When supper time came the old cook came on deck
Saying fellows it’s too rough to feed ya
At 7PM a main hatchway caved in
He said fellas it’s been good to know ya.
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot (1976)
I always wanted to use that quote in a piece, but I never found the right one. Until today – tonight – when I watched a run of toadies, idiots and rabid imbecile ideologues in Congress talking about how they planned to vote against the financial rescue plan when an amended version of the bill comes up for vote in the House.
Let’s put aside the craven self-interest of the representatives voting “no” out of fear it’ll cost them an election this November. Let’s put aside the Republicans who voted against it because Nancy Pelosi hurt their feelings with her speech. Let’s put aside the false notion it’s a gift to Wall Street – the cheap class warfare of types who like to throw around idioms like “fat cats,” “corporate welfare” or “on the backs of the taxpayer” with no understanding of how and why this happened.
This problem was caused by Wall Street and Main Street, and you might not want to hear that, but it’s true. Truer than tomorrow’s sunrise. We can debate the differing degrees later, but make no mistake – the culpability here is shared. It was a combination of malignant, unmitigated greed, stupendous incompetence and pathological status and class envy – the worst elements of us all, combining from different levels of our society in a perfect storm. To those of us who didn’t profit from the housing run-up on Wall Street, who didn’t take out ARMs we couldn’t afford – who lived within our means – this is a rotten pill to swallow.
But swallow it we must. This isn’t a time for division or politics or finger-pointing. There’s no schadenfreude here, no triumph in populist rebellion. Nationally, globally, interbank lending is beginning to freeze. Sounds like a benign statement on its face, but economically speaking, it’s a near nuclear event. If the plan in Congress fails once more before the end of the week we will see a complete credit lockup, just as an engine would seize if you ran it without oil.

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People write me to ask for career advice a lot – specifically if they should stop doing a job they hate and chase a passion. Here’s the best response I can offer. If you’re thinking about quitting and following a dream, ask yourself these three simple questions.
1. Are you doing what you like?
I’m not asking whether you love what you do. That’s unrealistic. Nor am I asking whether you tolerate it. People can tolerate root canals and hemorrhoids. I’m asking whether you like it – whether on balance you get a sense of satisfaction and fun out of doing what you do eighty percent of the time you’re doing it. Whether it interests you and you feel like you’re learning something you want to learn through the work.
If you can honestly say you enjoy it – that you don’t wake up most mornings dreaming you hit the lottery and that you wouldn’t quit immediately if you inherited enough money to stop; that you actually look forward to the work – then I’d say you like your job. Congratulations. You can stop reading here.
2. Do you have a plan?
If you don’t like your work, you probably fall into one of these three categories:

A. Depression Cases – People who think work is supposed to be awful – that it’s just the human condition to hate your job and “suck it up.”
B. Escapists – People who spend their every disposable dollar on dinners, drinks and distractions – anything to take their mind away from the office.
C. Planners – People who dislike their jobs but are following through on a scheme to either make enough money to retire early and never work again or find and shift into a career they actually enjoy.

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1. Texting
FK: Can u shoot a me T and Js addresses and #s? PK’s digits 2? Tx.
PL: Fuck u. Call me 4 them.
It’s not that I’m too self-important to text. It’s that you’re self-important enough to think you don’t have the time to talk to me, but I should feel compelled to stop whatever I’m doing and type out a reply to you. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re single, middle management and if my watch is right, it’s Saturday afternoon. What’s the emergency, Spanky? Need to run out for fish food? Heated game of Everquest? Pick up the phone. Practicing speech might remind you how to meet women.
2. Walks for Cures
Why I would want to sponsor somebody to walk somewhere?¹ And why does anyone think they’d need that hook to get me to donate to a cure for Cancer or AIDS? Do they think if they merely knocked on my door and asked for money I’d say, “Sorry, but I’m pro-cancer. The lines at 7/Eleven are already way too long.” Is this approach based on market research? Have people told them in the past, “Well, I’d really like to donate, but only if you and a hundred of your friends agree to walk somewhere in identical t-shirts. And ribbons – I’d really like it if you could all wear matching ribbons of some sort.”
3. Stories about “Struggles” with Drugs
When I was a kid people “used” drugs. Then Reagan came into office and suddenly everyone was “abusing” drugs. Now everyone’s “struggling” with them. People write 500 page tomes about it and we all obsess over how to cure the problem while the answer is right under our noses. Clearly, the more people are exposed to drugs, the less facility they have with them. If we’ve gone from “using” to “abusing” to “struggling” with the stuff, why slow the progression? I say speed it up. Legalize them all now and in five or six months people won’t even be able to find their drugs. Steven Leavitt and I are cooperating on a book about this – Peter Tosh, Contrarian Economist.²

