I'm Glad I'm not at St. Mark's Anymore

When Thurgood Marshall learned Clarence "Uncle" Thomas would be taking his seat on the Supreme Court, he remarked, "You had chicken salad.  Now you have chicken shit."  That's proved to have been an understatement, but it accurately describes the current state of my old musical home.

I spent seven seasons in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City.  It was great being back in a music group, especially one that was decent as opposed to the Turdville Chum Shovellers.  And we had good clergy.  Tyler Doherty, rector and then also dean.  And Holly Huff, rising through the ranks to assistant priest.  COVID hit, but we kept burbling along courtesy the powers of the Internet.

But it soon became apparent COVID had hit harder than we knew.  When I got it in January 2021, the gift it kept giving me was a torpedoed GI tract and a gut biome I had to rebuild and still have to monitor.  That was nothing compared to Tyler.  He couldn't get rid of it, and it was sucking the juice out of him.  He needed a cane to walk.  The services he conducted became fewer, and he had trouble standing for any length of time.   By the time he finally threw in the towel, resigned, and went on disability a year ago, he was practically a phantom.  His farewell service he had to sit through entirely.  Holly stepped into the breach to become priest-in-charge.  She was young (barely older than my youngest daughter) and managing a long distance relationship (a draining pain in the ass as I well know), but she held things together.  Then they announced the selection of a new dean, her partner finished grad school, and on my birthday she left the cathedral and headed for NYC.  Probably with a severe case of burnout and a deep reluctance to return to a second fiddle role, especially since the new boss will be far less than Tyler.

In the meantime they brought in another priest to help Holly and now fill in until the new dean takes over.  Steven Smith.  In all honesty I don't care much for him, and today's sermon was a good example of why.  The Old Testament reading was Jonah preaching in Nineveh, and Smith kept talking about how we know this and we know that with respect to the Book of Jonah.  No.  We.  Don't.  What we know is: 1) there likely was a man named Jonah in the 8th Century BCE in the North Kingdom, and he may have been considered a minor prophet and preached at Nineveh; 2) there was no big "come to Yahweh" moment at any point in the Neo-Assyrian Empire; and 3) the Book of Jonah was not written until several centuries later, after the rise of Aramaic.  The only people granting any historicity to the Book of Jonah are evangelical "scholars" like Donald Wiseman, i.e. hacks.  It's a fairy story, and while we know what it says, we do NOT know anything in it is a true story.  Quite the contrary.  If I wanted to hear sloppily ascribed Bible stories, I'd go listen to some vangie Bible thumper rant away.  It has no place in an Episcopal church.

But then he kept going.  Supposedly, the moral of the story is that God does not relent.  Right.  I would submit the moral of the story, as with so many of the stories in the Bible, is that God can't be bothered to do his goddamned job.  Time and again He sends frightened, barely literate bumpkins into harm's way to deliver His message, when He could do it Himself far easier and with greater effect.  So why doesn't He?  Apparently He's either cruel, lazy, a buffoon, a dick, or some combination thereof.  And in a hairy plot twist, God ultimately DOES relent.  Because Nineveh sorted itself out, God refuses to destroy it, much to Jonah's chagrin, who holds to the position that Nineveh should get what it has coming.  And God ends up having to chastise him about this.  And that's why many modern scholars view the Book of Jonah as misinterpreted satire.

And then he kept kept going, into the Gospel reading, the Parable of the Vineyard Owner and the Laborers.  Smith's takeaway, which frankly is the standard takeaway, is that the folks who have been saved a long time shouldn't be resentful of those who get saved at the last minute and still receive full salvation because God has infinite love and infinite salvation to go around.  Let's set aside for the moment the inevitable consequence of a parade of Musks and other evil rat fuckers receiving salvation on their death beds after lives of leaving nothing but destruction in their wakes, a result we can see as nothing but unjust (contrary to the message of the Bible) and reinforcing of the need to make them pay in THIS world (also contrary to the message of the Bible; fuck it).  The real takeaway is that finite systems do not scale to infinity.  God may be able to get away with payouts like that, but a vineyard owner can't, and he'd find that out in a fast hurry.  The next work day, all the laborers show up at 5, work two hours, and demand a full day's pay.  That can't work.  Obviously.  And contrary to what Smith preached, it isn't about "deserving", it's about earning.  The full-day laborers aren't telling the owner he can't pay the part-day laborers whatever; they're telling him he has to pay them more than the part-day laborers because they earned more.  This isn't some Golden Ticket for Salvation, where one is all you get because one is all you need.  This is their daily bread.  So the analogy is silly, worthy of C.S. Lewis, yet people have slurped it up with a big spoon for nearly 2,000 years.

