Down Day

"Though I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards."

-C.S. Lewis

Up well before the sun this morning, learning that 5:30 a.m. is about the only time there is no one on the sidewalks outside. Any earlier folks are staggering home from the bars (and into my hallway at 3:30 a.m.--lucky me!); any later and the people who make this City work are unlocking and setting up shop.

Meanwhile my Facebook feed includes posts from back home about George Soros and his liberal cabal trying to infiltrate the political leadership of Bay County. Good grief. I'm learning on this trip that it wasn't that I've been all that bright, but rather than I've been swimming in a pond full of dull normals for the last thirty years. Every weekday now I sit in a room full of people who are intimidatingly smart. And younger. And prettier. And full of energy that left me long ago.

It takes me exactly four days to start unraveling when P and I are apart. This is day four. I find myself skipping meals, waking up at 2 and against a 4 to relive music videos of the greatest hits of 1978, or network ads teasing the Wednesday night TV lineup from this week in 1981, all trapped in amber there on social media. I guess it beats doomscrolling.

My daily routine doesn't help. I awaken, skim the digital NYT and Heather Cox Richardson's daily post, start studying, walk 1.2 miles to class, sit there for a couple hours drinking from the tax firehose, then trudge 1.2 miles back to catch up on a little work and start studying for the next day's class. My only in-person verbal interaction is with the doorman as I leave and return. Around 5:30 I pour a toddy, reheat something Peg's left for me (or skip it altogether as my appetite wanes during these separations), spend a few minutes on the phone with her, and fall into bed exhausted by 9 or so, only to wake up every couple hours after that to look at Charlie's 80s Radio Attic for the MTV play list from this week in 1984.

And as often happens during these weeks, the war starts crawling back into the space where P would be. Never a good thing, that.

It occurred to me this morning that I'm coming up on the 40th anniversary of my college graduation and commissioning. May 9, 1986. All of my family that attended that day are dead, as is my best friend back then who joined our posse for lunch afterward at my favorite Mexican restaurant across from the Coliseum.

It all makes this LLM exercise feel sort of quixotic, or maybe ridiculous. I'm reminded of Martin Sheen's description in Apocalypse Now of Colonel Kurtz when he decided to go back to train as a Special Forces officer at Fort Benning late in his career: "They must've thought he was some far out old man humping it over that course."

I get that inquisitive look from my classmates, probably wondering why I'm not out standing in a tee box in Florida right now. I wonder that too sometimes.

But here we are, with only a few hours before I get to drive back to Corning and P. She comes back with me on Sunday, as do Dean and Slane, and we'll be together for the better part of a month from here.

So this funk will pass, and the Desert will go back where it belongs, trapped in a place where I don't trip on it.

Back to my readings for the day, and finishing a draft summary judgment motion that's been vexing me for weeks.