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Hey, you. Yeah, you… The guy in the tattered Colgate Lacrosse hat sitting at the computer killing a hangover, reading shit like this when you’re supposed to dropping and adding courses for your senior year. You don’t know what you’re going to do with your life when you graduate, do you? Accountant? Too boring. Doctor? No chance at that with a Poli-Sci major and a 3.1 GPA. Finance? Good luck getting hired in this market.

I know what you’re thinking… Law school, right? I’m not going to talk you out of it. If you’re still interested after hearing all the reasons not to go you’re either really desperate or really committed to the project.¹ But there are a few things a person like you ought to know going into the thing – a little friendly advice from a fellow screw-off who stumbled into the career.

1. Do not spend the LSAT prep course money at the bar.

If you’re looking into law school you’re not much for math or linear thinking. Otherwise you’d be on your way to Wall Street. You’ve taken three years of classes like “The History of Wicker,” “Allegorical Significance of Elves in Middle Earth Literature,” and “Famous Southern Marxists,” dashing off last minute papers on Ritalin binges to hold your meager GPA. This won’t fly on the LSAT. Put the bar tabs on the Discover Card (you’re going to max it out at some point this year anyway). Spend the money mom gave you for the LSAT course on the actual classes. Trust me. There’s no other way that liquor sponge between your ears is ever going to get through those logic exams. Don’t believe me? Answer this in the next ten seconds:

A swinger’s club has five rooms, numbered 1 through 5. Each room accommodates up to two people. Three couples–Edith and Purvis, Melvyn and Ethel and Bertha and Adolph –are visiting at the same time. Melvyn is sharing a room. Ethel is not sharing the room she is in, which is situated immediately next to an empty room. Edith is not sharing a room with either Purvis or Bertha. Purvis is in either the third or fourth room. Which of the following groups of swingers could occupy the second room? Assume all are bi-curious.

(A) Melvyn only; (B) Edith and Purvis; (C) Melvyn and Ethel; (D) Adolph and Edith; or (E) Adolph, Purvis, and Bertha.

However true it might be, “Dude, that’s a retarded hypothetical… What could that shit ever have to do with being a lawyer?” is not a correct answer. Take the course.

2. “I’ll just drink beer tonight” is not the proper approach to the evening before the LSAT.

Everybody has that buddy who doesn’t study for the LSAT, plays beer pong until 2:00 a.m. the night before and still scores a 175. He doesn’t go to law school, of course. He goes to MIT Business School and runs a hedge fund when he’s thirty. This is good because you’ll get to freeload at his summer place from time to time when you’re older. For now, however, absorb this cold reality: You. Are. Not. Him. Don’t even try to make the argument in your head. Yes, he’s as a much of a mess as you are on the surface, but when he goes to class once a semester it’s to ace an exam in String Theory 303 or Organic Chemistry, not to hand in his fourth paper of the year on Canterbury Tales.

You need to stay home the night before the LSAT, rent a movie and no, do not drink beers as a sort of “light buzz” to fall asleep.² This leads to a multiple pitchers with friends, which leads to late night gorging, which leads to you running to the bathroom multiple times during an already arduous test the next morning. Let me assure you, there is no pain on Planet Earth like sitting in a stall in the middle of the LSAT, wiping the wages of Milwaukee’s Best and Taco Bell burritos from your ass, the whole time wondering, Could Adolph, Purvis and Bertha all be in the same room?

Of course not. Bertha’s only into soft-swinging.

3. Bullshit

It’s going to be difficult for you to get into law school. Most of your competitors will have much better resumes. They’ll write essays about building bridges with volunteer crews for refugee camps in Third World protectorates or interning at a law firm that just argued a Supreme Court challenge to New York Times v. Sullivan. Your essay about wanting to be a lawyer from the first moment you finished To Kill a Mockingbird, fleshed with plagiarisms from Matlock and Law and Order, is practice meat for the admissions office’s new shredder.

You need to bullshit your way into law school. Really. Remember the only good line in the movie version of Bonfire of the Vanities, where McCoy’s father tells him, “If the truth won’t set you free… then lie”? That’s you, Sherman. And if you don’t want it bad enough to lie – if you can’t or aren’t willing to lie – you have to stand back and ask yourself, “Is law the right career for me?”

