Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

Lex Anteinternet: Some unwanted Christmas introspection.:   Today, of course, is Christmas Day. Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace...

Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

 

Today, of course, is Christmas Day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace tradition now for almost four decades, a scary thought in and of itself.  I'll admit that I've grown very weary of it and have been now for quite a while.  It involves going to lunch with my coworker professional colleagues and it usually involves having drinks, a delay in ordering, more drinks, etc.

We always go to Mass on Christmas Eve.  Indeed, even as a child my family always went to Mass on Christmas Eve, although not Midnight Mass.  I've never been a night owl and I just don't want to be up that late.  That's the same reason I don't like to go to alte Easter Vigil Mass either.

I am, rather obviously, an early riser.  That's about the sole reason this blog even exists.  Almost everything on here is written very early in the morning.

Anyhow, as I was noting, I've grown really weary of the lunch.  It's clear to me that it's a big deal for some of my colleagues, but in noting that, what I further note is that the more secular they are, or the more convivial, the bigger the deal it is.  And for some it's a rememberance of those who started the tradition, in a decade that is now long past, and which is from nearly another world, the world of men at work without women as colleagues.  I'm not going into that here, although I will in the future.  I've never lived in it, and I don't imagine that world nostalgically.  My best workplace colleagues are women.

For me, with a sense that things must be on time and on target, I get really worried about things dragging on too long to get to Mass on time.  It's never happened, although for the first time yesterday it nearly did.

Things have been really odd recently, for reasons I'll not go into.  I realized right about noon that people had left, save for me and the one coworker I'm really a friend of/with/to.  I noted to her that everyone had left and perhaps we should too.

When I arrived it was rapidly clear something was gravely wrong.  The whole meal had that feeling, and at the end of it, a massive argument broke out/resumed between two individuals who had been engaged in it prior to our arrival.  Indeed, in reality, it was the culmination of an argument that had broken out in a heated fashion after the company Christmas Party (which this was not) and which, in retrospect, has been burning hot and cold now for months and months.

The whole spirit of the country is like that right now.

Around here, where it should be extremely cold right now, it's nearly summer temperature warm. That's not only weird, it's a massive warning sign.  This morning Doug Burgum is posting on "clean coal".  That's moronic and anyone with the slightest bit of sense knows that this has to stop.  Donald Trump, for his part, posted his typical stupid comments oozing anger and this:

I note this as part of what I think I witnessed was both the nation's politics and the nation's political atmosphere bleeding into daily life.  You can feel it everywhere. This must be what it was like to live in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s.  The nation's gone insane, and a certain percentage of the nation is now angrily insane.

But it's more than that.  Part of it is, I"m sure, the inability to endure big changes and big expectations, combined with gross misunderstanding.  Part of it also is the anger that idol worshippers have when they realize their hero is human.  Maybe some of was the march of time on both parties.

Like several other things I've seen like this recently, I was so ill prepared for what I saw that my reaction time to it was just insufficient to deal with it.  It happened, nad was over, before I could do anything to stop it. And looking back, I should have stopped what I should have seen coming weeks ago. 

I've wearied and I'm not the man I used to be.  I'm too tired to put up with and endure such things. But why bring this up at Christmas? There must be some really hurt feelings today, and there must have been going into things.  For me, who has had to take up roles I never anticipated, it's a bitter failure and now a delicate matter to repair.

One thing I think I'm going to repair is the tradition.  It came out of the all male workplace past, and that day is over.  The tradition can remain in the past. The present and the passage of time overcame it.

More and more, the Mass part of Christmas, Christ's Mass, is the important part to me.  It always was really, but I managed to take the wrong road, the American Road, when I was young, even though I knew better.  The field, vette and prairie is what always appealed to me, and the book.  The courtroom not so much.  I've been dealing with the fact that its now too late to change that.

Or at least its too late to change the past.  Enduring the present and future of that, and the office, well not so much.  Sometimes the messages are clear.

"The man's done enough. Leave him alone."  Field of Dreams.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.: 

Roads not taken.

I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective.  Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.

Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik.  His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.

I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career.  I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary".  When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.

Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them.  I've defined existential occupations in this way:

Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grow them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men.  I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.

Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier.  It wasn't the only one I contemplated.  As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture.  Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college.  Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.

At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier.  It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of.  I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have.  And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course.  So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.

I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away.  But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state.  So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard.  This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.

I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans.  By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it.  My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then.  My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness.  She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.

Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management.  He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.

As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old.  One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.

I was right.

Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made.  I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.

To play the story out, I was a geology major.  I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?).  While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.

Lots of people become lawyers that way.  Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.

But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal.  Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it.  I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.

Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar.  And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school  Harvard JD? So fucking what?

Still, the idea resurfaced one more time.  A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time.  At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job.  My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

Well, not really.  But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.

Brian Nesvik is a Casper native.  He  decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.

He's 55 years of age now.  He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree.  He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General.  Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense.  I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out.  He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school.  I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that.  He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.

His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command.  His military career is also impressive, noting the following:

Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY

Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade

Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait

May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq

Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming

Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming

Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming

Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming

His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely.  My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.

Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.

I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?

Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.

Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?

Well, maybe.  I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all.  Externally, I look like a real success.

But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?

 

This is an interesting article:

Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters

The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.

Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things.  But, here goes anyone.

Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church.  The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist.  Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme.  So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.

He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses.  In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.

Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas.  Not every week, however.  It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town.  The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.

These are not the only young women there.  There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer.  My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla.  I know a few of  them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time.  There's the young lawyer and her family.  And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.

The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago.  She's been working there for about a year as well.  Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart.  Apparently, she has no desire to do so.

Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter.  My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another.  Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.

There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage.  Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young.  The opposite is actually the case.  My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married.  My mother's parents were about the same.  I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either.    Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so.  The mantilla women are outliers.

What do they all hope for?

That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.

So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.

Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled.  For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy.  But people are sold in the idea that they do.  Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:

Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.

Joanna, in Office Space.

What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either.  It was foisted upon them.

One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people.  People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species.  For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers.  Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm.  Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.

What also was with us was our basic natures.  No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children.  Everything, in fact, centered around that.  While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't.  That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want.  The existential occupations served that purpose.

Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis.  Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else.  Wealth always corrupts.

Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked.  We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other.  A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.

The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.

Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories.  It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is.  Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of.  Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.  

And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.

The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first.  There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons.  The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home.  There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.

None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself.  Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night.  They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen.  When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home.   One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.

White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.  

If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well.  Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did.  John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from.  Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.

This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest.  Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them.  Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.  

But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized.  Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings.  Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building.  Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.

None of that was natural on a day to day basis.

The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment.  Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two.  After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.

The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology.  The pill took care of that.

The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired.  Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work.  First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message.  Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place.  Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else.  The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.

Problem is, it's all a lie.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not stating that women should not work.  What I'm saying, really, is that men have to.  We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying.  But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging.  And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.  

Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young.  When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it.  We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.

Not can, but must.

And the pressure to do so remains massive.  Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook.  That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.

But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.

I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers.  One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority).  Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.

On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s.  "Lawyers don't like retirement".

If that's true, it's phenomenal.

I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it, Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog.  I'm not sure why I even did.  I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure.  After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history.  I should have.  He was quite a character.

One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan.  I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me.  Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him.  I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff.  You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.

I'm not.

I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it.  I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.

I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.

Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.”  I think there was a huge amount of truth to that.  There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..  

Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it.  As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know.  I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years.  The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.

A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left.  Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it.  All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently.  It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.

I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.

Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai. 

Related threads:

Work with meaning and the meaning of work.

Labels: Commentary, Daily Living, Distributism, Existential Occupations., Mid-Week at Work, Retirement, Subsidiarity, The Practice of Law, Women, Work

A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Labels: Agrarianism, Christianity, Death, Existential Occupations., Health, Hobbies, Introspection, Killetarianism, Medieval Europe, Mid-Week at Work, Old Age, religion, Retirement, Work

Lex Anteinternet: What's Wrong with the United States? We're really ignorant, and its getting worse.

Lex Anteinternet: What's Wrong with the United States? We're really...: 

What's Wrong with the United States? We're really ignorant, and its getting worse.

21% of adults in the US are illiterate. 54% of American adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level. 

And we wonder how Trump got elected?

The illiterate are ignorant, and blisteringly ignorant people vote for stupid stuff.

I had a very strange experience the other day, which I need to be indistinct about.

It had to do with homeschooling.

Twice in recent weeks I've run across a topic that's in the legislature, that being the legal requirement, which the Wyoming 2025 Legislative assembly is about to wipe out, that home schooling parents submit their educational plans to their local school districts.  The requirement is there to prevent parents from basically not educating their children.

Not educating children is what homeschooling is all about.

This wasn't always the case, but it's become the case.  

