The Most Important Thing

This summer, when I was swimming, just past the breakers at the South Jersey shore, a couple of kids, maybe 12 or 13, got near me. I could tell they had never been in the ocean before because their minds were just blown.  They were giddy and half terrified, their eyes just starting out of their heads.   The tide was going out a bit.  One of the kids was kicking on boogie board, laughing and smiling.  When he floated by me, in the direction of the open sea, I saw his situation was a split second from panic.  His smile was tight, and I could tell his mind was in utter turmoil.

The lifeguard started blowing his whistle.  I reached out and gave the kid my hand, pulled him back to shallower water, until he could stand.  Told him and the other kid (who just had to be his brother) that they should not go above their waist.  That was that.  The lifeguard gave me a quick thanks when I came out.

When I pulled him in, he had just passed to the point where he needed rescue.  He had just gotten into a position from which he could not recover without help. Now, the kid was on a boogie board, and the lifeguard I'm sure was about to come out for him, so it would be a huge misstatement for me to say I saved this kid.  Heck, if I wasn't there, overwhelming odds are, he ends up just fine.

So what I did there wasn't extraordinary, and in fact was extraordinarily easy -- I just reached out my arm and pulled him in -- but if that's the greatest feat of my life, it is enough.  Even if all I really did was save the kid from real panic in the water.

Analog

I got a record player for Christmas.  Yesterday, I set it up after finally managing to get together a couple speakers, speaker wire, an amp, and some records.

Before 2013, I'd never really been much interested in vinyl. I love music, and I listen to a lot of it, but I am not an audiophile in the least.  Vinyl seemed almost perversely difficult: at once fragile and clunky.  Yeah, I'd heard claims that, if you got the right setup, nothing compared to a turntable.  Sure.  If you get the right setup, I would allow for the possibility at the highest level of equipment.  But then, who but the most obsessed could divine the difference?  Any minimal increase in sound quality couldn't possibly be worth an investment I couldn't come close to making.  We're talking thousand dollar styluses (styli is also correct!).  Thousand dollar speaker wire.

Why pursue an expensive, obsolete parallel music platform when I already had first tapes, then CDs?  You could get those anywhere that sold music.  But you had to go looking for vinyl.   After the dawn of constant connectivity (2007?) I got all my music from emusic for a while, then pandora and spotify took over.  Now, the only reason I even own CDs is the car CD player.

My thinking changed in the fall of 2013 when I heard Paul Green play some records on Radio Woodstock.   Maybe Led Zeppelin.  It was something rich and meaty.  It did sound richer than the rest of the (digital) tracks they were spinning.  Somehow brighter and fuller.  This perception of mine may have been a sort of placebo, but, I am sure it sounded good, and certainly not inferior to the other tracks.

I started to think I might want to sink a couple hundred bucks into a budget system.  If the purity of vinyl could come through a radio over car speakers, surely even a mediocre record player and speakers could still produce very satisfying sound.

The lure of vinyl came not just from a perceived richness of sound, but also from its anachronistic quality.

Its simplicity is its advantage.  For one, I have a rudimentary understanding of how a turntable and speakers work.  Not so much with a CD.

And then there's the feel of a record in your hands. I've long been attracted to records as objects because they flat out look cool: all glossy and grooved, spinning smoothly, cardboard jackets like this.  Even better than unfolding the paper insert from a cassette case is sliding a record out of its sleeve, and then poring over the album art and lyrics while the sound washes over you. 

If you put your ear near the turntable, you can even hear the sound coming off the record.  How cool is that?

Looking for records is an adventure with tangible rewards.  I found Born to Run for a dollar. I figured it was probably all crapped up (I can't really tell if a record is in bad shape unless it is severely scratched).   When I put it on, it popped a little on the first song, but after that, it was perfect. Won that find.

Maybe most importantly, it isn't smart, and it doesn't have Internet connectivity.  When you listen to a record, it's not collecting your data or playing commercials at you.  Record listening is a step removed from the commodity and markets that attend every online moment.   Which I think makes it easier to appreciate the music as art.

Then again, all the pre-internet nostalgia and appreciation for the object of an album itself wouldn't com to much if my contemptible little setup didn't sound at least a little awesome.  And it does.  Better than anything I've ever had.  (I admit I've spent an unforgivable lot of time listening to music over computer speakers). Now, if I plugged a CD player into the setup instead of the turntable and cued up the same album, I don't know whether it would sound better or worse or whether I would be able to tell the difference.  But I do know that I've been having a blast with it so far.  Looks like I'm going to need more than four records.

