"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
Back in the condo again, dealing with two quite unhappy cats as the rain subsides. This canned food we thought they loved after feeding them from this brand in NY has turned out to be reviled. Well, mostly by Dean. Slane pretty much eats what you feed him; hence his ever growing mass.
Last night an approaching line of thunderstorms woke me at 3 a.m., lightning increasing in intensity as the flashes drew nearer to the shore. I pondered closing the drapes, but the cats were sitting up on the bed enjoying the show; And, after all, doesn't one own a bayfront condo to watch the weather blow in from the Gulf?
Once awake, however, there was no going back to sleep, and not just because Slane started singing the Song of His People while Dean pulled a bag of cat treats off the counter and attempted to help himself. I fretted over the trial that's coming up on Monday, a fairly straightforward affair. Trials, however, are wildly unpredictable, and I'm a little behind the eight ball on this one because I was hired late in the game and my co-counsel has announced he's not participating because he might be a witness. This is the lawyer who knew all the players and facts. I have some work to do, and in my head around 4 a.m. I was sending out witness subpoenas, selecting photographs to display on the courtroom monitors, and writing my opening statement.
I have another trial in November, and another in December. An avalanche of cases that had been trapped in post-Covid amber for months, now all looming just over the horizon with their own demands and challenges.
And so many other cases demand my attention. Yesterday I learned my paralegal sent the other side emails from our client in a discovery response, a big no-no in my profession. To say I've been a little hamstrung by staff since the hurricane would be the understatement of the decade. I'm not supposed to be checking every page of a document dump at this stage of my career, but maybe I need to go back to that stultifying task, a standard rite of passage for new lawyers, if I can't hire someone else to do it.
Dean's sitting here trying to apologize for the cat treat episode. I stroke his head and tell him it's okay, although stealing cat treats is a crime of intent and not carelessness. Can a cat even form mens rea?
Then there's the annual late year crunch, when we get over our skis waiting for end-of-year bonus. This has been a good year overall, but we still have a barn to fix, and this whole exercise of turning the Mighty Columbia into some sort of flying Ship of Theseus wasn't exactly in the budget. Neither was re-purposing resources from finishing the barn to cleaning up the mess after Idalia. So, as has been true since I started in this business, I spent an otherwise pleasant September dusk running numbers in my head instead of sleeping, figuring that if we shift into a beans and rice mode for the next ten weeks we'll just about make it to bonus time.
Next year's resolution will be to live smaller, because I'm truly starting to feel my age and these worries about work and trials and money are something I'd just as well leave to my memories of a turbulent, interesting youth as a lawyer. Plus, keeping up with it all means I'm here and Peg's up there, and when we're together it hangs like a pall over my time and space, making what should be the very best of times a little less so.
A better quote for this morning would've come from Picasso: "I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money." There's something to that.
Dean keeps trying to swat my hand away from my coffee mug so I'll pet him. Slane's eaten both of their breakfasts, and is lying fat and sprawled under my feet. Such a life these two lead.
On an unrelated note, I also wasted valuable sleeping time pondering on the book I dove into on the plane ride down here yesterday. The Ideal of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Humanity, by Bernardo Kastrup. He's an arrogant little bugger, belittling those philosophers with whom he doesn't agree, and repeatedly reminding us that his approach is the most valid because it's the most "parsimonious", as in having the fewest moving parts and exceptions. Still, it's a dazzling thought exercise, exploring the nature of reality as not dualistic, not divided into the material and the ethereal, but entirely an ontological construct of the sentient experience of beings whose consciousness constitutes a dissociation from a megaconsciousness, a being that is only experience.
I was commenting the other day that cosmology and quantum physics appear, to this history major, to be on the cusp of an overturning of the explanations for reality as they collect exceptions to exceptions and encounter data that don't fit the model. Kastrup explains all of this by pointing out that the physical world is really just a sort of experiential organism, and we along with every other metabolizing being are a living part of it. Our insights and thoughts, or the principle in quantum physics that something comes into being when it's observed, all derive from the fact that we're not separate consciousnesses; rather, we're all tied together by the mega-presence to which we all remain connected.
Damn. I've observed before that not being able to explain something is a sure sign of not actually understanding it. Clearly I have a ways to go.
I'll ponder more on this, and particularly the theological aspects (of course), later. For now it's time to get ready for depositions, trial prep, and what promises to be a very, very long day.
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