Some background.

My father was the first male in his family to graduate from high school.  He might have been the third member of the family, as I don't know that much about my paternal grandmother's early life in that fashion.  She probably graduated high school in Denver however, likely from a Catholic high school.  His older sister graduated from a high school in Scottsbluff.

My father went on to a doctorate.

My paternal grandfather, who left school to work at age 13, had such an advance knowledge of mathematics that he helped his children with their high school calculus homework, which is revealing for two reasons, one that is amazing on his part, and secondly all of my father's siblings took calculus in high school.

I didn't take calculus in high school

My father could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.  My paternal grandfather also could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.

My mother did not graduate from high school She was not given the opportunity to.  She earned an Associates as a an adult.  Her mother was university educated, as was her father.  They all spoke two languages, English and French, and had a command of Latin.

Growing up in my family household was like getting a post doctorate in some things, history and science in particular.  I read so early that I was on to adult books before I left grade school and had the odd experience of a junior high librarian not wishing to check a history book as she feared it was too advance.  I read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire before I left junior high.

I was in fact educated on a lot of stuff at home. . . but I was sent to school.

There's an interesting pattern here.  Some of my friends of my age had college educated parents, but not all of them did.  But all of my friends attended college or university.  Not all graduated, but they did receive some post high school education.  One of my closest friends had a father who did not graduate from high school.  He joined the Army in his senior year to fight in World War Two, following in the footsteps of a father who had fought in World War One.  My friend has two bachelors degrees.

And there's another thing here.  Even those people I knew from my generation, and the prior one, who had parents that didn't graduate high school, had quite literate parents.  If I ever went into a house that didn't have a lot of books somewhere, it was shocking.  I can only really recall one.  The home of my friend noted above was like a library.  My parents house  and that of all of my aunts and uncles were packed with books.  In my parents house you could find a few books that were in German or French.  A friend of mine who did not graduate from high school, but none the less went off to university, recalled his grandparents house being packed with books in . . . Gaelic.

My paternal grandmother absolutely insisted that my father go on to get an advanced degree, something he briefly though about not doing.  His unmarried sister near in age to him was sent to university as well.  I was given no real choice but to go on to higher education myself.  

And this was common for people my generation, and the preceding one.  Farm and ranch family in particular often had a manic dedication to higher education.

Home schooling has been around since time immemorial, I suppose, but when I was a kid, what it probably meant, where I live, is that the kid in question was living on a really remote ranch.  Even then, most ranching parents made a dedicated effort to avoid that.  More than a few had a teacher who lived at the ranch, paid for by the school district.  The county I live in had four rural remote public schools, of which only one is still in operation.  The neighboring one had some so remote that if you run across them on really rural roads its a shock.  The teachers at these institutions were admired in a way that's hard to describe.  Anything going on in the area always included them.

I didn't know a single homeschooled kid growing up.

Next to home schooling, of course, is private schooling.  When I was young the only private school I ever heard of was the Catholic school.  It was a big downtown school.  It's moved from downtown, but it still exists.  Catholic education had long been a thing in the US and apparently Catholics are supposed to send their kids to Catholic schools if they can, but I didn't go to it (it was full), nor did our kids.  

When in high school I learned that there was a Lutheran grade school, to my enormous surprise, as I walked by it every day.  After high school I learned that there was a "Christian" school, by which I mean a school attached to one of the sort of due it yourself evangelical Protestant groups.  It started in 1978, so I would have been in high school when it commenced operating.  The ministers for that church, at the time, were drawn from the congregation, and I later met one who was ironically adverse with its tenants as he was a geologist who accepted the truth of evolution, which the church did not.

A church that thinks evolution is a fib, probably doesn't have it taught in its schools.

Which is the point, really.  The goal of a large amount of modern homeschooling is to keep students as ignorant as possible, which is conceived of as limiting tehir "exposure" to corrupting elements.

I've been exposed to a few homeschooled kids over the years and frankly a lot of them were rather weird and very socially awkward.  Having said that, I've met one kid, and know of another, from a homeschooling family who were not that way, and one of which went on to a really high dollar career.

Now, with that comment, let me note that education isn't about getting rich, or shouldn't be.  It's about the Allegory of the Cave.  The problem here is that those exposed to  the sunlight are seeking to drag the ir offspring back into it, deeper in the cave, and into chains.

The simple fact of the matter is that Americans were much more literate prior to the 1990s than they are now.  They read.  They read even if they hadn't graduated high school.