And now we come to the crux of the problem.  This parable, and nearly every Bible story, was just an attempt by finite people to explain the infinite acting on the finite world.  People who had little if any idea that infinity existed in any sense other than "really effing big".  People who had little understanding of how any aspect of reality worked.  So their stories, when actually examined, have proved to be wrong or at least silly.  Churches should be explaining how these stories can still be considered to explain anything, if in fact they can.  This is the intellectual and spiritual heavy lifting that churches should be focused on.  And that they avoid every Sunday. 

Yeah, Complicated

Now back in Rottenwood Depths, I started packing shit up and getting it out of the house for real.  By the time I got done, I had four storage units in the rental center.  Rented a truck for the in town hauling, and it was pricey.  Looked into long-haul costs and about died.  They would have crippled us.  So I made a command decision and bought a truck.  Even with license, insurance, and repairs, the thing cost 1/3 what renting would have.  What a fucking world.  (As an epilogue, it's now sitting at the farm in need of more repairs.  Some wee, gnawing beastie chewed through the fuel line.)

So I loaded the truck, and on 10-11 June (with no license, title, or insurance because there was no time to wait for them) I did a straight shot back to the farm.  Unloaded, cleaned some more, then went back to SLC on 16 June.  Piano movers came 17 June, and I got the truck licensed and insured 18 June (Woohoo!).

21-24 June: Time to move Boy.  Loaded his stuff and other stuff and did yet another straight through.  He followed in his vehicle with his luggage and the cats, making a stopover along the way.  Got to the farm, unloaded, did a last check-through for deados and bait stations, moved him in, straight back to SLC for the final load-out.

To be continued.

The Beginning

Well it's July and I'm getting ready to head back to Iowa to wrap up a bunch of business, so I figured I'd better get this narrative back on track.  I've spent the time recovering, along with clearing underbrush (endless blackberry), maintaining the woodpile, cleaning and repairing the roof, doing house maintenance, tending the vegetable gardens, and performing household chores while Frau works.

As I said in the prior entry, in April LL Spurge and  PM 3D gave me notice in April, three months earlier than I'd intended to give them for an end-of-August departure.  The June deadline stole two months from us, so Boy and I were scrambling.  Spurge and 3D had been planning this since last year.  The routine for 10 years had been that 3D sent me a new lease in August, and I ignored it.  We spent the vast bulk of our time there as a monthly rental.  This time, though, instead of the lease running through the following August, 3D inserted a March termination date.  When she gave me the notice in April, she noted the lease had already expired and they were being generous by allowing us to stay through June.  I quickly added Spurge and 3D to the list of assholes who will meet untimely ends should I ever be diagnosed with an unfortunate condition, and I started working the problem.

First I moved a bunch of stuff back into the storage units, which was disappointing but freed up most of two rooms for staging items for what I knew would be a multi-destination move.  Then I got on the issue of what to do with Boy.  Fortunately, a problem arose that allowed me to solve two in one stroke.  Li'l Sis informed me it was no longer possible to insure the farmhouse without someone living there.  I ran it past Boy, and he agreed to move there.  I knew I would have to get there and clean it out first as I knew it was a mess.  That proved a gross understatement.

I left 7 May and drove straight through (Yes, straight through.  Until I had the farmhouse ready and was out of Rottenwood Depths, I knew I did not have the leisure for overnight travel.) and arrived at the farm on 8 May.  For a lesser mortal, what I found there would have been soul-destroying.  The outbuildings were all gone, except for the metal bones of the boxcar and the rubble pile of the old garage lying on its former contents.  Antique implements were standing around, and everything was decaying from exposure.

Inside the house was worse, much worse.  The place was stuffed full of stuff, piles of nonsense everywhere, with little pathways through it all in the dining room, living room, and parlor.  Grandma's desk was buried in piles of financial and medical records.  Everything in the basement was rotting.  The main bedroom upstairs that Sperm Donor had used reeked of piss because he had become incontinent and regularly soaked the mattress.  He'd wrecked Mom's mattress in the parlor in a similar fashion.  And there were dead mice (deados) everywhere.  Li'l Sis had simply had the exterminators put poison stations everywhere, and there were desiccated carcasses practically carpeting the place.  Hells, there were two in the washing machine.

We had a 20-yard Dumpster scheduled, but it wasn't there yet, so I went to work on what I could.  I cleared a small space in the living room to set up a cot, then I cleaned the kitchen so there was a place to store and prepare food.  I cleared out the office area and other spaces by dragging all the papers out west of the house to where the chicken coop once was and burning them.  Several yards of it.  The Dumpster arrived, and I filled it rapidly.  The refrigerator hadn't been cleaned since it was moved in, so I cleared all the ancient food out of it and disinfected it.  I dumped the smelly mattresses so I could start airing the place out.  Hauled a carload of clothes to Mom's nursing home in Wellman (At least they had treated her nicely, which was more than you could say for the fucking asylum in Lone Tree.).  And everywhere there were deados and poison stations that had to go.  I filled the Dumpster, wrapped up a couple of other things, and on 22 May headed back.  Again I drove straight through and arrived on 23 May.

Then things got complicated.

