Just another Monday

It's 5:54 PM and I am taking a small break from the paperwork accumulated on my desk. Just outside my office, my paralegal team is concentrating on their work, they are quiet, save the constant typing of the computer keyboards. This is MSA, or marital settlement agreement week, and we are going over maybe five of them this week.

I am going through messages, to make sure nothing important was missed, and have about three cases that I need to deal with tonight.

This is the unglamorous side of law, just paperwork and phone calls (or, more accurately, emails).

A good friend of mine is in a murder jury trial and I truly envy him at times like this!

My reward after another hour of this- Palapas a great new restaurant in Chula Vista. Do you like real pollo asada? Do you love Mexican style fruit stands? This is the best of both.

Nice guys finish first?

A friend of mine is constantly asked how he can be an effective lawyer, being so nice.

His answer, white teeth flashing, "I'm not always so nice."

But, bravado aside, I've always thought that nice guys like him get a bad rap. I don't think that jerk do well in the legal profession, because of a many reasons. One, who wants to hire a jerk. Second, whenever someone is a jerk in a legal proceeding, he is always inviting the other attorney's "A" game. Whenever the opposing attorney is giving me a difficult time, it makes me more likely to respond in kind.

In real life, my friends tell me that jerks get all the pretty women...then, pause, look at the picture of my pretty wife and say that I'm an exception to the rule.

"Or maybe you're just a bigger jerk than we thought..."

But, in reality, I think that normal men and women are attracted to people that make them feel happy. Nice guys, so long as they aren't doormats, tend to do better with pretty women for the simple fact that they treat them better. The "jerk" that you see out with Ms. Universe, probably isn't a jerk to her.

Of course, there are exceptions, but I think that nice guys actually usually finish first.

A bit of a break from blogging

I'm working on a couple longish blog entries- a humorous family piece, "My brother, Hitler," and a kind of sarcastic political piece on "holier than thou" activists that do drugs.

But, it may be a while before either comes into print.

In the meantime, I wish you all a Happy Easter!

Some Poetry

First, some honesty- from a lawyer, nonetheless! Although I really enjoy poetry and admire good poets, 90% of the poetry that I've written in my life was probably written to impress a girl. Like many of my friends, I spent a good deal of my pre-married life chasing after pretty women. At UC Berkeley, many girls liked poetry- so I ended up writing a ton of cheezy poems.

Some of the poems were just funny invites to a coffee or a dinner.

Others were more traditional "come hither" poems- "come share with me a lover's night, no moon, nor stars, just you and I, two lights in darkness, together so bright."

For a period of time when I was seeing an actual poet, I wrote more traditional poems- about world issues like AIDS- "I write to you, who could never write to me, your night has passed to stars that we can no longer see, etc, etc.." I think some of these poems were even published, but I have no illusions about the skill level.

Here's a sample (reproduced by memory) of my work.



The Baby

She lies next to me tonight
Her slender arms clutching a
Baby Doll she thinks she
may never really have

Tears run slowly down her
Small brown eyes and she looks
out to the world through
a watery prism that sees only
the pain that remains

A night of red, gray, and black
when a man too much like me
showed her what a woman was for
A friendship betrayed under a moon
that had belonged to lovers
the light of the stars faded
Never to return

No, she cries
The tears fall faster now
I put my clumsy arm around her
and she just clutches the baby tighter
Finding in the baby doll the hope
She can't find in me anymore

She lies next to me tonight
Her slender arms holding a
Baby Doll that I wish
We could have really had



And that's why I became a lawyer instead of a poet!

Here's a link to some poetry that I like

Willie Perdomo

Geoff Bouvier

Lizz Huerta


The first two were teachers of mine- they had to put up with having a hypercritical lawyer in their workshops.

"So, what exactly is so great about Kafka's weird sentences?"
"What if I don't especially feel like writing about my childhood?"
"What's the point of this?"

But, they were both incredibly patient and informative. I recommend their poetry books to anyone with an amazon.com account. Perdomo's poetry is fun, incisive and actually educational about social issues. You can learn a lot about the streets, reading his work. Sometimes, it's more fun to listen to his work as you'll see from the link. As a fellow "mutt", I enjoy his takes on what it feels like to be considered both black and Latino.

Bouvier is more cerebral and nerdy in his approach- the finely constructed sentence turned on its head, hidden messages in the poetry and such... You can easily spend an hour contemplating a single poem in his book "Living Room." His best work is not online, but in the book, so I urge you to buy a copy (or, if you know me, borrow mine.)

