When I was in my teens — and at fourteen I wasn’t old enough to vote yet — I somehow ended up working for the McGovern campaign for President.

It was my first exposure to the actual work of politics and I cannot tell you, in all frankness, how I became involved with that campaign. I must have liked something about McGovern, because I cannot imagine that otherwise I would have done what I did. It was a lot of work. I stuffed envelopes. I wrote out postcards. I went door-to-door handing out information pamphlets and, I think — come on, do you know how long ago fourteen is to a sixty-eight-old?! — trying to answer questions. We had these little mini-rallies.

Anywayser — that’s a familect of mine, by the way, passed down in my family for one generation — as a child, I was horribly offended by “injustice.” I didn’t call it that then. I don’t know if I understood, fully, the word. It wasn’t part of my vocabulary. But, as an adult, I recognize that this attitude of being offended by injustice has been a throughline in my life. I have ideas about where that came from.

But those are for another essay.

I also remember that I had this little lapel button. Of course, I didn’t have a lapel back then, except on church days, and I was not allowed to wear my lapel button then. LOL!

But I wore the button to school sometimes pinned to whatever shirt I was wearing. It said, “I LIKE IKE”.

Now, I don’t exactly remember why I liked Ike, but I did.

Maybe it was the story of what he did when he was liberating those who lived through the concentration camps and how he had certain people—Germans living in the area, including mayors—brought to the camps and forced them to see what they had enabled. Maybe it was something about his photos. I remember that I always liked his face and his uniform. He just seemed so…stately. Yet friendly. Warm.

Moral.

Like, this is the man who is going to stand up to the whole world. He’s not letting anyone tell him to stand down when something is wrong.

I needed that at that stage of my life. I need it now.

There is a certain irony to that election cycle. In 1971, Amendment 26 to the United States Constitution was ratified. I was 13 years old. A year later, in 1972, McGovern’s campaign for President — the one I worked — was launched. Today, some call this the presidential election campaign that essentially torpedoed our nation.

But I digest. (There are enough of using the word this way that I can imagine a future where “digress” and “digest” get listed in the dictionary as synonyms. Or maybe it goes the other way: maybe “digest” keeps its meaning, but hides the nuance that digestion doesn’t eat everything and so, along the way, a little shit pops out now and then.)

There’s something to be said for expertise. There are people in the world who study a particular thing, or come to know a particular — what shall I call it? either “need”, or what I think is oddly connected, “zeitgeist” — “requirement of this time” that the hoi polloi (I include my 14-year-old self here) miss. They actually “get it” and we “feel it” in a way that might be, in the end, just wrong.

That’s what happened to me when I was younger. I sensed things. I felt them. And I responded to those feelings. I worked for McGovern. I liked Ike. But things started to change a little when I voted for the last Republican President I would ever vote for: Ronald Reagan.

Before I go on, I want to say that I decided to write this essay because of an essay Dan Rather from Steady wrote. Rather’s piece is rather partisan and I wanted to write but I wanted to try not to get too partisan. We’re going to see if I succeed at that. But I feel the need to say right here that I’m neither Republican nor Democrat. People who know me will laugh at me saying this, but I don’t really consider myself to be very political. In fact, I don’t even remember how I’m “classified” in California these days. I’m either unregistered or independent. I don’t know the label and I’m not going to look it up right now because, frankly, I don’t think labels fit me very well.

Confused, maybe. That might be a label you’d say works.

Except I’m not confused. I know why Reagan was the last Republican President I voted for — and I’ve voted for Republicans in other races until 2020. We’ll get to that later. But once again I digest.

The repeated digestion here is happening, actually, because trying to write this essay is giving me indigestion.

But anywayser, I am not confused. Reagan’s Presidency taught me something. And it did so through what I’ve come to call Trickster-Down Economics. You might know it by another name.

Or two.

Trickster-Down Economics is a play on what was already a sarcastic labeling for the popular policy name. To see that my name fits better you just have to remember that the core idea behind the policy was that giving financial relief to corporations and the wealthy would encourage them to invest, create jobs, and boost production, which would eventually "trickle down" to the middle and working classes.

It’s perhaps the only remaining core piece of formerly-conservative Republican policy — though maybe not known by any of these labels today — which has ultimately resulted in massive deficits, over $40 trillion in fact, and has brought us such things as tech bros trying to create new countries — or take over pre-existing ones. It’s something of a cross between a bad sad joke and a potential real threat to democracy (such as it is).

But I didn’t bring it up to rip Republicans. Because if you want to know what I really think about political parties, I am just as afraid of the freedom-hating Left of the Progressivism that is taking over the Democrat Party.

I brought it up simply because Trickster-Down Economics is the first thing that helped seal the deal, so to speak, on who I think I’ve become. It congealed my early feelings about truth and injustice and turned them into the driver that forced me to start learning real things instead of just running on those feelings. It drove me to get an edumacation in a variety of disciplines and work several disparate professional careers, before landing me in the maw of the law — as a criminal defense lawyer.

This happened because in retrospect, McGovern, Ike, and Reagan — aside from not being anything alike — maybe weren’t such wonderful people to whom I should have been unquestioningly attracted anyway.

Trickster-Down Economics was (and remains) voodoo. Reagan created numerous effigies — including the mythical, Cadillac-driving “Welfare Queen”, the steak-buying “strapping young buck”, and the Lazy Hippie — and used them as a smoke screen to dismantle the American social safety net. But having created the effigies, the pins he stuck in them ultimately hurt us all, puncturing the economic security of the very working class that voted him into office.

As with their descendants foisted on us by Reagan’s political descendants, these effigies, though, were built on lies; they were caricatures. Only instead of eating the cats and eating the dogs, they’re constantly eating the truth and feeding our society a great whopping helping of injustice.

Trickster-Down Economics did nothing to fix any of problems Reagan claimed to have identified. It did provide a rationale for redirecting money from social safety nets to the social misfits becoming millionaires and billionaires by running our world today.

I brought this up because it’s what first helped me to see that how I felt about someone — remember, I liked him; I voted for him; and I wasn’t completely lacking in knowledge about him because I’ve been living in California since at least the 1970s — but I learned a few things from Reagan.

One was that I needed to question my feelings. I needed to do that because not only was there something going on behind what Reagan was doing, but there was something going on behind my feelings.

This seems to me even more important today than it was when I first started to learn it. Because in one sense, it could easily appear that I’ve just done to Reagan what Reagan did to Linda Taylor, the “young buck”, or the Lazy Hippie he used to convince people that poverty was a character flaw rather than an economic condition: that I turned him into an effigy. That’s not the case.

Politics today is fueled principally by lies.

Wow. Did you hear that? (Or were you one of the ones who shouted “DUH!”?)

I know lying and politics go together like George H.W. Bush and Willie Horton.

In fact, they’ve gone together since the very beginning of our nation, founded on a lie about honesty. The entirely fabricated myth of a young George Washington confessing to chopping down a cherry tree because he “could not tell a lie” is itself a lie.

But there is a reason I use the word principally to describe what fuels politics today. Things have gotten astronomically worse. Parson Weems invented the cherry tree myth to build a shared moral standard, using a fiction to elevate the virtue of truth. Today’s political lies do the exact opposite: they are designed to assassinate the very concept of truth. We have moved from aspirational myths to a cynical, scorched-earth reality where the goal is to make us believe that nothing is true, no one is honest, and everything is an effigy.

We didn’t get here overnight. Going from Reagan to what we have today with what filmmakers call a jump cut or a smash cut would be disingenuous. It also skips over something else. I didn’t get where I am overnight, either.

So let’s lay another section of the road that brought us all here.

Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003, where he stated with total confidence that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs and was actively concealing a weapons program did something George Bush — and the people around him — desperately wanted to do.

This is when I first became aware of the importance of paying attention to what I call the satellites of the Presidency. Dragging the American public to a questionably-legal war long before the current illegal Iran War — which the current lie says isn’t a war, anyway — were the intelligence community’s claims, Congress’s authorization vote, the media consensus that amplified Powell’s speech — that's the machinery of enablers operating around one man’s presentation. It’s the first time I recognized a reason to distrust the apparatus surrounding a leader rather than just the leader himself.

