Some things are still a mystery to me, while others are much too clear.

Apropos of nothing, "Hogan's Heroes" has more of a racially diverse cast than "Sex and the City." Even extras, too -- watch the intros to both shows. How can New York circa 1999 be whiter than a prisoner of war camp circa 1943 (when the U.S. military was still officially segregated)?

Hogan's Heroes

Sex and the City

I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers.

Anyway, I am out of town, sitting in the lobby of a chain hotel (perhaps one owned by followers of Joseph Smith, perhaps not) working the free wireless while waiting to meet with a client. I am listening to a consultant of some sort, working his mobile phone a couch or two away from me, his spiel already growing tiresome to me. I wonder how he does it -- how does he make pitch after pitch to apparently Not Receptive people without at some point snapping in rage, flinging his Samsung at the iron-framed mirror across from him?

I can't quite see him, but I can hear the voice -- the smoothly persuasive tones, the polite chuckle, the candid admission that he could make some concessions on pricing the warrants, and that maybe he could find some room on the margins of the cost centers.

I shake my head at the falseness, and I feel all smug and superior -- until I remember that he probably makes several multiples of my paycheck. And then I want to throw my BlackBerry at the wall.

Google alerts

I have been visited by a celebrity, I think. Of the G or H list variety, to be sure, but still. At least I assume he was the one who left the anonymous comment to my post about the effects of bourbon on my prose shortly after I added his blog.

I refer, of course, to my imaginary friend PhilaLawyer. For those who didn't know, his book is coming out in a few months, and is available for pre-order on Amazon. Interesingly, his work appears to be quite popular with Nixon buffs. Go figure.

Suggestions?

As I have some free time today, I have been tinkering with the look and layout and whatnot of the blahhhhg. So far, I have added links to the blogs of a couple of my imaginary friends -- if you have suggestions for other blogs to add, whether they belong to you or not, let me know. There are some other places that I will add -- some of you have already suggested some cool places, and I appreciate it.

The happy days are here again.

The case that I was whining about the other day settled. It was a very good result for the client, and I am relieved that I don't have to try it. (Short version -- it was a business dispute and my client had a decent liability claim, but it would have been difficult to quantify damages at trial.)

I am, per the re line, quite pleased by this. And I will try to avoid too many more of these lawyer type insider baseball-ish posts. Onward and upward!

Misty, water-colored memories.

The funk eased a bit as the week progressed. I am reasonably Not Funky today, although none of the underlying causes of Monday's blahs have been resolved. Perhaps, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, I am simply defining funkishness down. Whatever.

At any rate, I was watching the Mets game on TV the other day, and had a little semi-Proustian moment of remembrance. As anyone who watches a televised baseball game knows, much of the action is shown from a camera behind home plate, which points towards center field. At Shea Stadium, the center field wall is 410 feet from home plate, and ever since I can remember, the 410 painted on the wall has looked the same. And I have been a Mets fan ever since I could remember.

So, for whatever reason, seeing this "410" the other day triggered a memory of a young me watching a Mets game with my father. Or, rather, a memory of me watching the game with him either dozing or watching or reading or doing all three, with a beer and a cigarette, of course, while sitting on his green easy chair in our living room in The Ancestral Homeland. (Dad died when I was 10 or so, and we moved shortly afterwards, and so the decidely Not Magical hometown has had this sort of special hold on me ever since, but I digress.)

And his beer was not Bud or Schaefer or Rhinegold -- no, Dad was a fan of Hedrick's. He used to get it at the wholesaler by the case, until we bought a new fridge, which he converted into a refridgerated tap, and installed it in the garage, at which point he switched to buying Hedrick's by the keg from the wholesaler. Hedrick's was bought by Schlitz, I think, sometime after Dad died and we moved, and I never really thought too much about it after that.

At some point much later, a friend loaned me Ironweed by William Kennedy because he found something amusing about the main character. (Well, it's a long story.) I enjoyed it, but enjoyed Kennedy's Legs (a fictionalized story about gangster Legs Diamond) much more, and found myself wrapped up in Kennedy's works, which were all set in the same milieu.

As some of you may know, the political boss in Kennedy's fiction owned a brewery, and "Stanwix Beer" was therefore sold in every bar that wanted to avoid problems with the police despite its poor quality (according to some). I found out not too long ago that "Stanwix" was Kennedy's code for "Hedrick's." I wonder how my father ended up drinking the stuff. Acquired the taste as a lad, since that was what was available?

Hanging around, nothing to do but frown.

So, my Monday is almost over, and I am in a funk.

Why, you ask? Well, I have a case that I lack enthusiasm for that I am trying to get settled. I made no progress in making said settlement, and trial is rapidly approaching. It's set for mediation next week in a far away land, which should cheer me up, but actually depresses me for a variety of reasons.

In an effort to distract myself, as soon as I return to Not Manor, I am going to jump into a Manhattan and continue reading the truly delightful essays in the Sloane Crosley book I mentioned the other day.

But the funk, I fear, will be waiting for me when the booze and the glow of someone else's amusing life wear off.

