I thought I’d get to see one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, tonight at OCU, but he cancelled because he’s got the flu. Likely story.

Oh, well, I’ll just go to Rococo’s for the jazz jam tonight instead. That’ll show ‘em.

I want to mention that I very much liked Paul Medina’s work at JRB last Friday. Very strong images and innovative presentations pleased my eye and teased my thinking/emotions.

I had a quiet and somewhat productive weekend, but I spent almost all of it alone at the house with the cat, who got his ass whipped by another neighborhood feline. I rescued him from the magnolia tree in the front of the house, but he had obvious signs of being the loser of some titantic battle.

Rock chock Jayhawks. I’ll root for the Big XII team every time and they looked awesome against North Carolina.

Chief campaign strategist Mark Penn was demoted, but not out and out fired from Hillary’s campaign. This is the second major shakeup at the top of her campaign since February 5. I’ve been in campaigns that were behind and not catching up and it’s not so much fun as being on the winning side. Today’s Gallup Poll puts Obama 9 points up over Sen. Clinton and polls indicate that she will not get the double-digit win she needs in PA., is in a tie in Indiana and far behind in North Carolina. Her reality check seems to be bouncing as three more superdelegates came out for Obama over the weekend.

I can feel the April 15 tax deadline looming over me like today’s cloudy skies, cooling off the warm spring and my desire to get out of bed at 7 a.m.

Let there be light, and there was light and it was good.

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UPDATE: The jazz at Rococo’s was smooth and cool. I actually applauded several sets. I treated myself to coffee and a hot chocolate pudding pastrycake with whipped cream and cocoa shavings drizzled with a chocolate sauce. The Jayhawks came from 9 points down with two minutes to go in regulation play and came back to win the national college basketball championship in overtime play against the Memphis Tigers. It was a very good game between two excellent teams. Storms flashed and thundered through the metropolitan area, whipping the leaves of budding flora in my neighborhood — a natural symphony I’ve always liked. Peace out.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the fact that the practice of law will not change to suit my needs of the moment; Courage to change my attitude and focus more on solving my clients’ problems and less on what I get out of it; and the Wisdom to know that bitching and whining only make things worse.
Amen.

Sorry, but I don’t have time to post more today. I’ve got to go to work.

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Thanks to those that responded to yesterday’s post. I love you. All of you.

I think 20 years this year is long enough to bitch about practicing law (although I took out a couple years to teach). I can either find a way to like it or find something else to do that will make me happy.

From ’68 to ’82, I had about six years in the newspaper business when I was happy about going to work the vast majority of the time. The other eight years, I liked it most of the time but not as much. Both years I taught, I looked forward to most of my days in the classroom and even those days I didn’t look forward to the day, once I got there, I found something pleasing almost every single day. Grading finals over Christmas break, not so much.

Since 1987, going to the office to practice law has been dreadful as the norm. Some of those years, I might only enjoy 10 days out of the whole year on a professional level. I rarely feel like it’s been rewarding. I can even do it fairly well, when I actually get down to work. It must hold something because I know happy lawyers who like what they do and make a good living. For me, it’s a beating. If I could figure out how to get there, I honestly believe I would enjoy being a Starbucks barista or a Barnes and Nobles bookseller more than this. I don’t think that’s what I’ll do and I hope I can come up with something even more fulfilling and satisfying, but as monotonous as those jobs may be I’d rather do that than what I do now. For one thing, you have a lot more pleasant interactions with customers at those two places than you have people with a problem. I don’t have so many pleasant professional interactions. People are under stress and emotional and/or are being paid $200/hr to give me shit and make problems.

I bet I told my children a hundred times “Do what you love and love what you do and the money will follow.” They both seem pretty happy doing what they do and they seem to get along somehow. Doesn’t mean they don’t have problems, it just means that neither one of them loathes what they’re doing.

Again today, I was told to write. In fact, I was told to write even if I know I’ll fail.

I’ve been doing this blog since Sept. ’05 and I’ve written more than enough original material to comprise a book. Hundreds of posts and comments on other blogs pad the accumulated writings of Blogblah. In addition, behind me at this desk is a four foot shelf of handwritten journals, year after year for eight years. The equivilant of at least 10 hefty books, although it’s a couple dozen slim volumes. I’ve written a dozen short fiction stories. I also have hundreds of pages of novel ideas that I got bored with and just stopped.

