GOD BLESS YOU, AMEN

I took a case in the mountains. This is usually a mistake. The client, McGrady, has to pay me for the drive, and I show up as an outsider, a big Quin County lawyer. People called McGrady “Mac.” Or “Grady.” The town was mostly vacation cabins. The only people who lived there year around were contractors who flopped there in rental properties, sometimes dorms, and commuted to work in the more expensive resorts.

The town, Princetown, had an ice angel festival every Christmas and a jazz festival to attract tourists in the summer. The courthouse was an old Victorian house that had been renovated into a clerk’s office and two courtrooms. Administration offices on the second floor.

In court, Judge Monroe said a little prayer before each proceeding which was highly inappropriate. A judge isn’t supposed to pray in court. At the end he said a little prayer as well. He’s also supposed to keep his religion out of his rulings. It lacks decorum. I really was an outsider, and there was nothing I could do.

The case was a divorce, a knock down drag-out fight. Kara kicked Grady out of the marital home. Naturally, he stopped paying the mortgage.

I used to meet him at the one bar in town and pick him up to take him to court. The bar was called “GI Joan’s.” It was no Overtime. It was dark and dirty, with old wooden paneling on the walls and country music blasting from the speakers. A bear’s head was mounted on the wall at one end of the bar.

Supposedly the bar had the best wings in the county, but I never tried them, I never ate there.

Mac still wore his work clothes, covered in paint, and unless he snuck into one of the vacant homes he was painting, he had no place to take a shower. He looked like a homeless guy. Among his things, he carried a backpack with all his papers and fistfuls of cash because he didn’t want to report his income for taxes. He couldn’t deposit it in the bank because he didn’t want Kara to know about it.

He kept two sets of books. One for the divorce case to show he had no assets. Another, for himself, in case he had to get a loan.

What was funny was, as we talked on the way to the courthouse, he’d give me financial advice. Talk about stocks and bonds, inflation, and recession. Like I’m going to take financial advice from a guy who’s lying to the court, cheating the IRS, and living in his van. And if he went on and on for an hour that he was keen about some great investment, or a stock, you’d find out that he only owned three shares.

Their house was in foreclosure.

Kara wanted an emergency hearing to force McGrady to pay the mortgage. She wrote two or three motions, claiming it was an emergency, and if Mac didn’t pay the mortgage, she would lose her home.

At Kara’s request, we attended a brief status conference. After driving up to Princetown, making us wait in the courtroom for almost an hour, the judge denied the motions. Sometimes judges get tired of reading motions. They just get fed up. You have to be able to read the room. What’s an emergency to a client is not necessarily an emergency to a judge.

When Judge Monroe denied the motion, this is what he said:

“You’re both adults. You refuse to work anything out. If you want to destroy each other, go ahead, I’m not going to stop you. If you want to do a death dance, go ahead and dance. God Bless you. Amen.”

--30--

I’m reading the manuscript of a book about economics that Westphalia is thinking about publishing.

It’s by my friend, Ralph. He doesn’t have an advanced degree in economics, but has more passion for the subject than any economics professor I ever had in college.

I’ve only read the first few chapters so far. It’s a dense read with graphs and data and an occult language. But already I get a sense of where he’s going with it, even if Ralph doesn’t fully realize it yet himself.

Right off the bat, he does not dismiss the idea that, actually, we likely live in a world of unlimited, if not infinite resources, which immediately reveals him to be heterodox, at odds with the Church of Economic Orthodoxy where economics is defined as the science of choice in a world of limited resources.

To pass Econ 101 I had to know that the value of money is inversely proportional to its scarcity.

Ralph wonders about the definition of money in a world without scarcity, a world transitioned from an entropic to a culturally defined reality that’s negentropic? Money has to reflect something real, even unlimited reality. It could not be limited by anything finite, like gold ore from African mines or by people who buy and sell money for a living.

In such a reality, anybody, on the spur of the moment, could decide to take a trip to visit family on Mars without ever having to think about how to pay for it. They’d be free to just take off. There wouldn’t be anything about their jobs that they couldn’t do just as well from Mars. Even plumbers could message their robotic hands back on Earth with the code to fix a leaky pipe at such and such a location.

Is this where we’re headed? Is this where we want to go? I can hope. We know now that it’s possible, science tells us so. But we define the meaning of money, whether it’s a vehicle to free us, or something that gets in the way?

I think Ralph’s working out the details of how to get from here to there. We’ll be keeping in touch.

--30--

             Focusing

To some well off & some who are poor
it’s obvious that everyone must join
the win machine.

To others comfortable or desperate
it’s obvious, that they must kill
those operating its controls.

Both parties mislead! —
everyone who insists that you agree
to what you know could never be!
Resist!

I know you’re alone, vulnerable, daunted —
but we’re the solution, moment by moment —
you, whatever they named you
& whatever you dreamed about yourself til now —
& I —
gathering what’s become of us — focusing —
in awe — deliberate, with good will, persevering.

                                               --30--

We Were Once Children

In the twittering morning

Children carry book bags

Heavy with what will be forgotten

With shoulders stooped

All memory is imagination

Our bodies bare witness

   to our circular days

Rings on a tree

A dry season and the monsoon

Leave their mark,

   engraving the lines on our face

We look away quickly

   from mirrors

We sit in dark corners

   repeating our stories

We were once children