The Long and Winding Road

Well here it is, 13 December, Friday the 13th, and I'm just about to the end of this mess of a year.  25,000 miles on the box truck I picked up in June, thousands more on the car, and another 1,000+ by air.

It started in April.  I'd been planning on ditching out this year and rejoining Frau in Washington State.  Target date was August since that was the month we'd moved in and that was what had been the "annual date" even though we'd been on a month-to-month for years.  But Landlord Spurge and Property Manager Debby Does Deseret had apparently been plotting, and in April 3D told me I had until the end of June.  So I had to scramble and find places for Boy and Le Crap and then get myself hauled the 1,000 miles to Frau.

And I did it.  Nearly turned myself into a crater, but I did it.  Now I'm sitting in Salt Lake City wrapping up some business, Then I'll run the leg to Washington one more time.  Then I'll settle in for a long, Winter's nap.  And I'll tell this story serially over the next few months.  Buckle up, it's been a bumpy ride.

Back To The Actual Road

Well this has been a year from Hell, a substantial percentage of it spent on the road.  In April I was informed we had to be out of the Cottonwood Heights place by the end of June.  I started arranging moving Boy to the Iowa farm and me to Washington to finally rejoin the wife.  This resulted in seven, cross-country road trips between Utah and Iowa and two between Utah and Washington, with the ultimate monster, Washington to Iowa and back, coming up some time in November.  It's been a real bite in the pills, and I have many tales to tell that I shall spin out in the dark, wet Winter to come.

The Religious-Hate-Ure of the Theocratic Republic of Utardistan Strikes Again

Back in January, the Utah Bar offered an online CLE for that pesky and farcical "professionalism and civility" credit.  Since I didn't have to go anywhere, and since it was free, I signed up.  The program was our glorious governor Spencer Cox (aka Spence Buddy and Dick With Ears) and another governor bemoaning the incivility in current political discourse and solemnly advising us to be nicer.  What it really amounted to was a big promo for the status quo.  "Be nice.  Don't get angry.  Keep things safe and sedate."  That works well enough for those at the top of the hill and they treat each other more or less civilly because they don't want to mess up their cushy sinecures.  How they treat those down the hill though is another matter.  As I've pointed out with law firms, the tower firms treat the rest of us like something they just stepped in, and they do so with impudence because no one will enforce any behavioral rules against them.  That's the way it is across the entire system.  So if you want the people at the top of the hill to stop pissing on you and calling it rain, civility is not going to get you there.  You're going to have kick in some doors and then kick in some heads.  Sorry Friends of Gandhi (FOG, because that's what you're walking around in), but Stokely Carmichael was right: For nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, and the US and the rest of the crapitalist plutocracies have none.

And this last week Governor DWE demonstrated yet again just how easy it is to control a flock of sheep.   At the request of the Fools on the Hill (which, like the RethugliKKKon Party in this this state, is really just an arm of the LDS Church), he signed into law a ban on all alcohol over 80 proof.  Say goodbye to all whiskey and a lot of other things.  This of course is religious legislation aimed straight at all of us who aren't delightsome.  It's part of Larry H. Christ's Parent's Empowered program, which I got to see up close and personal at its inception as a member of the study group at Dan Jones Research (Which is another arm of LDS fascism.  Dan Jones was at Utah State when I was there, a geography professor whose specialty was finding new and interesting ways to lie with statistics.  It got to be too much even for the goose-steppers running the university, they told him he couldn't do partisan politics on company time, and he left to make a mint ginning up bogus numbers to "support" LDS and RethugliKKKon shit-shoveling.).  It was a deliberate attack on everyone who wasn't ortho-Morm, and this is just an extension.  And they'll get away with it until the Hill-Top Temple is brought low.

 CORRECTION: Finally got my hands on the law, and it's 80%, not 80 proof.  Whiskey is safe.  Governor DWE is still a douche.

More Rubbish From My Alma Maters

As if I needed another Dunning Kruger case to make me question the value of my Utah State diploma, in waltzes (in the Spring 2022 edition of Utah State Magazine) Bliss W. Tew, Class of '78 (majoring in gods know what, probably remedial bugger eating) bitching about USU trying to increase diversity and wondering (Tucker says, "People are asking!") if there isn't a conspiracy because Why Be You (which he apparently also has some abomination of a degree from) is doing something similar, and concluding it must all be the result of Critical Race Theory (even though he knows no more about CRT than any other shrieking, fascist broflake).

Tew is a climate change denier.  And an anti-vaxxer.  And an ammosexual.  And on top of that, he's a John Bircher, which means he's a fascist and a racist (Since my father has been a Bircher for over a half-century, I have some knowledge of the topic.).  So his opinion can't be considered surprising.  But it is disappointing he's walking around with a degree from an institution one of my degrees is from.  And it's even more disappointing that institution platforms mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers whose primary goal is the destruction of American education and democracy.