Want to know why I just haven’t jumped off and tried a writing career? I have a readership of 40, that’s why. I’d starve. I see people more clever than me writing and not getting published. Nobody reads anymore, folks. Maybe you missed that, but it was in all the papers. Publishing has turned into a tough game. I’d write chick lit if I could. Love to turn out a John Grisham, but that’s not what I write. I spend enough time at B&N leafing through Editor & Publisher to know a little of what I’m talking about. I’ve read books on getting published (it amuses me that such books exist) including books by Henry Miller, Anne Lemont and Elmore Leonard. Do you know WHY such books exist? Because there are so damn many people who want to get published. You can’t swing a dead cat in a coffee shop without hitting a would-be writer. The cup runneth over.

That’s why I blog. It’s what I do. I write. I write a lot. Often. Sometimes, more than once a day. Sometimes for hours. Look at yesterday’s post. Look at how many references to philosophers, popular culture and classic literature. Look at the length of that baby. Knocked that sumbitch out off the top of my head in about an hour. Not possible if you don’t write as much and as often as I do. It takes practice to turn out the drivel on this blog, baybee. Just exactly who do you think would pay to read that whining? Millions of Americans sitting on the beach just can’t wait to hear me kvetch about my pointless life. I write, but again, so what? If you’re one of the 40 people who have ever read this blog, you already know. Sometimes it’s OK, sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s better, but only if you already know me. It would be nice to have one of the two qualities most needed in a writer: I’d like to be clever or insightful, but I’m not particularly either one. So, if you want to know why I don’t kick off the traces and write, it’s because it would be pointless, stupid and meaningless, just like this blog.

I’m frustrated, sad and frightened.

I didn’t go to work today, in fact I didn’t leave the house.

I’ve been sitting at my desk smoking one cigaret after another.

I loathe my profession. I dislike the adversarial nature of the practice of law. I’ve been plowing this field for 20 years and it’s never been good to me. I’m trapped into a life that regularly leaves me feeling stupid and ineffectual and cowardly, regardless of the reality.

The promise of making a decent living in the practice of law has so far eluded me. I’m not a very good businessman and my business reflects my disinterest and half-hearted attempts to do better.

Yet, as I near the age of 60, I can’t imagine where I could go from here. Who would hire me?

I made my own decision about my social life more than a year ago that I would be better served by not dating. I thought long and hard about it. In most ways, that seems like a good decision in retrospect. There has been a downside, of course; there is a downside to everything. There are days like this one when I’m not just alone, I’m lonely. I wish I had a shoulder to cry on, a cheerleader to buck me up and a companion to bounce thoughts back instead of the echo chamber inside my head.

In the job market, the reality is that my age would be a large obstacle to beginning a new career. Similarly, in the dating market the truth is that I’m not much of a catch.

I’m fortunate that I have enough to recommend me that I have a cadre of close friends. I value them more than gold. I have a supportive family that sometimes likes me less than at other times, but is loyal and loving even in the times I’m not at my best.

This is not the despair of depression. I’ve been there and I know that “black dog” (as Winston Churchill called it) all too well. I’m not overwhelmed by darkness. I see that I have been fortunate in more respects than I can here enumerate: I’m smart, well educated and relatively healthy; I certainly am not homeless, without wardrobe nor hungry.

This is also not the “restless, irritable and discontent” of my alcoholism. This is not something I’ll drink over. This is not something that I have a finger to point in blame. I have no resentments about this, except perhaps with myself and my sometimes unwise choices.

It’s just where I am.

I wish it were so easy for me as to simply have faith in God that I am in his care and will receive what is best for me, if not what I want. I wish I could turn to non-attachment and the path to nirvana or unification with the universe. I’ve poured over the Tao de Ching, studied the Gospels, immersed myself in Rome’s Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius and pondered the analects of Confucious. They appeal to my intellect, often striking me as holding wisdom beyond measure. Today, they elude me.

Lately, I’ve been proactive with my interior life. I’m in the process of seeing a psychiatrist who is helping me find the right medications to control my depression. I go to AA meetings, having seen what failing to go brings. I plan activities I find enjoyable: I see my friends on Wednesdays and Fridays, go to art openings and next Monday, I’ll go see Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite bloggers, at OCU.