And it became particularly disheartening in the years that followed because I liked Powell in much the same way that I liked Ike. Powell was, at the time, probably the most trusted, least partisan-seeming figure in the Bush administration — a decorated general, measured, credible, believed by people who didn't trust Bush or Cheney. And although I initially thought the Iraq War was just as illegal and bogus as I think the Iran War is today, Powell’s public pronouncements made me doubt myself.

It wasn’t until much later that the Iraq Survey Group’s postwar investigation found no stockpiles and no active program. Powell himself later called the speech a permanent “blot” on his record. Not only that, but information that came out over the years — all the way up to comments he made in 2015 — show that Powell himself had doubts. He just never told us about them at a time when it might have made a difference to whether or not we were all gung-ho to support the bogus war effort.

Powell, at least for a while, excused himself because, as he would put it, he wasn’t the intelligence chief. He believed the information that was fed him. People around him remember things a little differently. And this leads us to a test; it shows us where we should be looking when those around the President are making their case.

It also shows why, after 2020, I quit voting for Republicans at any level of the ticket and not just for the Presidency.

The test is whether a public figure’s justification for what they did survives comparison with what they actually did. If it does not, the excuse was never really an excuse — it was cover. It was a lie.

In 2016, “justice” Scalia suddenly died in his sleep — an undeserved reward granted by the gods, fate, or, to put it in terms of things that really exist, a myocardial infarction. Bernie Lomax, aka Mitch McConnell, stated within hours of Scalia’s death that no replacement would be considered until after the election. His stated reason was that the voters should decide who got to pick the next Supreme Court “justice”.

Never mind that they already had.

When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland as Scalia’s replacement, Lomax and Senate Republicans refused to hold hearings or a vote, leaving the seat vacant for 293 days.

This became known as the “McConnell Rule”: a Supreme Court vacancy shouldn’t be filled during a presidential election year so that the voters could have a voice.

In 2020, a mere seven weeks before the end of Trump’s first term, a vacancy again opened up on the United States Supreme Court because one “justice” suffering from pancreatic cancer could not see her way to vacating her position before Death ripped the position from under her.

You can argue the wisdom of this decision however you like. As you can guess, I consider it a major miscalculation. One that has probably changed the course of history and will have repercussions for at least 40 years, if not the remainder of our existence as a nation (which, now that I think about it, could be a much shorter time).

What you can’t argue about is what happened next.

With just about a month-and-a-half until the election, the McConnell Rule deemed that there should be no Senate vote until after the voters decided who would make the choice on a replacement “justice”.

So, of course, the McConnell Rule vanished into thin air. Amy Coney Barrett was rushed through a vote, creating a new 6-3 conservative Supreme Court and leading directly to overturning a half-century of law that all those conservative “justices” had indicated they could not see being overturned.

In 2024, Trump was re-elected. Having learned from his first term, he began appointing people based on his own version of DEI: qualification for a position was based not on expertise, knowledge, or even a remote understanding of the position, but on whether or not the appointee was deemed loyal enough to Trump.

Among those appointed to positions for which they were not qualified was Pete Hegseth who began remaking the military in his own unqualified, but loyal, image.

Hegseth fired General CQ Brown and Admiral Lisa Franchetti with no explanation given, but he’d already written in his own book that he questioned whether Brown’s promotion reflected merit “or his race.” The old version of DEI and “wokeness” were targeted for elimination along with those Hegseth believed benefited from them. Only Trump’s version of DEI would survive.

Months after firing the General and the Admiral, he personally intervened to strike four Army officers — two Black men, two women — from a promotion list that had already cleared the normal process, over the Army Secretary’s repeated objections. Reporting puts the total blocked at six.

The Pentagon’s denial — “meritocracy... is apolitical and unbiased” — opens a gap between Hegseth’s constant complaints and the truth: the Pentagon’s stated principle and the documented pattern of who Hegseth blocked don’t square.

This essay — at least partly because it literally decided to grow in a direction I was not planning when I started — is already too long. Plus any discussion of the prevarications and deliberately disinformation from the man at the top are not only obvious: they’d be redundant.

I don’t expect I’ll write anything this “political” on this Substack again. (Although I’m not going to fall into the trap of making this a promise.) It started with memories of my earliest involvements in politics and how I thought the reason I like Ike is because he refused to allow the Germans to make excuses for what they’d done and made them look at the evidence. I said that I liked him because he was the man who was going to stand up to the whole world. He wasn’t letting anyone tell him to stand down when something was wrong.

I said that I needed that at that stage of my life. I said I need it now.

But Ike is long gone, so I guess I will have to fill that need myself.

As an interesting coda to this: when I first started writing and I had written only up to the part about Ike, Bunny Chafowitz got excited and said, “I have something I have to show you!” She quickly left the room and almost as quickly returned.

She handed me a small pin.

“This was my grandmother’s.”

I think I’ll wear it on my lapel when I go to court next time.

When I was seventeen, it was not a very good year. My father and I had a complicated relationship. We fought frequently. The details are not important but the night I ran away, he’d said that if I as long as I lived in his house, I would live by his rules.

Those rules, it seemed to me, were arbitrary.

And since I did not know how to live by arbitrary rules — I still don’t — I left.

Years later, I’d been through a few things. I had not returned home after running away. My father had finally agreed to sign for me to enter the Navy and I turned 18 in boot camp. I served a Hospital Corpsman and then, when I left the Navy, as an EMT, medical transcriptionist — later owning my own business for a couple of decades doing that while simultaneously spending six years in university because I wanted to learn everything. When I finally decided it was time to graduate and get on with life, I was close to a degree in Anthropology or Philosophy and I had enough other areas that a one-year push could have given me degrees in Linguistics, Psychology, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting now.

I settled on Philosophy and immediately ran into a problem. When I asked Dr. Slinger, one of my mentors, about my chances of making it as a philosopher, he didn’t say why, but didn’t seem to think it was my greatest idea. And, when I looked in the paper? No Help Wanted ads for philosophers.

Instead I helped start the first two Internet Service Providers in Central California before moving on to become the Director of Information Systems at Valley Yellow Pages, then a multi-million-dollar company with offices throughout California and even one in Florida when I started. I designed and built their first really functioning network, tying everything together in real-time.

At VYP, I became fast friends with James (Jim) Varon, in-house counsel. During our many lunches, he kept trying to get me to go to law school. One day, I said, “Jim. Enough. I can’t go to law school.” We’d been talking about a local law school that had a 4-year night program. “By the time I graduate, I’ll be 48 years old.”

And Jim said, “How old will you be in four years if you don’t go to law school?”

Now I’m coming up on 20 years as a criminal defense lawyer in Fresno, California.

But, as one of my favorite legal writers frequently says, “I digest.” (And, yes, I’ve decided I might just steal that habit.)

My parents and I kinda sorta patched things up for a minute and my father and I started having long brunches together whenever I had a case in Hanford, where they’d been living since I was in junior high.

One day, I said, “Remember when I ran away from home?” It was a rhetorical question so the “of course” response was not unexpected coming from my dad.

“Well, I was already 17. But I could not wait what would have been less than a year, when I would have been able to legally walk out the door. That was just too long a wait.”

Dad didn’t respond this time. He waited.

“Well, now I’m in my fifties. And if someone comes to me with a project and they tell me I have a year to complete it, my first question is always, ‘If I need more time, can I have it?’ Because a year just seems to go by so very, very fast.”

And my dad said, “Wait until you’re in your 70s.”

I’m 68 now. Last week, I blinked. And when I finished blinking, I'd lost another week.

In musing over this the last few years, I’ve told friends that I think of it as kind of an experiential thing. Sometimes I’ve compared it to other things you learn, like riding a bicycle. When you first start, you don’t have much experience. You’re paying attention to every moment — every second, actually. You note where your foot is in the arc of a pedaling cycle. You lean and immediately overcorrect because you leaned too far.

But one day, you realize that you’re just getting on the bike and going. You’re not focused on the minutiae over which you stressed and strained to get started. You no longer notice the mechanics of cycling, but you start to pay attention to other things. Before you know it, the ride is over.

Time, I’ve told friends, might be like that. When you’re starting out in life, you don’t have much experience with time. Nor with navigating time. You sit in sixth-grade class and focus on the world’s slowest-moving minute hand on the clock above the teacher’s head. Summer vacation seems like it will never arrive.