Then there is the news I got last week.  I attend the Episcopal Church, but I was confirmed Presbyterian (as in what is now Presbyterian Church (USA)) and I keep track of what is going on over there.  A few years ago they revised the Canons to amend the definition of marriage from "the union of a man and a woman" to "the union of two people", basically green-lighting same-sex marriage.  In spite of that I am in no way considering returning for the simple reason the PC(USA) seems to be doing a shitty job of policing the Canons.  For example even in a liberal place like Seattle, University Presbyterian is apparently allowed to have only a limited and questionable adherence to same-sex marriage (It apparently has only a limited and questionable adherence to prima scriptura over sola scriptura as well, but I'll leave that for another day.).

Reich Wingers have been fleeing the PC(USA) for decades, the biggest schism being when the Presbyterian Church in America split to become a major player in the Reformed, Religio-Fascist TULIP Patch.  About 10 years ago another group split over LGBTQ+ rights and formed the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO, since renamed Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians but retaining the acronym because why not, I guess).  I guess I have to give these folks some credit for packing their bigotry off elsewhere rather than being crypto-bigots in a denomination they shouldn't be in.

Anyway, I learned last week an old friend jumped that fence.  He was a classmate at Michigan Law, nice guy, Grateful Dead/Rolling Stones fanatic, very liberal.  Practiced law here and then in Seattle, and then a few years ago dumped that and went to seminary, becoming a Presbyterian minister.  Came back here and was assistant pastor at First Presbyterian.  Then earlier this year PC(USA) released him, and he went over to ECO.  Makes me wonder just what he was preaching at First Pres since he'd already bought ECO theology while he was there.  It also makes me wonder if my alma maters were actually engaged in education or just in the planting of philosophical time bombs.  Or perhaps they were just miserably inept at identifying and defusing the time bombs that were already there.  While not bothering to do much education either.

More "Progress" At USU

 I see they're tearing down Reeder, Greaves, and Moen Halls.  Back in my day they were the "women's cooking dorms", i.e. they were women-only and had kitchens instead of relying on a cafeteria.  It's bad enough they had to go, but the replacement is obscene: expansion of the Business School.  Oh yes, let's expand that shrine to unfettered crapitalism and outright fascism.  They might as well put a 50-foot statue of Ayn Rand on top.  And as if that weren't bad enough, it's going to be yet another monument to the megalomania of Kem C. Gardner, who is treated as yet another business genius when all he did was the standard move of starting with a lot and then piling up a lot more by grifting his way through an endless parade of "real estate developments".

Choir

For those who don't know, I sing in the choir of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Mark here in SLC.  Tenor.  We had our usual two-service gig for Christmas Eve, with the second being the more musically intense.  We finished at 12:30, and I had long since descended into a very bad mood.  Hells I was writing dirty, alternative lyrics to carols in the program from the beginning of the second service.

I felt burned out at the end of the last liturgical calendar in June, but everyone was.  We'd reactivated in May 2021 after the COVID lockdown, then we went straight through the Summer and the entire 2021-22 liturgical year.  13 months straight.  We were all ready for a break.  This time is different.  I've felt this way toward music just once before: late 1989.

Back in the 80s I was very involved in music.  In college because it was my first chance to play regularly with really good musicians.  In law school because I could play with even better musicians, and because music was the only thing that kept me from going up in Rackham with a sniper rifle.  In Salt Lake after law school because it was fun and I wanted to avoid dealing with being on a career path to nowhere.  Things didn't last, though.  First both Connie Brannock and Alta Dustin got screwed by the record companies, and the local rock scene kind of dissolved, leaving only a punk scene still wrapped up in "authenticity" arguments and a pop scene suitable only for ortho-Morms.  The instrumental groups I was in dissolved as well.  I was left with First Unitarian Choir and the Ad Hoc Singers, a Renaissance and Reformation group.  And I was getting tired of both.

The Unitarian choir was decent enough, but we weren't doing anything as exciting as what we'd been doing in the Unitarian choir in Ann Arbor.  More importantly, though, I was tired of the church's namby pamby, middle of the road message.  There were a lot of things that needed calling out, and the entire denomination was disinterested in doing any calling.  With a new wife who wasn't Unitarian and one toddler and a baby on the way, I didn't have time for such things.  I had one foot out the door by the end of 1989.

The Ad Hocs tore themselves apart.  Part of the group wanted to perform more seriously.  Another part had no time for that.  On top of that, my wife joined the group, replacing a soprano who had left, and two of the members decided to be totally toxic toward her and also target me.  And I doubly didn't have time for that shit.  We'd have been gone, but the Ad Hocs broke up first.  And so I found myself outside of any musical group for the first time in over 20 years.  And I thought to myself, "You know, I don't care.  This has stopped being fun."  I did a jam session in April 1990 at the long-gone Blind Pig in Lincoln Park, and that was my last public gig.