And they read a lot, and a lot of it is much more advanced than what people claim to read now.  Even people who mostly read novels often read things much more advanced than people do now.  I recall one parent of a family friend being a fanatic fan of C. S. Forester, whose novels were just that, but noen the less dealt often with the Napoleonic Wars, something a lot of current Americans probably don't know occured.  One fellow I knew in the National Guard loved Louis Lamour, so much so that he read The Walking Drum, which is set in the Middle Ages, about which he was able to speak intelligently.  Another fellow, who had been a career Marine, was reading War and Peace.

Everyone read the newspaper.  You'd frequently see periodicals in people's houses, including unfortunately Playboy on occasion, but the latter had sufficiently good interviews that my high school newspaper teacher used those as examples and adopted them for the pattern of a series in that high school journal.  Less unfortunately, you'd see Time, Newsweek and Life in people's houses routinely.  And everyone read the local newspaper, by which I mean everyone.

The National Geographic seemed to be in the home of every household that had children, including ours.  Our collection went back into the 1940s, from my father's parents home.

Cartoons didn't make much of an appearance in our house, and I"ve never developed a taste for most of the cartoon journal type of cartoons, like Superman, but what I do recall is when they showed up, it was often Mad Magazine, which actually is really adult oriented, and not in the juvenile way "adult" is often used.

The point is, when people claim people were "more educated" in the past, including populists who are not today, they tended to be, but in ways that people now just don't really quite grasp.  They often had lower levels of educational achievement, but because they lived in a literate world, they were societally educated.

You can go into a lot of homes today and find that the occupants read. . . nothing.  

Instead, people consume only what suits them.  

In almost all of the 20th Century, it wasn't really possible to hear only the news you wanted to.  Even if you limited yourself to radio, prior to the introduction of television, you were going to get a wide range of news.  Newspapers were, as noted, almost a requirement for most households.  When television came in, at first, it was highly local but the news was national and there was no avoiding it.  You weren't going to get right or left wing propaganda from anyone.

That's all passed.

Americans aren't reading.  What media they consume is self reaffirming, like Protestant sermons from the 1600s.  People are listening only to like minds, and the nation is becoming more and more ignorant.

Which is why we have Donald Trump in office.  No literate nation would elect him to anything.\

Note that this doesn't mean the population is dumb.  Ignorant and dumb are not the same thing.  But we suffer from the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect in a major way.  We're listening, basically, to ourselves, and making excuses for our failures, and justifying our appetites.

And it puts the entire globe in danger.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Ann Camugula and Cynthia Blanton.: 

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit.  I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.

Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:

Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog.  I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.

Miss March holding her own centerfold?

No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.

The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing.  Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt.  She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph.  Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar.  Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy.  Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.

So why am I posting this here?  Cute story?

I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does.  But we're posting this for other reasons.

Gerard is apparently a famous playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted.  The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy.  That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.

And that's the reason we're noting her.

She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family.  By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life.  If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be.  She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.

In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.

Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico.  She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.

At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age.  Camuglia was born in May 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that.  Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.

Blanton went on to success.  Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.

The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy.  In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker.  It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.

What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be.  Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through.  Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.

I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either.  Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links.  That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew.  There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people.  Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.

Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".

Related threads:

Secrets of Playboy

Lex Anteinternet: The Obituary

Lex Anteinternet: The Obituary: 

The Obituary

Mira qué bonita era by Julio Romero de Torres, 1895.  Depiction of a wake in Spain.

I didn't have him as a teacher in high school, but I certainly knew of him.¹  Somehow or another, I also knew that a student that was in school with us, and who my cousins knew, was not only his daughter, but also one of his students.  Apparently that was awkward. 

I don't do a good job of keeping track of former teachers.  I probably couldn't tell you where a single one of them was, even the ones I really liked, let alone those I only sort of knew by association.  In his case, there was our classmate, whom I also didn't know (she was a couple of years ahead of me), but he was also known to our parents.  Without knowing for sure, in looking at it, I think that must have been because he was from a Catholic family here in town.

My classmate died the year before last.  She was 62.

I read his obituary as he was so well known locally.  And then I recalled there were bits and pieces of his story I'd picked up over the years.

His wife was also a teacher.

