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My friend Mike Tolbert, above, who manages KOTS, which is run by SHAL (Southern Assitance Homeless League) for the City of Key West, called and blasted me for the italicized portion of this part of yesterday’s post at goodmorningkeywest.com:
“In the dorms, the 3-ft-wide sleeping pads are inches or less apart. Unless you have an end pad [in one of the KOTS dormitories], you sleep next to two other homeless men. If one of them has an infectious disease, such as MRSA, influenza, hepatitis, scabies, lice, TB, you can end up with it, and I doubt you will see SHAL (Southern Assistance Homeless League), which runs KOTS for the City of Key West, or the City of Key West offer to pay your medical bills. In fact, if you make a stink about it, you could end up finding yourself banned from KOTS, for “whining”.”
Mike said, in fact, SHAL is the only agency in the Florida Keys which provides medicine to homeless people, for free, including hepatitis vaccinations. I told Mike I would publish that today. Am glad SHAL does that and will ask homeless people I know if they know about it, and what kind of experiences they have had getting free medicine from SHAL?
Next today, a Facebook morsel on one of our city commission races, the general election is tomorrow:
John Parker shared Elect Richard Payne for City Commission‘s photo.
13 hrs ·
I support law and order in Key West that’s why I urge Key West, Florida, voters to support former Chief Judge of Monroe County, Richard Payne. Please support local candidates, not democrats borne in Cuba.
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John Parker Keep supporting your attorney, Samuel “Rookie Crook” Kaufman. Let him set up a crack house at the homeless center, not at my mother’s place. My brother is dead, my mother is missing, and no one gives a shit, right Sloan? Your boyee can do no harm…but I am not a lawyer or a ex druggie or ex candidate for office. But, I am an ex political campaign manager. I can’t remember ever losing a race. See my picture on the front page of the Key West Citizen back in 1976, as manager for Gov. Wallace. Mrs Spottswood asked me to handle his campaign in Monroe
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Sloan Bashinsky Damn, John, I told you to write so a 3rd grader could understand it, what you claim Kaufman and Cintron did wrong to you and your mother, and you said you would get on it, and you didn’t - that was just a few days ago. I also asked you several times if you sued Cintron and Kaufman, or brought legal grievances with the state bar, and you never answered me, even though I kept trying to get your answer. You are not a credible person, John. You know lots of people, having grown up here, but you carry on like someone they let out the state mental hospitals when they were closed down. Dennis Reeves Cooper, publisher of the blue paper, was mostly responsible for the CRB coming into being. I was involved. Lots of people were involved. Kaufman was not the leader of that, although he probably did support it, since he represented homeless people who were griping about the cops; and since he was Chairman of Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, and still is, which gives down and out people, who are willing to give up their drugs of choice, and who don’t have history of repeated violent crimes, another chance to turn their lives around.
Compliments Jerry and Donna Weinstock, of Key Haven, just above Key West,
I took in “Pawn Sacrifice” last night at Tropic Cinema on Eaton Street, just west of Duval Street. I really liked this movie, which climaxes with Bobby Fisher finally crushing the Russian world champion chess master, Boris Spassky, in Iceland. Thereafter, the movie winds down with clips on the screen summarizing what then befell Fisher, the Mozart of chess, en route to his becoming what might have been totally insane. How he ended up going that route is laid out pretty well, if it was true to his real life story: a Jewish mother, who was a rabid American communist activist, who would tell young Bobby nothing about his father.
I suppose Fisher felt like he was from another planet, maybe he was. I did not know, however, that he had become a staunch anti-communist, and anti-Jew, and that was part of what propelled him to take on and dismantle Spassky, who represented godless communism, the Evil Empire, in Fisher’s mind, with, in the film, plenty of encouragement from President Nixon and the US Government, until, right, Fisher later played Spassky in Europe, when that was not okay with the US Government, and Fisher became a man without a country until Iceland allowed him to make his home there, prelude to his going totally insane.
For me, the most interesting part of the film was the two men who had the most influence on Fisher, a patriotic lawyer with serious Washington connections, who persuaded Fisher to let him represent Fisher for free, and Fisher’s childhood Catholic priest friend, a very good chess player.
Oddly, just a few hours before I saw the film,
I received a call from a Key West friend’s brother, in Washington state, to say my friend, about whom I have written a number of times, a great chess player when he was younger, still darn good today, I call him “The Terminator”, because he terminates most people he plays chess, after a week in our local hospital, and then helicoptered to Mt. Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, where he spent two months, with double pneumonia, on full life support, probably an induced coma, during which time he had a stroke in his right side, I just learned yesterday, and then he was transferred to a rehab center, where he stayed about six weeks and was learning to walk again …
Well, this Thursday they are making him leave there and are transporting him back to Key West, even though I seriously doubt he can take care of himself, much less get to a grocery store. I told his brother yesterday, if his brother, my friend, goes back to drinking booze and smoking cigarettes, I will kill him and used the mercy killing defense to try to avoid going to prison. His brother sort of laughed. He has been doing all the hard work with the different hosptials and agencies, and getting his brother’s rent paid to the local housing authority here n Key West. Maybe I will see if The Terminator wishes to try to take in “Pawn Sacrifice”. I bet he knows by heart every move in the pivotal 6th game, in which Fisher made unprecedented, unfathomable moves, and unhinged Spassky. But then, there is so little actual chess played in the film, and so much about the tension and drama and backstories, maybe The Terminator won’t care for the film.
I will never be more than a C - level chess player; my mind does not work like good chess players’ minds work; my mind cannot even fathom how a chess player like Bobby Fisher’s mind worked. I’m a poet, not a chess player, however, it seems in my line of work I play a lot of chess on a spirit chess board, which does not look anything like the chess boards Fisher and Spassky used. The last time I played The Terminator, at his apartment, he was hacking, and coughing, and choking something terrible, already I was telling him he needed to go to the hosptial. He suggested we play chess, even though I didn’t feel in the mood. I had not beaten him in maybe 2 years, and then when he fell asleep during the game and lost his concentration. He resigned two games in the middle game; we did not reach the end game; and I told him he was not there, he was not up to snuff, and a few days later he was in the hospital on Stock Island, after he went to the nearby grocery and collapsed and they called an ambulance.
The Las Vegas odds of me receiving the phone call from The Terminator’s brother just a few hours before I was to see “Pawn Sacrifice” were zero; the angel odds where 100 percent. Now what does all of this mean for me? What chess games am I playing in spirit, which are playing out on this world through human proxies? Are just pawns being sacrificed? Or is it more grand than that? That is normal thinking and wondering for me.
sloanbashinsky@outlook.com
