"Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble."
Watching it snow out there this gloomy, gusty morning and doing what I do best, worrying about whatever's around me. I was going to paste a photo here, but as usual lack the bandwidth on our wifi to do that.
At the personal level, the grand transition into solo practice continues, haltingly. I've paid for all the technology, the hive spaces, the virtual assistant who's started work and appears amazingly competent. Check. Check. Check.
And yet, what happens next week when I flip the switch and this thing comes to life? There will be glitches, of course, sort of like opening a restaurant or any other business. There will be unforeseen challenges, expenses, and setbacks. The goal for February will be to survive, to lurch the thing into motion, to send out a few bills and have them paid. Then I'll build on that.
My greatest work worry, I suppose, centers on the volume and nature of the work itself. The phone hasn't been ringing off the hook lately, and after spending lots of time away from Florida it seems that my old community has moved on. I said I wanted to work less, and make room to do work that wasn't all litigation. God was listening.
I'm definitely going to have to market the mediation practice a lot harder. Volume's probably down by over half since 2023, a disturbing trend given that it's one of the few things I do professionally that I actually enjoy. Getting that part of my practice back up on plane is going to require paying for marketing, something I've never done. But the volume hasn't tapered off because customers are unhappy with the work product, at least as near as I can tell. It's because they've simply forgotten I'm out there. That, and the recent trend of local lawyers who've begun insisting that mediation take place in person, which I can't do from 1,100 miles away.
I also need to market my practice in New York, finally. If there's a value to in-person work, and I'm seeing a decrease because I'm not in person in Florida as much as I once was, then it's time to build something here. The problem with that is Peg's Massachusetts assignment in a month, which means I won't be here to do any of that until the end of May.
Or maybe we just need to live smaller, maybe even much smaller. But then I worry that if my income starts dropping, it's going to start having a serious negative effect on my home life, not to mention a self-worth built too largely on profession and bank balances. Nope, I can't let that happen in any appreciable way, at least not yet.
And boy are the bills coming fast and furious now--trying to buy a condo and sell a house, get the wedding venue opened, schedule the replacement of the storm-damaged roof at Wyldswood, pay my NYU balance after switching a couple classes--I've never seen a cash burn rate quite like the last month or so, just as I'm about to switch jobs and endure a few weeks of air in the pipeline. This is why people don't switch jobs, I suppose.
Then, looking more broadly, there's the end of the American democratic experiment, happening right before our eyes. An ICE raid in full military regalia of a lawyer's house in California, looking at gunpoint for two Venezuelans he was represented after a change in their immigration status rendered them illegal (they weren't there, but Fox News was, capturing the whole thing for their sick audience). The arbitrary halting of federal loan and grant programs through a two-page memo that apparently explains that it constitutes a de-funding of "Marxism" and "wokeness", and conspicuously states an incorrect number for total federal spending, something one doesn't want to see from a budget office.
Thomas Edsall nails it this morning in the Times, writing about the Orange One's rapid transformation of this once great country into a "electoral autocracy".
And he quotes H.L. Mencken who, writing about the people who elected Warren G. Harding in 1920, observed in his own inimitable way that they constituted a “a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand … the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”
MAGA in one evocative sentence.
And as an additional source of worry, nothing's being done to stop it, or even slow it down. He won the election. His party rules all branches of the federal government, and most statehouses. This is what the people want, particularly young people who've grown up in a sclerotic democracy where nothing seems to get done. He's just giving it to them, by tearing the edifice down.
So their eyes are growing hazy
'Cause they wanna turn it on
So their minds are soft and lazy
Well
Hey, hey, give 'em what they want
If lust and hate is the candy
If blood and love tastes so sweet
Then we give 'em what they want
So their eyes are growing hazy
'Cause they wanna turn it on
So their minds are soft and lazy
Well
Who do you want to blame?
Ah, 10,000 Maniacs. I bought that CD in 1992, an officer in the military of the greatest nation on earth. I miss that place. Maybe I'll pull up their Unplugged album on Spotify tonight, build a big fire, pour a strong one, scrunch my eyes and try to picture and wish that America outside our door instead of the shit-show we're living now.
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