Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

edit: Ha now i have controls over when things get published. I can move this train a lot faster.

Its a social D sorta holiday: The Story Of My Life

2005 was a weird time for my family. It was time for bar attempt number 2, my grandfather and I lived all alone in his rather palacial home on the waterfront. It was too much for him. He told me I had to go in May of that year. He wasn’t terribly thrilled when bar attempt 2 came up short. He didn’t really care anymore. My relationship with him pretty much ended at that point. He didnt ask about me, rarely called, or seemed to even care. That’s when I moved back to City 17.

That summer through the end of 2006 didn’t really amount to much. I was struggling to pass the bar, working in dead end restaurants and telemarketing jobs, with intermittent clerk work in between where my license status was never brought up. My loans were in deferment, and my private loans were.. well.. falling behind. One day I got into a minor car accident, and a $1000 deductible was more than daunting. I had to beg the family for help with it and I nearly didn’t get it. Nobody bothered to tell me my grandfather had the month before paid off my entire private loan debt to the tune of 88 thousand dollars. I never knew either until I confirmed it with the loan company. He was a cosigner to the loans, and more likely than not did it just to protect himself. Who can blame him. A heads up would be nice, so it didnt seem like I was just a begging mooch even though in some ways I was. That Christmas with the family was marred because I was the odd man out; the black sheep. I felt guilty even receiving a Christmas present. At least I had the MBE taken care of.

2006 was where a light started to shine at the end of the tunnel. Well, not until the July exam, as the February marked another failure on the state exam. Amazingly, I found a tutor who helps people from my TTT for free with writing essays. Writing really fucking good essays. Our state exam tests state specific law with essays and multiple choice, and strategically, he said, you score the most points with essays, and its where people leave the most points off the paper. If I would have met with him years before I might have gotten this right the first time. Anyways it all fell into place and I passed. Only problem was, I hadn’t submitted my application to the bar. Big fucking idiot number 1 mistake: why the fuck didn’t I start the application when I was a 1L when it would have cost 75 dollars and I would have dealt with the ethics crew a lot sooner. As it stood, my application got held up because I didnt file my 2000 tax return until right when I got my passing score. The reason: that year I sold a bunch of stock to pay for college. Nobody told me about the capital gains tax, and I had a 3000 dollar tax bill blossom into 5500 bucks. It’s paid off now, but thats more stupid tax, to say the least. Of course in the meantime I had to retake the MPRE since my law school score had expired. Lovely stuff, this bar exam process. 2006 ended with me spending Christmas in Jurisdiction X with my loved one, who told me shortly after coming back that she was moving to X to stay. Oh good, another bar exam.

She left in February 2007, which really hurt. She and I had been dating since 2002, and for one reason or another we hadn’t lived together. It was mostly my fault for not getting the bar exam settled. She never got a serious job down here, working essentially part time and commuting 1.5 hours one way for part time wages. Believe it or not I made more than her working 2 jobs, and she was the attorney. Now I finally had my shit together, and found the job I work at now, and she was out of my life. I decided I would face the damn demon again and take another bar exam and dig up all the shit I had to dig up for Florida, including a 1986 divorce decree that changed my surname, and do it all over again. I’ll be damned. I was told the essay section tested common law, MBE type concepts. 5 essays. No biggie. Until I got the blue books and noticed 6 of them, and noticed a 6th essay question. Civil procedure. Well, fuck me. I called my old lady from her car in the parking lot, and we talked civ pro as much as we could bullshit. Well, it worked. Even with a 121 MBE for that test, I bullshitted my way to a passing grade, since the civ pro essay was all about perfect diversity jurisdiction or whatever the fuck it is to get your way into federal court.

I informed my family that I was going to try to move to Jurisdiction X, and that I was doing okay, and was an actual fucking lawyer, and doing something with my life. They started to warm up to the idea, but for my grandfather it was too late. He had started dating some woman 18 years his junior, and it was obvious to everyone she only liked him for his money and he only liked her because she was someone to hang out with. Then his health started its decline, as senility set in. I spent that Christmas with the family, and my grandfather’s girlfriend was nowhere to be found.