At that point, you’ve only got eleven or twelve summers behind you and, hell, you can’t seriously say you even remember more than six or seven of them having happened.

Turns out, like so many of my deep thoughts — James Slinger was right — someone else had it before me. In 1877, which is not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, Paul Janet proposed that a given stretch of time feels shorter in proportion to how much life you've already lived, so a year at 10 is a tenth of your whole existence and a year at 68 is a sixty-eighth.

That’s just a different way, I think, of describing the experiential theory I thought I’d come up with myself.

More recently, Douwe Draaisma, a historian of psychology at the University of Groningen, built an entire book around the idea. In his early 2000’s book, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, he wrote about autobiographical memory generally — déjà vu, near-death experience, savant memory, and the effects of trauma on recall all get chapters — with the "life speeds up" question as its through-line rather than its whole subject. Draaisma asks (among other things) why time seems to condense and speed up as we age, while distant memories from early life can stay as vivid as yesterday.

Draaisma’s musings meld more with mine. He discusses the density of first-time experience. Childhood and adolescence are packed with firsts (first heartbreak, first job, first everything), and minds log firsts more richly than repetitions, so those years leave more memory-traces behind them. In retrospect, it feels like they lasted longer. On the other end of life, adulthood's routine, comparatively, leaves less to find later, explaining why last year can feel thin when you look back at it, even though it took the same 365 days.

When you drive the same route to and from work every day for 20-25 years, you stop noticing every run. It’s become just part of the routine. Ever have the experience of intending to stop on the way home to run an errand and finding yourself pulling into the driveway having totally forgotten the errand?

This is an oblique outcome of what I earlier I mentioned with Janet’s proportionality thesis. We pedal through Draaisma’s density of first-time experience and after enough rotations, instead of attention saturating every second, we withdraw from the mechanics entirely. Once the skill's automatic, our attention shifts gears.

In 1890, William James’s The Principles of Psychology talks about a beginner's “now” being thick with monitored detail while an expert's “now” glides past because there's nothing left demanding to be noticed inside it. He speaks of the “specious present” — a term coined by E. R. Clay in 1882 — “the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.”

That wording, by the way, from “Chapter XV” (15), “The Perception of Time” of his book, is virtually identical to what he’d written a blink earlier in his 1886 essay in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy also titled “The Perception of Time”.

And as another “by the way”, E. R. Clay was E. Robert Kelly, a retired cigar maker who’d taken up philosophy as a hobby — which just shows to go ya that anyone can be a philosopher.

William James borrowed this idea of Clay’s as part of a triptych to explain how it is that we perceive time. In essence, “the present” is just “a giant trick”. The lie of the “right now” as some kind of frozen “now” moment is not all there is to our perception of “now”. Clay used the example of music to explain that when we listen to a melody, we don’t just hear one isolated, mathematical vibration at a time, but rather notes trailing together. For Clay, the “present” — the “now” of human experience — was really just a chunk of the recent past passing through our awareness.

It was this deceptive, stretched-out window, that Clay named — and James adopted — as the “specious present”.

A man after my own heart, William James then decided to start mixing metaphors, giving us both the Saddle-Back and the Ship (with its Bow and Stern). With the Saddle-Back we sit atop a horse — a more modern metaphor would be a bicycle seat — able to naturally look forward and backward at the same time. Thus, as Clay before him had noted, the apparently fake present contains within it more than the razor’s edge of time. James actually finds this necessary because, he says, if our minds really worked like a razor-thin knife-edge of the exact present, we would be forever trapped in the now, unable to perceive the past. Instead, our window of “now” is like a single ship — or to avoid mixing metaphors, bicycle — the rearview of which holds onto the echo of what just happened while the bow anticipates what will happen next.

One block of consciousness sits atop the bicycle seat, holding everything together, so that time becomes a single smooth-running path — or as William James with his Ship’s Bow and Stern view put it, a smooth, flowing river.

I need to clear this up a little, though, because while William James is mixing metaphors, I’ve slightly mixed chapters.

In The Principles of Psychology, while William James does casually re-invoke the “stream” to describe the general flow of events passing through the specious present, the explicit declaration that consciousness is a “river or a stream” is actually the foundational centerpiece of an earlier chapter — Chapter IX (9) — “The Stream of Thought”. In the “Time” chapter, he beautifully compared the specious present to a rainbow on a waterfall, standing permanent, while the events of our lives stream right through it.

I’ve carried on enough, though, and finished what I started a blink ago. It’s time to leave James behind — James Slinger and William James. My dad fell of the bicycle on December 1, 2021, having metaphorically pedaled through 81 actually-lived years. Even if he had lived to see me reach my 70s, he would not have known: Alzheimer’s took him long before Death did. Now, I pedal on without him.

But the nice thing about the seat of consciousness?

All I need to do to see him again is look back and there he is with his goofy grin, holding up the past.

I’ve started leaving my office a little earlier than I used to so that I could “beat the traffic.” The high point of the day is the drive up the ramp out of the basement garage.

This is Fresno, after all. No Lombard Street here!

And for a long time, this has worked well for me. Light traffic to the freeway. I stomp on the gas — my 2016 Prius V is surprisingly responsive and quick to take the hint — zooming up the ramp and even if there is any traffic by the time I’ve met up with the freeway I slip right in. Sixty-five miles per hour. Center lane.

Thing are going swell. Until I hit what I call “the swell.” Fresno drivers are perfectly happy to drive seventeen times the speed limit, as long as the road is straight. But “the swell” occurs when you reach the turnoff from Highway 41 North onto 180 and then — before you would realize you’re on 180 if you weren’t distressed at what you were seeing — onto 168 to Clovis.

Except something funny happens right at that point if there happen to be more than three cars on the road. (And gods forbid there should be an 18-wheeler!)

The Swell. A curve in the road.

And I didn’t name it that just because I often mutter, when I spot it, “Great. That’s just swell.” The word, as you know, can also refer to an increase in size or number, or to a wave, or a bulge. Or a hemorrhoid, when you think about it.

Here, it means all those things except that anything here is swell.

For a long time, I found myself not only cursing when I spotted it but wondering to myself, “How does this even keep happening?!” Because it just doesn't ever seem to have an explanation. No accident. No cop eyeballing everyone from the side of the road. (We’ve got an AI-driven Panopticon for that now in the form of Flock cameras and other doo-dads none of us even knows about.)

But my understanding has since made a 180-degree turn. Ninety degrees at a time.

The problem comes down to the space between.

And although that appears to encompass primarily the space between the car in front of you and the car behind you, that’s not all that makes this (so) swell. There’s a lot of other spaces that have to be considered about the space between.

There’s what I already mentioned: the space between the car in front of you and the car behind you. There’s the space between you and the car on your left (if you’re in the right lane) or your right (if you’re in the left lane).

And then there’s the space between your ability as a driver and that of the driver in each of the cars surrounding you: front, back, left or right.

Any one of those could be greater than the 90-degree angle in the turn that creates the swell.

But let’s talk about what we know.

Human beings are lousy drivers. It’s not entirely our fault. A big part of the problem is that even if you take a Driver’s Education course, you’re not likely to learn much about what really happens once a bunch of us get behind the wheel of a car. Nobody teaches us about zipper merges. And we’re pretty bad at being able to maintain a steady speed without help from advanced automation in our cars. I use speed control whenever I’m able so I’m always cruising along right at the speed limit. And I laugh when I see the drivers who pass me and then a mile later fall behind me only to pass me again a minute later.

“Foolish person! You need speed control,” I cackle.

Well, okay. I don’t really cackle. Though I do sometimes say those words and think about cackling.

Some years ago, Japanese physicists with nothing better to do collected cars on a closed course. The drivers were told to keep to a specified speed and distance, but it proved too much for them. Before you could start cackling, the system broke down. As the drivers began adjusting to the space between cars, a reverse shockwave rippled backwards, impacting the entire line.

To quote from one article where I read about this, “You’re not driving into a traffic jam,” says Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (2009). “A traffic jam is basically driving into you.” He thinks autonomous cars will reduce this problem considerably.