Sometime after I left high school, the couple apparently civilly divorced.²   He remarried, and apparently to an apparently significantly younger women whom I take was also a teacher.  According to the obit, they had a child after he retired, who would now be about 31.  He would have been about 56 when she was born.  I can dimly recall my parents and my father's siblings talking about this as well, mostly in a somewhat bemused manner, given the difficulties of raising an infant, in their view, when you are that old.

When my classmate died, her mother was mentioned in the obituary.  Indeed, her obituary characterizes both of her parents as loving, and contains praise of them.

His obituary mentioned both of his daughters by his first marriage, and then goes on about his second.  His wife, the mother of my classmate, isn't mentioned at all.  The obituary is profuse on his latter "marriage", calling that individual, named in the obituary, the "love of his life" amongst other things.

Of course, the dead don't write their obituaries.  If they did, who knows how they'd read?  We might all fear how they'd be penned.  I've read plenty where a "first" and "second" spouse are mentioned.  This one is profuse on his love of one woman that he had children by and which the civil law would regard as his wife, but totally silent as to his wife who was the mother of my classmate. My classmate's obituary mentions her, and kindly, using the Americanism "step" to describe her as her "stepmother", which is polite, but the second "wife" of a divorced person isn't anything, relationship wise, to a child of the "first" marriage at all.³    Children, of a later marriage of any kind are, of course, as they're related by blood, i.e., genetically. Of course, children born out of wedlock to an illicit partner, to which I am in no way comparing this situation other than to note it, are "half" siblings as well.⁴ 

It must be a later child of the second union that wrote the obituary, as it concluded with the funeral details, those being an apparently civil funeral, followed by an "Irish wake", the latter something not really understood by Americans.  A real wake comes before, not after, the ceremony, and the body of the deceased is present. Indeed, the body is key to the wake, and the dead's family and friends do not allow the body to be left alone.  Prayer for the dead is a feature of it, but there is also food and drink and even courting, which in part has to do with the fact that life goes on, but in part because in more natural societies people live much closer to death than they do in our false one.

Everywhere, real wakes have much diminished.⁵

But then, so has our understanding of, and appreciation of the metaphysical and the existential, and as most people do not dwell deeply on those topics, and the culture has drifted many of those who drift with it bear no fault for having done so.

There's no Irish wakes without prayer, the deceased, and a sense of the next world having stepped into this one.  In our age, however, we expect this world and how we define it to step into the next one.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,

et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion,

et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.

Exaudi orationem meam,

ad te omnis caro veniet.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,

et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.⁶

Footnotes:

1.  In no small part because he was a well put together athletic man who drew hall monitor duty, but didn't seem to care for it much.  Indeed, if you went by him in the hall, when he had it, he didn't bother to ask you where you were going.

2.  I'll admit that this entry disregards the topic of Catholic annulment. Did they obtain one?  No idea.

To add to that, do I know anything whatsoever about the circumstances of their "divorce" and what brought it about, including who brought it about.  No I don't.

3.  The etymology of the prefix "step" goes back to the 8th Century and denoted an orphan.  It was later extended in Old English to connote a remarriage of a widow.

Some "step" parents, it might be noted, particularly in the case of an early death of an actual parent, or an abandonment by one of them, really step up to the plate and become effectively de facto parents.

The Pogues song Body of an American gives a good description of Irish wakes and how they can be.  The movie Road To Perdition, however, gives a very good depiction of a traditional wake, complete with the body iced.

4.  Again, as the fraud of civil divorce is so widely recognized as real in the Western World, I am in no way comparing the children of illicit affairs to the children of later contracted civil marriages.

5.  I've been to a real wake once, for a deceased second cousin, and it was horrific.  My father, who was 1/2 Irish, and 1/2 Westphalian by descent, but whose family did not retain any Irish customs, detested them.

6.       Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon them.

Thou art worthy to praised, O God, in Zion,

and to thee shall prayer be offered in Jerusalem.

Hear my prayer,

for to thee shall all flesh come.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon them.

 Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Lex Anteinternet: 2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.

Lex Anteinternet: 2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.: 

2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.

Jimi Hendrix playing Room Full of Mirrors

At least by some measures, New Years are supposed to be periods of introspection.  If so, the annual arrival of New Year’s this year certainly has been for me.

2023, by which I really mean the period from October 2022 to the present, has been the worst year of my life, and that’s saying something.

