“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
"Diurnal variation" it's called, or so I read this morning as I try to figure out why the predawn hours always arrive with a dark emotional bent.
There's no reason for this sadness, with P curled up warm and snoring softly into my ear, hum of the air conditioner drowning out the birds outside, money in the checking account and food in the fridge. Cheer up, Donk.
Ah, that it should be so easy. The morning voice isn't all that concerned with material well-being. It's all about reminding me of failures and worries, about painting a scene of physical and professional decline even here in a comfortable, outwardly successful season of life.
It begins by pointing out all the unpleasant physical consequences of my late-middle-aged senescence, all the things I was and will be no more. I've run my last marathon, lifted my personal best on the bench press, and now live in a losing battle of attrition with only one outcome.
Of course, that would be me and everyone else. It's just life. But I wish P were married to young, impressive, rakish me. I reckon she feels the same way sometimes.
Then there's work. I've been a lawyer for so long it has become difficult to imagine life without all the stress, without lawyers playing lawyer games and clients with unrealistic expectations about what they might gain from all this money dumped into a lawsuit. It's like the tag line of the movie "WarGames", when the super computer plays out the algorithm for global thermonuclear war: "the only way to win is not to play."
But that game is my livelihood, and on this and lots of other mornings I found myself in bed with eighty sets of clients and opposing lawyers, knowing there's no way I can keep up with it all and wincing at every failure occasioned by too many files and not enough time. But I owe too much in ransom and airplane payments ever to stop, even as I watch myself crumble a little with each crashing wave of legal warfare in which I'm paid to engage.
Okay, so I can't do much about the whole physical decline thing except try to slow it down and learn to accept the old man I'm becoming, and there's no turning the practice of law into anything except the stew of conflict and crisis it is.
As for the diurnal mood variation (that's what this whole morning gloom thing is called in the psychiatric world, according to my favorite expert The Internet), there are ways of managing this form of depression. Get enough sleep. Don't do as I did yesterday at 6:00 p.m. when I muted the phone an hour into a conference call devoted to arguing over digital discovery, poured a healthy tumbler of Jameson's with a golf-ball shaped ice cube floating in the middle, and continued the call on mute while sitting on the porch watching the cats play in the yard, until at 6:30 my tumbler ran dry and I announced I was leaving the endless telephonic squabble to go eat supper. Then I skipped supper.
So maybe we could work on that sort of self-defeating behavior. The other options suggested by Dr. Internet range all the way to electroshock therapy. Let's start with less extreme remedies. Maybe a little arugula tonight?
The second floor of Tara is a sauna even at seven in the morning, feeling far hotter than the 81 degree outside temperature my phone conveys. I'm sitting here in the home office next to a roaring window unit, which I must turn off with every conference call so I can hear the person on the other end of the line. When I start to feel boob sweat settle over my midsection, it's time to end the call.
The weatherman promises highs of maybe 80 from today through the end of the week. We'll see.
My gloomy, sweaty world lightened up a little with the news that a former reality TV personality mistakenly elected to high office six years ago in a sort of national prank had the FBI as a houseguest last night.
I hope they searched the toilets, which seem to provide an integral part of the suspect's filing system.
To no one's surprise, the response of the Trumposphere, particularly back in my benighted home state, consisted of saliva-slinging apoplexy.
By this Governor's standards, that's actually a pretty measured response. Another elected official from the Insane Clown Party was less circumspect, calling for Florida to withdraw from any cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies, and to arrest all FBI agents on sight:
I guess the disappointing thing here is that both these guys are lawyers. Granted, Harvard Law School is no UGA, and let's not even get started about UF. But really, guys, you know better than this. There's never been a bar exam that didn't touch on what it takes to get a search warrant, so you had to know this at one time. And you can bet that, if law enforcement is going to rifle through the sock drawer of an ex-POTUS, those procedures were followed to a T.
What that means, for those of you with the good sense not to have attended law school, is that they had to go before a federal judge (likely a magistrate) and make a sufficient showing from sworn evidence to establish probable cause that would justify the issuance of a search warrant. Merrick Garland doesn't just pull a search warrant out of his desk drawer.
And the fact that the courts have behaved thusly toward the Insurrectionist-in-Chief should give one hope for the country. Even after a fevered season of court-packing during the last president's term, the judiciary--at least at the trial court level--has been the staunchest defender of the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented assault from the right. I have one good friend who's a Trump-appointed federal judge (I won't name names, lest his association with a libtard like me make news somewhere), and can tell you that Federalist Society leanings aside, he's a very bright guy with a moral compass that seems to point to true north. I have trouble picturing him even considering politics in making a ruling. It seems there are a lot of those judges still out there, willing even to subject the most powerful and dangerous political figure in America to the rule of law.
So that makes me feel better, here in a room that's gone almost as dark as night as rain comes pouring down outside and the temperatures begin to ease a bit.
Oh look, an email from a truly nasty south Florida lawyer, demanding that I share with him my research on settlement communication privilege so he can decide if our position has merit. He can go f*ck himself.
Ah, that feels better than being sad. This is going to be one of those mornings when I need to dictate every communication, then let it sit there on the screen for a while before hitting "send".
Which I probably should do with this entire post, come to think of it.
Wow… beating yourself up every day must be even more exhausting than it appears from the outside . Relax, my precious, smart husband. Please ❤️