Regarding Eddie

I have a friend who is a murderer. You would never have guessed it to look at him. He's kind of an overgrown kid, prone to nervous laughter and a fantastical view of the world. When I first met Eddie though another friend, he talked to me about the power of the mind. He said that I could use these self hypnosis tapes to improve everything in my life. I mumbled something about not being quite happy with mediocrity, but he made me take a tape back with me. Of course, I fell asleep listening to it. We kept in touch throughout the years- occasionally he would join my group of friends for a movie, a fishing trip or just a drink at someone's house. Eddie began to get increasingly involved in Eastern philosophy and would call me at work to read me some passage from the Dalai Lama, insisting that as a part Asian, this was my heritage. He'd try to talk to me and the other guys about the possibility of astral travel. We'd laugh at the idea of sending your spirit to travel around the world, but Eddie was always good natured about our reactions. He would just laugh along with us. His good nature was something that I always enjoyed about him.

So, how does this bring us to murder? To be honest, I'm not really sure. One day, Eddie started a relationship with a woman named Anna- a sweet woman that he saved from an abusive relationship. They dated for almost ten years- sometimes going out with my wife and I. Often, they would break up and Eddie would be despondent, but they always seemed to find their way back together. Eventually, they had a child together- a wonderfully messy boy that always seemed to have a face smeared with chocolate. On a couple occasions, I remember kicking the boy and the father out of my office for smearing chocolate across my furniture and wall. Eddie would laughingly apologize, then call me later with yet another quote from the Dalai Lama.

During Eddie's last breakup with Anna, he was living in a small room in a house near a park. He seemed to be the normal Eddie- doing well at his job in Albertson's as a meat cutter, enjoying the simple pleasures of an occasional movie and trying to spend as much time with his son as possible.

Then, one weekend, I received several calls from Eddie's mother. When I called her back, I found out that Eddie had been arrested for throwing Anna off a second story balcony, eventually killing her.

Due to confidentiality rules, I can't tell you what Eddie told me about the incident when I went to see him, but the San Diego Union ran a series of articles on Eddie and the incident.

All I can say is that it is tough for me to picture my friend behind bars. I keep expecting the phone to ring with another quote from Eddie on eastern philosophy.

Here's a quote that he probably would have liked:

"Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion."

Who you gonna call?

A ghost was seen in my house. Honest. My neice-in-law, who is only slightly prone to exaggeration saw a black shape scurry across one wall and then disappear down a hallway. Her shrieks at seeing this ghost, almost woke the dead. And her sighting has lead to a number of ghost stories told by similarly honest members of my wife's family.

"Stop laughing," my wife would invariably say as I cackled away each time her sister or aunt would tell a new story. She's right. Ghosts are no laughing matter.

In fact, I once almost came face to face with a ghost... It's a terrifying tale, so I'd suggest you gather together with your loved once before reading on.

It happened once upon a time, when I was, uncharacteristically sprawled across a sofa watching something enlightening on the television. I heard a noise behind me that almost made me choke on my cheerios. There was a sawing sound that seemed to be coming closer and closer.

Once commercial time came, I rushed to see where the sound was coming from- but it had disappeared.

I returned to watching the TV and began to reassemble my lap top and dinner plate in the right configuration, when the sound came again. I leapt up from the couch, but couldn't quite tell where the sound was coming from. Could it be the backyard?

I went to the garage for a suitably big stick, but when I returned the sound was gone again. I then proceeded to walk the perimeter of my house listening for the sound and looking for anything suspicious.

"What the heck are you doing," asked my wife when she arrived to see me stalking around the yard in my underwear, brandishing a pool cue. I explained about the sound. She just rolled her eyes.

As it turned out, that sawing sound was a mouse gnawing on the pipes. (I'll detail his capture later- lets just say that he became a ghost.) But, for a while, it could have been explained as a ghost.

I think a ton of ghost sitings are explainable by normal phenomena mixed with an overactive imagination.

My father has, I believe, the best approach to ghosts that I've seen. He once heard people playing on an old family pool table in the middle of the night. He reasoned that since it was unlikely that a robber would play pool that it must be a ghost. Thus comforted, he went to sleep.

My wife's family doesn't take the same attitude towards ghosts. Her niece ran when she saw the black shape on the wall. Other family members shivered upon hearing of the sighting and gave their own ghost stories.

I tend to be unafraid of ghosts, like my father, but to play it safe, I leave a light on downstairs so the black shape can find its way around...

No reason not to be polite to the ghosts among us.

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!"