Probably only people who know me really well would know that I’ve had, at least by western world standards, a rough life to some degree.  My teenage years and early (20s) adulthood was overshadowed by the physical and accompanying mental decline of my mother, something that still hangs over me like a dark cloud in a lot of ways.  It certainly sprung me from being a child at age 12 to an adult at age 13 virtually overnight, and not in ways that were good really, but in ways you can’t ever get back.  My relationship with my mother really didn’t recover in some ways until she was near death, and it never recovered in some ways.  I’m still working on that, trying to understand that what happened to her wasn’t her fault, or anyone else’s.

Added to that, the death of my father at age 62 was an irreparable loss to me that I’ve also never recovered from and won’t be able to.  As I noted here the other day, being an only child meant that I didn’t have a sibling to help endure this loss with, and when he died the person then closest to me in the world died, leaving me with an obligation to my mother that was a very heavy burden under the circumstances.

In short, things haven’t been always a treat.

But then, are they for anyone?

It may in fact be the case that everyone’s life is rough, to at least varying extents.  Maybe its best if you don’t even recognize that fact.

Anyhow, in October, 2022, as I’ve noted here before, I had colon surgery, following a colonoscopy that revealed a polyp too big to be removed in that process.  I really waited well beyond the age at which you should have your first colonoscopy, which was inexcusable on my part.  Had I gone in earlier (a lesson for everyone who might read this), the surgery would never have been necessary.  Ultimately the polyp proved to be precancerous, and was “as close to cancer as it can be without being cancer”.

I was 59 years old when I went in for that and that’s the very first instance of surgery, other than I suppose oral surgery to have a broken molar and the nearby wisdom tooth, taken out.  What I didn’t really grasp, but should have even due to the oral surgery, is that I wasn’t going to bounce back right away.  I expected to.  I didn’t even really expect to be out of work for more than a couple of days, in spite of everything that everyone told me.

Well, I’ve never fully recovered from the surgery and I’m not going to, that’s clear by now.  I notice it mostly in the mornings.  I just can’t eat.  Things make me sick, no matter what they are, as a rule.  The onset of late in life lactose intolerance has made that even worse.  For decades what I ate for breakfast was cereal with milk.  I can’t really eat that anymore.

So be it, but what really surprised me was the onset of really deep fatigue.  I was simply worn out from the surgery and it lingered for months.  I was tired like I never had been before in my life.

To compound it, when the diagnostic films were done for the colon surgery, a MRI was done all the way up to my neck which revealed I had a sizable polyp on my thyroid. The same surgeon recommended that the thyroid come out and seemed to look at the question as to what to do as almost absurd.  I was so surprised, and so beat up from the first surgery, that I went to my regular doctor for a second opinion.  He referred me to an endocrinologist. That doctor had no qualms at all about what needed to be done.  It needed out, the risk of cancer was so high, I was informed, that it was almost certainly cancer.

Great.

I ended up having a partial thyroidectomy in Denver.  I was extremely hesitant about the whole thing.

Well, the polyp turned out to be benign, which overjoyed the medicos but made me feel like I'd done something I could have avoided. After surgery, I hoped to avoid medication (I've never had daily medications), but wasn't lucky there either.

Since the thyroid surgery, and particularly at first, on a lot of days I've just been in a fog and tired all the time. It’s a difficult thing to describe, as it’s a feeling that’s internal.  I don’t think anyone else noticed it at all, but plowing through my days, and that’s what it felt like, I just didn't feel right.  I complained a lot about it to my wife, but in retrospect now I realize that if you complain a lot about certain topics, it become routine and won’t be paid too much attention to, particularly if there are no external manifestations that are obvious.

There were in fact external manifestations, but they weren’t obvious to anyone but me.  Normally, I look forward to the weekends and feel disappointed if I have to work on Saturdays, which I often must do.  I was so tired and dragged down, however, that I actually started to look forward to having to be in my office on Saturday.  I’d drag myself out, a little, to go fishing and hunting, but my feet felt leaden and I just wasn’t having the fun I normally did, the exception being when my kids were here.

I just went in for a follow-up and upon examination just recently. At that time the doctor asked me how I was doing and I reported what I was feeling and experiencing.  He gave me a physical examination.  I didn’t have bloodwork yet, as doing this on December 26 meant that I didn’t have the chance to get it done.  Based on the physical examination, they determined they needed to up my meds. “Everything will be fine”, I was told.

The bloodwork came back and showed everything to be just what it should be.  They immediately cancelled the doubling of the meds.

Long story short, what’s going on is post-surgery depression, a thing I didn't know even existed.