Do It

To keep this feeling.
To stop this feeling.
To feel something.
Because it's what you do
It's who you are.
Without it, there's no spark.
No point.
Nothing to do.
No you.

Only this.
This is what we do.

Maybe tomorrow will be different.
But not today.

On a Minor Street

One time, a hot wind, high mountainside.
That day, canyons and boulder shade.
You stood easy above.
King panted, pranced.
One time, crude day distilled to sustaining air.  


On a minor street in a lesser city,
In a hard-won room
She sets her lips and winds her hair.
She waits for them to beat down the door.
And drag her away.



Sideways years of crumpled days;
Brittle leaves over ragged lawn.
Beware that man's intentions.

On the Unit Today

First thing I met with a client who spotted me at the nurse's station, asked me if I was a lawyer, wanted to talk.  So we sat down in private and he began by telling me that he wanted to go back to the group home he had been staying in.  At least I think that's what he was saying.  It was hard to follow him.  He mumbled.  Like many of my clients, he was unable to remain focused on a single train of thought.  I couldn't tell if he was borderline retarded, overmedicated, or acutely psychotic.  Maybe some combination thereof.  He wasn't altogether incoherent, just difficult to follow.  He told me he had two fathers, that one had left him money but the government stopped paying but they weren't supposed to.  His father had to prove he could take care of him.  He had been abused his whole life.  No little kid, 10, 12 should have to see.  All the blood and everything.  Like many of my clients, he was unable to express to me what he wanted me to do.  Probably, to the extent that his thoughts hung together this well, he just knew that he had a bunch of problems and lawyers are supposed to fix problems and right wrongs.

Fix problems and right wrongs.  That's what I thought I would be doing as a lawyer.  It seems almost foolish to me now.  Like I would pass the bar exam and be handed a magic wand.  Yet, I still believe that's my job. It's still why I'm doing this.  Fix problems and right wrongs within a narrowly circumscribed framework.  That second part is what I'm coming to understand.

And a lawyer is only as powerful as his clients.  By that I mean that lawyers appear powerful to people because they are instruments of the powerful.  Corporate lawyers don't win because corporations hire the best lawyers (though they sure try).  They win because they have all the money.

Back to the unit.

My next client made a suicide pact with her husband.  He succeeded.  She had given him the morphine that he used.  She took more than him.  They couldn't pay the bills anymore.  He was slipping into dementia.  And now she was here in front of me.  What is there to say to her?  Sure, I can tell her not to talk to police without a lawyer.  I can advise her of her present legal status.  But really, what in fuck all am I doing here?  What can I possibly say to this woman that will mean anything?  Her husband died less than a week ago.  As far as I can tell, she remains ambivalent about not dying alongside her partner.  She was soft spoken.  Quite friendly in a diffident sort of way.  I felt powerless and wanted to get away.

A while back I sat down for a meeting with a woman who would turn her face away from me, hold one hand over her ear like she was receiving a radio transmission through an earpiece, start muttering to an unseen interlocutor, and then answer herself back.  "Frederick, they're trying to send me away.  Do you see what they're doing to me here?  Sally, this is Frederick, we're not going to let them do that to you.  We're coming to get you today and we're going to take you home with us.  You don't have to take that from them."  When the subject of her hospitalization and the hospital's desire that she take psych meds came up, she would weep and wail "there's nothing the matter with me."

I wanted to run from her.  I wanted to run screaming from from the lobby, run the 60 miles home, and never speak the name of the city of my employ again.

That was months ago.  Still trying to fix problems and right wrongs.  Still earning my paycheck.

A Poem

This wing's air wheezes dust,
Day wrought grey by crosshatch screen.
It's quiet time.
Four steps across my room
Four from wall to wall.
If I focus I can find the pattern.

Glue glitter on workbook pattern.
Press into paste metalic dust.
No break in the wall.
No bar to pry the screen.
Shuffle every tangent cross the room
Cold and smeared for all time.

That first time,
Lost in orange mottled carpet pattern
Chanting cross the room,
Ashimmer, every thought burst to dust.
Then on your knees behind the screen.
Shackles bolted to the wall.

Paste it to the wall,
For all the watchers of time.
On every whispering screen
A pattern
Battles dust
For the honor of burying me in this room.

