Tonight I shall begin writing in English, not because my passion for the German language has abated, but because of the topic to which I must commit my thinking for the next 47 days, my argument before the Massachusetts Appeals Court on November 17, 2016, at 9:30 a.m. My thinking is compulsive; I'm unable to abandon a train of thought once it emerges; if I tried to juggle them, both the development of legal arguments in English and the composition of sonnets in German would be impaired, Better, I think to devote myself for the time being exclusively to my arguments which having come to fruition in five weeks, will then fade rapidly and leave me free to try to express what I have learned - and what I have become - in German. This month my legal dispute with the Town of Nantucket is of twelve years duration. It has produced thousands of words of text, some printed out on paper, much in computer files, none of which so far as I know have been lost. To read in its entirety would take weeks, if not months. To become conversant with it all, a lawyer would charge thousands of dollars, and the courts would refuse to spend the time. Inevitably, much will be lost to oblivion. Aletheia, "not to be forgotten" is only a noble dream. By the same token, the prolixity of the material available to me invites selective fabrication. I must be careful not to commit the wrongs which I ascribe to others. I begin with a consideration of what I should tell the Appeals Court. With so much potential material, the answer is far from obvious. Although it represents itself as monolithic and imperturbable, the court is subject to forces that make it motile and dynamic. My case will be heard by a panel of three judges, one of whom will write the opinion to which the other two will subscribe. The opinion will reflect not only their agreement, but, however subtly, their disagreement as well. Hence I must avoid provocative statements that are not essential to my argument, and I must not forget that the judges are substantially unfamiliar with the record which I must recapitulate for them. The task then is to focus the events and experiences of eight years into an explanation that may consume no more than fifteen minutes of the Appeals Court's valuable time. The intellectual and emotional evocation of past events as narrative is the essence of history. (In dem Heraufbeschwören einstigen Geschehens als gegenwärtige Darstellung besteht die Geschichte.) I will begin with an outline of what I propose to tell the Court. Insamuch as dictating it into an audio computer file takes 18 minutes, I will need to abbreviate. 1. Your honor: I represent myself as appellant in this controversy. The issue in this appeal is the interpretation of an order issued by this Court three years ago in 2013-P-1536. 2. The Appeals Court then ruled as follows: "The judgment is reversed. We remand this case to the Superior Court for entry of a new judgment that directs the board to conduct a hearing to determine whether the order that the plumbing must be completely removed is justified by the specific violations that are noted in the inspection report and substantiated by photos. Both parties are required to provide competent evidence to the board concerning the effect of the deficiencies and whether they support an order to completely remove the plumbing. The board shall be directed to make specific findings about why the entire system needs to be removed or, if that is not necessary, what needs to be fixed by a plumber." 3. With this order the Appeals Court was responding to an effort, now of 8 years standing, by the Board and by the Town, to secure the destruction of plumbing I installed 10 years ago without a plumbing permit at 3 Red Barn Road on Nantucket. 4. This controversy is now before the Court for the third time. a. The first appeal was from a destruction order in the absence of any inspection at all. b. The second appeal was from a Superior Court judgment that confirmed a destruction order in which the Board stated that it had not reached a decision as to whether destruction was necessary. c. This third appeal concerns the Hearing which the Appeals Court then ordered; at which the Hearing it required the parties to correlate specific deficiencies if any, listed in the plumbing inspector's Inspection Report and Condemnation Order with specific deficiencies demonstrable on one or more of the 35 photographs. 5. Subsequent to the Hearing, the Board issued a report which identified "poor workmanship" as the only deficiency cited in the Inspection Report, claiming that poor workmanship was a specific deficiency. 6. I argue that poor workmanship is not a specific deficiency because poor workmanship is a description insufficient to enable a licensed plumber to identify repairs required to make the system code compliant. Poor workmanship is a non-specific deficiency which can be remedied only by replacing the entire system, the need for which the Appeals Court would not permit to be taken for granted. If I am correct that in the context of the Appeals Court order poor workmanship does not qualify as a specific deficiency, then, since poor workmanship is the only deficiency cited, the defendants' claim to the contrary is a concession. There is no case. No further argument is required. 7. However, given the Superior Court's imperviousness to that argument, I must continue: I argue that the August 6, 2014 Hearing was invalid. When the Board ignored all testimony at the Hearing, it must be concluded that the Board did not hear. The Board made its ruling on reliance of a secret re-interpretation of an exhibit which had been in its possession for two and a half years, a secret re-interpretation which I, as appellant, never had an opportunity to rebut. I assert that the Board's Final Decision and Order is invalid because it is not based on testimony "heard" at the Hearing. 