2008 marked the beginning of the end for my Grandfather. I kept up with him from time to time, but he was suffering from dementia. The new girlfriend he had encompassed much of his free time, and he practically adopted this woman and her family as his own. Posthumously I found out the extent to which he did, it was rather disgusting seeing photos of him doting over a family that had no idea who the hell he was. But there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I was busy trying to find work in Jurisdiction X, since I got sworn in. I was flying all over east jesus to job interviews. The shitter was that I got an offer, and a damn good one. 55K plus benes for a barely 1 year lawyer about 25 minutes from my old lady’s home. It’s just she wasn’t having any of it. Long story short, I had to turn it down. I’m not going to go into detail about the where and why, cause me and my old lady, we could fill pages on that tale. Let’s just say 2008 was aggravating on many fronts, but with my family, it was quiet. Not much really happened, Christmas was boring and tepid and my grandfather was barely coherent. Fast forward to 2009.

July 2009 rolled around, and on a rainy day I got a phone call at work. It was Uncle “Hot” Carl. “Toiletlawyer, I just wanted to tell you that your grandfather is dying and he won’t make it through the day. He suffered a cranial aneurysm. We don’t know when he will go so don’t be in a rush to get over here.”
Just then the 80 thousand in private loans he paid off and never told me, the golfing trip to Pinehurst North Carolina, the Mazda 626 he bought me, the Country Club, the times we spent together in his better days, him reattaching my right thumb, all these memories flooded my brain as I put in “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell,” the signature Social D album, and jammed my shitty Mitsubishi across the state in rainy weather. I was scheduled to go to Jurisdiction X two days later for a pre-established trip. And here I was going to watch the man who was essentially my father die. I had no father figure in my life worth a damn aside from him. My biological father left my mom and I for his gay lover when I was 2. My mother dated and married a few shitheads in the interim, two of which beat me, and one of which I beat back when I was 13. My friends say I am rather well adjusted for coming from such a fucked up background, but I digress.

I arrived at the Hospital, one in which he performed many surgeries as a cardiovascular specialist during his 30 year surgical career. There he was, snoring obnoxiously in a tiny hospital bed, surrounded by my family. He was put on painkillers while the bleeding did it’s dirty work. Doctor after doctor, family friend after friend, came by to pay their respects. It was surreal. The one thing I will remember most about the whole damn thing was the baseball player on tv hitting a home run as my grandfather breathed his last. I’ll always remember Carl Crawford for that. Life has it’s weird juxtapositions.

This meant a lot of changes for my family. With no central figure to rally around, we felt lost and disparate. Sure, we tried to rally together for a while, but as the will settled out and everyone got their money and purchased their luxuries, fissions grew. A spite grew over one of my cousins, who, along with his mother, frequently used drugs and alcohol, and had sunken to a gaunt 5′10 135 pounds from a more appropriate 175. He drank heavily and frequently, and wrecked his 2009 lancer evo more times than i can think of, all purchased with his mother’s money, the same mother/aunt whose neglect of my older cousin led to his drunk driving death so many years before. This fight came to a head during thanksgiving this year, and it directly weighed upon Christmas. I was actually glad to spend Christmas eve at the dog track, and part of Christmas day in a jail visiting a client.

To think it would come to this: I’d rather be around gamblers and criminals than my own family during the holidays. I hope that changes, I really do.

Through these eyes I’ve seen the shape of things to come, and I’ve watched it all fall apart. Ness,Mike. “Through These Eyes.” White Light, White Heat, White Trash Epic Records. 1996.
Link

Christmas is a wonderful time of the year. I am Christian, and I believe it an appropriate time to celebrate the birth of Christ, and I feel that that spirit is manifested best through being with loved ones and sharing communion with them. It is a small way to bring peace and goodwill to Earth. Christmas has not been kind to my family in any capacity in some time.

I am the first grandson born of the first daughter of a man who pioneered aspects of cardiovascular surgery in the county in which I grew up. He was Duke educated, and was fundamental towards developing the concepts of trauma medicine there. He had a doting wife; a very old school southern belle type. They had 4 daughters, the oldest of which was my mother. From the outside, the family was somewhat well-to-do, my grandfather worked hard and made good money as a surgeon. Where he succeeded as a professional, he was less successful as a father. I will never know the entire story of my family. There are too many secrets that have gone to various graves. My aunts haven’t told me everything, and they never will. I do not think I wish to know it all. My grandfather essentially was my father, and he sat on a pedestal too high for even him to stand upon. Long story short; he was as human as everyone else despite the fact that he regularly held people’s lives in his hands. He was the patriarch, a man of no small amount of wealth, and this Christmas was important; it was the first one he would not attend in our family.