There's no room
Beyond the wall,
Only rubble and dust.
A place outside time.
A readymade pattern.
A silk screen.

They installed the screen
To crowd my will from the room
With pat pattern
Patter banking off blank wall.
So there is no time,
Only layers of dust

Screen upon wall.
Room swelled with time.
Pattern in dust.

Another "Win"

I went in today on what was supposed to be a day off in order to have a hearing for client who wanted out of the hospital. It was a tough fight. Prehearing motions, objections, chastisements from the judge. I went after the psychiatrist pretty hard on cross. He admitted he hadn't examined her for two weeks and that he didn't know if she was presently suicidal. I put my client on the stand and she did fairly well. Admitted to a drug problem. Admitted mental illness (PTSD, not the way off base diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder given by the psychiatrist). Judge reserved decision. I told my client to hold on, that I didn't know how long a decision would take, that the long-term goal was keeping her out of the state hospital. I came home and, around 4PM, got a call from work. We won. The judge ruled that the hospital did not prove that she presented a threat of serious harm to herself or others as a result of a mental illness. Huzzah? I hope she doesn't OD.

Election Angst

The presidential election has been dominating the news for months now. I am so sick of the coverage that I often ignore the news. Most of what is reported is gossip and boosterism. Obama going to Afghanistan on the anniversary of bin Laden's death does not induce questions about the decade-old war in Afghanistan, extra judicial killings, or whether the chase was worth the cost. Reporters simply play a clip from whatever vapid speech he gave and then quote republican politicians and political hacks complaining not about the manner of the killing, consequences of it, events leading to it, or even the waste of resources involved in flying to Afghanistan for a photo op, but about him unfairly trying to gain political advantage from the death. In other words, his critics were offended by his style. He was being uncouth. The unrelenting falseness of it repels me. Even further alienating me from politics is that, as Ralph Nader has long argued, both parties are corporate apparatuses. The federal government continues to strengthen itself and the executive continues to assert greater and greater power to ignore the laws passed by congress. Meanwhile, the supreme court issues impenetrable 100-page opinions to justify decisions that can usually be predicted by the party preferences of the judges. But then I see meaningful issues at stake, such as gay marriage and civil rights for gay people, financial and environmental regulation, and social services, and I re-engage. If a republican is elected, I think the country will be worse off than if a democrat is elected. But Obama has been consistently bad on civil liberties, his white house has operated with corporate-like security, and has loaded with gold the corporate criminals responsible for the market collapse. I live in New York, so it really doesn't matter who I vote for for President. I will probably lodge a protest vote of some sort. But I've been pulling for Obama, rooting against Romney. The lesser of two evils. Someone who often seems like he's trying to the right thing. And there's the fear of what would happen if the Republicans got back into power and no one bothered to throw sops to the peasants. If Paul Ryan got to run the show. Then again, maybe I just get sucked into the simple theater/sport of it. Hooray, the Yankees win! Hooray, the Democrats win! Let's go out for Mickey Dee's! So a big part of me wants to say, fuck mainstream politics, I need to focus on something meaningful. Either guy will continue to support the catastrophic Drug War, either will fail to prosecute elites for crimes that would put a poor person in prison, and either will spend much of his time making sure that the money that got him elected stays satiated. But then, Paul Ryan.

More Cinquains

19.
Tonight
Is not the night
Your life changes like you
So long dreamed under tree-shadow,
Dumb kid


20.
Promise
Is for the young.
How to see the future
As ascending blast of guts and
Talent


21.
In Ed's
Room, his finger
Jabbed into my soft chest,
He seems to think that I did this
To him

Cinquains

11.
Listen
Applicant, your
Resume must whisper
Profit, Ivy. Or admit you
Submit.

12.
When you
won't go the speed
limit, I say “Come on,
are you new to driving?” like I
hate you

13.
Master
I called for you
for hours until my throat
was raw and torn but you didn't
appear

14.
Master
I called for you;
you came and put the room
in order never asking why
I called



NOTES FROM THE PSYCH WARD

16.
The ward
stifles Edward
needs a cigarette and
fresh air all he needs, like any
person


17.
The meds
Flatten feeling
The me I know is gone
Wretched as I was before I know this
Is wrong


18.
Caitlyn
Is twenty one
Mixed lithium and booze
Called the help-line slumping into
Coma