Meanwhile, I have writing projects that lie fallow. I don’t know why I’m not in pursuit of that. My studio hasn’t been used to produce even the smallest watercolor or sumii in months. I inexplicably walk past that door in the hallway dozens of times a day without a flicker of interest.

Right this minute, while I write this, it’s quiet in the house — with no one to disturb, there’s still no music to entice me.

I hate this cigaret that burns between my fingers. I get up and hack and cough for a half hour every morning, smoking and choking both at the same time. The very thought of giving them up scares the living shit out of me even though I know beyond all reasonable doubt that they are killing me.

I wash and dry the clothes, fold them and put them away. I do the dishes and reshelve them. I play solitaire on the computer between hours of reading about politics. I write in my journal of my gushing and mixed emotions and the trivial happenings of my day to day quiet desperation. I go to bed.

This is existence, not living. This is waiting in a self imposed prison for an indeterminate sentence of death. I am a character in a Kafka story. I look at the tree outside my window and it dissolves into the vomitum of Sartre’s nausea. The soft velvet veils of television, religion and consumerism are denied me and I long for my lost naivte, a virginity I lustfully flung away many years ago.

Perhaps if I were a woman I could blame men, or if I were black I could blame whites or if I had come from the hardscrabble of some ghetto I could blame capitalism. Please victimize me. No matter how coy your rationale, let me have some thin reed to hide behind, some straw to grasp, some will o the wisp as an excuse.

I thought not.

Yet, I refuse to truck with nihilism. It may be true that none of this will matter half as much a thousand years from now in the big scheme of things, still it matters a great deal to me right now.

Even if life isn’t fair, can’t my life still fare better than this?

Post Script: Since I’m still up and thinking about this stuff, I’d say I’m suffering from ennui. It’s not that stuff doesn’t matter, it’s just that I’m bored with it and I don’t care. I’m all outraged and shit about politics and maybe that matters. Maybe it matters that your baby left you or that he never gets off the couch. Maybe my eternal soul is paramount. Sometimes I think I know what’s important, sometimes I lose track. If I could, I’d croon Ms. Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”. I’m a walking, talking, typing Gallic shrug. I mean, is this really it for me? Is this the best I could do? Is this really what life offers? The best you can do is “Life is suffering; get over it”? Some pie in the sky bye and bye? I see these wretches at some AA places I go and their hands are trembling and I thank God for my sobriety. And, I think I’m damn fine because these bastards want what I’ve got. They are willing to do anything to be me. If they only knew. Being sober is better than not being sober. Now what? One stick in the eye is better than a stick in both eyes. Yeah, great. That’s the best you got to offer? No other choices? I got this great law degree. One of my sisters is fond of telling me how wonderful her life would be if she had a law degree. Right. The practice of law is the pot of shit at the end of the rainbow. It feels like a betrayal, an utter loss. I’m sorry I ever went to law school. I don’t know the answer to your question and I can’t offer you justice, I’m all out. It’s just all bullshit. All of it. Bickering like magpies over meaningless details. Plucking the entrails out of people’s lives. Literally making a federal case out of bruised feelings and 30 pieces of silver. Yeah, I’m one great pillar of civilization, contributing to the betterment of the lives of all mankind all right. This is the apex of American culture? A petite bourgoisie sinecure? Shuffling paper and impoverishing my clients with mumbo-jumbo and jargon is supposed to crown my life’s achievements. Life has been so not worth it, if that’s true. And, maybe it is. Maybe it’s like this one centenarian I interviewed as a young reporter. Maybe living to 100 is nothing more or less than waking up 36,500 times. You get up. You drink coffee. You fold the clothes. You go to bed and do it all over again tomorrow. You can’t even help it. Eventually, you’ll go to sleep. You’ll wake up. No matter how hard you try, you’ll wake up. And, you find something to do until you sleep again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Pointless and stupid. Brute, nasty and short. I am frustrated because life is pointless. All this effort and just nothing other than a big “so what?”. It’s sad to think that it doesn’t get any better, that this is it and there isn’t anything else. We push a boulder to the top of the mountain and it rolls back down again. Every once in a while, we think this is great and we’re happy. We sing in our chains and warble in our cages. I don’t feel like singing just right now. I’m afraid I may never again be happy pushing the boulder up the hill. I can also imagine Sisyphus anguished, disconsolate and tortured. Tonight, I don’t care about Sisyphus. I’ll log off and go to sleep and wake up in the morning.