Time Won't Give Me Time

If, like me, you're a child of the 70s, it's been pretty disturbing to see the celebrities who have died recently: Paul Newman, Dom DeLuise, Bea Arthur, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Benedict (played English neighbor Bentley on The Jeffersons), Clint Ritchie (played Clint Buchanan on One Life to Live - I used to watch it sometimes before General Hospital) and Marilyn Chambers (okay, that last one was for me). There are a bunch of obscure, one-hit-wonder 70s singers I could name (i.e., Danny Seals, who sang "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight"). And Farrah Fawcett, the object of lust for every adolescent boy born between 1962 and 1970, is dying of cancer. Forget that bizarre kookiness of hers in her later years, in the 70s, she was THE sex symbol of sex symbols. Her iconic red bathing suit poster was practically being handed out at supermarkets - 12 million copies sold. Damn, she was hot! Next to Olivia Newton-John, Farrah was my very first Celebrity Viagra. The fantasia quadrupled when I learned that she was married to The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors. It gave me a great deal of pleasure to imagine all those $500,000 babies they would make together, babies who would increase in value over time and develop into Ten Million and maybe even Twenty Million Dollar supermen and women. Alas, their relationship didn't last and they cut the cord in '82. By then I'd moved on to Donna Dixon and Phoebe Cates.

Part of the way I measure the passing of time is by accounting for famous people who have died. Celebrities are an easy benchmark, because I remember how old I was when I first encountered them and how I felt back then. Whether the kitchen counter was above or below my head. Some of these people died at a ripe old age. Dom was 75. Ricardo and Bea were in their 80s, I believe. Some lived very long lives. Others didn't. Others died in their 60s, or younger. And so, in my time analysis, I do the math. I deduct the years and address the ramifications. 2009 minus 1976 is 33. 80 minus 33 is 47. Okay, so some of these people were on the older side when I watched them. But hold on just a second. I'm 40, 47 is not that much older than I am now. Shit, seven years ago, it was 2002 and that was AFTER 9/11. And if I tinker with the math a little, let's say I deduct 33 from 70, we're at 37, which is younger than I am now when I was watching these people, sitting in my red bean bag chair and eating my Swanson t.v. dinner! How quickly did those 33 years go? A blink. From childhood to middle age in 33 years and it happened at warp speed. If I slow it down and think of it year by year, no, it went slower, but when I think of it cumulatively, it's nothing, a microsecond.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the passage of time, but I think about it a lot. Not necessarily death so much but just time passing and how little most of us make of use of it. It's the one commodity that no one, not the richest or most powerful person in the world, can get more of. You can be Donald Trump or Ted Kennedy or Osama bin Laden or the Sultan of Brunei. You can buy all the cars, houses, jewels, guns, and women you want. You can run countries, foment revolutions, blow shit up, build skyscrapers, or have your own narcissistic t.v. show where you get to act like a prick and fire people in front of your kids. You can spend your life working your ass off in a fluorescent office, saving your acorns for a rainy day, or living a life of complete freedom, hopping westbound trains like a hobo, with just the shirt on your back, taking whatever the sun brings that day. What no one gets, though, no matter how they live or who they are, or what they do, is more time. Somehow, some day, at a time not of my or your choosing, the body's clock runs out. Rich, poor, or neither, the body quits, it breaks down, and it's time for us to go. We all know this in the back of our minds and still, what do we do about it? What can we do about it? Thinking about this too much would make life unlivable and not very enjoyable. But to ignore it completely seems wasteful too.

Ten years ago on May 10th, I joined my current law firm, leaving one of the best law firms in the country for the promise of better, more interesting work, with nicer people, and the promise of partnership after a few years. Not all of that worked out and there have been more than a few times when I thought I made a mistake, or I got bitter about how certain things went down, or how some people have changed over time, going from humble, easy-going friends when I first encountered them all those years ago, to Class A, two-faced assholes totally out for themselves. Fortunately, there are enough people who stayed the same and wonderful friends who came along later that I can still tolerate the place. But in the end, does it really matter? Isn't it the same, or worse, at other places, doing other jobs? It has to be. Or maybe, like my father, I'm just too much a creature of habit. I'm the immovable object.

My entire life, I've never had a job at one place this long and yet, when my ten year anniversary arrived last week, I didn't celebrate it, or even acknowledge it. Why? I'm not totally sure. Maybe because it's just a job to me now, maybe because it's not exactly a wedding anniversary or birthday, so why make a big deal about it? But I think it's deeper than that. I think it's because I've realized that while my job is important in the I've-got-to-eat-and-travel-and-pay-my-mortgage sense, and yes, I'm happy to be busier than I've been in awhile, at the end of the day, life is life, and work is work, and work is not the measure of my true happiness or who I am. People are. Friendships are. Relationships are. Family is. Experiences, doing new things, making the most of my FREE time is. I know a few people who define themselves by what they do, how many hours they bill, how much money they bring in, how big their house is, what kind of car they drive, and I feel sorry for them. There are one or two people I'm thinking of right now who love the sound of their own voice, schmooze inside the firm like advertising agents on Mad Men, kissing asses and taking names, and who I wish would just. shut. the fuck. up. They are nails on a fucking chalkboard. Serenity Now. Sereeeeenity Nowwwww. Lawyers seem to be all they are, and they want you to know it! How boring.