The third poet, Lizz Huerta, has no books for purchase online, but has a blog where she will be posting a poem a day. I haven't read enough of her poems to launch a full critique- but the poem that I linked- "To Know" is a brilliant analysis of your typical Latino father- sacrificing for his children and swallowing his pain, but perhaps sacrificing his children by his emotional distance. It has a beautiful allusion to the story of Abraham and Isaac.

I have always loved poetry- Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, Neruda, Emerson and many others were inspiring to me and enriching to my life. It's wonderful to see how a tiny poem can have a depth that is so profound. Sometimes even just a line sticks with you. Like "if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being."

Pretty cool stuff. Poetry- it's not just for chasing women!

April Fools Jokes

I've always been something of a joker. My instinct has always been to find the funny side of life, even in stressful situations. Moments before my surgery for cancer, I was joking with the surgeon about whether he'd paid his malpractice premium. Friends say that had I been on the Titanic, I probably would have been doing stand up.

So, in the spirit of April Fool's day, I thought it'd be fun to scribble down a few stories about funny pranks that I played on people.

Story #1- The Chicken Incident

On of my closest friends- I'll call him JC (because as a lawyer he might sue me!). Anyway, JC and I had the exact same model of phone. We were running errands for work and my phone was almost out of charge.

"Do you mind if I charge my phone on your charger," I asked.

"My phone isn't fully charged yet," he said, not bothering to look at me.

"But it has more charge than my phone. I'm almost out."

"I said no." he said, still looking ahead.

Inwardly, I seethed with irritation. I really needed my phone as I was expecting a call from my fiance (and now wife). So, I did slight of hand. While JC looked ahead, I switched phones on him- placing my phone in the charger.

We drove around for a while and out of boredom, I checked to see what ringtones he'd downloaded. It turned out that he had the same funky chicken ringtone that I had. It gave me an idea.

"So, we're here," J.C. said when we had arrived back at court for the afternoon calendar. "I'll see you later."

"Yeah, see you," I said, but I followed him down the hall way a few steps back. I waited until he approached a group of officers that were his witnesses for the afternoon. Then I dialed his phone.

"CACKLE DODOO DODOOO! CACKLE DODOO DODOO!" came the sound from his ringtone. with any accompanying disco beat. The officers that were with him stared at him and then burst into laughter.

"Nice phone, counselor.."

Story #2- Sing, mothertrucker!

When I was a teenager, I had an interesting relationship with my oldest brother Mario. We would steal from each other. Nothing serious- mostly music and clothes. He would see a cassette of mine that he liked and, being bigger than me, would take it. I would respond by going to his house or car, and taking two CDs. Then he might snag my favorite sweater, while I would respond by taking his shirts. Being ten years older and actually having money to buy good stuff, Mario almost always came out losing in the exchange. He would complain to my father, but it fell on deaf ears.

"You should be setting an example for your brother. You're the older one." Papa would say and Mario would grumble.

Then came the famous car crash of the Pontiac T1000. In addition to larceny, my brother and I shared bad driving in common. No one else in the family had crashed as many vehicles. My latest victim was my Pontiac economy car- chosen by my father because it could not exceed fifty miles per hour and was presumably very safe for me. As it turned out, it wasn't very safe for my Aunt Betty's car. I totaled both cars in a collison that happened while I fiddled with my new car radio.

The Pontiac ended up at my brother's used car dealership. He took the car radio out and put in his car and showed it off to me while I grumbled.

"I'll give it back to you when you get a new car," he said. "In the meantime, try singing?"

But, when I got my next car- a wonderful Datsun pickup that you could drive with either keys or a screwdriver- Mario refused to give me the radio back. He offered me a used radio from the dealership and easily deflected my attempts to take it by force- I was tall and gym strong, but my brother Mario has always been street strong.

I ended up returning to the dealership when he wasn't present and borrowing a slim jim from the car lot. This was a tool used to open cars without a key- it was a slim piece of metal with a hook that you could use to jimmy a lock.

That night, I drove to his house in Tijuana and parked next to his car. It took only a second to open the car and another few seconds to remove the radio, but I felt like I was going to be discovered at any moment. Sure enough, I'd just finished locking his car back up when Mario emerged from his house.

"Dinner?" I asked, dropping the radio surreptiously at my feet and kicking it under my car. My brother grabbed me in a headlock, but then dragged me into the house and fed me. It was a wonderful dinner of meat, tortillas and salsa. After about five tacos, I got ready to leave.

"Can I borrow a piece of paper and a pencil," I asked.