For over 27 years.  Until wife talked me into joining the St. Mark's choir for Advent 2017.  It's been pretty good, even with wife off to Washington, and even with the COVID lockdown.  But Christmas Eve the old feeling crept back: This isn't fun anymore.

Part of it is physical.  I probably have a hiatal hernia, although since there's nothing simple that can be done about it, and since this is the United States and we can't have nice things like affordable health care, I'm not going to have it diagnosed until I'm on Medicare.  Let's just say it negatively affects my diaphragm.  But there's also a social aspect.  I've always generally gotten along with everyone, but there's always been something off between me and the tenor and bass sections heads, and that offness is getting offer.  And I have a lot less time for that shit than I did 33 years ago.

A Halloween Tale

We've lived in this neighborhood for years, and in all that time, we never had anyone come by on Halloween.  Until last year.  I came rolling in from the office, and standing on the sidewalk about to approach the house were an abuela and two little girls.  I got the impression during our conversation that a) one girl was the grand-daughter and the other was her friend, and b) Grandma didn't speak much English, so her grand-daughter had to do the talking.  I explained to her we had given up on having candy because no one had ever come, and I apologized.  She said that was OK, and they started to head on up the street.  Then she turned around and said, "No one's ever come?  That is so sad."  She wasn't upset because she didn't get candy; she was upset because I was alone.  I'm a pretty hard case for...reasons...but it was all I could do to keep from turning right there into the meme of David Tennant's Doctor crying in the rain.

This year I had candy.  One trio came by, but it wasn't them.  I hope nothing has happened to them, like being deported or some other patriotic American bullshit.  Because those three are worth more than 70 million pieces of Trump MAGAt fascist filth combined.  And choosing which ones I'd rather build a country with is truly a no-brainer.

Preparation

As time has gone by, I have questioned more and more the value of my college education.  I never had such qualms about law school; I knew by the end of my first year I'd made a rum investment I was unlikely to see a decent return on, and the years have proved me exactly right.  So ram all your donation requests sideways, Michigan Law.  But it took quite awhile to start questioning the value of my time at Utah State.  My posts here and here, though, show that I finally got around to it.  My attitude is even worse now.  Apart from Alder giving me the worst advice I've ever followed, the place simply did not prepare me for anything.  It did not prepare me for finding a way to make a living, going to law school, or dealing with my law school classmates.  It did not clue me in on the problems a kid with my background would have to identify and overcome (Sorry to the late Bob Cole, you may have grown up on a farm, but you did not come from the kind of hardscrabble background I did.  And to the extent you did, you came out at a time when there were opportunities by the bargeload.).

And I have to say it goes beyond my own time there.  I have to ask just what the place is teaching in general.  So many graduates, people with alleged science degrees, are climate change deniers.  Several of them I know personally, but I'll just leave that right there.  None of them have degrees in climate science, which means that if they were intellectually honest they would admit they were operating outside their expertise regardless of their science backgrounds.  Instead, they rant away with an arrogance and butt-ignorance that matches the worst QAnon clowns.

I will say right up front I am not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist. I have read a number of their comments, though, and they boil down to this: 1) We have a pretty good geologic and biologic record of climate changes over a pretty long stretch of time; 2) the rapid changes have overwhelmingly (and effectively uniformly) been caused by some catastrophe such as meteor strike or increased volcanic activity; 3) we are experiencing rapid change now; 4) there has been no catastrophic event; 5) the only identifiable difference between this rapid change event and all the others is the existence of H. sap. and its industrial activity. Nevertheless, the deniers know better. In the Winter 2020 alumni magazine, Frederick Su, a retired physicist (specialty: optics) who received his bachelors and masters from USU, claims that because we can not do control and variable experiments on climate, it's all bunk (I wonder what his attitude is on astrophysics.). This of course ignores the archeology and the fact that human activity is the one data point different from all other climate events. Yes I know correlation is not causation, but when you have just one correlating data point.... Anyway. It should come as no surprise that this guy is a raving ammosexual (He once said that the NRA is "the greatest civil rights organization in the world".) and LDS (He once actually wrote, "Hence, the Constitution was born, the greatest document ever conceived by man. The Founders were touched by God."). Just wow.

Then there is Bruce Nieveen, a civil engineer who I assume received his degree from USU, who in the Fall 2020 alumni magazine claims that we should not listen to climate scientists because they use models and models are wrong, quoting George E. P. Box out of context that, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." It's a fun aphorism, but as Box himself, who created a great many mathematical models in his time, would explain, its real meaning is, "All models are incomplete and therefore wrong at some point, and it is necessary to be mindful of their limits for them to be of use." Nieveen then accuses USU and climate scientists in general to be taking bribes to reach their conclusions. Talk about reaching a conclusion with no evidence.

USU, like Michigan Law, should not be expecting a positive response to any of the donation solicitations it sends me.

