The Columnist Manifesto

Given the nature of many blogs as thought-journals, it surprises me that you don’t read lots of blog posts about “what I dreamt last night.” In fact, I can’t call to mind a single one, offhand.

I awoke from a vivid absurdist dream this morning, and wanted to record as much as I could right away. Of course, the details are rapidly vanishing, as if the memory-erasers in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (my favorite movie of last year) were after me. In fact, it seems as if the very act of trying to remember and articulate one dream image causes two others to fade away. And it’s impossible to reconstruct it in a chronological narrative. I’ll just give you a few elements I still remember.

I’ve recently returned to work as a lawyer for a civil rights non-profit. I’m trying desperately to catch up on my work, but it seems that my days are taken up with one time-wasting meeting after another. At 10:55 a.m., I’m about to settle in to some quiet concentration when announcement comes over the loudspeaker. It’s the voice of the brand new, and very obnoxious, managing attorney/office manager: Oscar, it’s 10:55, please proceed to your 11 o’clock meeting.

This is unbelievable! Since when does our office manager remind us about meetings?! Aren’t we professionals who keep track of those things for ourselves? True, I had not written this meeting down on anything, and it had completely slipped my mind, but still! And since when did our office have a loudspeaker?

It seems like I’m in the midst of an office move, so to make the meeting, I have to pack my stuff up in something that looks like this:


What’s the meeting about? It’s to hear a presentation from an expert witness in an environmental law case. This is troubling, since expert witness preparation is not my forte, and I since when does our firm practice environmental law? Outside the meeting room, I bump into Elisa (a public interest environmental lawyer in real waking life) “Since when do you work here?” I ask.

“Oh gross,” is Elisa’s reply, because I’ve accidentally spit on her. In fact, I’ve been generating an unusual, prodigious amount of saliva and have been inadvertantly spraying people all morning. Is this going to be some sort of permanent disability?

The office manager comes up behind me and says, “You realize your shirt’s not tucked in. Can you take care of that please? I can see skin.”

I turn around and face her. “Who the hell do you think you are? Since when [hmm, a lietmotiv here] do you tell me when my meetings are and how to dress for them?”

“Well,” she responds, “all I know is when you bend over I can see your butt crack.”

The problem is, she’s right... I can feel cold air on my skin. Does my butt crack show? The other problem is that the office manager looks kind of like Jennifer Connolly:


“I hate you,” I say. “Do you think this is some sort of screwball comedy, where you can just tell me stuff like that?”

Screwball comedy? Clearly, I’m in a love-hate thing with the office manager. The meeting begins, and I’m sitting at a big rectangular configuration of tables, facing the discussion leader at the front. To kick off the meeting, a black gospel choir appears at the dias and sings a rousing number about fair housing rights. (I thought this was going to be an environmental case – boy, am I having a hard time following the meeting.)

The man sitting next to me is someone I’ve never seen before – he looks like the baseball writer and Boston Red Sox consultant Bill James, but with a long beard – but somehow I know that he is the author of the blog The Rising Jurist. “I always thought he was younger,” I think to myself.


Rising Jurist is muttering to himself – making sounds that sound like, but aren’t, words. I yawn.

Suddenly, the meeting chair recognizes me to speak: “You sir, you have a comment, and the man sitting next to you too?”

“No,” I respond, “I was just yawning. And he’s speaking in tongues.”

Scattered laughter throughout the room. “No, I mean it,” I protest.

Rising Jurist (you get that it’s not really Rising Jurist, just my dream version of Rising Jurist, whom I’ve never to my knowledge met) says, “Yes, it’s just something that we southerners do.”

The meeting continues, but my mind wanders. All I can think about is, “If I have sex with the office manager, do I have to listen to her when she tells me to tuck in my shirt?”