Who'll play with me on saturday afternoon

June 16

So yeah, it's been more than a month since I updated. Summer doldrums? Sheer laziness? Infected by Matt's most recent malaise? Possibly all three. I had all these little bits I wrote that I was going to save for "my next entry" but you know what? screw that. I'm starting fresh.

Going home was good, except that I got in Dutch with my mom for staying out on my birthday till (gasp) 4 am. She was all worried about me, dead in a ditch somewhere after doing 12 jello shots and then driving her minivan into a tractor trailer.* I had a hard time knowing how to deal with this, seeing as it was my 33rd birthday and not my 17th, but ok, that's Mom. Moms worry, until you die. She'll be 90, worrying about me staying out all night on my 60th birthday, doing Metamucil shots and steering my Rascal into unsuspecting pedestrians in a drunken furor.

I am home and able to write this because I just got off of three days of jury duty. Now I'm good for another four years. Jury duty was incredibly boring, although it gave me a good cross-section of the NY population. I was called for a potential juror pool, for a dispute between a city agency and a woman who'd been the victim of a hit and run. I was happy to be called, until I realized I was assigned a seat next to a mumbling man who reeked of alcohol. He turned out to work for the post office. Also in our juror pool: a Broadway dancer for Fiddler on the Roof, a midwife, an extremely geeky Columbia professor, and several people who were disqualified because they had serious beefs with the personal-injury lawsuit system. I don't know why I wasn't chosen. I was wearing a slightly low-cut shirt, maybe the lawyers thought it was too distracting.

Anyway, the rest of the time consisted of sitting, reading, chewing gum, sitting, going to the bathroom, and sitting. It was like work, except I couldn't check my email and I had to read the actual paper instead of the online version. I hate that, because the Times is too hard to open out when you're sitting in close quarters, and the ink gets all over your fingers. I'm ready for the future, when we carry little personal slate computers that are a cellphone, computer, music player, and downloadable book-reader all in one. Yeah, yeah, paper books are nice, but they are hard on the environment and a pain to haul around. I'm ready to go digital already. You geeks out there...get on that, would you?

I was going to say something earlier about jury duty. Yes, it's boring. Yes, it's a pain in the ass. Yes, it inconveniences your employer, blah blah. But nothing irritates me more than people who are all "Oh, man, bad luck" when you get called. You know what else is a pain? Voting! You take off work, you go to some elementary school, and stand in line, and you have to make a decision. God, what an inconvenience! Maybe we should just reinstate the monarchy, then we'll always know who's in charge, and we won't have to waste all that time voting. We can just spend more time pleasing our corporate overlords instead!

And what about that pesky freedom of speech? I mean, god, who needs it? Why not let our leaders tell us what we should and shouldn't say? Wouldn't that be easier?

Here's the deal. You get called to serve, you go, you do your bit, and try not to gripe too much. Because when it's your ass hauled before a judge, you want to think there are 12 people of reasonable intelligence making the decision, not just a herd of mouthbreathers too stupid to finagle a way out of jury duty. You live in a country with trial by a jury of your peers, well, someone's got to be those peers. So shut up already, with your strategies for getting out of it. Just haul your lazy butt to the courthouse and sit in a chair for a few hours, read your paper, and shut the hell up. Thank you.

Ok, that was angry. To offset the bile, check out my review of Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow in the Tour de Testosterone.

*What actually happened was, I went out with friends, drank maybe 3 beers, and played cards at a friend's house until 3am. I have never actually done a Jello shot, because it sounds nasty.