It seems Christmas has become an anniversary of the dead than a celebration of the newborn. It started my first semester of law school. Just a few days before Christmas, 2001. I got a phone call at 4:30 am from my mother. I woke up, alone (of course), and realized there is never a good phone call at this time of day. My oldest cousin, 17, who was like a little brother, was dead. He had gotten drunk and ran headfirst into a parked semi at 35 miles an hour. It cracked his sternum on impact and he bled to death fairly quickly. He had gotten into a lot of trouble with drugs and alcohol, and was trying to work his way out of the situation when it happened. That aunt was devastated, his little brother, the new oldest cousin of mine, was robbed of a brother when he was 13. He had no role model to look up to, and it would alter their lives permanently, for the worse in my opinion. Christmas was predictably ruined.

Christmas 2002 passed quietly, as my aunt was still devastated at the horrid anniversary. But then it was time to go back to school. The third day of class I got home from trial advocacy. I got a phone call from the patriarch. My mother had died. She was not in good health for some time. In the 1990’s she suffered two heart attacks, got on every painkiller and upper/downer a doctor would prescribe, and developed congestive heart failure around 1999. She was essentially bedridden in 2001. She couldn’t take it anymore and the Rhodes Scholar found her end at the bottom of a pill bottle.
I was destroyed. She and I had a rough relationship through high school. She didn’t think I would make it, but when I got my BA and was accepted to law school, she was very proud of me. I remember being on the phone with her the morning of 9-11. We shared that awful moment together, and we were never closer.

Ironically my estranged biological father died from complications from AIDS in a state mental facility 5 months later. I had only seen him once when he left my mother and I in 1983 to permanently pursue a homosexual lifestyle. I can’t help but think those deaths were linked somehow.

My stepfather died from cancer 8 months after my mother died. All he had to do under her will was make it 6 months and everything passed to him. That will was drafted when they were married in 1992. A revised will giving me everything was drafted in 2000, after the marriage had deteriorated to the point my mother slept with a gun within arms reach. Due to circumstances I dont care to get into, it was never executed. My stepfather sold the home 3 weeks before his death. A beautiful estate that was built on 8 acres of land for 350 thousand in 1990 was sold for 130000. It is little more than ruins now, the land is slowly reclaiming the once well kept landscape. All inherited from the stepfather was the cheap fake diamond wedding ring he couldn’t hold onto. Thankfully my aunts went into the ruins after the sale and recovered some of my mother’s jewelry with substantial value, including a diamond necklace I had cleaned and appraised at 3100 which will become an heirloom.

That was 2003.

2004 came, and it was time to graduate from law school. I had my degree, and my lease at school was running out. I had nowhere to go, so I went to live with my grandparents. My grandmother was suffering from a terminal illness which had her health deteriorating throughout 2003 and 2004. By the time I moved in with them to help out around the house for the elderly couple, she was bedridden. I cooked dinner nightly, suffered through my first bar failure, clerked during the day and cooked at a Ruby Tuesday at night. Then it came Christmas time.

2 nights before Christmas my grandmother took her last steps. She made it halfway to the bathroom then collapsed on the carpet. My grandfather knew this was the end. My grandmother did not have enough oxygen in her blood due to her illness. She laid in the floor, gasping for 2 and a half hours as we summoned my 2 aunts who lived in the area to the house. I sat at her head and my oldest aunt held my grandmother’s hand as she breathed her last. In the corner of the bedroom, Thus Spake Zarathustra comforted the 81 year old surgeon. Everyone broke down in tears. I was the only one who knew what had to be done. I called the police and the funeral home. The family objected loudly when the police took photographs of my deceased grandmother. It was SOP for any death, just so they can close the file as a natural death. The funeral director himself showed up with the hearse. I helped load my grandmother onto the stretcher, and carried her over the banister, down the stairs, and loaded her into the hearse, never to see her face again.

I’ve had a lot of beer, and I just got back from jail. I think I’m going to leave part 2 for another time. I’ll pick this up in a few days. If you liked the song at the top, this one’s good too. Same band. Insane album. Shame they lost the guitarist.