I'm not going to say I don't like what I do, don't like to work hard, or don't like nice things. Anyone who knows me should know none of that is true. But for me, work is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. I have my limits. For example, I'd sooner live in one of those modular, modern-looking houses -- the kind you design yourself and they put together with a crane in two weeks -- than a McMansion. Any spending spree I undertake, which hasn't happened in awhile, actually -- is followed by a much longer period of hermitlike frugality. Okay, so these aren't exactly choices people get to make in Angola or Sri Lanka, but everything in context, people. I live in the United States.

A bigger difference, though, between me and some of my peers is unless I really need to, I don't go out of my way to tell people I'm a lawyer or discuss my cases, or banter about legal strategy and the interesting subtexts of client relations, or novel issues presented by the latest reporter squib. Probably not great for my prospects, but right now, I couldn't care less. I don't define myself as a lawyer, and I don't enjoy kissing gray-haired asses or promoting myself to people as an expert on this or that, even if I've been doing this for 14 years now (shit, really?) and have learned a thing or two about a thing or two. I don't like self-promoters. They may be higher on the ladder, they may make more money, but there is something needy about them, like an ego itch that needs to be scratched, one that won't ever go away no matter how well they do. They're insecure and fake. What they do is their identity and they wear it like a Superman costume everywhere they go. Take their job away, even if temporarily, and what are they? Husks.

Apart from nostalgia over dying 70s icons, a couple of things happened this week that are making me go off on this time/lawyer tangent. First, a few days ago, I logged into Above the Law and read about two lawyers, both partners, from my old law firm whose careers have completely derailed. One I didn't know well. Apparently, he intentionally overbilled a client $500,000 for work he hadn't done, and he got fired. The other, I knew really well, mostly from my days as a summer associate when I did a foray in the corporate department. Fantastic guy. Down to earth, supportive, just an all around decent person. He made partner in 2001 and I was thrilled for him, even though I was long gone from the firm by then. I don't know what happened, but he got fired in April. Partners at this firm don't get fired unless something has gone horribly wrong. Picture in the paper wrong. So I'm really curious about what happened to him. I've been trying to track down his email address but they took it off the website and I have no way of contacting him until he joins another firm (if he ever does). Both of these guys were at the top of their profession, partners at a prestigious firm where the average partner clears $1 million a year, easy, and everything combusted. Why? What was the purpose? Why do multimillionaires with impeccable integrity like Bernie Madoff decide to steal from people when they don't need the money? Why would they choose to run the risk of dying in jail? Wasting the time they have left rotting behind iron bars?

The other thing that happened was I got an email from a friend yesterday telling me that a partner at another law firm, someone he'd introduced me to when I was interviewing to join a new firm ten years ago, died a few days ago. He didn't say how, but this man had some physical issues; I remember that when I met him at his office a decade ago, he used a cane or some kind of walker to get around. And when I got the email, I thought to myself how when I was sitting across his desk in his nicely decorated office and he was telling me about the firm and giving me advice on interviewing and other places where I had offers, how strange it would have been to know that this man had only ten years left to live.

And how much time do any of us have? It's not like a bell goes off that tells us. How much would it suck if it did? We'd all need megadoses of Prozac to make it through whatever time we had left. It's the not knowing that makes life livable. But it's also the not knowing that makes us think we're going to live forever and fucks up our priorities. It makes us chase the wrong things. It makes us proud. It makes us flaunt our positions in society or our wealth or our status like we're Zeus, like we're immortal gods. It's the mother of all delusions, as Saddam would say if he were still alive and had chosen to spend his time in existential contemplation rather than trying to hold on to his tenuous power by torturing people.

How do we spend our time? Why do we spend it the way we do? What's the best way to spend it? Why did I just spend a great deal of the past month following the Boston Bruins, who haven't won a Stanley Cup in 37 years, only to be crushed when they lost to the Hurricanes in sudden death overtime two nights ago? It was meaningless, really, but it felt important at the time. Why am I enjoying doing Sudoku when I get home from work lately, instead of writing or watching t.v.? Are either of these activities worth my time? For those of you who have kids and families, do you ever lament how much time they require? How little you have for yourself anymore? Maybe your own time stops mattering as much once you have them. Maybe you find a way to squeeze your own interests in and you don't need as much time for them, like a condensed zip drive. Maybe your kids are how you spend your time and you're happy with that.

I don't have the answers to any of these questions. But I am asking them.

Is that a waste of time?