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(originally published in Snake Nation Review)

Inside the Emerald

Brett sat on my kitchen counter — ancient, mottled pink and gray Formica — wearing tight corduroy jeans, cut off at mid-thigh. My eyes couldn’t stay away from his meaty, shaved bicyclist’s legs, hanging there, swaying, his feet clad in hiking boots. Brett’s bulk scared me, but on another level it seemed clownish. He was trying to seduce me, but it wasn’t working. He couldn’t get things moving: he seemed pendulous, awkward.

Besides which, I couldn’t stand his beard. It was one of those really long ones; it touched his chest. It made me think of old age, of death and decomposition and depressing black-and- white movies. He looked freakish, a cultural throwback; the medieval flagellant, the cold-weather mountain man.

“Let’s have a love affair,” he said. His voice was pinched, immobilized in the hairs of his nose, but also…

quote:  anton chekhov

In Defense of Lawyers

Inevitably, a person’s defense of an idea becomes most impassioned just before they cease to believe in it altogether. Passion comes to open the way for the loss of innocence: the world we once loved is lost. What does this say about the plight of lawyers? They shoulder the breach of your dreams for simple cash and nothing more. Everybody sympathizes with garbage men: well, somebody’s got to do it. Lawyers handle the garbage of the soul.

I myself had clients I believed in — false teeth and all, I took them to my heart; well, somebody’s got to do it. I wasn’t unusual in this regard; it’s a phase all of us go through. Granted, most people don’t understand our system of laws. We’re born into this web of relationships, whether we like it or not. No way to opt out, though…

Photo of artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (PD).  Though O’Keeffe’s vision was compromised by macular degeneration in later years, she continued to work well into her 90s.

It has been said that we become more ourselves, as we grow older.  Superficial beauty fades, and a softer (or, in some cases, starker) beauty takes its place.  This incorporates our scars, evidence of the life we have lived, with and without our consent.

We long, in youth, to be part of a larger whole – the beloved or a noble cause, perhaps.  The paths we take determine greatly – and depend greatly on – whether or not that happens.

The heart calls us to venues and ventures we would never have thought ourselves capable of pursuing, let alone achieving.  Sometimes though it seems we are being led.  Not by our desires alone, but by some external force.

“…[H]e…