Crown of Thorns

You never really get to appreciate the disconnect between lawyers and laypersons. Sure, everyone cracks a wry smile at a lawyer joke; the Bard himself got cheap pops condemning us to special layers of Dante’s inferno and suggesting that our liquidation be the first thing to do. I don’t claim that the hundreds of thousands spent on a legal education makes me better, to the contrary, many would argue the venture to be complete Posnerian economic waste. But I see things differently than most people.

I am economically conservative/mostly socially libertarian. However, because I deal in criminal law I am more involved with the direct punishment and the severity of prison sentences. I am not necessarily light on crime, mind you, but I know that when a judge hands down a 20 year sentence, that is a hell of a lot of very hard time, and it is not something to be taken lightly.

A major case of ours finally went to sentencing. Despite our best efforts, we did not get the judge to agree to a departure from the guidelines. The Defendant will easily spend the next 23 years in prison. We did our best, and to be honest, it was an expected result, at the low end of the guidelines. Despite our expert testimony, despite family testimony, despite preachers and high school coaches, it was what it was. However, if the client pursued trial he faced stiffer sentences, including the possibility of life imprisonment. I know this person will have a very hard life ahead of him, and he deserves it for what he did. However, I make no bones about it, and if he does his time, he will have paid his debt to society.

The hearing was written up in a fairly objective manner in the local rag. I can’t argue with the journalism. What got to me though was some of the comments left in the online section.

There were people blaming Obama (because the Defendant was an illegal immigrant)
There were people blaming Bush (same)
There were people blaming Clinton (same)
There were people legitimately advocating chemical castration (a practice banned by the Supreme Court under 8th Amendment considerations)
There were people advocating the death penalty for noncapital offenses
There were people looking forward to the likelihood of prison rape.

I saw every manner of ignorant utterance the depth and breadth of which would stagger the mind. These are the people who elect officials, who blindly listen to political pundits without individual analysis, who struggle to make sure they’ve tivo’d every episode of Dancing With The Stars, who hang on every word Paula Abdul says on Idol. This is the idiocracy. For a brief moment, I contemplate whether constitutionalists like me should even bother defending the bill of rights.

On a lighter note, after the sentencing I proceeded to a casino and drank Bacardi and diet and played Early Retirement, a little known slot that for whatever reason really REALLY fucking likes me (Buyin 380):

Someone takes a diarrhea dump in the toilet and just leaves it there and doesn’t flush, and you haven’t had a client this morning, and you just got here, and the only other fucker who is here is Milton.

Death to Milton, Death to Middlebury, Death to Billed Hourly, Lifeat160 is great.

Instead of waiting for something to pop into my head, I decided to just post these one offs as a feature of this fine, respectable legal blog.

YOU KNOW YOU PRACTICE SHITLAW WHEN:

1. Your client pays you to take his case. You look his docket up and say “See you Monday morning for your pretrial hearing.” Then when Monday comes around you spend 80 minutes sitting on your ass in court texting him asking where the fuck he is and step out to call him 3 more times. You realize you could be billing a number of different things instead of wasting time on this flat fee bullshit, then call his case where the judge inevitably issues a bench warrant. On the way back to the office, the dumb fuck calls you and says “Oh man I didnt know I had court; I slept in man,” and you spend the next hour drafting a motion to recall the capias and drive right back to the courthouse to drop it off so it gets heard two days later and you stand a chance of getting the bond reinstated.

God damned motherfucking Milton. He is the king of the sperglords. Every day something abysmally stupid comes from his mouth. Before his first “err or uhh” which escapes the gravitational black hole of his ignorant face, I automatically think of filling that face with a cement wall a la Poe. I’d give anything to bury him behind concrete as he spergs on about the origin of all of his spergy stories: Middlebury fucking college.

I’m sure Middlebury is a fine place, a hoidy-toidy 40 large per year liberal arts hippie douchebag generator. It’s fine, it can stay in Vermont I don’t care. It and I have led perfectly happy lives without intersecting.

But not until Milton. Fucking Milton came from Middlebury, and the shitfucking cock commander goes out of his way to remind you. ALL THE FUCKING TIME. I’m talking to my boss about this aggravating divorce case, when the ambulatory cumstain oozes around the corner and announces he is taking his lunch break. Whatever, nobody cares. But then he launches into a 4 minute monologue about Middlebury Rugby or Lacrosse or Cricket or some bullshit sport that is mostly played in Europe or some equally faggy enclave of the United States.