(Happy! Surely, my dear boy, the case will settle, the pre-bills will become bills which will become fee receipts which will become new pencils, and all will be right in the world. The glass is half full!)

Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.

Does Knob Creek mix with crisp prose? Apparently not. I hope that the original version of the previous post was Not Read, and if anyone did read it pre-edit, I apologize. For those who didn't read it, I can assure you that it made even less sense than the edited version. With even more typos.

Carry on.

Politics in the new century?

I have been pondering Hillary Clinton lately. Is she the wave of the future in primary contests? Or is her continued campaign a quirk? Unlike past primary campaigns, where people in her position dropped out or were marginalized/ignored/disregarded (hello, Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson!), she continues on and, at least for now, is treated as a serious rival.

So, will the future reward candidates with the will and resources to gut it out? Or is she sui generis (as we lawyers like to say)? That is, is this year, because of some admixture of the zeitgeist, somehow unique? Whether it's the historical nature of her role as the first woman with a serious shot at the presidency, the Clinton brand name, her smarts, etc., why is she able to survive where Gary Hart or Al Gore or Paul Tsongas did not? Is she the wave of the future, and from now on -- at least on the Democratic side, with no winner-take-all states, and proportional allocation of delegates -- we will see these sorts of wars of attrition in the future?

It is an axiom that generals want to fight the last war. I think that that was what damaged Team Clinton this year. She and her campaign decided to go for a knock-out blow, just like the way that Kerry crushed Dean early, and Gore squashed Bradley even earlier. The Germans in the early 1900s recalled how their rapid thrust into France in 1870, and their overwhelming victory over MacMahon at Sedan, knocked poor Napoleon III off of his throne and ended the Franco-Prussian War tout suite. Their plan for war in 1914 was a reflection of the 1870 experience, and called for an end-run through Belgium and a turn towards Paris, with the idea of knocking the French out of the war quickly. They came close, but General Gamelin's Paris taxicabs saved the day, and four years of trench warfare followed. Then the Germans lost, and in another 20 years or so we had another example of generals fightling the last war.

Uh, where was I? Ah yes -- fighting the last war. Anyway, it seems that the Clinton campaign thought that she would be the crowned nominee in March, and were unprepared for any primaries following Super Tuesday. Their lack of knowledge regarding the system for awarding delegates in the Texas primary/caucus hybrid was sort of the symptom of the problem with this approach. And recent reports that chief campaign strategist Mark "You Owe Me Big Bucks" Penn reportedly said that Senator Clinton would clinch the nomination when she won California, apparently forgetting that it was not a winner take all state, reinforces this perception of, well, idiocy on the part of people running her campaign.

At any rate, it seems that she was effectively out of the race months ago -- at least by the standards of earlier years -- and yet she shouldered on. And, despite the delegate numbers, she was (and is, still) regarded as having a shot at the nomination. I just wonder, again, whether this is an anomaly or a harbinger of the future.

What I'm reading.

I just picked up I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and I must say, so far, so good. Like much of my cultural awareness, I learned about this book and author Sloane Crosley* from Gawker.

Her essay on her first real job, and the difficulties she had with her Jekyll/Hyde boss, reminded me of my own first job out of law school. The desire to get everything right and the mysterious way that things ended up going, well, Not Right, and the paralyzing fear -- I had a case of that. A much more mild case than poor Sloane's, but I can vividly recall that feeling of disappearing competence.

*Should I leave out the "bon-bons from her belly button" comment? Probably.

A scene from the imaginary Great American Novel.

Well, here goes. I should note that Maureen is actually the older sister of the lad who is intended to be the main character/protagonist/hero/whatever (my imaginary book is *not* about lawyers). But I like her, so I don't mind starting out here with her.

Have at it.

**********************

snippet now down. Thanks for the comments!

You said you'd stand by me in the middle of chapter three, but you were up to your old tricks in chapters four, five, and six.

So, one of the reasons I decided to try to regularly blahhhhhg is to dust off the cobwebs from my Not Work writing. Like approximately 97.8% of the population, I am convinced that I have the Great American Novel "up here" [imagine me tapping my forehead]. In my case, I have multiple scenes imagined, a general plot outline thought out, some characters and descriptions, and a beginning section of four or five pages written on college-ruled notebook paper when Bill Clinton was president.


Given my desire to rub shoulders at exclusive literary cocktail parties with prestigious authors like Sidney Sheldon and J.D. Salinger, and to eat bon-bons from the belly-button of Jhumpa Lahiri,* this is an intolerable situation. And no matter how many old lamps I rub, my wish of having a neatly-typed manuscript of my mentally-stored novel appearing on my desk remains unfulfilled.

Accordingly, I have decided that, on occasion, I will actually type a scene, and will post it for public scorn, ridicule, or praise. And, by telling my readers (all three of you) about this plan, I will force myself (maybe) to actually follow through on this. At any rate, I have been thinking about one scene in particular lately because I saw a woman on the subway the other day who looks like my mental image of one of the characters. Let's see what happens.

*No, I haven't read her new book, but from her picture, she looks like someone from whose navel I would like to nibble. I know, I know -- I'm a looksist.