This is, apparently, particularly associated with thyroid surgeries, although most people don’t experience it. To just sort of note what’s out there, here’s a medical journal report on it:

Thyroid surgery is usually recommended for thyroid cancer and can be to remove one lobe of the thyroid (partial thyroidectomy) or to remove the entire thyroid (total thyroidectomy). Thyroidectomy may also be recommended for certain non-cancerous disorders including hyperthyroidism and large goiters. The results of a total thyroidectomy is hypothyroidism which requires lifelong treatment with a thyroid hormone pill. Several recent reports have highlighted a decrease in the quality of life and an increase in depression in some patients with hypothyroidism due to thyroid surgery. Therefore, the authors have examined if there is an association between thyroid surgery and a new onset of depression.

Great.

Apparently post-surgery depression is a thing with older adults anyhow, and I’m 60.  But to make it even niftier, depression is even more associated with colon surgery.  Another medical journal notes

The prevalence of anxiety, depression and PTSD appears to be high in patients who have undergone colorectal surgery. Younger patients and women are particularly at risk.

I don’t know the cause of all of this, and there could be a bunch of them that occur to me, some of which actually wouldn’t explain it in my case.  But being honest with myself, one of the things has to do with a family history and my early life.

Anxiety of a type is a condition which occurs on my mother’s side of my family.  Not everyone has it by any means, but some do and at least in one case, my maternal grandfather, it was really noticeable.  He was by all accounts an extremely intelligent man, but as a young man he suffered enormously from anxiety which kept him from building a career at an age, in that era in particular, a person normally did, and which in turn kept him from marrying at an age when people normally did.  My grandmother was his fiancé forever, and its actually a bit surprising that she waited for him, but then she had her own background haunting her, that being that she was highly educated and intelligent, but her own mother was not particularly fond of her, and was open about it.

Ultimately my grandfather found a career in real estate in Montreal, and did well until the Great Depression. When the Great Depression hit, and funds trailed off, he turned to drink, something that plagued him for years.  Remarkably, probably in the late 40s or early 50s, a Catholic Priest apparently told him to stop drinking and he did then and there, cold turkey.  Even more remarkably, my Grandmother suffered a miscarriage with what would have been her eighth child and went to a Priest, maybe the same one, and asked if she could stop performing the Marital Debt.  He said she could. That means that my grandfather, for the last ten or more years of his life, didn’t drink anymore, which is where he had taken refuge from stress, and also lived in a sexless marriage, which must have added enormously to his stress.  Amazingly, he seems to have actually pulled his act together, and lived out the balance of his life as a happy guy before dying at age 58.  His siblings, however, never got to where they trusted him and that ended up being taken out, after his death, on his widow and surviving children.

That’s an extreme example, of course, but there are a couple of others.  Something afflicted my mother, but nobody has a clue as to what it was.  She recovered from a condition pronounced to be terminal, and therefore the early diagnosis was either wrong, or her recovery was miraculous (which is what I think it was).  Her recovery, while real, was never complete, however.  As another example, one of my cousins on this side of the family, named after my mother, and one year older than me, was so conscious of anxiety being a factor in her makeup, she purposely chose a scientific lab career in order to avoid it.  In her early 60s, the impacts of this have not hit her, but she’s dying of cancer presently.

I know now that anxiety has impacted me my entire adult live, although largely unacknowledged by me.  I don’t recall it being a factor at all until I was an adult, but the trauma of what I went through as a teen probably didn't help, long term.  The first time I really experienced it was when I worried about going to basic training, but I got over it quickly when I was there.  After that, it became clear to me that I experienced travel anxiety, which is a condition that is something that uniquely occurs in some people.  It’s hard to explain.  Ironically, I've traveled in my adult life a huge amount, and generally like where I'm going, once I'm there.

It’s when I became a litigator that I really became conscious of anxiety, however.

Litigation is an extremely stressful career as it is.  Anxiety runs rampant in the field.  According to the ABA, for lawyers in general, a study revealed:

• 64 percent of lawyers report having anxiety.

• 28 percent lawyers suffered from depression

• 19 percent of lawyers had severe anxiety

• 11.4 percent of lawyers had suicidal thoughts in the previous year

And that’s just regular lawyers.

There have been study after study on this topic, and they all come about the same, with some coming out much worse.  I’ve seen one article that has dissed these findings, but just one.  My guess is that probably double these figures (except for the self reporting anxiety, which would amount to a statistical impossibility) would be the case for litigators.