My boss, all 5′3 and 120 pounds of her 50 something year old frame, is like a deer in the headlights. Milton has worked for her for a long time, whereas I am dying to get the fuck out if i hit the job lottery in Jurisdiction X. I can only imagine the horrors she has sat through, the endless bullshit about how fast he runs, the people he went to school with, the upper crust parties, the various times he has bested someone younger, stronger, faster than him at whatever sporting event he’s sperging about. Its probably piled on for years. She has to be jaded to it. But then I realize how she puts up with it. He is a 42 year old billing baby. He bills everything, from when he turns on the office light at 745 am till he closes the office door at 6pm, and is a literal toddler. He has no social skills yet spends his time perusing dating sites. He can’t communicate very well, but loves to show mommy whatever obscure iota of bullshit about Middlebury College he can. And mommy, now having to help care for two new grandkids, just sees him for the 42 year old infant he is.

I mean he shits the carpet in the office, so I guess his immaturity is both physical and emotional. I did not mistype that. Take that one in.

I honestly swear Milton has Asbergers. I normally mock Asspies because on the internet they attribute any antisocial behavior to it as an excuse, but this guy, man. This fucking Milton can’t be right. Something is really wrong with him, and it can all be fixed by blowing up Middlebury College. You can warn the students to get out first. Except the pre laws and poli sci. Thin their numbers out a bit.

I got free lunch today. I get free lunch practically every day. It’s one of the few perks of my shitlaw job. Every day I get to go down to a local deli and get the equivalent of a 7 dollar lunch for free. It’s almost like 2500 or so bucks untaxed every year. Alert the IRS so that they can kiss the fattest part of my ass.

But today’s lunch wasn’t at the deli. It was sushi. A friend of mine asked me to cover something for her because she had to go Georgia all of a sudden. I had to go to Georgia once all of a sudden and it became 36 hours of pure hell riding with motherfucking Milton the whole way. Long story short it involved me handing him his fucking toothpaste and brush 14 times in the car ride because everytime the useless fuck put something that wasn’t water in his maw he had to brush right away. Not to mention he had to adjust his AC from cold to hot to medium at least 70 times over the trip. And fucking radio stations man, he had to have switched radio stations at least 600 times. Death to Milton. But that’s not the point of this post.

My friend needed me to cover some administrative thing. In this state if you get a DUI your license is suspended pretty much automatically after a short grace period. However, you can postpone it if you apply for an administrative review. It’s a low percentage play but it buys time for your client to get to DUI school and lessen the amount of time before they can get a restricted license. All you can basically do is argue the evidence doesn’t sustain a DUI conviction. You can’t go into 4th amendment or intoxilyzer things. “Don’t worry about it” my friend says “It’s a dog case and i didn’t even subpoena the cop.” Dog is putting it nicely.

So I head over to the tiny little building at the appropriate time and wait 30 minutes for my hearing officer. I trundle into his tiny office, he lets me see the file. Motherfucker had blood in his alcohol stream. .251 BAC. He was weaving, hit a curb, 4am stop. The only thing he didn’t do was drive into a Chapaquiddick Island tidal channel and leave some 20 something whore to drown and wait till the next day to call someone. I look it over and groan. But hey she said she’d pay me to do it and I need poker money so whatever. Off the record I laugh about how fucked the guy is. The hearing officer says “you want to waive the hearing” Hell no. I call my friend and tell her this case is pure unadulterated donkeyfoam, and she says just repeat after me “We dispute that the evidence is sufficient for probable cause for arrest.” So I say pretty much that and the officer says he reserves jurisdiction to review the file and thats about it. I guess it takes a couple weeks for him to sustain the suspension which is the point of all this. Its pretty much routine for DUIs. My friend later admits that out of the 40 times she did this she had won only once.

Anyways she owes me and hits me up on facebook for lunch. IMO she’s pretty hot. She has a really cute face and the rest aint bad either. She and I went to the same TTT and I alienated her my first semester by making a drunken offhand comment or gesture about her breasts at a student party and that was that. Good thing I never owned up to the anonymous love poem I sent her. God I was such a fucking douche. We go to sushi and we catch up since we really havent done any hanging out in ages.

