Just in time for the holidays, Dr. Rob and I round out our series on the "Trifecta of American Hangups," sex, drugs and death.

Part III: Death

PL: Most people think we're obsessed with death as entertainment based on the violence and gore we feast on in our movies and television programs, and our apparent appetite for global Manifest Destiny. I don't think so. I think the American hang-up with death is our refusal to acknowledge it. We race like rats and consume as though toil and collection of material are the only markers in life. To say one's more interested in experiences and maximizing the number of interesting stories he can amass than buying the biggest home, car and stuffing his 401k to make sure he can live well in the decade before he dies is perceived as strange. I think there's a willful ignorance at work here. I don't know exactly the forces at work causing it, but we're conditioning ourselves with excess to avoid consideration of our finite circumstances. We don't want to think about death because death forces us to ask whether we're maximizing the moment, and the answer to that question for almost all of us is "no." But I don't think this is sheer delusion. I think on some level we realize that, in order to keep the stores open and the streets clean and lights on, we have to push the reality of our fleeting situations from our minds. Our abstraction of death is the biggest of those white lies that keep the world spinning, keep the systems we accept rolling along.

Dr. Rob: I couldn't agree more with you. As I had mentioned when people are diagnosed with a terminal illness their first reaction is often one of denial. "The test must be wrong" or "I need a second opinion," or even "I don't care what you say, I will beat this." This isn't always a bad thing; just look at Lance Armstrong. The human psyche needs to go through a process to come to grips with mortality. Strangely, fear of dying is at its lowest in old age, which to me suggests at least in part the loss of denial can be a lengthy process.

We need that white lie you mention and distraction can be an extremely useful temporary tool to get things done. But it's overused in our society. Adults focus on their jobs, money and material goods. Some theorists go beyond that to say we have children simply to cheat death, that a small version of ourselves is a way to live past our time-limited flesh. Other say that religion is just a delusion to help people cope with the finality of death. I think both of these takes have merit for certain people.

Thoughts of death and embracing life don't need to be mutually exclusive. The happiest people I know are the most mindful. Whether they are thinking about death, money, sex and everything else people cogitate about, these people are maximizing the moment as much as possible.

PL: Why do we have to let things get so far before we come to grips with it? I understand the need for abstraction, and that when a person's young he feels immortal, but it's not like we don't have enough clocks, or wristwatches around us, or read enough obituaries, or stories about disasters or accidents to be reminded how fragile we are. Why are so many of us only spurred to live after facing grave illness? Why don't we consider death frankly while we're young, when we have the greatest capacity for spirited living? Other than distance from mortality, is there a psychological reason this tends to occur in old age or facing serious health issues rather than youth?

Dr. Rob: We understand death at an intellectual level, but this is where Freud made his coin. Our defense mechanisms are incredibly strong, probably more than they should be. We can superficially acknowledge that we're going to die, relatively soon in fact, but the psyche is designed to ensure that we don't experience much anxiety from this idea. That's why true psychoanalysis takes so Goddamn long to work: breaking down those defenses is a constant effort of understanding and integrating potentially painful ideas into our personality.

I don't know if I agree that youth carries the greatest capacity for spirited living. If an older person takes care of himself, he generally has more practical resources and, more importantly, much more wisdom than his younger counterpart. I talked about the decrease in neuroticism and psychological disorders as one gets older. This greater understanding of life and the world plays a major factor in the elderly's ability to put things into perspective and live more fully. While this phenomenon may not apply to those who are extremely old, enfeebled or without social support, I think the elderly have a lot more going for them than society would like us to believe.

PL: I have different take on religion's relation to death. By creating an afterlife and this concept of judgment in it, I think religion fills an enforcement vacuum for people who need it. I remember reading a quote from a philosopher something to the effect of, "Without religion, man would see no reason to do anything but what pleased him." That's terribly paraphrased, I'm sure, but you get the point. Sans fear of Hell, some folks are going to behave like serious assholes. I disagree, of course, believing that secular people can be and often are far more ethical in their behaviors than the religious, who often seem more fixated on the badges of visible, outward compliance and judging others than they do with actually following the letter of the scripture (Exhibit A: The Bible Belt).