So now I understand that(’s) Swell: one person hits the brake. Maybe they’re not a good driver when it comes to curves; maybe they’re reacting to a bad driver who broke the flow by going too slow. Whatever the reason the car behind that drive reacts a beat late, then the one behind her is later still. By the time that wave reaches me a half-mile back, it’s a dead stop for no visible reason. The curve that causes the Swell just tightens the space between cars whose drivers cumulative reactions to one another silently explain it.

Once I see something, I tend to start seeing it everywhere. (Well, I’m not alone in this. I’ve read that if you’re talking to friends about buying a nifty new red Toyota Prius, you’ll start seeing them everywhere.)

So a couple of days ago, I was working the market. I started doing this last November and found out I’m pretty good at it. I try to follow the techniques taught by Ross Cameron of Warrior Trading. I even broke down and started paying the $197/month non-members pay to use his 10-second charts — because through my almost-year-long love/hate relationship with Schwab, I’ve learned they’re probably never getting those — and his excellent scanners that help surface scalps.

Nothing was happening. And I was really itching for a scalp. It would be fair to say I had a scalp itch. I was watching a stock and I kept telling myself, “No, no. Don’t do it.” I knew the read wasn’t quite right. But there wasn’t anything else even as close to right as this wrong stock.

Then I saw that Ross had jumped on it. There was no space between his move and my reaction: I bought 500 shares.

And immediately regretted it.

But I’m a really sore loser. And I have something I call “the Cisco Rule”. CSCO was the first stock I ever bought in my life and I bought it at about $80/share right before the infamous dot-com bubble. Like all tech stocks, it crashed. By September 2001, it was trading for around $11/share. I didn’t do anything about it. Like Edward Hoagland in his famous 1971 essay The Courage of Turtles, I realized there was nothing I could do.

I walked away and left CSCO to drown.

You might say I gave it space.

And I’ve taken a huge turn — at least a couple of 90-degreers — since I started writing this essay. It often goes like this: I don’t know what I’m going to say until I say it. (Or, I guess, write it.) But the point here is that I gave CSCO 25 years of space. And when I returned to the stock market in earnest (or, more accurately, in November 2025), I realized CSCO had survived. Ultimately, I sold it when it hit $80; a move I now regret.

I’m slowly learning that my so-called CSCO Rule — hold a losing stock until it recovers — isn’t always the best rule. You could argue there are opportunity costs, though I find those negligible; I always have enough money for my trades. But, still, I don’t have many 20-year stretches of life left. So I’m learning to be a better loser and to cut my losses sooner — to get out while the getting’s bad and before it gets worse.

But, in the familect of one of my dear friends, I digest. We were talking about me following Ross Cameron into a bad trade and me, as I said, hating to lose. Because I said I’m learning to be a better loser. I didn’t say I’ve learned.

So Ross pulled off the road. He took his loss. (It was a doozy for him. He’s not driving a Prius, but more like a huge train.) I did not get out. I hung on. I think I literally hung on to the edge of my desk, fingernails digging in to keep me in my chair.

Sometimes the CSCO Rule works. It took just under one nail-biting hour but I came out with a profit of about $32. I got out fine. But as Claude later said, “the exits were good” and “the entry was good” are different sentences, and I knew it while it was happening.

I’d been following too close.

There’s an irony in all this. As I’ve gotten older, I realize that at heart, I’m a guy who believes in rules. They’re just not always the same rules everyone else follows. Or maybe it’s that I recognize there’s more than one rule and too many people get stuck on just one.

In a recent court case — in pre-markets I’m a not-so-mild-mannered trader, but in my day job, I’m an even more ill-mannered criminal defense lawyer — I had a client (who has given me permission to write about this) whom I was trying to get into a special program. Though I do have permission to write about this, I’m going to be spare with details.

Because what matters aren’t the details of my client’s case, but the fact that one driver — a judge — decided that the traffic flow was irritating and so she swerved. And then a whole bunch of other judges and “justices” followed her, disrupting everything.

Suffice it to say that this is a special program I’m talking about is one that judges and other prosecutors hate. It’s such a good program that, frankly, I think it should be the default type of judicial system: we should give up on the adversarial system being our court of first resort and make this collaborative court primary.

There’s a problem with doing that, though: it’s not vindictive enough. It recognizes that crimes are sometimes the result of mistakes and other times they’re the result of mental issues — I’m avoiding “illness” because sometimes they’re temporary breaks, as was the case here — and ditching vindictiveness would go too far toward making the world a better place.

By now you might be wondering what the hell this has to do with the Swell. So imma tell you.

There’s a whole bunch of case law that is, as we say in the legal world, “on all fours” with the case my client had which said that it defied logic to deny him entry into the program in question here. But as I’ve also said, judges and other prosecutors aren’t fond of the program for its lack of vindictiveness. And in certain cases, they really want — they even seem to need — that vindictiveness.

The massive amount of case law favoring my client is, here, pretty swell.

At least, you’d think.

Much of that case law is from 2023, 2024, 2025, and even 2026.

But there’s this lovely little case from 2022. And one particular prosecutor in a black robe found it.

It’s chock full of vindictiveness. It says, in essence, that if you don’t like all the other cars on the road, you can ignore them. Follow this one closely. You’ll tap the brakes and bring the entire line of case law to a halt. Like the original swell that opened this essay, it won’t make sense. (The court, when I said “this doesn’t even make sense” responded by saying “there are a lot of things in life that don’t make sense.”) But whether it makes sense or not, whether, as all the case law that came after it said, it defies logic, ignore all the space after it and hang onto its bumper.

Petition for admission to the program, denied. Petition for writ, denied. Petition to Supreme Court, denied.

The upshot? Only the space occupied by the 2022 case matters. You can safely ignore all that came before and all that comes after.

As for my client? After three years of not so much as a traffic ticket, his life is about to be destroyed.

Today, as I head back to my office, I come upon the 168-to-180-to-41 interchange from the opposite direction and a new problem confronts me: same Swell; different cause. Here, drivers must deal with a decreased number of lanes. Three lanes become two and the two become one.

Ideally, this would be handled with something called “the zipper merge”. All lanes are used right up to the merge point and drivers take turns entering the merge point from each lane. Doing it this way reduces bcakups, keeps cars moving, and (done correctly) reduces road rage.

But some people are too polite: they start merging early, leaving one lane moving slowly and at least one open and fast. They feel offended by those who rush down the open lane to the merge point, “cutting in line” with some even straddling the lanes to prevent this (which is illegal). Yet using all lanes can reduce traffic jams by up to 50%. Not to mention road rage incidents. Everyone moves at the same speed, leaving only a Swell as the slow moving cars slow down and speed up to accommodate the space around them and saving everyone 15-to-25 minutes in one Michigan location studied.

While moving through the space of this essay, I’ve used the word “space” in different ways. My ADHD brain easily connects the nuanced interchange of words. We’ve also seen cars hanging on one another’s bumpers, me hanging on to the edge of my trading desk, and prosecutors in a black robes hang tightly to the one case that pushed all others out of all judicial space.

For me, though, the most interesting bit of all is the way these points all fully inhabited the space inside my mind in under 90 seconds. Not that it was written that fast! I’ve often described — as only a man could do — the pain of birthing an essay to the pain of birthing a baby.

In the end, I leave it to the reader to decide if my use of this space was worth the ride.

The minute I entered the bookstore in the converted train station, it was as if the bunnies began to flag me down. I’d come into the room not even knowing yet what was in it. I hadn’t seen any signage. I thought it was going to be just another empty room; maybe exactly what I was looking for. I was on a scouting mission in Merced for a new point of presence (nickname: POP) for a nascent Internet Service Provider we’d started building out of Fresno.

I made a beeline for the bunnies and discovered an accompanying book: Guess How Much I Love You. It was perfect. I immediately bought the bunnies and the book and brought them home to Bunny. She became Little Nut Brown; I became Big Nut Brown. Never mind that they were father and son and we were husband and wife. It was the love story. The distance to the moon. And back. We were, after all, over the moon in love.

That event spawned numerous new forms of address. You might say they began to breed like bunnies. Bunny, LNB, BNB, Little Nut Brown, Big Nut Brown. And, a little later, all those bunny names — it was just the two of us with enough nicknames for a large family — led us to getting married, which brought with it another naming problem.

