Please don’t say Mañana if you don’t mean it.

Hello, my name is Not Jackson, and I am a procrastinator.

[hi, Not Jackson!]

Friends, Romans, countrymen -- lend me your ears. I put shit off. I mean, everything. If I can do it tomorrow instead of today, I will. Hey, can I call you back next week? Would you mind giving me an extension on the discovery responses? Could you tell McGillicuddy that I'll call her back later?

It is my cross to bear. Why do I do it? Because, sadly, sometimes if you put stuff off, Fortuna intervenes, and you don't have to do the thing at all. Unfortunately, one falls into that habit easily, and boom. One finds oneself updating one's blog instead of doing something productive. Uh, not like now, though.

She really worked me over good, she was a credit to her gender.

I bumped into a friend today at the courthouse -- someone I haven't seen in a while. We did the usual catch-up as we waited in the hallway for our respective hearings. It was really good to see him.

And yet it also wasn't. Why, I hear you ask? Well, we used to work at the same firm, and as he went through the people that we used to work with together, he very carefully (to my mind, anyway), and studiously avoided any mention of our mutual friend The Inappropriate Crush Girl. Maybe I am reading too much into this, but she was a very good friend of his, and to have him ask me about Lars the copy service guy, and tell me about Skippy the real estate paralegal from the Sheboygen office without mentioning her just seems a bit off.

Which leads me to a couple of dark thoughts:

(1) Dude, I am so fucked up. How did this chick implant herself so deeply into my soul?

(2) They were such good friends that she told him about my blurting out to her of my crush on her, and so he avoided mentioning her out of delicacy.

(3) I am reading way too much into a brief conversation.

Anyway, as you all know, it doesn't take much for me to plunge back into the dark beauty of the ICG. So I am wallowing a bit in memories and thoughts of her today.

Friday night and the lights are low.

So, everyone's favorite Raoul Duke wannabe, my imaginary pal Philalawyer, has confessed to a love for Abba. And that made me realize that we all have a band or song that we like, or even a genre of music, that we don't necessarily advertise to the world. PL, who loves to drone on and on about the Stones or (God help him) the Dead, gets a secret thrill when he hears even the Muzak version of "Fernando." It's cool.

My secret musical vice? Well, I do love me the chick singer-songwriters -- preferably the ones with predominantly lesbian fan bases. But that's not really a secret, now that I think about it. So, I'd have to admit that I love pop music from the 1970s. Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy." "Popcorn." "Billy, Don't Be A Hero." "Run, Joey, Run." "The Night Chicago Died." This secret musical vice is one of the reasons why I enjoy the new CBS series "Swingtown." (Well, that and Grant Show's mustache, of course.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's getting close to midnight at the oasis, and I've got to sing my camel to sleep.

And from out of the shadows came a young girl's voice, saying "Johnny don't cry."

Well, I'm not sure that this means that I am back to thinking Really Deep Thoughts and looking at the big picture, but I learned today that I got a good result in a recent trial, so I am pleased. Of course, this may simply be negative positive reinforcement in that it encourages me to continue in this "looking at the trees and not the forest" thing that I seem to be stuck in. (Can I fit any more cliches in here?)

But enough about that for now. The point is that I am pleased (although had the result been Not Good, I would have serious questions about my skilz as an advocate). This feeling is what made me think that litigation was for me, and as I noted previously, it doesn't come often enough. Of course, that also means the downs of a loss are that much rarer, too. (Goddamn, I still think about those losses.)

Oh, and one of my former colleagues just got an appointment. Whether she'll get confirmed before the current dude heads off into the sunset is a different story, but still. Good for her.

Gotta get away from this day to day running around.

One of the things that I miss about the days when I was a twit is the way I thought about the big picture. I was convinced that I was destined for Great Things, and so I looked at life accordingly. I did not worry about the day to day running around -- I knew that my path was the Path of Progress, and the trivial details of the day (a test, a game, homework, whatever) were merely put there to give me an amusing story to tell at some point down the road to appreciative audiences during my prime time speeches.

At some point, alas, I lost my sense of certainty about the destiny of Great Things. Maybe this sense was part and parcel of my twitishness, and if it was, well, so be it. But I have become one of those people who spends their life putting out fires. As a lawyer, we clean up the messes of others (as Michael Clayton noted, we are janitors), and it is easy to fall into a reactive mindset. I feel like a boxer who has lost his jab and who only knows how to counter punch.

