14.8

"It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before--that he had not lived the kind of life he should have--might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing.”

― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

As an initial matter, I am not depressed. Apparently that has been a concern in some circles, but no I'm not depressed at all.

My eye hurts, has oozed and ached for nine days and running (pun intended). At first I figured a corneal abrasion from my dusty eight hours on the zero turn, but then it didn't get better after a week. My next thought was pink-eye, that most opprobrious of middle school maladies, but it's neither red nor sufficiently snotty to qualify.

I know what you're thinking--why don't you just go to the doctor?

Well, there's the matter of how many hours I billed today, the title number of this little bedtime post. Seven and some change is a good day for a lawyer. I worked almost without ceasing from 6 a.m. until well after nine. No way for an old guy to live, and a vocational arrangement that leaves no time for trips to a physician.

We also are having a disagreement, P and me, regarding what the proper medical path might be. P wants an ophthalmologist, someone who knows about eyeballs and can offer expert diagnosis and advice. I'm thinking that may take weeks, and this gooey mass in my left orbit hurts right now, making me look like I'm in a perpetual state of hangover without the previous evening's upside. I want to drop in on my longtime doc-in-a-box, a graduate of the finest med school in Grenada who appalled my lovely P by letting me leave his office one day with blood pressure readings that flashed "imminent stroke" to anyone paying attention. Yeah, he's not Dr. Right, but he's Dr. Right Now, and maybe he'll have some drops or pain meds or something. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Further compounding my medical woes is this piece of royal blue masking tape on my hand, staunching the flow of blood after I bumped the top of my hand, the part with all those throbbing blood vessels, against the refrigerator door handle. It isn't much of a cut, but boy oh boy such bleeding, even without the blood thinners that leave my friends looking all bruisy at this stage of life. We have no bandaids, or at least none I can find, and P's bed has white sheets. I'm hoping the masking tape keeps me from ruining the Ralph Lauren bedding.

Today I drove a couple hours each way to sit in a conference room defending depositions while a half-dozen "victims" sat scowling at me while they weren't playing on their phones. That took care of the six-to-six time slot. Then I talked to Mom, speaking in barely a whisper after Covid, as well as her husband of thirty years, until I begged off so I could reheat some of Peg's holiday gumbo and dive back into dictating a complaint in a breach of fiduciary duty case involving one partner cheating the other out of a couple hundred thousand dollars. Tomorrow I'll get up an hour early so I can dictate another complaint in a construction defect case, which only leaves maybe four major writing projects to complete between now and jury selection in my 22 August trial.

I'm too old for this. Simply too old. And my eyeball hurts.

But the sunrise this morning was pretty grand, in a washed out sort of way.

Oh look! A text from a client at 10:23 p.m. I think it's time to declare myself asleep. Two wakeups and a plane ride and I'm back with P. The carrot dangling in front of this tired old mule.