What, exactly, were we to do about surnames. My name, common enough these days amongst people of Jewish descent — particularly if they happen to be descended from a particular Jewish rabbi (not rabbit), or, more accurately, rabbinical family.

The very first person to adopt the Horowitz name was a rabbi. Around 1391, a prominent Levite rabbi named Rabbi Joseph HaLevi fled persecution in Europe and settled in the town of Hořovice, in Bohemia. (So, yes, I’m proud to also claim that I’m a bohemian.) To identify himself, he took the moniker Ish-Horowitz, meaning “Man of Horowitz”. His descendants turned this geographical marker into their permanent family name.

When I say the name comes from a specific rabbi, though, I’m referring (as most do) to Rabbi Joseph’s most famous descendant: Rabbi Isaiah Halevi Horowitz (c. 1555–1630). He is widely revered in Jewish history by the nickname “Shelah HaKaddosh” (The Holy Shelah), named after his foundational mystical text, Shnei Luchot HaBerit.

Shelah HaKaddosh, before moving to Israel, was the Chief Rabbi of Prague and Frankfurt. So “Horowitz” became a famous Jewish surname because a specific dynasty of rabbis adopted a Czech town’s name as a nickname — more accurately in this case “moniker” — and passed it down. So if, like me, you trace your lineage back to a "Rabbi Horowitz," you are likely a descendant of this exact rabbinical line!

My dad often told me we were Levites.

And one of my mom’s nicknames was “PeePee” — not to rain on your parade here, but that was derived from the fact that some genealogy site suggested that she was a Polish Princess.

But that’s enough about rabbis (not rabbits), my alleged lineage, and me. Let’s talk about the Chaffees.

In 1965, Dr. Paul S. Chaffee was hired as the first formal director of what was then known as the Roeding Park Zoo.

To be brutally frank, even as a moniker the place hardly deserved that name. At the time, it was essentially a collection of tiny cages with pitiful primates and pent-up pacing predators. Most just laid there languidly looking at those who looked at them.

Okay. Enough with the alliterative alloys.

I do want to say more about “Doc” Chaffee, though, before I move on the core of this essay, because he was such an amazing man. (And not even on a sammich!)

You see, Doc wasn’t hired just as the first formal zoo director. He was also the primary veterinarian. And the “zoo” — again, it barely deserved that name — really needed both.

The “tiny cages” I mentioned weren’t just psychologically brutal; they were physically dangerous due to the extreme Central Valley heat. One of Doc’s first major legacy wins in the late 1960s was installing widespread climate control. He designed misting systems, proper shade structures, and cooled indoor quarters so that animals like the primates and big cats could actually survive and thrive in 105°F summers.

Before the mid-1960s, zoo animals across the country were often fed whatever was cheap, available, or thrown into the cages by visitors. Doc drastically overhauled the nutrition and quarantine programs. He established strict diets tailored to each species and built quarantine areas to ensure sick animals didn't infect the rest of the population, which massively extended the lifespans of the animals in his care.

Under his 25-year tenure, the facility underwent a massive cultural evolution. He helped steer it toward becoming an educational institution, introducing classroom spaces and the “Adopt-an-Animal” program. He laid the groundwork for the zoo's massive Walk-Through Rainforest Exhibit, which opened in 1988—a towering, half-acre habitat that was light years ahead of the concrete pens he inherited.

The now-named Fresno Chaffee Zoo is well-known as a world-class zoo. Many other zoos have copied Doc’s ideas and even expanded on them. It’s still one of the best zoos in the world.

And to think it started from what were essentially just crummy crates of critters.

Ironically, I met and talked to Doc exactly once. He was on the porch of his “cabin” at the zoo. (I understand it will perhaps become a museum. And we’re holding some items from the actual cabin that we hope to return to the zoo when that becomes a reality, including a now-antique microscope of his!) I asked him a question. I don’t remember what it was. I know it wasn’t, “May I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?” because, at the time, I didn’t have an inkling that fate had already inked his daughter into the pages of my own future.

We met in 1994. July 2, to be exact.

So, here we were on July 2, 2001 — the date I picked because I knew in 1994 in the first hour we met that I wanted to marry this woman — getting married in the backyard of our house.

Bunny’s mom couldn’t be there. She lived in Las Vegas and was not in good health. We had talked to her about the “name problem.” You see, with the legacy of the names, we didn’t want to give up either of them. And we didn’t. Legally, I am Rick Horowitz; she is Denise Chaffee.

But we told her mother we were going to ditch tradition — we needed a way to scratch out a simple name, without breaking from our names — and so we were going to become “the Chafowitzes.” Yep. We told her we would both change our names to “Chafowitz.”

We did not know at the time that Peggy was in the early stages of dementia.

Soon after a wedding gift arrived. A check. Made out to “Denise Chafowitz.”

Some of you may have noted the date. Most probably not. We were married in July 2001. Mere months before the Day of the Twin Towers (a nickname I just made up now). Back then, the United States was still a free nation. We didn’t have all the freedom-extinguishing rules that we have now. We were not yet a fiefdom.

The bank, after Bunny explained what had happened, let her deposit the check.

At first glance, one might think that “Peggy” was what we call a hypocoristic. A hypocoristic is a pet name or affectionate or diminutive form of a proper name. “Richard,” for example, becomes “Rick” and “Margaret” becomes “Peggy.” Hypocoristic is a general linguistic term for what people often just call a “nickname,” though nicknames are actually a broader category.

A hypocoristic is specifically derived from the given name — although I probably should tell you right here that in my wife’s family history, “Peggy” was her mother’s given name. Whether Peggy’s parents had someone named “Margaret” in mind when they chose the name is not known to us. That fact, or lack of a fact, is lost to the mists of time.

A nickname can be unrelated to the person’s real name. “Doc” Chaffee’s real name was Paul, but many people called him “Doc.” And “Bunny Chafowitz” is a nickname for Denise Chaffee.

I could go into all the ways this works. I have a feeling, though, that you might not find it quite as interesting as I — and some linguists — did and do. Linguists can draw finer distinctions among diminutives, pet names, hypocoristics, sobriquets, bynames, nicknames, aliases, and the rest. Linguists might even talk about the connection between these sorts of things and a familect.

A familect, by the way, is a term coined by Cynthia Gordon in her 2009 book Making Meanings, Creating Family. Technically, it’s a portmanteau of “family” and “dialect” and is officially defined as covering not just families with kids, but also what’s sometimes called “marriage language.”

Marriage language is the invented vocabulary two people build together. “Little Nut Brown” and “Big Nut Brown” is a perfect example. It’s a private reference only legible to insiders — until and unless it’s explained as I’ve done in this essay — built from a shared text (in this case, a book), reapplied to our own relationship even though the roles did not literally map (father/son in the book; husband/wife in my marriage). This is how familects actually form: it’s more about emotional resonance than literal accuracy.

As I said, this is something that linguists (and me and maybe some of you) would find fascinating and we would perhaps parse and try to dictate distinctions between pet names, hypocoristics, nicknames, and monikers.

Most ordinary people don’t.

Which brings me to fulfilling the promise hinted at in the subtitle to this essay: “why you don’t mess around with monikers.”

All these things — diminutives, pet names, hypocoristics, sobriquets, bynames, nicknames, aliases, and the rest — serve social functions. Kathryn Hymes, writing in Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home, talks about familects and quotes Cynthia Gordon, author of Making Meanings, Creating Family, who told her that sharing one is an act of “welcoming outsiders into one’s clan.”

“The truth is,” [Gordon] said, “moment by moment, in everyday language use, we create our families.”

— Kathryn Hymes, Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home, The Atlantic (May 13, 2021)

Law enforcement officers and prosecutors take this in another direction. They draw what seems to me an illegitimate distinction between two of the categories I talked about above. They make a rhetorical move whose intent is to pre-judge certain people based on their nicknames.

“The Man” — a sobriquet, epithet, or descriptive nickname for the boss, the authorities, or an oppressive system of control — transforms nicknames into something sinister. “Little Shorty” might have gotten his nickname the same way that “Bunny Chafowitz” got hers. Perhaps he was the littlest kid in his family. The name started as a piece of their familect. Then, as sometimes happens, it began to spread. His sister called him “Little Shorty” at school and soon his friends were using the same appellation.