It’s all a math game. If you spend enough money and spray enough phony applications around the country, statistically one of them’s going to hit pay dirt. And don’t worry about being nailed for doing it years later. If you’re bringing enough cash into a firm, they won’t care if you’re a registered sex offender. Most of your fellow litigators will respect you for it – call it “brilliant, daring strategy.”

4. Do not buy books.

Once you’re accepted, the tendency is to buy a lot of thick legal books. This is wrong, and dangerous. Those books are confusing, filled with complex constructions and long Latin phrases. They’re also incredibly heavy, to the point of being a health hazard. Sciatica, vision impairment from staring at the tiny, dense text and narcolepsy from falling face down in them every time you try to read a case — this is what you get from legal textbooks. Unless you want a bad back and the cost of Lasik surgery after your first year, save your money and get your school materials from No. 5 on this list.

5. Make friends with “The Lawstitute.”

Law school’s not a beauty pageant. And I’m not being sexist here. In fact, the law school singles scene is a lot crueler to females than males. A lazy woman looking for anything from a fuck buddy to Mr. Right is faced with endless varieties of Dustin Diamond, Beavis, Bobcat Goldthwait and the guy who played the subway ghoul in Ghost. There will, however, be at least one “Lawstitute” in your class – the woman who will fawn over any male she thinks has the best course outlines, however frequently he picks his teeth during conversations, sweats through his short sleeve Oxford or references Philip Dick novels.

Some will disagree. They’ll say the best tactic is to make friends with the stressed people hiding in the library all day writing their own notes. This is terrible advice. Those people think too much. Their notes will be confusing, overly comprehensive and lack any semblance of focus. Get to know the Lawstitute. Make her a close friend. She’ll have all the Grade A outlines you need, and a wealth of future contacts. This is a person who’s going places – places you can’t because you don’t have her rack. Or her mouth.

6. Get a job.

Normally I’d never recommend this, and friends from law school would vehemently disagree, but I say get a job. If you have good course outlines, there isn’t much reason to go to class. In fact, class will only hurt your grades. Law isn’t brain surgery. The difference between the best and worst students isn’t thinking, churning or studying endless hours. The difference is not thinking. The people at the top are limited, and that’s by design. They narrow their focus and deal with a finite set of concepts – the simple issues at the heart of complex fact patterns. They don’t focus on learning every silly, peripheral fact. They memorize the minimum they need to know to ace the exams and not a stitch more.

Class involves thinking, and thinking works like drinking. A little leads to more, and more leads to excess and then fatally, suddenly, without even realizing it, you’ve lost all focus. The only way you can be sure to evade this common pitfall is to avoid all of your classes – be certain you won’t be there. The only way to do that is to get a job requiring you to be somewhere else. And anyway, work builds character. Nothing teaches you to appreciate your time in graduate school like having a day job.

7. Avoid “That Guy.”

You won’t meet many people you like or relate to in law school. It’s an asshole magnet, just like the career, and that’s kind of the drill – a necessary part of the education. Inevitably, however, you will run into “That Guy” who’s just like the people you hung out with in college. Avoid him like the plague. Do not become friends. Both of your class ranks will drop twenty points merely as a result of the acquaintance. And let’s be honest… If you’ve read this piece this far, there’s a ninety five percent chance he’s a lot smarter than you. He’ll make partner somewhere years later and find himself burned out in an industry he hates, surrounded by people he’d like to kill. You’ll both loathe your situations and commiserate, wishing you were in each other’s shoes. The only difference is you’ll be the guy taking a wild, reckless chance on a book making fun of the legal profession. He’ll be whining from the cabin of his boat.

In closing…

My advice? Think twice before you go to law school. Take a few years off after college to consider what you want to do with your life. Tend bar. Be a ski instructor. Get a fucking paper route… As an eminent jurist once noted when asked by a college student whether the young man should go into law, “[T]he world needs ditch diggers, too.” Say what you will about the calluses, I hear they keep real nice hours.
———-
¹ I heard them all – from friends, family, neighbors. Every lawyer I talked to warned me not to go, or at least take a few years off before I did. I went anyway, straight out of school. You think you know everything when you’re twenty-two. You don’t know shit. You might actually be smarter at eighteen, before you’ve spent four years in the fantasyland of college.
² This advice doesn’t apply to bar exams. In those conditions I advise being limber. I wouldn’t recommend it for the multiple choice section, but splitting a magnum of wine with a friend and laughing over old college stories the night before makes the essay portion go a lot more smoothly.
³ Everybody hits this once or twice in college. Leave the number of times vague.

