bang

 bang.

  Now every day when I get all my clothes on and decide to walk out to the car..it's like an amazing escape from a computer screen.  I wake up,  and have a fixed and rigid routine. I check the dog to make sure he hasn't pissed or shit in the back of the house where we keep his antiquity riddled body. He ignores me generally.  Then I make coffee. And dammit the coffee is not acceptable if its not Starbucks Sumatra dark roast pre-ground so that the effort I have to put into making rich coffee has been minimalized. 

My friend who died last Summer, Stan Robison,  made the act of making coffee some sort of Himalayan art by using only distilled water ..brought to a certain temperature and pouring into beans he had FRESHLY ground...moments before the steaming water. And it was this...this sacred drink (it really did taste as if it was in a class of beverage only gods had access to) he would put into a metal thermos and bring to the courtroom each morning of our 2-3 week double murder trial where we were defending a kid who considered Stan a father figure...had paranoid fantasies the Sheriff was preparing a Hog motorcycle for him to escape on at the end of the double murder trial...where he and his savage mentor*...a snake who wore a "SLAYER" tee shirt when he was called to testify, had laid in wait for some old country people to return to their shitty shack farm in Mauckport where the SLAYER had blown his own daddy's head off with a shotgun and then ...waited some more until step mom and grandma come rolling in in a chevy van at which point our client and SLAYER riddled the vehicle with bullets from the rifle and shotgun ...killing granny and maiming the step mom ....but each morning Stan and I had the most wonderful coffee to start the days' trial work.

All of which had made me unfit to accept lesser coffees. After which I went, in my pajamas, out on the back porch to smoke my Macanuda Inspirato mini cigar to start the day and feel I was alive. The cigars are a micro aggression to my self and to those around me who love me and insist I stop smoking completely...not realizing I am more determined to smoke the more they shove their disapproval at me in a totally self destructive way. But then ...My mom smoked into her 80s until she died..So I have that DNA shit going for me. Maybe. 

But back to my morning...I have to check my stocks...are they looking up or down?  Because I am a bastard sonofabitch I refused to put my finances in the care of a pro.  So I check the market and usually make no adjustments.  Then I go to get the zeitgeist...I look at twitter and for the conservative horrible point of view I look at Britain's  "DAILY MAIL"  site.   This paper/site is the lowest of the low...and I hate it. But I read it to keep apprised of the bullshit I am likely to see entering my world.  Then I do WORDLE. I am sort of convinced this is a part of the computer simulation that makes so much sense to me. Every morning you do your wordle and get aligned with the Matrix they want you in. 

On the porch, I am in my pajamas....The neighbors have been very nice to not complain about my appearance there or my smoker's hacking or my general dishevelment and then I think of my day ahead.

Usually I have some ZOOM incident I have to involve myself in due to my duty to my clients. This is weird and cool and surreal all at the same time. I enjoy shutting off the camera so I cannot be seen. I wear a dress shirt.. sometimes with a tie and almost always just my pajama bottoms because I haven't bothered to fully dress when the action starts. 

Most days are spent on the computer but for me, it's not social media or games.  I am way too cool to waste my life on that kind of trivial pursuit. For me it is digging into the law on some arcane theory I want to resurrect to get my client out of trouble. Or, it could be looking at the evidence in a case and pouring over police reports or witness interviews.  I have been doing this kind of work so long I consider what I have as almost a superpower.  I can read from a police report so much more than what has been written.  It's from this 'grey area' stuff I dig out the material I can use to bust a case open. On a lot of my cases, for example,  I can tell by reading the story of the 'crime' that complaining witness is a loser.  I mean they are a lousier person than the defendant is. Or sometimes they just have stuff so messed up in their own life...which is how they got into being a victim in the first place. This is very common in 'domestic' crimes.  On cases like this you can sense whether the right thing to do is to dig right in as fast as you can because the pressure of the case is too much for the witness and it will collapse. On the other hand, some cases  you look at it and know ...know like you know what you want for lunch...that all you have to do is wait. We all have known people who manage to screw up no matter how easy the job is. Well, there are a lot people like that in criminal cases. Cops follow   procedures for a reason...it avoids the random screw up...or at least helps prevent them most of the time. But the civilian witnesses don't have procedures. So let them alone and watch them mess things up. Like Frank Sinatra sings,  "nice and easy does it". 