But Little Shorty’s family lives in a specific area of town. Perhaps he’s known to hang out with friends who also have nicknames. Maybe he’s been called Little Shorty so long that some of his neighborhood friends don’t even know his real name.

One day, the police pick Little Shorty up. It’s a case of mistaken identity, but nobody knows that yet. Maybe there’s another Little Shorty somewhere and the po-po (see what I did there?) got a tip.

But they grabbed the wrong Little Shorty.

Whatever happened, Little Shorty now finds himself in court. People v. John Smith. The police reports tell you that he is “a.k.a., Little Shorty.” That’s his moniker the reports say.

As an authorial aside, I want to be up front about something. I chose the “real” name — it’s obviously not a real name as this whole scenario is based on “types” rather than real people — of “John Smith” to try to be a bit neutral. But in my work as a criminal defense lawyer, I’m going to state this as I normally see it: cops don’t target John Smith. They go after Juan Gonzalez. Or Jamal Washington. Or — because profiling rarely bothers to distinguish — someone who just reads as Asian to the officer looking at him.

Little Shorty, when he was questioned, said, “What’s a moniker?” And the officer used the ordinary word to explain “Your nickname.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say that,” Little Shorty says.

And there is a reason. A moniker is a nickname dressed in evil garb. And a man dressed in evil garb is easier to convict than someone with a diminutive nickname based on his diminutive size. This is why jurors are hammered with the information that “The defendant’s moniker is ‘Little Shorty’” rather than “His nickname is….”

“Moniker” has a history. A social history. And as I already pointed out above, nicknaming has a social function. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about hypocoristics, sobriquets, epithets, nicknames — or monikers.

But the interesting layered twist here is that whether you call them “nicknames” or “monikers”, “sobriquets” or “epithets” also serves a social function. (Can I get an exclamation point here?!)

Monikers — and the history is sometimes a little muddled here, but these are the basic bones — were originally marks made by hobos.

Maybe.

I’m personally fascinated by this part of the etymology for the term. Because, among other reasons, there is a certain irony in modern prosecutors weaponizing the word “moniker” in legal briefs to imply criminal intent.

The term itself always belonged to the marginalized. Long before it found a home in police reports, “moniker” (originally recorded in the mid-19th century as monekeer) was birthed from the slang of hobos, tramps, and the London underclass. Scholars suggest it may trace back to the word “monkery” — a slang term used by 19th-century British vagrants to describe the communal, transient life on the road.

Just as monks threw away their birth identities to take on new spiritual names upon taking their vows, those living on the fringes of society took on “road names” for survival, anonymity, and solidarity. It was an unwritten linguistic shield against the authorities of their day. Over time, what began as a protective piece of underclass street code was co-opted by the state, flipped on its head, and transformed into a tool for criminal profiling.

There are, of course, other theories.

Yet, the criminal justice system didn’t invent the obsession with rebranding people by their street names. Long before the police began cataloging neighborhood familects to build cases against the likes of Little Shorty, a completely different underworld had already perfected the art of the alias, turning the humble nickname into a symbol of absolute power, fear, and institutional myth-making: the Mafia.

Baby Shacks, Vinny Gorgeous, Tony Bagels (a man after my own culinary heart), Tony Ducks — showing, by the way, why the Mafia Monikers had “first” and “last” names — The Cheeseman, The Chin, Cadillac Frank, and many more. Frankly, these are monikers. “Little Shorty”?

That’s a fucking nickname.

The difference comes down to branding. Everyone knew who Vinny Gorgeous was. The Cheeseman wasn’t hiding behind his moniker. Like the hobos of old, these nicknames were identifying marks. The names themselves are almost comical. Like Dr. Doom. Magneto. The Green Goblin.

They’re characters.

Little Shorty? He’s a person. He acquired his nickname the way every ordinary human being with a nickname gets theirs.

The prosecutor or cop telling a jury “His moniker is ‘Little Shorty’” isn’t just dressing an ordinary nickname in scary language generically; they're specifically borrowing the connotative weight of institutional criminal mythology — Cosa Nostra, Murder Inc., decades of Hollywood glamorization — and pinning it on a kid whose nickname came from being short. That's a bigger theft than “nickname called something scarier.” It's stolen menace — in an odd way similar to stolen valor — borrowed from a genre that has nothing to do with him.

Rabbi Joseph HaLevi, who fled persecution and adopted the moniker Ish-Horowitz, perhaps as a way of ditching his pursuers who wiped out his people, was arguably more deserving of the treatment prosecutors dished out to Little Shorty.

Little Shorty was just a nickname.

I watched someone sing tonight on an AGT video. It was astounding. Amazing. And as soon as I said to myself, “that was amazing” I heard my father’s voice: “And it wasn’t even on a sandwich!”

My dad used to say that just about any time he heard the word “amazing.”

I often say it myself these days, although I usually say “sammich.”

I don’t know why. I just do.

But I always hear it in my dad’s voice.

I miss him. My dad, that is; not the guy from the AGT video. Despite our complicated lives — together and apart — he’s been an integral part of who I became. Of who I am. I’ve written about him often. One of my favorite pieces is still unfinished. I won’t get into it here, but I will quote this portion of it:

When I was little, my father was a large man. He was strong and brown with dark eyes and darker hair, stiff and wavy and thick. Not once in all the twenty-six years I knew him did one of those hairs move. Each had its own special place, its own course to trace along the contours of his head. I imagined that, at night, those hairs fought and jostled one another as the pillow pushed them first to the left and then to the right. In the morning they all quickly forgot their arguing and snapped crisply back into position.

At night, when he came home from work, he liked to work in his shop. Sometimes I would stand in the front yard, where I could watch without him knowing from the shadows. He was lost for long periods on the details of the corners of the furniture he was building, the wood he was shaping against its will into something useful, something functional, something of which he could be proud. His head was bent low over the bench; his eyes riding above his fingernails as he carefully filed a recalcitrant knot in the pine. Concentrated on his concentrated features, I wondered what he was thinking and what it would be like to be him.

There was a pained tension between he and I, agonal in nature, the ache of two who love each other but don’t know how, and are afraid to admit it, as if caring for one another was an inherently shameful feeling. I knew he loved me because he worked on me with the same careful concentration he gave to woodworking. He used to try and tell me how important it was to select just the right tool for working the wood, the importance of understanding the lie of the grain and of not working against it. I believe I was the most enigmatic piece he ever tried to work, and the only one he worked without reward. Bilateral love, bilateral inscrutibility. He never found the right tool to smooth out my knots. Not that he didn’t try.

— Rick Horowitz, portion of an unfinished draft I won’t name here yet

I’ve left the last line off this section. It gets into something I’m not really ready to talk about yet. About who I was at the time. And how it shaped who I’ve become.

Connie Chang writes about something linguists call familect, or familylect.

The secret words and phrases shared exclusively among the members of a household are what linguists call familect (sometimes called familylect). And though it might just sound like a family being silly, building a familect can have emotional benefits for kids and adults.

— Connie Chang, Why your family’s secret language is good for kids (October 18, 2021)

Familects include words, expressions, nicknames, anecdotes — the in-jokes that make each family amazing, even if the family isn’t fond of sandwiches. They come from a shared history and evolve to establish a family’s identity.

And the identities of the individuals they grow.

According to the Psychoanalysis Wiki, Freud — not much in vogue these days, so far as I understand it — developed the idea of introjection in his understanding of the formation of the superego. For him, it was a necessary part of normal moral development.

As the Wiki points out, that concept, extended, points to how “cultural and social values become internalized.” This is where the familect slots in. It creates, at the closest and most intimate level, the milieu we draw from in coalescing into competent — or sometimes incompetent — persons; it produces personality.

Now, I’m no professional linguist or psychologist, though I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once or twice in my life. So someone might say I’m stretching the familect idea a bit. But I don’t think so. “Sandwich” — and my morphing it into “sammich” — seems to me to be both an obvious mechanism and a demonstration of introjection. The less-obvious parts and patterns of speech are part of the familect, as well.