Diversity

Went to a CLE today, "Why Diversity Matters", largely to pick up that bloody civility credit for my CLE requirements.  On the panel was Cecelia Romero, who is now a U.S. Magistrate but who 14 years ago was an associate at Holland & Hart when I was a contract attorney there.  The firm was doing a lot of hand-wringing about why they weren't retaining minority and women associates, but it really wasn't doing anything about it.  There were four of us contracted on this project, and at the end of the contract, they ostensibly interviewed us for permanent positions.  I say "ostensibly" because we all knew they were only hiring one of us and we all knew which one she was (The woman they hired is long gone out of there, BTW.).

I interviewed with the HR manager (who is also long gone out of there) and decided that, rather than wholly wasting my interview time, I would tell her why I thought they had a problem with associate retention.  First, if you are from a disadvantaged background, you have a real shortage of contacts who will allow you to build the book of business a firm requires you to have (voice of experience here).  Second, if you're LDS, which the overwhelming majority of people in Utah are, and you are a young associate at a firm, you are in a singles ward or a young marrieds ward, socializing almost exclusively with people of your own age and social status, not executive types who make attorney hiring decisions for the kind of corporations firms want as clients.  So your success as an associate boils down to this: Without some exceptional input (a genius-level mind or an extraordinary mentor who will help you get that book of business), you had better have been born to the right parents, ones who socialize with the kinds of people who will channel meaningful work your way.  Without that, all the voyage of your career is bound in shallows and miseries.

I got into the University of Michigan Law School on affirmative action.  Now you may ask, "How did you, Whitey McMalerson, get in on affirmative action," but Michigan's system was based on general diversity and not exclusively on race or gender.  They decided they needed a token hick to provide a diverse experience for all those suburban preppies, and I was it.  They didn't bother to tell me that, though.  No, I had to figure out for myself that I wasn't supposed to go anywhere important after I graduated; I was just supposed to go back to Turdville and practice Turdville law for the rest of my life.  I had trouble figuring this out for two reasons.  First, it made no sense, at least not to anyone in any way familiar with Turdville.  You could make a far better living in Turdville doing plumbing and electric than law, and you wouldn't have to worry about student loans.  Second, a significant disadvantage to being a white male is an underdeveloped ability to recognize when you're being patronized.  You think that, at least relative to other white males, you're competing and winning on merit.  Which is bullshit.  But it was my third year before I even got an inkling of what was going on and years before I got it figured out.  I can be slow.

So.  If you're going to bring people from atypical backgrounds on board, you should do one of two things: 1) Be honest with them up front that you're just going to use them for a few years and then boot them, or 2) help them overcome the systemic barriers they have to satisfying your expectations.  Because if all you're going to do is throw a kid from Turdville or the inner city in to sink or swim against a bunch of "peers" who grew up in Grosse Pointe Shores and went to Choate and then Princeton and then Yale and whose parents are feeding them a steady stream of corporate business courtesy their country club circle, you are a cruel, ignorant shit.

Lawyer Fashion

I'm sticking with men's clothing here.  Women's clothing is  a mystery wrapped in an enigma locked inside a sales pitch, and I'm not going near the issue.  So I'm asking, what is it with the crayon-blue suits?  Suddenly, they're everywhere.  And they look gods-awful.  The guy who thought this was a good look was probably the same guy who thought mustard-colored shoes were a good look.  They aren't.  They look like your dog blew it out both ends all over your shoes, and you haven't had time to clean them off.  And don't think you're fooling anyone with the puckered edge stitching either.  We know that isn't hand stitching, just an over-tensioned machine trying to look like hand stitching.

Speaking of colors of clothing, I wasn't wearing white pants, as you ridiculed me in the middle of the street for wearing, Nate Alder.  They're khaki.  You should know that, but since you're from Logan and haven't lived anywhere more appreciably advanced since, I suppose it's possible you missed that memo.

The Door to the Last Alternative Slams Shut

Well, there I was in the Spring of 1981, basically up the creek without a boat, let alone a paddle.  I was finishing up my BA in history, I didn't have a teaching certificate, and I couldn't afford grad school.  Lovely.  But I had one ace left up my sleeve, or so I thought.  I nailed my first round Foreign Service exam and had a happy facility for languages, so I figured either State or the CIA would pick me up.  So off I went to Germany, and after a couple of weeks of acclimatizing, off I went to the US embassy in Bonn to meet with a man from USAID (which meant he was on the TO&E chart under State but was actually CIA; bases covered).  He noted off the bat that Utah State was not on the normal list of colleges they recruited from, at least not for nontechnical positions (STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM), he would look at me for my language skills.  He then asked where I had gone on my mission.  I said I wasn't LDS.  I could see it on his face as he mentally ran my application packet through a shredder.  (I've often wondered since if he was really that bad at maintaining a poker face or if he was deliberately giving me the signal.  Another thing I'll never know.)  The only reason I had gotten through the door was because they had thought I was Mormon.