Indeed, I’ve long noted that most litigators actually won’t try a case.  I have tried a lot of cases, and one of the reasons why is that I’ve always been conscious of the duty not to allow a person’s anxiety to keep them from dutifully fulfilling their duty to their client.  I”ve sometimes worried, in fact, that I might possibly try more cases than others in order to counter the fact that anxiety might be infusing my views, but I don't think that's the case.  Anyhow, anxiety in litigation is so bad, as noted, that a majority of litigators actually won’t try a case.  I've always just been aware that it was there, can impact how you think, and set it aside.

In other contexts, I’ve long seen the impact of anxiety working itself out in destructive ways in the legal field.  I’ve known lawyers who were drug addicts or alcoholics, or who engaged in other destructive life choices.  I’ve known two who quit practicing due to anxiety, one self-declaring that and the other just not being able to overcome an addiction to alcohol otherwise.  One really well respected plaintiff’s lawyer actually disappeared from his household and family for a couple of weeks until he was found in a hotel in another state where he’d gone on a profound days long bender.  Three I’ve been aware of just disappeared, two resurfacing in a seminary and one in the People’s Republic of China.

This all being the case, while I’ve been a successful lawyer, law probably wasn’t a field that I should have gone into.  One lawyer friend of mine from Germany, whom I remarked to on this, dismissed this, saying “you are an intellectual, your choice was to become a lawyer or a priest”, which is an interesting way of looking at it, but had I been smarter, I’d probably have chosen the path of my scientific cousin in order to avoid the stress.

It doesn't matter now.  Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, "This is the business we've chosen".  And by and large, it worked out well.  Being honest with myself, I've been able to do a lot of interesting things, and have constantly learned new fields and topics, all the time.  If you are an autodidatic polymath, it's hard to imagine a field that would actually offer so much as the law.  And if you do like visiting obscure places, at least prior to COVID, it really allowed you to.

In saying all of this, what I’m saying now is that looking back on the past horrible year, I can look back decades and see the points at which the stress rose up and made me act in ways I never would have, although never in a professional sense. Each time, really, was a cry for help, but cries for help don’t really come through that way if they’re not posed that way. And sometimes, there is no existential help, you just need to pick up your pack and carry on.

This past year, however, with the fog of post-surgery depression setting in, I was really unaware of it.

I should have been, as I didn’t mentally feel right.  I did keep mentioning that “I feel slow”, but that means you feel slow.  The real warning was when I absolutely exploded on two partners who have been keeping a long running irritating argument going for years, permanently ending it.  It needed to end, but blowing up on them was the wrong thing to do, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I wasn’t told to take a hike.

In Catholic theology there’s something called “the problem of evil”, which boils down to “why does God allow bad things to happen”. There are various answers to that question, but a universal partial response is that God doesn’t allow something to occur if he cannot bring good out of it.  In our temporary lives that can be awfully hard to accept, but I believe it to be true.  In this instance, I can now in fact see this at work.  In a way, this allows me to go back, but clear minded, to the beginning of my career as I now approach its end, but to be a kinder, more thoughtful person, and a more grateful one.  I do believe that people can and do change if they wish to, and while it’s not as if I’m now going to become an Iron Man competitor, or something, I am in a way following a bit of the same path taken by a friend who was very bitter about his legal career, and openly so, but in the last few years has become very grateful for it.  I have a lot to be thankful for.

I also have the chance now to beat anxiety that was lurking there, rather than to sort of give into PTSD, which is basically what I have had in a way.  That condition, known as combat fatigue originally, or shell shock, has been determined to be much wider than originally thought, and the frequent comparisons of litigation to combat are pretty accurate.  But knowing what’s what is frankly more than half the battle.

Part of that also I think is following a bit of what Alcoholics Anonymous and other addition programs have in their “twelve steps”.  I’m not saying I need to join AA or NA, or something but rather the page AA took from the advice of a Catholic Priest, which is similar to what Jews do on Yom Kippur, is to apologize to people you’ve hurt.  I’ve done that with four people already, which is probably the set I needed to.  But beyond that, part of it is being more tolerant to the people and conditions we routinely encounter, something that is difficult in a judgmental profession like the law.  

So, in the end, I’m grateful to have an outside professional let me know what was going on, and that its connection to surgery, twice will remediate, and indeed already are.  But beyond that, I’m grateful for the door it opened and which I’m walking through to be more aware.

Pax vorbiscum.