She strikes up conversation, and its a quiet small restaurant. Her voice booms. First topic: Motherfucking Eldrich Q Woods. I dont give a flying fuck about it, its celebutard nonsense, but we argue about it anyways. She says he’s captain numbnuts with a big friggin N because he’s a role model and he’s so horrible. I say he’s just a golfing robot we put on a pedestal and turned into a god, and he basically did some stupid shit most of our clients do, and nobody should care and he isn’t a role model. It’s basically the Barkley argument. She says I’m completely full of it and analogizes the average idiot’s relationship with “ranger rick on the golf course” with that between a patient and doctor, parishioner and priest, and client and lawyer. My head hurts. Instead of pointing out how ridiculous that is, I look at her breasts, getting lost in the mocha colored delights, and she wins the argument.

I fill her in on my life, how im trying to move to jurisdiction X to work and be with the same woman I met in law school. I’m about to tell her the job market is beating me down like Elin Nordegren with a nine iron but bite my tongue mid-analogy, and explain how it’s basically SHIT SUX. I even explain how the guy from our TTT wouldn’t even give me a pity interview or handy j or hell spare change for a bus. I explain how its even tougher since we have to contend with grads from in state and even the T14′ers. Our TTT is about as prestigious as the cheap cubic zirconia bullshit sold by Israelis and Guidos in mall kiosks.

“But we went to a good school. TTT is a very well respected school.”

I wish I could slap her with the octopus on the end of my chopstick. I instead give it a second soaking in the wasabi and soy sauce. How could such a smart woman who is making it as a solo be so oblivious! Then she goes on about how intimidated she is by federal criminal practice. I fill her in on the CJA panel and how any git who’s had 4 or 5 trials is missing out if they’re not on it for that sweet gubmint cheese. Not my fault if she wont do it. She slides me the envelope with the cash for covering for her, we chat some more about how she’s not getting laid and how I would drive dicktatorship home if the future Mrs Toiletlawyer didn’t exist. I inform her of a conflict of interest grand theft case I’m going to refer to her and dont tell her I’m also giving that defendant the number for my ex prosecutor law school roomie as well to see if any lulz ensue. I head off on my way just in time to catch Jim Rome reset eldrich with the same tired audio drops for the umpteenth time and realize some people just dont fucking get it and that’s alright, sweet America. Because sometimes those people post lurid bikini self shots on facebook, and thats enough for some crown royal infused spank sessions.

City 17 is a medium size metropolitan city boasting a few million residents. The county in which it resides merits its own judicial subdivision of the State Court. However, there is only one courthouse for the entire county, which is of course in City 17.

Mondays are usually docket sounding days when there are no trials for the week. When you need something done quickly, such as in my case, asking for a sentencing continuance, you draft the notice of hearing and motion, and get it in by thursday for the following monday. So this morning I was supposed to go in and get this continuance. 20 minutes of driving and about 45 seconds of lawyering. If only it were that fucking simple.

The gits who run security at City 17 courthouse recently fucked up big time. Someone snuck in a weapon in their purse, and they didnt catch it until 2 hours after it happened. So the entire courthouse was evacuated and the weapon was never found. Heads rolled. So the natural response being to pay the fuck attention to the xray machines was ignored in lieu of less lines, less scanners, and making people take off practically everything like a airport security line. Now lines to get in are the norm.

Now cue in a backed up docket since there was no thursday or friday court last week, and every son of a bitch and his sister had to go to court today. Lines stretched around the block. And 3 days a week some black preachers are out front with megaphones yelling at you about how racist and evil the court system is, and you just trundle along in line waiting to get in to do your business. So I had to wait in line for 30 minutes after a 20 minute drive to do my 45 seconds of lawyering. It gets better.

The judge for my continuance just got moved to the civil division. And since half the docket was still outside waiting to get in, the judge who was standing in decided to break until 915. So now tack on another 20 minutes of waiting where i get to ogle the prosecutors and think about how hard I would hatefuck some of them.

Then of course my boss bounds in just as court is about to resume. “I thought you werent going to handle this?” she says. “Well, you told me to get it continued, so I figured I might as well do that.” We laughed and I told her about the judge rotation. The good news was the judge coming in to take this divisions place is a real hang em high, but he is no longer going to sentence rape boy. The bad news is he is going to hear the sentencing hearing on my state appointed teen strong arm robbery case.

So my boss tells me to head on, and I stop by the clerk of court’s office to pick up some judgments on a different appointed case. I hate waiting in line for any clerk of court. Especially the criminal clerk since half of the people waiting in line are complete fucking morons who are waiting in the wrong line or are in the wrong building altogether or could have saved us all a lot of trouble by using a fucking phone. So I wait for another 30 minutes behind lovely disadvantaged urban minorities who never know what the hell is going on. I just need some judgments. Enter case number, hit print.

