What chair to choose

I am never surprised at work. This doesn't mean it's boring. It means that, overall, I make my living off of people who just don't get it. Here are a few common characteristics. I'd suggest you check to see if these apply to you, but if they do, you probably won't recognize yourself, because you're too fucking thick headed.

1. You're too fucking thick headed.
2. If you don't like a rule, you think it does not apply to you. Guess what? People in uniforms will have a problem with you. Get with the program. That's the point of rules -to get your dumb ass in line.
3. When other people tell you that you are being a dumb ass, you justify your behavior until they get tired of arguing with you, then convince yourself you convinced them and should move ahead with your retarded ass plan. For the record, you probably should not.
4. Nothing is more important than defending your pride, even your record, employability, or freedom from strip searches. Guess what? That idiot talking shit to you will not give you a job, sign your paycheck or bail you out. Let him talk.
5. You regularly break more than one law at a time, or break two in the same day. Today I read about a public employee caught with some weed at his house. Later the same day he gets a DWI in the company truck. He tells the cops he wasn't impaired because he only smoked a roach. Dude. First, you were at work. Second, you already got busted once today. Did you really have to ensure you spent the night in jail and lost your job? Third, you don't argue with the cops about how little pot you smoked. It's all illegal and you just blew your defense. Go home and flush the weed. You are not using drugs successfully.
6. Distorted self image with respect to the rest of the world. If you look in the mirror and see a cool outlaw, an entreprenuer who just thinks outside the box, a risk taker, a gangsta, if you often say 'people don't understand', 'I had to' or 'it will be ok, and if it's not, I'll deal with it then', chances are that you are, on some level, an idiot who is begging for an ass kicking. Haven't gotten one yet? Ask yourself if luck, like hope, springs eternal. No, wait - ask some homeless guy or somebody in an orange jumpsuit with 'inmate' stamped on the back. That won't happen to you? Refer back to #2. Back yet? You are a dumb ass. Now refer back to #3.

These are my people, and I love them, and appreciate that they pay my mortgage. Well, them and my girlfriend, who makes a lot more money than me. And because I know them, they do not surprise me. However, I am acutely aware of how little space there is between our chairs at the defense table. You have to be ballsy, innovative, flexible and headstrong to be a decent defense attorney. But being able to draw those fine lines put me in a suit on the left instead of handcuffs on the right.

The moral of the story is - It is, in fact, the the subtle differences that make a life.

Habeas is corpus

I've apparently killed my fishie and am very sad. I really loved this fish. He lived in my office and I felt guilty every weekend when I left Habeas by himself with no one to talk to him or feed him, and apologized every Monday morning. I rescued him, since people are always stuffing bettas in these tiny, sad bowls, which I think is terrible; so he got a 3 gallon tank with live plants and was very happy. However, yesterday I thought the tank needed to be cleaned and I changed out the water and washed the algae and fish poop out of the gravel and apparently, he liked it better dirty because he was dead this morning. We buried him in a paperclip box outside my window and I cried in the parking lot.

This leads me to philosophize a bit about some of the fucked up people I see every day. The system punishes them and occasionally tries to rehabilitate them but maybe if they cleaned up too much, they'd go belly up. Maybe some people just need to be in a little crap to be OK. Who are we to say? Maybe the laws of nature apply to us too. For instance, a catfish wants to eat gunk off the bottom of the pond. It's what makes him big and fat and whiskery. Maybe some people are just made to have a continually revoked license, a pissed off family, a familiarity with the jail guards, a lawyer budget, and favorite games to play in a cell. They provide jobs for lawyers and judges and district attorneys and jail guards and legislators and police and probation officers and clerks of court and probably a bunch of people I don't even know about. Maybe some people just don't need the water changed.

Sigh. Well, guess I'll mourn the fish for a couple of days and find another, perhaps luckier, inhabitant for this lonely looking tank, and let him get dirty if he wants to. In the meantime, more power to the catfish people who pay for my office so I can give a dirty fishie a home.