Billing in Pajamas

“There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You’ll know when you deserve these times. They come after you’ve been broken.”

― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

Another unproductive day. This last brief is proving to be a long, painful delivery. The arguments aren't flowing as they should. Maybe I'm losing my edge.

Or I'm just exhausted after four months of juggling a very demanding academic program and this equally demanding job.

I'm also still processing the meaning of what just happened. I was telling P last night that there have been formative events in my life, after which I fell into sort of a funk as I tried to figure out what to make of the experience. The days after the Gulf War come to mind, with me spending hours either staring into space or watching enraptured as MTV drew me back into culture and society after being away for a very long time, cigarette in one hand and a Bud Light in the other, at 9:30 in the morning.

This is sort of like that, but in a more positive way I suppose. I went to Manhattan terrified of the unknown, not sure all of this would work, not sure the money would hold out, not sure I had enough intellectual gas in the tank at 61. But it ended up being a magical moment in our lives, so magical in fact that it's sort of dimmed the glow of everything and everyplace else. We both want to go back, to find a rental and spend weeks at a time down there. But will it be the same if the quest, the NYU LLM, isn't there to animate the experience?

This wrestling manifests in several ways.

I want to sleep a lot. It's a constant fight not to crawl back into bed if no one is expecting me on Zoom, and fall into drooling slumber.

I've become pretty surly toward lawyers acting like lawyers. If one of the younger, out-of-town crowd (it's always those people) tries to engage me in the verbal stupid lawyer battles that are the hallmark of this profession, I tend to shut them down or roll out a bit of eye-rolling sarcasm at their performance. Not a great optic for a guy who's spent three decades building a reputation as a nice guy, mentor, and a problem solver. I just don't have the patience for it anymore.

Then there's the emotional thermostat starting to fail me, in small but noticeable ways. Choking up at some song lyric. Hell, I even got a little dewy-eyed at a couple books Peg bought me that arrived yesterday, one about the 1964 baseball season and the decline of the Yankees and rise of the Cardinals that year, and the other proclaiming 1908 the greatest year in baseball history, with the likes of Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, and John McGraw gracing the diamond.

Why get all gooey about baseball? I mean, I never played organized baseball, am demonstrably worthless in a batting cage. But baseball has always carried so many metaphors for life, and been one consistently good part of mine. So yeah, lately any sentimental dive into baseball lore is going to hit me in the heart.

I also find myself trying to mend fences, or more accurately relationships, now that I have a few moments to consider what's important. One of my best friends for nearly forty years texted me last night, unsure if I'd heard he had a heart attack two weeks ago, and was recovering from open heart surgery that required bypassing six blood vessels. They also found a malignant growth. We hadn't spoken for months because of MAGA, and nondenominational Jesus (the buff one), so I'd pretty much completely missed all that. The things we've lost because of this awful political moment, awful decade come to think of it. You can't replace friends who flew next to you in a war, who were there when your sons were born and for whom you were there when his died by his own hand.

What a meander this has become!

I'll get this first complete draft of the brief finished, hopefully before lunch, with a gym trip to break up the day, then back at it to address the fifty other neglected files begging for my attention.