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J and the Legal Heineken

Once upon a couple months ago I was working

And I was in a time crunch

And my co-worker Jalen

Sometimes known as J

Dropped what he was doing to help me

And I was grateful

And I asked him what his favorite beer was

And he said “Heineken”

And I told him

There was a Heineken in his future

But there’s a (completely reasonable) rule

Forbidding employees to bring alcohol

To the workplace

So I mulled it over

And got the notion

That the Heineken in J’s future

Would be in the form of a DRAWING

Of a Heineken

So I drew it

And J next to it

And it looked OK but not quite right

And the oinner voice that tells me what to do said

“Draw his hand holding up the bottle”

So I did

But the pencil’s eraser didn’t erase right

Smeared rather than erased

Being old and oxidized

So I said the hell with erasure

And that’s why the hand is a little ghostly

But J still liked the drawing

And gave me permission

To post it on social media

Like this.

..

He’s a good guy.

swollen eyelid

an eye is awry.

its lid hoods and occludes the iris

and tickles the lachrymal duct so that it weeps

and the tear-filmed pupil makes for blurrish vision

and the man who owns the eye

feels like quasimodo or someone

even more grotesque. he worries

that it may be a staph infection

or, worse, some flesh-eating parasite

chewing his head away.

..

he tries to dismiss such foolish thoughts

by reminding himself

of a lifetime of hypochondria

and the many oh-i’m-gonna-die episodes

that turned out to be laughably untrue.

..

a visit to urgent care

would be a resounding smack in the pocketbook

even if they don’t upsell him like the charming lady

doc who said “you have earwax. want me to

take care of it?” and that two-minute tune-up

cost forty additional out-of-pocket bucks.

..

he looks in the mirror and smiles

with the half of his mouth on the unaffected,

uninfected side.

tries to, anyway.

he wanted to make a comedy/tragedy mask

out of his single face but the other half of his mouth

insists on half-smiling too.

now he half-laughs at his melancholic vanity.

“That’s Life,” he murmurs,

and feels better.

A man in a flimsy T-shirt and polyester running shorts and running shoes affixed to snowshoes with circular-shaped surfaces runs

On a two-inch blanket of freshly-fallen snow  on a flat two-acre field on a farm whose owners have given him permission to run for an hour on their land.

He is also wearing glasses that provide a visual readout of what the drone flying overhead is recording. The drone moves according to his voice commands. His last command was for the drone to maintain a position twenty meters over his head, focal point the surface of the snow, field of view to include the running man and a circle of ten meters’ diameter with him at the center.

The conditions are ideal. The temp is just at freezing and it is windless and the snow is doing a remarkable job of retaining the impressions of the snowshoes.

What the man is doing is drawing. He himself is the dot-drawing stylus. An inset in the views reen in his glasses shows him the entire field on which he is running, with his position on the field represented by a green dot, and with his footstrikes trailing him represented as blue dots.

He has not been running long, but he is already on the second iteration of the array of comic-book-style panels that will contain the images of real-time running that he is doing now. An hour will give him enough time to fill in the panels with line drawings with enough detail to discern his facial features.

“Bogie, I want a drink,” he says, and the drone swoops down and dangles tubing connected to the modest water supply it is carrying. Three swallows is sufficient.

“Resume position above my head.” Bogie whizzes upward.

“Play ‘Running On Empty’ by Jackson Browne, any live version with David Lindlay,” he tells his audio feed.

The music starts.

“I effing love technology, I do I do I do,” he exults as he runs, his breath making a puff-pattern of condensation.

Some of us have Jobs, some Careers. A lucky few have Callings. Here is one such, the vivacious, acerbic Kathryn Petroff, who, so much like my late, great friend Karen Wilkinson, used her legal skills as a criminal-law attorney, defending the downtrodden and the scorned. And when her career took her beyond criminal defense, to judicial review, she became a force for the public interest, her work instrumental in unseating not one, but two bad judges. (Yes, Virginia, there are all kinds of Bad Judges out there!!)