“You’re stupid!” Or “don’t be so stupid.” Or “that wasn’t very smart” may not be traditional neologisms, but they are equal partners in the family vernacular — the verbal imprints that work to shape a person. They’re less-consciously internalized in the same way, through repeated exposure.

When I was a young bulb in the familial garden, one of my dad’s favorite phrases was “you’re very smart, but you’ve got no common sense.” I internalized that belief. Claimed it as my own for much of my life.

The way I internalized it was a problem. Just as I transformed “sandwich” into “sammich,” I also transformed “you’re very smart, but you’ve got no common sense” into something that made actual sense to me: my dad’s trying to soften the blow of calling me stupid by prefacing it with “you’re very smart.”

It’s not true. Well, maybe I’m smart. But like a lot of people, I sometimes do dumb things. And I’ve done a lot of amazing things in my life that go far beyond two slices of bread. (Full disclosure: I’ve also learned to bake a mean sourdough and even built myself a proofer.)

The point here is not to toot my own horn. I can talk about all the stuff I’ve done some other time. The point here is that we’re all born into families and those families will have a say — by what they say, as well as by what they do — in who we become.

There is a proverb often attributed to the Lakota:

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

The Tanakh, or “Old Testament” as it is known to some, says that God visits the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations. Most biblical citations of this concept carry the idea of punishment. If true, this seems to me inherently unfair. In essence, this has God punishing the wrong people. Or, worse, it presents God as a vindictive entity who just doesn’t know when to quit.

But I’ve never really read it either as sin or punishment and not just because I don’t believe in gods. Well, hmmm…maybe that is the reason I don’t read it that way. How I read it is that most of us are part of families. Those families and the individuals within them create an environment which a moment ago I called a familial garden in which our young grow.

The familect, among other things, functions as the fertilizer in that garden. And just as young plants take up nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium from the fertilizer they’re fed, so do children introject from the familect, attitudes, and behaviors of the familial garden. As one might expect, the more powerful the person who serves as their model, the more impact they will have.

It is in this sense that the sins of the fathers — and every other family member — are visited unto the third and fourth generations. Each “sin” has an impact; repetitive “sins” become candidate introjects.

I watched Jourdan Blue sing Breakeven again just now — that’s the AGT clip that got me writing and it seems appropriate that it brings us to the close — and at the very end, you can see Simon Cowell mouth, “Wow!” I was again, feeling a little of the wet eye, and right after the “Wow!” it came again. “Amazing.”

And it’s not even on a sammich.

The dark, heavy smell — a mix of burnt toast and oil, yet somehow oddly appealing — defined morning. My dad always drank his from a slightly bowl-shaped cup. I don’t know what drew me more. Was it the contrast? My cold white milk against his steaming brown liquid?

Coffee.

I did not then know why. I only knew I wanted. But children are seldom permitted coffee as part of their beverage repertoire. When I asked, I was told it was for grown-ups. Being as they’re already grown up, it wouldn’t stunt their growth like it would mine.

Little boys drank milk. Big boys got the coffee.

Years before I was born, Dr. Charles Bradley was trying to cure headaches at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home in East Providence, Rhode Island. The headaches had been brought on by a horrific, terrifying, and primitive technique of draining spinal fluid from the brain’s ventricles and replacing it with air so that brain structures showed up better on the equally-primitive x-rays of the day.

Bradley thought that benzedrine — an amphetamine — would perhaps help replace the fluids faster after the procedure.

I don’t know if it replaced the spinal fluid. And it did nothing for the headaches. It did have a transformative effect on some of the children. Kids who had been wild, aggressive, and unable to sit still suddenly did just that. They quietly worked at their desks. Grades improved. Instead of making them hyper, the amphetamine brought focus, calm, and improved grades.

The doctor wrote a paper. The children gave the white tablets a name. They called them “arithmetic pills.”

By the time I reached the third grade, nobody needed any x-rays or machines to understand my brain was always in hyperdrive. Diagnosis then was predicated on things like “does not follow directions” and “finds it impossible to sit still” and “won’t stop talking” and “constantly loses his jacket.”

Nineteen-forty-four. Ciba Laboratories. Basel, Switzerland. The rest of Europe was caught in the thicket of World War II. A chemist by the name of Leandro Panizzon creates a new compound called “methylphenidate.”

Panizzon wasn’t looking for a way to treat hyperactive kids. ADHD wasn’t a thing yet. Well, not by that name. Melchior Adam Weikard, as far back as 1775, had published the first textbook description of attention and hyperactivity symptoms. Sir George Frederic Still’s Goulstonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians in 1902 marked the true scientific turning point. But in 1944, Panizzon was just creating synthetic stimulants using himself and his wife, Marguerite — nicknamed “Rita” — as guinea pigs.

Rita suffered from low blood pressure and, as she headed out for a game of tennis, felt sluggish. So she takes a dose of her husband’s new chemical and, “Wow!” It was as if she’d swallowed an entire pep squad. Her focal point, precision, and drive on her forehand noticeably improved.

Panizzon was thrilled and decided to name the molecule after her: Ritaline.

The combined discoveries of Bradley and Panizzon brought the Americanized Ritalin to the chaos that was me.

Well, it worked. I mean, I “learned” to shut up, to do what I was told, to sit still. But I didn’t just stop doing all the things they wanted me to stop. I stopped doing all the things. Panizzon’s romantic tribute to his wife was like a tennis racket to the side of my head.

And here, perhaps, I should give my parents credit: they pulled the plug after taking one look at the ghost I’d become.

Or, as my mom put it, “The pills zombied him out.”

What had for a moment been the end of “me” was instead the end of that prescription. The bottle was tossed. For my part, I returned to my natural state: unmedicated, loud, and entirely on my own.

My parents found other ways — maybe I’ll write about them someday — to manage my ADHD. The medical establishment continued searching for better ways. In 1973, at the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute in South Carolina, Dr. Robert C. Schnackenberg found his own guinea pigs: eleven “hyperkinetic” children suffering severe side effects similar to those that had put an end to my own Ritalin experiment. And instead of Ritalin, he gives them two cups of coffee each day. Coffee at breakfast; coffee at lunch.

Schnackenberg then published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry about the miraculous result. As had happened with Bradley’s kids, parents and teachers reported that the coffee clatch was calmer, focused, and doing better in school. It was a miracle! A cheap folk medicine solving a clinical problem. No prescription — or regulation — needed.

There was just one problem. Well, three, to be exact. In 1975, C. Keith Conners (one of the fathers of ADHD research) tries to repeat the results using strict, double-blind conditions. It fails. Again in 1975, Mortimer Gross tries. And fails. Finally, still in 1975, the bridge over troubled water completely collapses when B.D. Garfinkel’s methodological hammer effectively crushes Schnackenberg’s coffee hypothesis in Methylphenidate and caffeine in the treatment of children with minimal brain dysfunction, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry with colleagues C.D. Webster, and L. Sloman of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That was in July. Then in October, the same three published Individual responses to methylphenidate and caffeine in children with minimal brain dysfunction in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Their sample size? Exactly eight boys. Schnackenberg’s eleven-child folk miracle was officially crushed by eight kids in Toronto. (A fourth paper that same year by Huestis, Arnold, and Smeltzer arrived at the exact same disappointing conclusion.)

Having “definitively proven,” in their opinion, that caffeinating kids did nothing to curb their ADHD, the medical establishment moved on.

For whatever reason — I really don’t know the reason — in the 1970s and 1980s and even into the 1990s the assumption was that children “grew out” of ADHD when they hit puberty. Adults didn’t have it. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) treated ADHD as a strictly childhood disorder, a “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood.”

Since the establishment believed adults could not have ADHD, 30-year-olds were not given Ritalin prescriptions. When an unmedicated adult went to the doctor with complaints of “brain fog,” chronic disorganization, or the inability to sit still through a meeting, they were given an antidepressant and a day planner and sent on their not-so-merry way.

On April 17, 2007 — my coffee-drinking father’s birthday — I became a lawyer. Criminal defense. A solo practitioner with a downtown office across the street from the courthouse to which I could go, or not go, whenever I wanted. I’d been unmedicated and largely untreated for my ADHD ever since my parents de-zombified me as a child. But one thing I’d learned from my parents that is true is that ADHD brains benefit from structured environments. Mine was gone.

