Do you like my car, Dirk?

I have a nine-year-old cousin in San Diego, who I’ve always mistaken for a dullard because of his unfortunate habit of mouth-breathing. I recently learned that he’s not. P.J. and Christine are twins who were born to my uncle later in his life and have been predictably coddled. Historically, my interaction with the twins has been limited to ignoring the gibberish that they seem to mistake for English, while they hit me for no good reason. But at one point during a trip which Claire and I recently made to San Diego, P.J. inexplicably broke into a long, coherent, and measured dissertation on the Harry Potter movies. According to Claire, it wasn’t so much the content of what he said but the seriousness with which he took up the topic that was so striking. So he’s not an idiot, apparently. My mom later told me that P.J. is a perfectionist when it comes to his schoolwork and becomes so agitated by his mistakes that he hits himself in the head. Unprompted, of course.

I shared that feeling yesterday. I have a jury trial in a week which I’ve been working on for the last month. I pulled a Lumberg and had a couple of paralegals meet me bright and early on Saturday morning. I was in good spirits because at that point in the day, the sun was out. That mood abruptly ended when I discovered that the paralegals, and myself, had made two separate mistakes. Once I figured this out, I quite literally wanted to punch the paralegal in the face and smash my desk to pieces. The paralegal, by the way, is a woman with two small children. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The paralegal’s goof, however, paled in comparison to mine. I’ve fixed it, more or less, but it lingers. In Boogie Nights, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a scene where he makes a homosexual pass at Dirk Diggler which Dirk brushes off. During the aftermath, Scotty sits alone in his faux-Dirk Digglermobile and smacks himself in the head while bawling, “I’m an idiot . . . a fucking idiot.” My cousin, Scotty, and I need to form a support group. If this were a six-month trial, I’d surely kill myself.

I like my job. I also like getting trial experience. But I was eating dinner last night with my family and I felt like throwing up. I’ve also had to fend off a daily compulsion to self-medicate through beer the second I get home each night. I am totally doing jack shit in June. I think my secretary’s sufficiently servile to turn on my lights and computer in the morning, put my suit coat on my chair, and spread some papers around my desk in a workmanlike fashion with no questions asked.