Jury Duty, Part III: The Panther of Justice

As we've already established, I'm not allowed to discuss the case on which I am serving as a juror. As an alternate juror, sorry. I keep trying to leave the modifier out in an attempt to make myself feel better about the fact that I don't get a vote, but it's not really working. I show up every day, sure, at the expense of my job and some things I'd rather be doing with my kids,* I listen to the same testimony, I take the same notes, I endure the same shameless sucking up about the "sacrifice of [our] service" and our "civic duty" and our "vitality to the administration of justice in America" and our "legally enforceable obligation to be there under penalty of fines or jail time." But no amount of investment of time or energy or not-being-visibly-asleep-ism is going to warrant me any say-so at the end of the proceedings. I sure as fuck bet I'll be required to show up (and wait outside) for the deliberations, though. Hopefully they'll take many, many days. I started reading Ulysses. I need all the free time I can get.

I don't want to in any way jeopardize the very important work that's being done by talking in any way about the case at hand. And to this end, to lessen the risk of spillage, I have chosen to simply stop paying complete attention. Am I listening to the same testimony as everyone else? I am, but only if you are comfortable defining "listening" as "not actively stopping up your ear-holes while in the presence of audible sound." Am I taking notes while this testimony is occurring? Well, the people are talking and my court-issued pen is scribbling the shit out of the pages of my court-issued spiral notebook. An easy inference can be made that the two activities are in some way causally related. I will do nothing in particular to obstruct that inference. Except maybe to say that the plot of what's happening in my notebook is a damned sight better than the one happening in the courtroom. Does their narrative have a single hyena in it? Let alone a whole pack of semi-sentient ones hunting down and murdering their former captors and tormentors after being accidentally released on the African savannah by the U.S. defense research lab who made them? Given what I said before about the state of my listening, I guess I can only say in all fairness: not sure!

I'm obviously not at work while I'm juror-ing, but I suppose I can't really say I'm not getting any work done. There's the writing. There's the staying awake. I spend a lot of time thinking about World Cup and who's going to win (Is it insane to say Belgium? Well anyway, it's definitely not Germany). I spend a lot of time thinking about sandwiches at my favorite sandwich place in the whole world, in walking distance of the legal center downtown. But when all is said and done, when there's a lull in the court proceedings or at least a lull in my attention span, the world falls away and a zen flow-state takes me to places in my mind one might only otherwise find under the influence of psilocybin or autoerotic asphyxia and I can really contemplate, in the liminal state of the semiconscious, the questions between the questions. These momentary graspings of the cosmic/universal are fleeting and euphoric of course. All I can do is realize my writing hand was moving the whole time, so I look down with great anticipation at my psychographical scribblings to learn of myself the product of superluminous truth. Usually it's, like, a couple of scribbly circles (maybe cherries? or two hurricanes in love?) and some things that are either lightning bolts (point for hurricanes!) or human veins.

I don't know, it's going to need some interpretation. That will give me something to do when the real jurors are deliberating.

---

*Pretending I have to go to the store or something so I can sit in my car by myself for awhile futzing** with my phone, away from my kids for one goddamned second.

**NOT masturbating. That's not what "futzing" means. God, I'm in my car, you pervert. I would never. I'd be risking a third strike.