"Not a problem, Mario said. He advised me to be careful when I went clubbing, evidently thinking the paper was to jot down phone numbers.

Instead, when I left, I used the slim jim again and left a note in the gaping hole where the radio had been.

"Sing, mothertrucker!"

A night out on the town- Remembered

Back in my college days in Berkeley, cars were hard to come by. Because of the lack of parking and the general lack of funds, few of my friends owned a car. I was lucky enough to have an Audi that my dad helped me buy at an auction for 1500 bucks. As you might expect for a 1500 dollar car, it had few of the bells and whistles normally associated with a European luxury cars. The windows rolled up with a handle and the air conditioning worked by rolling the windows down. The color was a combination of silver and gold..shall we say a rusty gold. But the Audi was reliable and fit a ton of my friends.

One day, my friend Suli asked me if I could loan him the car for a date.

"I don't think so. No one drives the Audi but me.”

"How about if you come with us and I pay for your drinks?"

I still wasn’t crazy about the idea, but free drinks were free drinks, so I reluctantly agreed.

On the way to the car, I bumped into my friends Cody and Brian and invited them to join us. If I was to be the third wheel, then why not add a fourth or a fifth wheel? Soon, a car full of four guys was on its way to San Francisco for Suli's date.

We parked in a rough area of San Francisco. There was a large group of mostly black males loitering on the corner as we walked to the apartment where we were going to pick up Suli’s date.

“Where are you, young uns going,” came a gravely voice belonging to a large man on the corner. “Why don’t you come and talk at us?” He looked over a group much the way a coyote probably looks over a chicken coop. Suli was black and nerdy with a pair of glasses thick enough to use to start fire in survival situations. I was tall, but as always I was as threatening as a six foot tall teddy bear. And Cody and Brian were short white guys...

“It’s cool, man” said Suli in the whitest inflection known to man. His voice shook, but he couldn't help sounding like Bryant Gumbel. He was black, but grown up in an Asian neighborhood. The guys on the corner looked at his dark skin and seemed unhappy. “We’re just going to pick up my woman and we’ll be out of here.”

“Are you for real? Damn Oreo.” came a voice with a lot of bass. This was from a guy who looked jittery as he approached us. Was he coming off a bad drug trip? I mentally calculated the odds of reaching the car if I took off running.. It didn't seem likely that any of us could take any of them in a fight.

“Hey, don’t be messing with my bro. You’ve got to show respect,” came a booming voice in a very realistic African American inflection behind me. I turned to look in the direction of the voice- there was Cody, all 5'2" of him, walking towards the guys with a Jefferson strut “This is your hood, but that’s his woman we’re picking up. Cool?”

Laughter ensued. “Man, you’re alright..” said the gravely voice and the guys left us alone after that.

Suli's date ended up being a good sport- she danced with all of us at the club and even treated me to a non alcoholic drink for being the driver. We stayed at the club until closing time and all became instant friends.

"This is the best date ever," she said "Four dance partners!"

On the way back to her apartment, Suli feel asleep. Cody and Brian started tossing pennies at him to try to wake him up. Eventually, his date joined in the fun. Suli would paw at the location where the pennies landed, but wouldn't wake up.

We dropped his date off at her apartment and Suli finally woke up halfway on the bridge back to Berkeley.

"Where's my date?"

Brian hit him with a another penny and a I drove the Audi back home.

Goddess of Cleanliness

Those of you that know me, know that my natural state is somewhat messy. My truck is filled with miscellaneous junk- ties that I've discarded after court, a brief case or two, papers, tools and God knows what else. It's often an adventure to fit passengers in my truck. My personal office within my law office is similar- the desk top is filled with papers that I am working on and the drawers are filled with books, electronic gizmos, tea canisters, tools and much else.

Yet, when you come to my house it's impeccably clean. A nice lawn leading to a beautifully decorated entry way. Sometimes the door will have a wreath or roses for Valentines or a similar holiday decoration. Inside the house you'll beautiful and comfortable golden sofas, a mahogany dining table with a matching vanity cabinet- the cabinet filled with beautiful crystals and the table set with a candle motif centerpiece.

The only thing out of place in the house is probaby the ruffled man wearing half a suit who is sprawled half in and half out of a leather loveseat with one hand on the remote control and a lap top on..well...his lap. He blogs away, while his wife watches, as observant as a CSI investigator, looking for any signs of messiness. Seeing if the man's leg will knock over the glass of juice...

The man, of course, is me and my wife is truly a Goddess to put up with my messiness. She graciously allows me a spare room and a garage for my messy habits! The rest of the house, thankfully, is hers!