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.

I'm back.

Sorry about the delay -- I had a trial last week, which means that I was slammed the week before getting ready, and slammed this week cleaning up all of the messes that my other cases turned into while I was busy doing my best Clarence Darrow impersonation.

Trials are a funny thing for lawyers. Contrary to the impression you might have from a lifetime of watching Perry Mason or Alan Shore, most of us law job guys and gals tend to have more than one case at a time. On any given day, you might learn that favorite client (they don't argue about your bills and they pay within 30 days) Finklestein Industries has just been served with a lawsuit, and you start preparing a motion to dismiss. But you have to stop work on the motion at 3 o'clock because you have a hearing over in Beaucoup Egypt on a discovery dispute in the Acme Manufacturing/Coyote Consulting litigation. And meanwhile, that cute court reporter is on the phone wondering if you want to buy the transcript from the MacGillicuddy deposition, and you are hoping that she left in all of the "uh's" and "um's" and incomprehensible mumbles of the idiot questioner who wasted five hours of your life eliciting approximately 15 minutes of useful testimony, and you know you need the transcript, but the client is going to whine about paying $600 for it. And so you walk into the kitchen and stick your head in the microwave to end it all.

Anyway, real life is nothing like your trial practice class in law school, where the climax of the semester was that one, single, solitary trial -- all about how to get those bastards at Mismo Fire Insurance to pay the Flinders Aluminum claim. That rocked. You were on fire (hah!) to try that case, and you lived breathed ate drank fucked that case, and everything was a complete rush. You owned the courtroom, and all of the witnesses sang the song you taught them. And you beat that insurance company (always so happy to cash the premium checks, yet so reluctant to pay claims) like a red-headed stepchild.* And you knew that this trial thing rocked.

But, alas, here in the real world, we have many more than one case to worry about. Which explains, in part, why so many so-called trial lawyers don't try cases. They can't afford to be out of the office for weeks in trial on a single case at the expense of neglecting all of their others. And so we settle cases -- probably 90% of them.

It's weird, really. Litigators like to think of themselves as surgeons -- they come in, fix the problem, and then go. Transactional lawyers, we sniff, are the internists of the legal world -- dealing with the day to day stuff like contracts and real estate and reporting and all of that other stuff.

Except surgeons, on the day that you are scheduled to have that tumor removed, don't come into your hospital room and say things like "listen, Ted, I just got off the phone with the tumor, and he's agreed that he won't spread into your lungs if you let him take the bones. I think that that's a reasonable offer -- we could go in to take him out, and you could die on the table. Plus, there's always the risk of infection. The tumor pointed out that this hospital had a real problem with staph a few years ago. What's that? Yes, I do remember telling you that I had completed several successful surgeries against this type of tumor, But that was before I found out that you concealed a 50 year history of smoking. When that came out, well, it changed things. Yes, I think that we can make a counter -- maybe tell him that we don't agree to him taking the bones, and if he's stubborn about it, we can just threaten to zap him with some radiation . . . "

*Apologies to red-heads. I am a huge fan of Nicole Kidman in "Moulin Rouge." And apologies to step-children. I was a step-child, twice. I was going to use ". . . like a rented mule," but I was afraid of the inevitable PETA protest. Those fuckers are mean.

Mother, should I run for president.

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been 74 -- she died a few years ago, very quickly (like less than a month and a half) after her diagnosis. By the time they saw it, the cancer had spread from her lungs to her bones and to her brain. (She went to the hospital with a back-ache -- it was the cancer in her bones.) Oddly, she had had pneumonia about a year earlier, and nothing showed up on any of the gazillion lung x-rays.

I was thinking about her last night when I couldn't get to sleep (cause or effect?). I still get mad thinking about some of the things she did/failed to do. For example, I still wish that she hadn't moved from The Ancestral Homeland when my father died, but I understand why she made that decision.

She had a great relationship with my daughter. And with my wife -- although they are two *very* different people. She lived with my grandmother for most of the time after my grandfather died -- and took care of her for a long time after my grandmother's mind started to go.

And she opened her home to those in need -- her pregnant 17 year old niece, her alcoholic nephew, countless friends who were in between jobs or homes or spouses.

Life was not terribly fair to her. Her husband died when she was the age I am now, leaving her with 5 kids. 5 bratty kids (well, at least one bratty kid). She survived breast cancer in her fifties. She watched her mother slowly descend into Alzheimer's, taking care of her at home until the last possible moment -- and then, one month after the trauma of putting her mother into a home, in a nice little "fuck you" from the universe, she was hit with her final cancer diagnosis.

Despite this, she dealt. She never whined, and she at least had her family around her when she passed away at home under Hospice care.

And, since I am half watching Olberman and Russert, I should note that she was born a New Deal Democrat into a machine family, and stuck with the donkey through thick and thin. She wasn't a huge fan of Hillary's, so she probably would be pleased that Obama has (apparently) won the nomination.

Anyway, happy belated birthday, Mom.