Barely watched charts today I ended up watching a movie about Miguel de Cervantes and found out he was gay. In Catholic Spain, that meant persecution or death, so he fled to Italy. In 1575, while attempting to sail from Naples to Spain, his ship was attacked by pirates. He spent five years enslaved in Algiers. That experience left a mark. It shaped his book 'Life in Algiers', and echoes throughout 'Don Quixote', published in 1605 and widely regarded as the first modern novel. Strange, how a man stripped of freedom ended up writing the most enduring fiction about inner freedom. Sometimes, the system breaks you. Sometimes, you break the system.