So I do my cases,  I do my emails, pay my bills send notes and stuff during the day. If I am lucky my dad's double first cousin (his mom and my dad's mom are sisters and the fathers are brothers)  will be on line and posting some outrageous right wing bullshit and I get to mess with him and he messes with me. Then I usually go out into the world. 

Bang.  It's post covid now.  You can take a real good look at what two years of shutdown insanity has done to your community.  Here it has dog eared most everything.  The part of town that was most sleek and buzzy now has boarded up windows and graffiti  and bums walking around. I try to keep my eyes open at what is happening on the streets. In warmer weather I often ride my motor scooter around into the most obscure parts of town and into back alleys and odd places that don't seem right inside a city. In the summer of Breonna Taylor there are daily riots and demonstrations and so I go to see first hand what is going on.  What I can see the people are demonstrating against police brutality and it's not much more than chants and hollering.  Then the police show up to 'control' the scene and suddenly there is violence and confrontation.  It's like an insane playbook.  I also check out the MAGA militias the guys and gals who come in town all carrying AR15s and wearing camo outfits. I call them 'costumes' just to make fun of them. To me they are scarier than the breonas .   I don't join in on any side.  I went to a couple of demonstrations one with my daughter where we carried BLM signs. It was not really eventful. I like to buzz around on my scooter on the outside of the main demonstration just to see what the hell is going on. Then winter came on.  That pretty much ended all that. Nobody wants to be out in the cold whether you are a self righteous social warrior or a racist bastard cop or anybody who..as the majority were..in between.

It's over.

It's over when I end the day by going somewhere and getting a coffee or sometimes a fancy coffee drink like a capuccino.   Then I go home and start my evening.  

(Mentor* This snake killed his pappy because pap had refused to come assist him one day when the snake's truck broke down on a country road somewhere.  He harbored that hatred for a few years and through the time in prison where he met our client who had been sent to prison for stealing some lubricant** to jack off with from a walmart. Stolen, no doubt, because he was too embarassed to actually walk up to the pretty little teenage cashier and buy it. When the security guard stopped him he weakly pulled out his little pocket knife as if in a manner to defend himself.  It was this crime...in some bumfuck prairie county where an actual judge...supposedly with wisdom and discernment sent our boy to prison for this, his first violation of the law and where he was thrown in with "Snake"  who told him he, Snake, was a secret member of an international group of paid super assassins.   Our client, brought up in a literal basement structure in the middle of a cornfield and homeschooled by his goggle eyed mama and with having only the social exposure for 17 years to be gleaned from sunday visits to the primitive pentecostal church the family attended,  had no reason not to believe Snake or question his assertion of master villainhood with an international team.) 

(lubricant**  Over the years as a criminal defense lawyer I have come to pay attention to what the swag is. It tells you about the client if they are stealing crappy small stuff they can easily re-sell or whether they are stealing stuff like food or a coat in the winter time. Also pay attention to how they got caught. Women like to steal make up. That's the most common swag for female shoplifters. I also learned you have to put you head into your client's head when they are committing the crime. Don't buy that crap that there is nothing hostile about a shoplifter. The whole thrill of the shoplifter comes from doing something secretive...something they know but NOBODY else does...and getting by with it. So...if the thief does something spectacular to get caught***...now you are dealing with another kind of critter. Some shoplifters WANT to get caught because they want to be publicly humiliated and punished. This kind of person is a little scarier because the head ain't on right and lets hope you figure it out.) 

(get caught***  So, a perfect example of this is a case I had many years ago. My client was the wife of a successful professional man. He was so successful she did not have to work. She wanted a baby but was infertile.  So, in the middle of the day she went out shopping a the Dillards.  She steals some minor item but does it in such an obvious and klutzy way of course she is caught. She is humiliated and taken to jail.  Her husband posts bond. I get her case and secure a good result for her...but before we can complete it...she goes and does it again...except this time it's even worse...its stealing something even MORE trivial and she does it in a MORE obvious way.  At this point I figure out about her shame about being infertile.  She is doing this shit just to humilate herself and punish herself.  So I get the husband aside and I tell him "here is what you need to do".. a. Adopt a child.  b. Get her in to see a therapist ...which they did.   The story has a happy ending...she's a great mom,  a child is adopted and she's never been in a speck of trouble again.)