The letter arrived a couple of weeks later.  They thought I was a fine specimen, but they had no room at the inn at the moment, although they would certainly keep my application on file.  Read, "You aren't Ivy League, you aren't LDS, we might be able to use you as an occasional asset sometime, but we will never let you into the company."  My ace had been trumped, and now I was stuck with law school.

More Cluelessness from the Reich Wing

I've already had one go at Brian McCoy (formerly an attorney in the Tacoma area, currently a resident of Riverton, and typical BYU grad) for an anti-transgender rant he got the Washington State Bar to publish (It wasn't his first phobe letter to the Bar.  He had a major rant against gay rights published in August 2007.).  Now he's back, and again he isn't alone.  In the November NWLawyer, our new Bar president committed the egregious sin of saying she was no lady and did not want to be.  In the February NWLawyer, McCoy comes riding to the rescue of what he views as proper female behavior.  It's standard, BYU fare that models women from a hybridization of a Jane Austen novel and "A Handmaid's Tale."  Then in the March NWLawyer, Barbara Jo Sylvester (another Tacoma attorney and active in the Calvary Community Church of Sumner) piles on with more of the same, showing that Evangelicals and Mormons actually do agree on one goal: the second-class position of women.  And both of them ignore or thoroughly straw-man Ms. Haynes's argument.  They both take the "There's nothing wrong with being a gentleman, so there's nothing wrong with being a lady" tack.  Talk about your false equivalents.  There is nothing about the statement "Act like a gentleman" that is code for "Know your place and stay in it."  On the other hand, that is exactly what "Act like a lady" is code for, and that was Ms. Haynes's point.  Neither response actually addresses that point, employing instead the usual Religious Reich barrage of bogus outrage it directs at anyone it perceives as a threat to its continued use of state power to coerce the rest of us.

Continuing Collegiate Cock-Ups

So I went to college, and I was in everything.  I figured I was making connections that would help me, since I was at least aware I needed some and didn't have any.  Foolish child.  Lynn Eliason got me to Germany, an opportunity I punted back through the end zone.  Anything from any other faculty?  No.  Linda Milbury Chappell helped Daughter 2 get into firefighting.  Anything from anyone else?  No.  Several college friends have become extremely successful, and justly so.  They're smart, they're focused, and they deliver the goods.  And they haven't tossed me so much as a chump collection case.  They don't even respond to my holiday and birthday messages anymore.

If I remove my degree from the equation (and its value remains highly questionable), I am compelled to write Utah State off as a loss.  Well, at least I was on scholarship.

Continuing with the Screw-Ups

We all receive lots of lousy advice.  It's part of life on Earth.  What makes the difference is whether you follow it, either because you see it's crap but you're stupid, or you just don't see it's crap.  I like to believe that, in this instance at least, it was the latter.

Doug Alder was a History professor and the head of the Honors Program when I was at Utah State.  He later became President of Dixie and has since retired.  His son, Nate, whom I have known since he was a little fritter and actually shorter than me, is a past Bar President (Fat lot of good that connection has ever done me, although Nate is far from unique in this, and that's a load of bile for another day.).  Doug was really grooming me for grad school, and along the way gave me the bar none worst advice I have ever followed: He told me not to get a teaching certificate.  He said it would look bad to graduate programs I applied to.

I ate that up with a big spoon.  My parents were teachers, so naturally I wanted to advance beyond that, so why waste time doing otherwise?  Dad was the generation past blue collar (in this case farming) and Mom was the generation past decayed, Southern aristocracy, so it was time to advance the family to white collar, upper-middle class status.  With hindsight, I can see the fallacies were as thick as fleas on a hillbilly hound.

First, Doug had no idea what he was talking about.  Although he tries to deny it or at least hide it, he is a silver spooner with precious little knowledge of anything outside academe.  He pokes fun at his bourgeois father, but that's where the money cushion came from that allowed Doug to become The Great Scholar with minimal pain to him and his.  And that's the thing about academe: If you're going to be in it in a non-tech field, it really helps to have a trust fund.  I most assuredly didn't, and I could see that five years of grad school followed by a questionable quest for an assistant professorship was unlikely to be a good idea without such a supplemental income.  After deciding not to pursue grad school, though, and not having a teaching certificate, my choices ran the gamut from law school to law school.  Hobson's Choice is not a good strategy.

Second, my assessment of my situation was, shall we say, overly optimistic.  Some might say delusional.  Contrary to my frankly uninformed read, the family had not really had that middle class generation that is necessary to launch into a contact-based profession, of which law is the ultimate example (Finance, accounting, architecture, and business are others.).  My folks had only managed to grub out an unstable, lower-middle class existence that gave me no connections nor any of the skills needed to acquire some.  STEM professions (engineering, health sciences, etc.) would have been tough, but at least they would have been in the realm of the possible.