Well I finally get to my turn at the window, and the clerk starts pulling everything up. Problem is the judgments I’m looking for are 50+ pages (from the gang case a few posts ago) and the line behind me gets longer. And of course more poor disadvantaged urban youths queue up and get loud and mouthy since its taking a while to get these fucking papers. If only our docketing were online like most modern jurisdictions this wouldnt be a problem and I’d never have to deal with the dickhead clerks and wait in line with morons and assholes wondering when their next court date is (as if their bondsman didnt know).

Anyways I am starting to hate the fucking courthouse and all the people in it can eat glass.

A common thread amongst the “law scam” blogs (the roster of which does not include this blog in my opinion) is how every e-lawyer, without fail, attempts to reveal to the uninitiated the folly of attending law school. Thread after thread on JD Underground bemoans that the practice of law is akin to a huge gamble with a massive house edge. You gamble money that isn’t yours to get into an oversaturated career path with little choice of happiness or success that TV has told you is but a degree away. The schools and loans are set up to perpetuate one another at the cost of students who don’t realize that where you get your license from does kinda matter, and if your grades aren’t really good you’re at a massive disadvantage. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with a good portion of this. But it’s nothing new. A relative who is an attorney told me, when I announced I was going to law school, to “not do it, unless you spend the next 5 years at the gym and look like a model.” Well one can tell from my previous post admitting my weight that I’m probably not one of those. Everyone, to the man (or woman), then says “Don’t go to law school” to the next bunch. How much of it is just a generational thing and how much of it is real is a question I cannot answer.

So the e lawyer is best described by our duly elected president. During his campaign he went on to describe some Pennsylvania voters as bitter, clinging to guns and religion. I’ll rewrite that part here:
” You go into some of these websites and law blogs on the internet and talk about the practice of law, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 10 plus years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these lawyers are gonna find employment and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to JDUnderground or Tom The Temp or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-law school sentiment or anti-ABA sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (i’m a political junkie so i thought it was appropriate). The point being, that some of this is reflexive and nothing new. Now, as for whether or not I would do it again if I had the chance.

I fell into law school like most “lemmings” who see it as a easy button for success. I orginally wanted to be an astronaut. Yeah I know. I took hard sciences in high school, and attended a reasonable state University to study physics, as they had a good program to get a BS from. I could succeed there and move onto a good PhD program and be on my way. However, I was immature. I decided it would be a good idea to enjoy my first year on my own getting to know people and have more fun than study. I got involved in student government at this fairly large school, and completely fucked up my studies. Attending an 8am calculus class taught by a Chinese TA seemed like a logical thing on paper. In practice, not so much. So I, as Mr. Ayn Rand Physics major/philosophy minor, had to find a way out of his current educational situation, exacerbated by losing a scholarship and not really getting laid much at all (making all the partying a total waste, I know). I withdrew from the school and came home to attend a smaller private university. There, I decided oh hey I could just go to law school. My advisor at the small local school was wary, but then when my LSAT came back with a 160, attending law school seemed more realistic, despite my 2.8 ish college GPA.

So the small school advisor got me into a regional private TTT law school, despite the fact I had no real appreciation for law. It was “something to do.” Now, things have since changed in some ways, and stayed the same in others. Law is still “something to do” but it is something I find intertesting, and is rarely the same thing twice. I learn something new all the time. I’m lucky to have a job that doesnt involve me being a document coder. I meet inteteresting people and once in a while my cases get some local media attention. I’ve met the woman I want to make an effort to marry due to this TTT. I also got very very lucky (depending on how you look at it) to have financed the whole fucking thing and gotten my private loans paid off due to some inheritance. So, in short, I might actually win this bet, but I did it by splitting 10’s, hitting on 19, yelling for seven at the craps table, and basically being the worst gambler in the world.

I think I am in the right career for me. I would do it again, but I would do it radically differently. However, that’s only assuming I would still meet the reason I’m trying to move to Jurisdiction X. She has been through a hell of a lot with me, and I would not like to contemplate the “would i do it again” option if she were not involved in the equation somehow. My first change would have been dumping the TTT and going to the top 50 law school who waitlisted me and then gave me an acceptance right before orientation. My second would be playing less counterstrike and paying more attention my first year. Then I would buy old barbri books, sit with a bar tutor to learn to write essays, and crush the exams. Would that guarantee a different outcome? Well, nothing is certain but I would likely have a greater chance to be in a different area of law, living in a different city, and possibly making more money. But then I wouldnt have the great friends I do, and a girlfriend who loves me very much.

