauling (he named the individual) in writing at this point will not accomplish anything other than to stretch the threads of respect and credibility that you still enjoy among your fellow  trial lawyers, who at  this point still view you as a brother lawyer who got a raw deal - a victim.   These are the same lawyers who will be glad to write letters on your behalf for reinstatement. 

    Doing what you propose would alter this  image of you from a bright creative trial lawyer temporarily down ( Sisiphyus in a bow tie )  to  one of a  vindictive sour grapes old man.    The latter is neither you nor anyone's perception of you.   It is certainly not MY perception of you and I don't think it is your perception of yourself.

The only person that  can control what people think at any  time is YOU.    

    Remember, you will not be in that penalty box forever.    Do not burn your bridges.

    "  After all, tomorrow is another day !".   Scarlet O'hara

Max