“A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
I woke up this morning in a generally poor state of mind. Late yesterday, while I was just beginning a quick nine holes with P on a glorious fall day, a filing arrived on my phone in a lawsuit that sends me down the rabbit hole every time I think of it. The issues in the case are anodyne enough; it's just a suit about money. But in the last several weeks the litigation has become weaponized by the entry of a law firm representing one party that has made personal attacks against me the centerpiece of their litigation strategy. These are folks I liked and had a lot of respect for in years past, but recently the senior partners of our two firms have gotten into an extremely personal and acrimonious dispute, and attacking me seems to constitute some sort of proxy war for them.
So this was another one of those filings, accusing me of making an assertion in court that was neither true nor adequately vetted. I didn't do any of that, of course, but the allegation has me seething with rage, wanting to lash out but lacking any respectable way to do so, and now forced to respond in court like some defendant in the gaol.
And we'll charge for all this, which is another form of punishment for my client and another motive for the courtroom histrionics. The client on the other side seems bitter and crazy (I'm not the only one to observe this), and for money the lawyers are helping her force my nonprofit to shell out legal fees to me as punishment for having the temerity to suggest their client did something wrong.
There's also the element for the lawyers of taking out a competitor, me, by trying to get a court to levy some sort of censure. It's a business model, I guess, wielded by the mediocre with time on their hands.
Why do I blame Panama City for all this? People are bad everywhere, especially these days. Maybe I'm bad too; there's room for introspection there. But Florida seems to draw the worst of us, with its history of criminals hiding in the swamps, then real estate developers stealing the life savings of the rubes who dream of settling on the beach and get sold an inaccessible patch of marshland instead, then folks running from failed businesses or marriages or subpoenas in more civilized states. Then finally every MAGA fanatic in search of a right-wing Mecca where they can finally own all those overeducated, wealthy liberals who obviously don't give two flips about them (actually, from what I've seen over the years, they're mostly right about that last part).
Only a state like Florida would elect this political troll, who yesterday sent a planeload of undocumented immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, the very epicenter of entitled liberalism, for the shock value and the photo op:
Fist Pump! Who cares what it cost, in a state where teachers post Facebook fundraisers for classroom supplies.
They love the guy in Panama City, line up to have their photos taken with him. Res ipsa loquitur.
My brain has a way at a subconscious level to remind me what's rolling around back there in its unreachable parts--music that pops up seemingly out of nowhere. Ever since yesterday it's been "Camera", a rather obscure REM song from the album Reckoning:
Ethereal, mournful. But that's not it. That song, that CD, was part of the soundtrack of law school, Athens in the 90s (the album was already a decade old by then, but whatever). A time when it was all still possible. I could stay in Atlanta, do big things, live in a place with seasons and hills that held my heart from the time I was five years old.
A year or two later I'd put on that CD sitting in the dark in Lynn Haven, ponder the decision to return to Florida, and drink.
Yep, I'm pretty sure that's what has dredged up this old tune. Mourning the consequences of bad decisions decades ago, culminating in this morning's brooding over another legal mess, twenty-five years of them almost to the day, a life spent mostly in a place I've grown to dislike profoundly, a place that never really fit.
What to do with all this? I'm flying the plane back from Binghamton this afternoon, and have a mediation in a little over an hour, so day drinking isn't really an option. I don't really feel like the gym, and my hips still ache from yesterday's run so a jog around the block isn't in the offing.
How about reading the paper?
That just brought me the news of Lindsey Graham's brutally stupid bill seeking to ban abortions, impossible to pass now but just wait until the Rs have control of Congress and the jester governor becomes the President. This bill is a warning.
His GOP Senate colleagues are angry at him not because they have qualms about further eroding what's left of women's personal autonomy, but because they think if the American people realize what they're up to they're bound to lose in the midterms. The cynicism is galling.
Meanwhile in Iowa, a teenaged girl caught in a sex trafficking ring was forced to pay the family of her rapist $150,000 in restitution after she stabbed the dirtbag to death while they were in bed together.
So it's not just Florida, is it? What I wouldn't give to blink my eyes and open them to 1995.
But only if P were there. I'd rather be with her on this sinking ship of a country than without her when all of this would've seemed like a dystopic fantasy.
Which reminds me of the demise of my new favorite philosopher, Elbert Hubbard. He and his wife decided to travel to Germany in 1915 to preach pacifism to the Kaiser, a naive pilgrimage if ever there was one, booking passage on the Lusitania for their trip. We all know the ironic ending of the story, with the doomed vessel torpedoed by the Huns. Realizing their predicament, Hubbard commented to a friend who was scurrying for a lifeboat, "Well, Jack, they have got us. They are a damn sight worse than I ever thought they were." Then he and his beloved Alice linked arms, went back into their cabin, and went down with the ship rather than be parted.
Again, what to do with this state of mind?
Go back to bed. So that's just what I did.
Posting this photo as proof I eventually made myself crawl back out, open the blinds, and face the day no matter how brutal and stupid it almost certainly will be. The sunshine is lovely.
Comments