Still, I understand the good of organized religion from a preserving society standpoint. When viewed from that angle, however (and I think a lot of people view religion in that pragmatic fashion) one is acknowledging it's a mere device, or delusion - another well-meaning fabrication. I think in modern society, most people feel this way. The myths that kept us believing in the divinity of the thing in the past are crumbling as technology and science progress. In the drafts behinds those advances, we're left with masses of people trying to find a meaning in the world and coming more and more to the recognition it's beyond us, and the events controlling our lives far more random than we're wired or conditioned to easily admit.

We seem to want to believe, as that Gomez tunes goes, "everything that's gone on happened for a reason." And everything that's coming follows a pattern, path, or guiding benevolent hand. In the past, religion gave us that - an end-run around death, or at least a comfortable explanation of it. That's gone now, and the only thing we have left is to avoid consideration of our mortality altogether. Do you think it's possible our collective mania, the ruthless schedules we follow, the obsession with multi-tasking ourselves away from every loose moment of our days - the minutes where we might consider what we're doing, where we're going - is an anxious escapism filling in the blank where faith used to be? Is our maddening lifestyle a subconscious attempt to make it impossible for us to even consider the bigger picture? A substitute coping mechanism where the certainties of religion used to placate us?

Dr. Rob: I'm completely with you on secular people often being more ethical than their pious counterparts. During my brief stint in Bible Study the facilitator commented on "Up Religion" versus "Down Religion." He said that far too many religions promulgate that we should do positive things to curry God's favor, to get into heaven ("Up Religion"). In contrast, his take was that we should have a viewpoint of doing positive things simply because of God's love ("Down Religion").

As an Agnostic I ultimately had to decide if there was or should be a connection between my positive actions and God's love. Ultimately I lean toward atheism but I don't like it. I'd like to be wrong because it does generate an anxiety in me and I will often engage in distraction to not address it head-on. As you suggest, I think many are like this. Having kids, making money, using substances, building up accomplishments can all be a way to simply never address the big picture. I don't necessarily see this as an outgrowth of increasing atheism but it definitely removes an angst.

PL: I'm not an atheist, but I can tell you this: There'd better not be an afterlife. I'm not spending eternity explaining riding mowers and chewing gum to every 12th Century serf bending my ear in the cafeteria. And you know it'd never end, all the goddamn questions... What else would they ask, and what would I offer? Explain for the poor knaves our every fantastic advance? Microwave souffle? Heated six car garages? Granite toilet seats and prep courses for kindergarten entrance exams? The unbearable lightness of driving a "gold package" German SUV? "In the future, my friend, we had glorious, glowing developments - filled with roads named Churchill, Buckingham and Bouvier Court. Boo-vee-aay."

No, once around this carnival is more than adequate.

The smut we must stop
The trash we must bash
The Laughter and fun
Must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!!!!
- "Blame Canada" (Parker/Stone/Bacharach; 1999)

The bar was on a main drag, halfway down a long sloping hill running through the center of the town next door. It was pouring rain by the time we got there, forcing Charles and me to race through streams of water slicing down the sides of the road.

"So you're sitting there and she's questioning you - while she's drinking it..." I grabbed two Chesterfield Ales from the bartender. "What's Emile doing while this is all going on?"

"That again?"

"You never finished the story."

"I thought you wanted to talk to some locals about the fire."

"You see many locals floating around?" The place was empty save a college aged bartender talking to a short man in a baseball hat smoking at the end of the bar.

"Okay. Here's how it goes. Emile's sitting across the table from me, across the pile of food. Bacon, eggs, pancakes... all kinds of shit. My uncle Bill's at the bottom of the table and Betty's at the top, standing up."

"Betty's the aunt?"

"The great aunt."

"But Bill's a regular uncle?"

"You mean 'Not a great uncle?'"

"I mean Bill and Betty aren't a couple."

"If Bill was banging Betty--"

"Were they on the same side of the family?"

"You mean, was Bill Betty's nephew?"