8. Assuming arguendo, as the Superior Court found, that the Board was indeed responding to testimony given at the Hearing, then the testimony becomes relevant as do the procedural irregularities by which it was compromised. My first witness was Christopher Gordon, a licensed plumber who had paid the Town $560 for a plumbing permit but was prohibited by the Inspector from doing any work on my installation either in preparation for or subsequent to the Inspection. Gordon testified that he found a few deficiencies which could be easily rectified, none of which required removal of the entire system, and which would not affect the functioning of the system if left unchanged. Gordon's testimony was partially lost, because the audio recording furnished by the Board lacked the sound track from the microphone closest to Gordon. Both the Board and the Town failed to cross-examine Gordon or otherwise challenge his testimony. My second witness Anthony Esposito, a Massachusetts registered civil engineer was prohibited from testifying for me because he was not a plumber, a circumstance which did not disqualify him from being asked to testify against me. Nantucket's only witness was Mr. Edmund Ramos, who was presented to the Board as an "Assistant Inspector" although the General Laws make no provisions of "assistant plumbing inspectors", his name is not listed on the roster of Nantucket officials and he testfied that he is concurrently engaged in the plumbing trade on Nantucket. Mr. Ramos testified to seeing "faulty pitch" on 33 of the 35 photos. He dismissed the Inspection Report and the Plumbing Code as "paperwork". He quoted no specific deficiencies cited in the Inspection Report. He admitted concerning Photo #1, that he couldn't tell from looking at the photo which pipe was pitching the wrong way, but he knew that faulty pitch was present. Mr. Kilb, the attorney for the Board clarified Mr. Ramos testimony to the effect that Mr. Ramos was testifying not only what he saw on the photos but what he remembered from the inspection four years previously, an hypothesis which Mr. Ramos confirmed. Chairman Kennedy cautioned Mr.Ramos not to report seeing too much on the photos, since one can't really see many deficiencies unless one is in their presence. My rejoinder is that "faulty pitch" cannot be assessed with the unaided eye even in physical presence, much less on a photograph. I argue that Mr. Ramos' report of seeing faulty pitch unaided is spectral evidence, evidence from dreams, fantasy or imagination, which has been banned in Massachusetts since October 1692. 9. The testimony was subject to serious procedural irregularities, specifically, a. that my witness Gordon was not permitted to rebut the testimony of Nantucket's witness, Mr. Ramos, b. that my witness Mr. Esposito was found unqualified to testify for me, but was qualified to testify against me. 10. The Superior Court's finding that these irregularities did not prejudice me because they properly excluded cumulative evidence reflects the assumption that the Board had the authority to make a ruling independent of all evidence presented at the Hearing, i.e., arbitrarily. 11. Turning now to the Board's secret re-interpretation of what it claimed to see in the photos, I note that there were before the Board three contradictory interpretations, those of Gordon, Ramos, and its own prior interpretation, to which, in order to support its order that the plumbing be destroyed, it added then a fourth. To support my assertion that what the Board purported to see in the 35 photos is untruthful, irresponsible and malicious fantasy, I motioned the Superior Court for permission to file an appendix consisting: a) of a synopsis of four contradictory interpretations of the 35 photos, given in sworn testimony or on file at the Hearing, to which I added my own comments on the Board's second and final photo-interpretation which had been concealed from me, b) a set of publically available documents concerning i) visual perspective, ii) projective visual tests such as the familiar Rorschach ink blot test, iii) the definition of "full S-trap" iv) Appeals Court opinions in the two previous appeals, and v) the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in FTC v. North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners. The circumstance that the Superior Court denied my motion to file this appendix and gave to the Attorney for Nantucket verbal assurances, documented in the transcript of the Superior Court Hearing, that it would take no notice of items in the Appendix raises the question to what extent, if any, the trial court is obligated to take notice of relevant publically available information, where such notice would be determinative of the outcome of a proceeding. 12. The Board's assertion that the installation must be destroyed because the large number of alleged deficiencies makes the repair impossible is incongruous. Assuming, as Mr. Ramos claimed, 90 percent of the installation required removal, then the remaining 10 percent which would not require removal would, by definition be code compliant and would differ in no way from the initial 10 percent of a new code compliant installation. If my 10 percent code compliant installation could not be completed for what ever reason, then neither could a new installation hypothetically code compliant but only 10 percent complete. In fact, if my hypothetically 10 percent code compliant installation could not be completed, then no other plumbing installation at the same 10 percent stage could ever be completed. 13. I argue that FTC v. NC Board of Dental Examiners is on all fours with my assertion that where a majority of the plumbing board and its chairman are competing in the trade that they regulate, and where the Commonwealth flagrantly fails to enforce the Boards prohibition of do-it-yourself plumbing, and where there is no precedent of interposition to Federal law by Massachusetts, the Appeals Court should declare that do-it-yourself plumbing is not illegal. 14. Unless it dismisses my appeal, then when it fashions relief, the following facts, documented in the record before it, become relevant: a) that in the Nantucket plumbing inspectors office there is posted a list of addresses for which the routine issuance of plumbing permits is prohibited, b) that the Nantucket plumbing inspector refused for 50 days to issue a permit to Christopher Gordon to perform the plumbing at 3 Red Barn Road, even when the issuance of such a permit had been mandated by the Appeals Court. c) the Plumbing Board regularly revokes the license of a plumber who does plumbing without a permit. d) Plumbing permits are issued by the Inspector at his pleasure and the Inspector's refusal to issue a plumbing permit may destroy a plumber's business. e) Therefore a plumber who is not a fool, - to use the Chairman's word for Mr. Gordon, will curry the Inspector's favor. f) The Nantucket plumbing inspector's order to plumbers under his jurisdiction to boycott my installation was breached only by Mr. Gordon, who was immune to retribution because he was about to move to Florida. g) The Town resorted to fictitious evidence in legal actions against me for the past 12 years. h) The plumbing inspector is an employee of the Town of Nantucket. i) The Town has used and is using legal process as an instrument of attrition. j) The Town has consistently flaunted the Appeals Court directives and misused judicial procedure 1) by failing to provide and Inspection of Integrity and Fairness with a report of detailed findings and reasoning, and 2) by offering the testimony of a witness who dismissed the plumbing code and the inspection report as paperwork.