So, I'm going to try to get back into the mindset I had in those halcyon days of youth. I've started by watching some episodes of "Hogan's Heroes" tonight. And I didn't drink Manhattans back then, but fuck it -- I ain't going back to grape Kool-Aid or Yoo-hoos at this point.

No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned.

I was watching "The Tao of Steve" last night when it hit me. The two lead characters were having a discussion about Kierkegaard and the opera Don Giovanni (apparently, Soren was a big fan of it), when one of them said something about the need to make a leap of faith in romantic matters, and wondered why people like the other character (and Don Giovanni and Soren) were afraid to do so.

Immediately I thought of this line from Prufrock (not that I have the poem memorized, but some of it does bounce around inside my head):


And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Uh, living through that "what if?" is, as I am now convinced good old J. Alfred knew, very much Not Fun. (As an aside, when I first read that poem in high school, I was convinced that Prufrock was simply a coward, afraid of life, one who never stepped out of his routine of days measured by coffee spoons, etc. Now, upon reflection, a few years, and a bit more experience, I think that Al had been wounded before, and was thinking that he wasn't going to take that particular chance again.

Happy times! Fuck you, Donal Logue.

I like cream in my coffee.

Back up for air. It's been a little bit hectic in the life of this jet-set trahhhhhhl lawyer in the last week or so. Yelled at by a federal judge? Check. Yelled at a client? Check. It's all good, baby. My pal PhilaLawyer (whose book should be on the remainder table of your local bookstore with a bright red "Only $0.99!!" sticker on it in time for your Generic Winter Gift Giving Holiday shopping) might suggest that I pour myself a nice refreshing glass of Sun Country Wine Cooler and listen to some godawful Grateful Dead bootleg ("dude, this version of "Truckin" from the Shreveport Convention Center show in 1982 will *change your life* -- I swear to you!"), but instead I decided to update my blog.

But what to say? I looked around for inspiration. Thankfully, my Imaginary Little Sister (the lovely and talented Miss Not Jennifer Anderson [ed. note: Ack! I meant Not Jennifer Aniston!) had a meme up, and so here you go -- 7 Things About Me You'd Not Likely Guess.

1. Well, as the re line suggests, I like cream in my coffee. (And to sleep late on Sunday. And Lyle Lovett.) Those of you familiar with my love of that other song about coffee might be surprised that I don't like my coffee black. (But for the girl in this, I would give up my dair . . . oh, nevermind).

2. I was an insufferable little twit until age 13 or so. I was the youngest of five, and I know that my brothers pretty much despised me (my sister is the oldest, and she was out of the house pretty much from the time I was 6 or so). I was a know-it-all and would not shut up -- I had an opinion on anything and everything, and everyone around needed to hear it. I still cringe when I think back. I apparently learned to hide this delightful quality around the time I hit 8th grade. Otherwise I would be single and a virgin, playing Second Life with a Pamela Anderson-ish avatar (nttawwt).

3. I flunked algebra. Twice -- once in high school and once in college. (Ok, I became a lawyer, so maybe this one isn't such a surprise.) Math, as Barbie once memorably and accurately put it, is hard.

4. As a drunken undergraduate, I came up with the brilliant idea of painting the words "Mister Happy" on the side of a replica of the Washington Monument and delivering it to the front yard of a sorority house after the homecoming parade. My co-conspirators included the 15 year old younger brother of a friend, and a fellow freshman who was pre-med, and whose contribution to the endeavor was a continuous stream of "I should be studying" mutters from the front seat of the Country Squire station wagon we stole from yet another friend.

Sadly, this did not get me a date with the [sorority name redacted] girl I was trying to impress.

5. I have a cat. I have been told that I seem more like the dog type. I like dogs, but they require too much effort. Cats are much easier.

6. I facilitated the signing of a professional hockey player from Eastern Europe who was a number one draft pick. I'm sure that it would have happened anyway, but don't burst my bubble. The details need to remain vague -- let's just say that a duffel bag of cash, a red-headed Hooters waitress, and a signed copy of Paul Newman's "Slapshot" accompanied me on a flight to Minsk, and . . . (I keeed, I keeeed. I just put some people in touch with each other. And like I say, it probably would have happened anyway.) The dude is still playing in the NHL, though not for the same team.

7. I cry at the end of "Shane," when the little kid runs after Alan Ladd. And at sad movies generally.