"Uh..." Nephew... Nephew... Jesus Christ. Did I just forget what a 'nephew' was? The word seemed to escape me, for reasons I couldn't surmise. It was one those moments - those creepy little instants where the hard drive in your head just stops, or freezes. Where you're doing something rote, mechanical - the sort of task you don't even consciously consider - and all of the sudden, with no hint of warning, mental gridlock. The gears grind dry, you totally blank. Forget what you were saying, what you were thinking - how something's done, or what you were even doing. You might be sitting at a stop sign a stone's throw from your home and suddenly struggle to remember, left or right? Leaning over your shoes, staring at the laces in your hands and spacing the steps in a knot you've tied a thousand mornings before. Damnit, I know the word 'nephew'! How the fuck can I forget what it means? You wonder if it's just a lapse, part of the aging process. But then there's paranoia, when you notice it happening a lot. Fuck? Did I have a mini-stroke somewhere? Fry a stack of circuits in the heat of bloated bender? I hope I don't have brain damage.

Nephew (n.) - A son of one's brother or sister or of the brother or sister of one's spouse.

I figured I was burned, suffering some low grade form of what Hollywood types call "exhaustion." The last eighteen months had been a brutal, ruthless blur. I'd moved, quit a job and written, then rewrote and edited a book twice. I'd learned a business I knew nothing about, stretched my dwindling cash like rubber and somehow - mainly luck - ducked the hooks of this doomed economy. And through it all, through the madness and convulsions and confusion, producing a website that demanded ten to twelve pages of high-grade content every week or two. Burned could be accurate, but fried might be better. Thinking that much, in so many disparate directions, slamming all that work into an abbreviated timetable... This can break the mind. Leave you wondering whether maybe, just maybe, you'd damaged the wiring enough that standard English was lost. That an idiot simple descriptive like "nephew" no longer registered. I didn't bother to think - remind myself of the meaning of the word, or do the verbal algebra to grasp what Charles was asking. It was easier just to speak. Take that fifty percent chance of sounding coherent. "Uhh...yeah. 'Nephew.' That's what I meant."

"No. They were on different sides of the family."

"So Bill could bang Betty."

"You could bang your mother."

"Banging a parent is not your uncle banging your aunt."

"Betty's fucking dead."

"Back then."

"She was 75, at least. She had a fucking moustache."

"Still, you never hear of that, you know?"

"Geriatric incest? I'm shocked. None of your family's taken you aside and said, 'Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I fucked Grandma?'"

"That's not what I mean--"

"'It was Columbus Day, 1977. We'd gotten into a bottle of Reunite and--"

"I'm serious... Say you have an uncle and he's single, and an aunt and she's single, and they're on opposite sides of the family. Everybody gets drunk together on Christmas and those two wind up fucking. You know that has to happen--"

"Except Bill was a regular uncle. Betty was a great aunt."

"Bill's dead, too?"

"You going let me finish this shit?"

"That's not incest. I'm almost posit--"

"ANYWAY... So I get up in the morning, go to the table and I sit down and the first thing I see is Emile. He's holding his head in his hands and his face is beet fucking red. I could see he was barely holding his shit together and while I'm watching him, the only thing I can hear is Betty, standing there, holding that pitcher--"

"Ahhh... So it was a pitcher."

"So what?"

"It's easier with a pitcher. I was trying to visualize doing it with a carton and it seems pretty hard. I mean, you could pull it off, but... Well, that'd be fucked up."

"Actually, it was a carton. Betty poured the juice into the pitcher the next morning. I think she got all formal because Emile was Canadian."

"Royalty."

"He did speak French."

"So do the French."

"The woman never left Pennsylvania. She was like a seamstress, or nurse or something."

"Tell me you washed the carton before you put it back in the refrigerator."

"I'm not a barbarian."

"Is that a 'yes'?"

"It's an 'I don't rememb--' Fuck!"

"What?"

"Order me another beer, will you? I forgot my dip in the car."

Continue reading "Pennsyltucky, Conclusion"

If you read this site because you find my insights on law or the horror of institutionalized corporate life amusing, I have a recommendation for you - www.Bitterlawyer.com. There are loads of websites out there satirizing law firm life, but I haven't found one with the quality of writing and production these guys bring to the program.