Its a question that’s really a lot of navel gazing. But the point really isn’t would I do it again, it’s would I tell others to go, isn’t it? You can get more of that analysis at another blog or site. Here, it’s more about my life as a toileteer and all the perks that come with it. I’ll close with this, I would do it again and I survived a shitty Thanksgiving without falling off the wagon, weight wise. More on that next post. I actually have to work today :/

There are a lot of reasons why being a lawyer is bad for you. First and foremost your choice of career has likely saddled you with 6 figures in debt and incredibly bleak job prospects. But then what happens to you when you get that sweet gig?

Being a lawyer involves a hell of a lot of sitting on your ass staring at a computer screen, either as a document coder in a roach infested slave pen beneath some crushing biglaw asshole factory, or copypastaing another brainless ID motion, or reading tiny script on fastcase and getting a headache as you desparately try to find something on point using such a subpar but really supercheap database engine.

Then you eat. A lot. The secretaries bring in food, clients bring in food, you have 15 minutes to get some lunch before you have to meet the next son of a bitch with no money and a 6 count indictment who wants to go on a “payment plan” so you run to mcdonalds.

There is only one thing I eat at mcdonalds now, just the eggs and a steak patty for breakfast. Its real protein, I’m sure. But it used to be, 2 for 3 big macs, large fries, 10 piece nuggets, or some such, and its easily 1800 calories of pure shit that leaves you hungry like chinese food in 2 hours. Oh and a coke which is more syrup than water. Basically your job is killing you, and your food is killing you, and your debt is killing you, and your shitty clients kill you and laugh while they do it. Its like the guy who can do 4 months in county on his head looks at me and calls me a fuckup.

Add to that the stress and cortisol and you basically turn into a fat sack of shit. Like me. I saw a girl I went to law school at the courthouse. She’s part of the state’s harem of family law bitches. She deals with the most fucked up people in the world on behalf of state agencies who set child support for deadbeat fucks. In law school she was petite, kinda cute, glasses, very quiet. I hardly talked to her but yeah i blew a few knuckle children thinking about how underneath the quiet bespectacled law school student exterior, she was a 3 input cumslut who begged for you to shoot all over her and was insatiable in bed.

Well now she’s just about a perfect sphere. Easily packing 2 bills. God this career can be so destructive to people. Not to mention the alcohol and drugs we regularly do to get by on a daily basis (not me mind you).

What is it I can actually control? Well, I can’t get a job in the jurisdiction I want no matter how hard i try (it seems), and I cant tell stupid assholes not to come into the office because then we wouldnt get clients. I can’t tell Great Lakes to fuck themselves with a dull knife used to cut habanero peppers, but I can control what the fuck I eat and what I do when I get home from work.

I’m a big guy, always have been. I still have a picture of me from prom. 6′0, about 215 pounds. I looked good. I was a social failure, and got practically zero pussy, but i looked good and damnit if i had my personality now in my body then I would be laying pipe like a champ. I came across this photo while moving recently, and I became completely disgusted with myself. Where did it go wrong? I saw a picture of me as a 1L on my student id. I was a little bigger but not by much. I took karate, I worked out, but then as time went on, it started to go downhill. After law school it really went downhill.

I weighed 345 fucking pounds this summer. Can you fucking believe it? I didnt look like some beached balloon whale mind you, but i know what i looked like naked and its a disaster. I finally said to hell with it all about the time i made that post about being a fat sack of shit. Just because i have a shiTTTY career, shiTTTy income prospects, deal with shiTTTy people on a daily basis, doesn’t mean I have to look shiTTTy. I may be TTT for life, but I dont have to look like it dammit. I got on a workout regime, and fixed what I eat pretty well, and have peeled off to 323 pounds this morning. But thats still easily another 80-90 to go. Its the one thing I can do to take back all the bad decisions i made so far in my life.

So gentle reader take this to heart. The practice of law will shorten your life, but it doesnt have to make your ass require its own congressional representative. I’ll link to some pictures for you later so you can track my progress and so on.