There's a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending.

But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction.

I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.

Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain.

There's a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending.

Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom.

Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.