People have complained for years about how litigation is ruining this country. How lawyers cancer every corner of commerce, from the shakedown artists suing for every slip and fall, technical violation of an arcane statute or slightest breach of contract to all of the different stripes of “defense” counsel creating what seem to be nothing but mammoth bills for their clients in response.
There’s no way to rid ourselves of the hyper-litigious or their advocates. Some people view the slightest basis for a legal claim as a bag of casino chips, and for every one of them there will always be a lawyer willing to walk him to the blackjack table. And anyone seriously interested in stopping the constant onslaught of frivolous litigation already knows the defense bar will never lead a charge to stop it. Lawsuits are their bread and butter, the fount of revenue that feeds them endless billable hours. They’d be as upset about tort reform as the plaintiff’s lawyers.
The only way to address the problem is for citizens to petition their lawmakers for changes to the court rules. Shame the legislators into adjusting a playing field the lawyers have slanted in their favor. I’m not talking about damages caps, a loser pays scheme or any other draconian reforms. Those are sledgehammers where surgical strikes are needed. I’m talking about making a few well placed changes to seemingly minor court rules which would cause a substantial decrease in the number of dubious lawsuits prosecuted.
1. Immediate Mandatory Mediation
The chief impediment to early settlement in every piece of litigation is the same dysfunction that earned Paul Newman a beating in Cool Hand Luke – “failure to communicate.” Disputes drag on forever in the courts more because of the litigation process than the parties’ differing positions. As a plaintiff (or his lawyer on contingency) starts spending money to prosecute a case, expectations begin to rise. As the defendant spends money on his counsel, the amount he’s willing to settle for decreases. At the same time the parties stop speaking to one another, communicating only through counsel and growing more and more disconnected.
In my experience, people are a lot more reasonable meeting face to face than they are speaking through their attorneys. Suppose we set up a system where instead of having the lawyers immediately take over the dialogue, after the filing of any case the parties were required to appear before a mediator who would grill them on their claims and defenses. They’d be allowed to have counsel with them outside the mediation room, like a grand jury appearance, but would otherwise be required to sit across from one another, look each other in the eye and explain in layman’s terms why they should win. At the conclusion, the mediator would tell them each privately what he thought their chances were in the case. This might not be economically sensible for smaller suits, but it would put a chill into those opportunistic litigants trawling for lottery paydays. It would also create bargaining parameters for settlement before the parties spend of thousands of dollars and feel like they have no choice but to go all the way to the courthouse.

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This is part one a simple, straightforward piece – more a list than anything else. People have asked me for music recommendations several times in the past. I haven’t provided an in-depth response because, well, I own a lot of music. I didn’t know how to whittle it down to a top ten or twenty list and frankly, music being art and art being subjective, a “ranking” seems ludicrous (you’ll rarely find anyone less qualified for his position than an art critic). The best I can offer is a list of compact discs I enjoy and figure you might as well.
These were picked off the top of my head as I scanned through my library. I tried to select obscure or overlooked albums, but a few classics slid into the list here and there. Mostly it’s alphabetical by artist, except for a few instances where I didn’t feel like following that order.
Abba – Gold: Greatest Hits
I can’t explain why, but there’s something evil about Abba’s music. Evil in a good way, as in it makes me want to get wired, get loaded and get laid. Partly nostalgia, I’ll admit. But there’s something more to it… The soaring harmonies, they way those insidious, simple, high notes on the piano kick the music along. Or it might be something Swedish, perhaps Scandinavian. My wife’s half Norwegian, and I love that squeeze-tube caviar they sell at Ikea.
AC/DC – Powerage
Supposedly, Keith Richards’ favorite record by AC/DC, which isn’t surprising, since it has a Stones-y feel. This is the band when they were just playing straightforward rock and roll, before the heaviness and polish of Highway to Hell and Back in Black. “Rock n Roll Damnation,” “What’s Next to the Moon” and “Gimme a Bullet” are some of the band’s greatest overlooked gems.
Allman Brothers – Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival / Live at Ludlow Garage 1970
Folk Festival is just like the legendary Live at the Fillmore East record, only with a broader song selection. And disc two of Ludlow’s Garage has the greatest, heaviest “Mountain Jam” I’ve ever heard.
Beatles – Abbey Road
I like Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album just fine, but this is the Beatles record I listen to over and over. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is built around this great, sinister lick and “Something” is one of those tunes you wish went on for another five, eight or fifteen minutes.
Beck – Mutations
Somehow, this elegant little record was buried in Beck’s catalog, listed as an EP between Odelay and Midnight Vultures. Probably a marketing thing, as it was moody and bleak and mostly acoustic, with little of the sonic painting he was doing on the albums before and after it. People rave about Sea Change and it’s a great record, but I think Mutations is as good, if not better, than anything else Beck’s done.
Jeff Beck – Beck Ola
Rod Stewart fronting one of hardest guitar records of it’s time. It’s a no-brainer.