The law firm life doesn't lend itself to humor. You have to pull that out, dig a few layers to mine the absurdity at the heart of thing - those subtle, carnival-of-dysfunction aspects that make every day in a firm feel like a real-life episode of Arrested Development. The guys at Bitterlawyer do exactly that, and then some. From their articles to their webisodes, Living the Dream, the site is easily one of the best sources of law-related comedy on the web.

I did a piece with them today called "The Seven Species of Legal Website Troll" Pretty self-explanatory. We dissect seven common types of commenters who flame, argue with and irritate everyone around them on some of the larger law-related websites on the internet. The targets are geared to lawyers and law students, but I think most of them are universally recognizable - law-themed variations of the general irritants who infect message boards and comment fields all over the web.

For your Monday reading pleasure, Dr. Rob and I continue our discussion of sex, drugs and death, the "Trifecta of American Hangups." Today's Part II - Sex:

PL: I think the reason we're hung up on sex in this country is because we're a pack of control freaks and sex is the one drive we can't ever conquer. It's our White Whale. We can stave off depression, hold cancer at bay, stop heart disease, steer the economies (well, until this year) and in all those things we can feel like we have the wheel, even if it's just an illusion. But then, passing a high school and seeing a 17 year old Catholic school girl in one of those maddening plaid skirts, we're suddenly forced to recognize just how little control we really have. Sure, we're not rabid sex-crazed animals. We won't act on our filthiest desires. But we're forced to deal with the concept that even within ourselves, we can never extinguish certain base urges. No matter how much we try, we're going to think about what's under that skirt. We've harnessed so much in this country, and we seem to think that if we just put the right amount of effort and ingenuity into the endeavor, we can control every force in our society. Master every aspect of our existence, bring it all to our bidding. Make it safe and give us comfort everything's always going to be alright. I don't think we can't deal with the fact that no matter how hard we try, our native sex drives defy our commands. So we do the next best thing - use sex as a device to control others through advertising, entertainment, or chastity as a form of moral currency in religion. Problem is, however much we use sex to control others, it still controls us, every one of us. Can you think of any greater force in the universe than sexual frustration? It's the root evil under every wrongheaded and infantile ideology in our country, on the planet. I think until people learn to deal with sex as a force beyond our complete control - something utterly incompatible with absolute edicts - it's going to remain the source of half of our national neuroses.

Dr. Rob: Like pinot noir, football and the Wii, sex is what makes America great. So it can be frustrating to listen to uber-conservatives prattle on about its immorality. And I agree that sex is used as a controlling device in both popular and religious culture. That being said, I caution every young client I see about the inherent vulnerability that comes with sexuality. There's something in our hard-wiring that makes sex more than just orgasms. Our bodies were created to do it as much as possible, yet the psychological ramifications of it can be huge. When people are forced into it they often never recover, no matter how much therapy or medicine you give them. Men are taught that there's a direct link between their self-esteem and how much tail they get. Women are labeled as sluts for having sexual expression. And while our bodies are prepped for sex at a young age, our psychological development lags far behind. So if sex is a superior force as you describe, our sexual education needs to focus not just on proper condom use and where to buy a dental dam, but also on how to work with this force so that the sexual experience is more fulfilling from a psychological standpoint. That might help our culture lose some of the neurosis you describe.

Continue reading "Sex, Drugs and Death: A Conversation With Dr. Rob - Part II"

Here's an excerpt from a college reporter's review of Happy Hour is for Amateurs.

On the surface, Happy Hour is For Amateurs is a story of drugs, debauchery, and promiscuity. If that is not your style, however, do not be afraid.

This book is much more than that. It is a story that brings out the truth about "the world's worst profession": law. It is a story about escape from an unfulfilling life.

Here's a law professor's suggestion that PhilaLawyer seek therapy.

Some media flack sent me an ARC of Happy Hour is for Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World's Worst Profession by "The Philadelphia Lawyer." If the foul mouthed ramblings of a profound narcissist with serious substance abuse problems sounds like a fun read, this is the book for you. As for me, I found The Philadelphia Lawyer to be a deeply unpleasant fellow with a seriously flawed moral compass who blames the legal profession for his own psychological and emotional failures and inadequacies.