She is also a courageous cancer survivor. When I asked her for photos to use for her portrait, the first one she sent me looked like she’d done battler with Smaug the Dragon himself, yet she had a tiny brave smile on her face. “What a brave smile,” I texted, and her reply was “Radiation makes me sleepy.” Is she a Trouper, or what?

And she has a fondness for Dorothy Sayers and her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. (Kat, there is no H in Wimsey. I checked.) And her son Toby followed her legal footsteps, going to Harvard Law, and was a prosecutor, then went civil, and now finds his bliss in bond transactions–I think. Being an ignoramus of both law and bonds I may have gotten that muddled.

But mostly Kathryn Petroff is a keenly intelligent, incandescent human being, and I’m glad to know her.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Kathryn Petroff

Kick/start a life with labor pains and soap
And Independence ready to say Nope
To surface-y success’s col de Mort
Half Frog-marched down Life’s dusty corridor
RIGHT WRONGS became her conjurable Stuff. O
Yes and Sure, Adversity does scuff
NYET Evil DA to Battle–call their bluff

NOTE: a Col de Mort is a way to weaponize an epee, turning a harmless fencing instrument into a deadly weapon via its sharp-pointed “collar of death.”

He was Stardust. And Golden. And he has returned to the Golden Stardust whence he came. But in between his pre-assembled Stardust and his current celestial state, he took himself on a wild ride, acquiring and losing bandmates, habits, dignity and freedom. One story of his extremism, recounted Graham Nash in his memoir, was so beyond the pale that Nash heard from the Legal department of his publisher. They demanded confirmation of the story that Crosby had sold his Porsche for crack, and upon his crack dealer’s death by overdose, Crosby sneaked back to the dealer’s abode and stole back the pink slip. So Nash called Crosby, and Croz told him that not only was it true, but in a scenario reminiscent of the CSN classic “Deja Vu,” Crosby later again sold the Porsche–for crack.

But he also pushed the limits of music, elevating millions with his jazz influence and harmonic entwinings in CSN and CSNY. And he cleaned up, and he got a new liver, and he outlived his old liver by decades, and he showed us oldsters that the best way to go out is in a blaze of creative glory.

As often happens, I choked a little on my portraiture with this image, wanting to convey his careening, pyrotechnic soul, remaining undecided about how old to make him and what expression to put on his face. I’ve overworked it to the point I had to say “to hell with it” and quit before I made it worse. But the words paint a fuller picture.

David CROZ Crosby

Dude was SCRAGGLY, PsychedeliC
And his HARMONIES pure WondeR
As a liquor–like F r a n g e l i c O
Velvet SMOOTH as distant thunderS
Irascibly zappish, a son of a B
Despite aural daZzle and all honestY


George Santos, a profligate liar, has been elected to Congress after telling a bushel of lies to help get himself elected. The ethical thing for him to do would be to resign. But telling deliberate, self-serving lies is itself not ethical. It is a dysfunctional pattern in American politics of late, largely thanks to the shenanigans of Donald Trump, whom I depict in this image as Yoda to Santos’s Skyler Liewalker.

Here are the words:

George Santos

Get a load of THIS guy’s BS
Embellished as a drag Contessa
OAN got nuthin on him! In
Regurgitory fakery with lament
Gosh darn the Media–so
WHAT? EVERY Politician LIES

Murder, She Wrought
(a brief nod to Angela Lansbury)

Chalk that outline,
Call the cops,
Angela,
Despite her chops
Stage and Screen and Animated,
Finds herself now Pearly-Gated.

Just as Calvin
Had his Hobbes,
Brooms have Sticks
And Beds have Knobs,
Sweeney Todd his scalpeled razor,
Angela had Occam’s Laser.

With it she sliced
Through our gloom,
Brightened beach
And parlor room,
Cut the diamond of her skill,
Set up legions for the kill.

Alackaday
That she would leave us,
Fell our crests
And sore aggrieve us,
Murder inadvertent wrought
Of our smiles, now that she’s not.

Rest In Peace, Angie.