Let's do a compare and contrast.  My best friend, Dave Weeks, was a year ahead of me in high school and was likewise the eldest son of two teachers.  His parents too were the generation that moved from blue collar (his mom off the farm, his dad out of the stone quarries).  He bummed around through college and finally got a Life Sciences degree.  Then he became a pharmacist, and now he's a successful MD.  He went STEM, and even with a slow start he took off.  I went humanities without connections, and I've spent three decades slowly spinning in the doldrums.

And so I have hammered on my kids to avoid my egregious mistake: Get the teaching certificate!  In my in no way humble opinion, if you get a non-STEM degree and no certificate, you just pissed away college.  Even if you get a STEM degree, the certificate doesn't hurt.  Have they listened?  Hmm.  Well, Daughter One really isn't the school type and is now married, but at least she found a Navy nuclear tech, so they have a STEM hook.  Daughter Two is in biology, so she's in STEM, moving slowly, but at least she's moving.  Daughter Three, the jury's still out, she has decided that she isn't doing STEM if she's in school, and we'll see where her probable husband is able to take her.  As for Boy, his interests are artistic, but he knows he'll need a day job, and he thinks EMT could do it for him.  Works for me.  In this economy, why bother with college?  Get technical training, preferably something with STEM.  EMT would be portable, flexible, and provide a paycheck, benefits, and a pension.  Good luck finding all that with a liberal arts degree.

Religious Freedom?

If you've read my bio, you've seen that I'm a member of the Washington State Bar as well as Utah. I was reading the latest Bar News from Washington, now called NWLawyer, and saw the predictable religious push-back to last month's editorial about respecting transgender citizens (And hey Google, why in Hell in this day and age is "transgender" marked as misspelled?). There are two letters. The first is from psychiatric "expert" David D. Cullen of Olympia, who asks where WSBA president Anthony Gipe gets off writing that being transgender is not a pathology, given that Gipe is not a psychiatrist. Cullen should try reading the current DSM-IV and the drafts of DSM-V, which happen to agree with Gipe. And here's a shock for Cullen: Neither book is based on the Bible.

Cullen also plays the "You're violating my religious rights!" card, but that's all the second letter, from Brian L. McCoy of right here in Riverton, manages. He claims they are pushing back as an exercise of religious liberty, and any interference is forcing them to accept practices that are offensive to their standards of right and wrong. First, I find it offensive to my sense of right and wrong to teach children pseudoscience based on Bronze Age campfire stories, and I consider it a problem not just in the public schools where it is already banned, but everywhere, because it is raising another generation of scientific illiterates, and that could be the last nail in the coffin of our economy and, consequently, our country. Do I think I then have the authority to enlist the government in banning church schools? As much as I believe the Constitution is not a suicide pact, no I don't think I have that authority. And that's the thing, McCoy. You and your cohorts have been using the state to enforce your religious beliefs to the detriment of the constitutional rights of other citizens. Now you're being blocked from that unconstitutional establishment of religion (Except apparently in Kentucky. Someone really needs to send a memo to those county clerks and remind them that they swore to uphold the Constitution, not the King James Bible. Somebody may need to read them the memo, though. And for those of you who think the Supreme Court overstepped its authority, Marbury vs. Madison is not exactly new law.). Stopping you from imposing your religious beliefs on others is not interfering with your religious rights. Further, being in business and yet not wanting to provide service to certain people who are not doing anything but offending your morals is no different than the white's-only lunch counters and hotels. Heart of Atlanta Hotel vs. United States was decided over half a century ago, although it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't heard of it, McCoy, given where you went to law school.

Cut the crap, people. Your whining about interference with your "rights" sounds like every secessionist in 1860 and every segregationist in 1964.

The Next Big Screw-Up

Having determined to pursue history and not STEM, off to college I went.  Utah State University, ironically enough a STEM-focused school.  And my overarching screw-up was that I thought I could play college like high school.  I was in everything in high school, and I thought I could do it at USU.  The problem is, it takes a lot more steam at that level.  I had to drop theater right away, which should have been a red flag that I needed to cut back in general, but I plowed on.  I should have been focusing on figuring out where I was going and what I needed to do to get there, but instead I was all over the place.  Ten hours a week in marching band, not to mention all the lost Saturdays.  Student government, frankly a contradiction in terms.  Too many languages instead of focusing on German, which actually got me somewhere and could have gotten me much farther.  And obscene amounts of time spent on the newspaper.  People were amazed at all the things I was involved in.  They gave me a trophy for it.  Big woop, I think it's in storage.  Neither that trophy nor all the activities that won it for me advanced me one jot.  It was the people who focused their punches who have since broken through.

Avoid Budget Rentals

Back in the days when I was an actual road warrior, say 8-10 years ago, my car rental company of choice was Budget.  Liveable prices, decent cars, good service.  Apparently all just a memory.  After waiting over an hour past my reservation time, I ended up having to produce more personal paperwork than I would to close escrow on a house.  Without being informed ahead of time what I would need.  And the car is dirty.  And the manager was rude.  Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. Naylor.  When I get this car dumped off, Budget need never worry about my shadow darkening their door again.