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George Carlin died three weeks ago and it’s taken me that long to figure out how to write about him. There just weren’t words. Initially it was embarrassment – revulsion at just how amateur every joke or opinion I’ve offered appears after watching his routines. That as Jerry Seinfeld eloquently noted, whatever joke anyone’s been telling for the last thirty years, Carlin told it first. And better.

But there was more to it than that. Carlin was “post-commentary.” Not in some cheap silly fashion, as artists are “post-modern” or candidates claim to be “post-politics.” The universal truth and clarity of Carlin’s observations placed them as close to “beyond dissection” as any entertainer’s work could ever be. Media’s cheap and most of it’s full of shit. We can parse and qualify the points of ninety percent of the mouths we hear on television, radio or the internet. Not Carlin. There were no two meanings to anything he said, and whether you liked it or not you knew in the end, He Was Right.

I won’t embroider that point here. Better to let Carlin explain himself. Watch these video clips from his last HBO special, It’s Bad For Ya.

The bullshit that binds us
God bless America
Your imaginary rights

Start at minute 4:00 of the first clip and move through the following two. If those fifteen or so minutes don’t savage all the delusions and absurdities at the heart of our aggregate national idiocy, you’re not living in reality.

George Carlin was far more than a comedian. He was one of our great individualists, in the air of Mencken and Twain.¹ He didn’t believe in faiths, factions or parties. I think he believed in people, in the inherent decency of humans alone, one on one, uncorrupted by the forced affiliations that drive us to so much groupthink – to zealotry, bubbles, wars and superstition… To the ludicrous insistence some omniscient hand has the wheel. That or in a tough moment like the present some elected official or policy can “make it all better” – as if a McCain, Obama, universal health care or “social justice” tax reform might save us from the bogeymen we read about in the business pages.

I never met George Carlin and I don’t know anyone who knew him. But I do know his work, and the thrust of his message is particularly important in year like this, facing an election like this and its endless marketing tentacles. If there was a way to honor a person like Carlin, someone who gave us so many laughs and so much spot-on social criticism, it’d be to stop, if just for a day, and tune out all the assholes telling us what to believe. To consider what we each want to do, what we think and what makes sense to every one of us as individuals. Turn off the Sean Hannities, Keith Olbermanns and Bill O’Reillys. Click off Townhall, HuffingtonPost and DailyKos. Tune out the Limbaughs and Frankens and Savages and in the words of another eminent voice silenced this year, “stand athwart” the idiot wind of the chattering class and the interests that feed them advertising dollars. Say “Thanks, but I’ll think for myself instead.” If you do that – if we all do that instead of buying into the misrepresentations and spin – we’ll have voted correctly this November, whoever gets elected.

Carlin wouldn’t have voted at all, of course, and that’s fine, too. If you examine the candidates’ platforms and conclude it doesn’t make any rational sense to cast a ballot, by all means, stay home on Election Day. Just so long as you make your own decision, based on actual facts. That’s all that matters. And that’s all Carlin ever asked us to do. If he had any message or mantra it was aptly plagiarized from Benjamin Franklin – “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”² It can’t be repeated enough… Think for yourself.

George Carlin was Right. We’re not at our best when we’re caught up in a fervor for aimless “revolution” or pumped full of bullshit by the mouthpieces of K Street and Madison Avenue. We’re at our best when we observe, consider and apply our judgment rationally. So thanks, George, for pressing us toward that end, as futile as it might be.³ And Godspeed, even if you didn’t believe in her.
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¹ Fittingly, Carlin will posthumously receive the The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor this fall.
² Often attributed to Lou Reed, who reversed the quote in “Last Great American Whale” (“Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear”). New York, 1987.
³ In a country where one third of the people refuse to believe in evolution, it’s hard to image “thinking for yourself” ever becoming the majority norm.