Funny they'd reach such different conclusions. Whatever your view of it, the Metro thinks it's a great Thanksgiving read.

This over-the-top (seriously, some of the writing was almost too much to handle - but in a good way) memoir will make you feel much better after your parents spending three hours talking about why going to law school instead of playing in that "silly little band of yours" is a good idea for you.

For the past few weeks, I've been reading reviews and feedback on Happy Hour is For Amateurs. But there have also been critics, and I've noticed a lot of them fixate on three subject areas - sex, substance use and mortality (on that last one, more specifically, the suggestion many of us aren't maximizing the limited time we have). For some, these subjects seem terribly complicated - infused with a good deal of neurotic angst. Addressing these subjects frankly, or lightly, in a comic, unapologetic fashion, seems to tweak a fair number of people.

I know, I know... You're surprised by that?

Yes. Yes I am. Not in the sense that it's unexpected, but in the sense that now, here - today - civilized man has been dealing with these things for what? Ten, twelve, fourteen-thousand years? You'd assume the species long ago reached a happy détente with the concepts of fucking, getting high and getting our ya yas out before we kick the bucket.

Apparently not. And this got me thinking, Why? Why do we carry so many neuroses about a biological function like sex? Why are drugs and alcohol postured as a moral issue by so many of us? And in a world where we obsess over avoiding our demise - in retaining or at least giving off the appearance of youth and vigor at all costs - why do we willingly engage in so many endeavors that waste the time we have and require, at least superficially, observation of the fiction we're immortal?

Again, I know... These are impossible questions.

But that doesn't mean they aren't worth asking. And luckily, I had just the person to bounce them off - the author of Shrinktalk and Rudius' own in-house psychologist, Dr. Rob Dobrenski. Dr. Rob and I had a conversation about the "Trifecta of American Hangups," sex, drugs and death, and all the myths, phobias and paranoia attached to them. We can't promise concrete answers, but we touched on a few issues worth considering. Here's the first part of it.

Continue reading "Sex, Drugs and Death: A Conversation With Dr. Rob"

I'm a humorist, a social critic. I never intended to be a repository of career advice. But considering the number of emails I've recently received from people asking whether they should go to law school - whether it's a good idea given the awful job market - one final piece on this subject, debunking all the myths that drive college kids to the profession in difficult economic times, is in order.

Myth No. 1: You can "time" you way around a rough job market by getting a law degree.

I'll go to law school, wait out a terrible job market and when I get out, things will be better and I'll make serious bank. Win/win! If this is your thinking, let me ask you a couple questions. How long did it take you to reach that conclusion? And how general and broadly disseminated was the knowledge on which you reached it? And more important than that, how many other college kids with identical limited information are thinking exactly the same thing?

Here's the first law you ought to study: Supply and Demand.

You and the other 100,000 college kids following this "escape route" will graduate en masse in three years. Just as the protracted recession we're in starts easing and firms start hiring again you'll create a glut of new associates in the market, tanking the value of the degree. A wave of thousands of like minds will find themselves in triple digit debt, fighting like wild animals to work for 2008 level wages. You want to be one of them?

Myth No. 2: Law is recession proof.

Wrong. Law is a business and every business depends on credit, particularly at a time like this, when bad debts and unpaid receivables are mounting. The current crisis forces firms to contract just like any other corporation - to jettison under-producing departments and slash salary increases and bonuses. And no, the spike in litigation that tends to occur in recessions will not offset the overall loss in revenue accruing from a bad economy. The corporations that hire billable firm lawyers are sophisticated buyers. They know their leverage in an adverse cycle and will aggressively shop counsel by price, negotiating payment structures less lucrative to the firms. And given the reality that some firm will always do the work more cheaply (some at "loss-leader" rates to grab new clients and clip the competition), lawyers have little power to avoid fee depression. So no, law is not recession-proof. Over the coming years of economic malaise, law firms will be reorganizing, going out of business and laying off workers at a rate similar to that of every other industry in this country.

Continue reading "No, Entering Law School Is Not a Smart Way to Deal with the Terrible Job Market (An Open Letter to Every College Senior Suddenly Considering It)"