Sure, I had court hearings. But I was just starting out and they were not numerous. I had no staff — no Serena yet — to tell me when to make notes, or remind me of appointments, or even tell me when to go to court.

Like a lot of other ADHD brains who never read Schnackenberg, I’d nevertheless stumbled onto coffee as something of a substitute for what was missing. Two cups of coffee in the morning kickstarted legal research. Another mid-morning to begin typing the brief. And a whole pot gone by mid-afternoon to finish off both the brief and my stomach lining.

I eventually came to realize I needed help — and not just for GERD. I saw an ADHD “specialist” and learned that since I was a kid there were new tests, new drugs, and a recognition that ADHD does indeed persist into adulthood.

The new tests were computerized. As I remember it, there were two parts to the test. In one part, the test bored me; in the other part, it frustrated me. In both parts, you’re supposed to watch for something to happen and you click a button. In the boring part, the target shows up infrequently; in the frustrating part, it’s showing up a lot.

Regardless, I was told that I tested “off the charts.” In fact, I was so far off the charts that the therapist initially thought I had somehow figured out how to game the system. A system that is actually supposed to be nearly impossible to game.

And why would anyone want to game the system? Because apparently neurotypical people want to get their hands on ADHD prescriptions. They are, after all, stimulants. And they work differently on ADHD brains than neurotypical brains.

Three things convinced the therapist that I wasn’t trying to game the system. First and foremost, I didn’t want the drugs. I still had my memories of Ritalin and the stories from my family as to why I wasn’t on it. Second, I had all the symptoms of ADHD. And, finally, I had the childhood diagnosis.

I entered therapy where I learned to develop routines like one I call “Pocket, Pocket” to keep me from driving 25 minutes to my downtown office only to realize I left my keys at home.

And I tried various drugs at the insistence of the therapist. One made me suicidal. When I realized the abnormal attraction I had to the idea of jumping out my sixth floor office window, I stopped that one. Others, including everyone’s favorite Adderall, worked great. Everyone else loved me while I was on it. I was “less hard” or “less argumentative” — unfortunately also less good at my new career. And, while everyone else liked me, I didn’t like myself. Because while not as bad as Ritalin, what was “smoothing me out” was still a form of zombification.

Somewhere between 2012 and 2015 — I’m being deliberately vague for client confidentiality reasons — I hired an expert for a murder case. Ironically, the expert was Dr. Robert A. Leark, lead author of the T.O.V.A. Professional Manual. Leark was a professor of forensic psychology. He wasn’t a general therapist. He was the measurement guy. More specifically, his published academic research dealt with malingering and “fake bad” response bias on the T.O.V.A. He wrote the literature on how to spot people trying to game T.O.V.A. — Test of Variables of Attention — the very test I’d briefly been suspected of trying to game a few years earlier!

By the time I met Dr. Leark, I was no longer seeing a therapist. Nor was I taking any medication. I’d learned a few techniques for dealing with my ADHD “irregularities,” adapted to the rest, and come to realize that Dexilant and copious amounts of coffee seemed to stabilize me.

Dexilant, by the way, is used to treat gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD), something brought on by all the coffee. (I want to type “LOL!” right here, but this is a Substack essay, not a text mes—oops!)

Anywayser, over the course of my time with Dr. Leark, I told him my story — including that I’d come to terms with the idea that the best thing for me was coffee. To my surprise, Dr. Leark didn’t scoff. No lecture on FDA-approved protocols. He just nodded.

What caffeine does to an adult ADHD brain isn’t magic; it’s basic chemistry. It blocks adenosine, a natural slowing mechanism of the brain, which indirectly boosts dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex. You probably already know that this extra kick causes jitters and racing thoughts in a neurotypical brain. But for the under-aroused ADHD brain, it supplies just enough baseline fuel to kick the system up to idle, quieting the background static, and letting me focus.

Dr. Leark basically confirmed what I — and innumerable others with ADHD brains — had discovered by trial and error: if an abundance of coffee leads to an abundance of concentration that gets me through legal research, brief-writing, and a murder trial without turning me into a ghost or sending me toward a sixth-floor window, it needn’t be a dirty secret.

So every morning, you can find me sitting with a cup of coffee — I like my first cup with a packet of stevia and 5 grams of creatine — in front of my stock-trading station. Another couple hours after that, you might catch me in my office doing a final prep before court. On the desk, helping me prep? Coffee and a corndog.

I think the smell — dark, heavy, smelling like burnt toast and oil with a hint of cornbread and almost imperceptible hot dog — enhances the effect.

Little boys drink milk. Grown-up me prefers coffee.

And a corndog.

You might recall me mentioning in my first post — my inaugural post here at Coffee and a Corndog — that I’m old.

How old am I? Well, we’ve already established that I’m older than the Internet. But this little story is going to knock me back a couple more decades from that.

I was having a conversation with a young Latina lawyer-friend. And somehow we got on the topic of M&Ms. I don’t remember exactly why. But I mentioned that lately I’ve been giving all the green ones to my wife and I’ve been surprised at how many M&Ms that comes to out of a bag.

“Why the green ones?,” she asked.

An older woman — well, probably my age, so I don’t know why I’m saying “older” — nearby burst into laughter. I just stared at my friend.

“I don’t know. I mean, they don’t really work anyway, do they?”

“Work at what?,” she asked. The background laughter seemed to grow.

And then it hit me. My friend was in her 20s. I just turned 68 a couple days ago. The laughter, as I already said, came from someone who looked to be part of my same cohort.

“You really don’t know about green M&Ms?,” I asked.

There was a shout from behind us — “THEY MAKE YOU HORNY!” — followed by more uproarious laughter.

My Latina friend blinked. She looked very much like Bambi after just wandering out onto a freeway at night.

So I started to give her a little history lesson on the 1970s. “You see, back when I was in high school….”

But there’s really a more interesting history to the story.

Forrest Mars, Sr., had come up with the idea for his hard-shelled candy coating small pieces of chocolate back in the 1930s after seeing soldiers in Europe eating British-made “Smarties.” The sugar shell on the Smarties kept the chocolate from melting all over the soldiers fingers while they were in the battlefield.

M&Ms came into being sometime around 1941. That’s when Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, the two Ms, teamed up to start “M&M Limited.” Mars had the idea for the candies. But he needed a reliable source of chocolate during the war-time shortage (During World War II, chocolate was strictly rationed). Murrie was the son of William Murrie, the president of Hershey Chocolate. Mars also had the idea — because of the rationing — of targeting the U.S. military as their first customer. In fact, it wasn’t until after the war that M&Ms became available to the general public.

I remember the marketing slogans when I was young, which directly tie to the reason the military liked the candies so much: Melts in your mouth! Not in your hands!

But back to our more colorful story.

A lot of people don’t know this, but the colorful shells on M&Ms have been there since the start. I used to hear that the original M&Ms were only brown. But that’s not true. The original colors included brown, yellow, green, red, and violet.

It was the peanut M&Ms, which came along in 1954, that were originally only available in a tan color. The color was supposed to look the color of a peanut shell. As you probably know, they eventually became available in colors, also.

(Interesting side note: the red color was banished briefly in the 1976 over the red dye cancer scare. This was purely a reaction to public fear, because red M&Ms did not actually use the FD&C Red No. 2 that was the source of the scare. It was returned around 1987 by popular demand after a Tennessee college student launched a “Save the red M&M!” campaign.

Another piece of irony: the Red Scare was caused by Russian scientists!

Bambi — not her real name — recovered enough to ask, “Why did high school students think green M&Ms made people horny?”

So I explained. First, though, we should probably remember that high school students pretty much get horny over anything. They don’t really need green M&Ms. And the rumor actually started in the early 1970s on university campuses. There’s a whole article in Contemporary Legend series 3, vol. 2 (2012), “Chocolate as an Aphrodisiac: Are Green M&Ms Randy Candy?”, if you’re interested. It’s where I got a lot of my information for this essay.

But I remember how giddy we got over green when I was still in high school. It didn’t take long before our parents were reacting as Bambi had over our covert “Green Ones” jokes.

Interestingly, this whole thing about chocolate candies causing coital considerations really goes back centuries. And, again, a great source for this information is the “Randy Candy” article I linked above.

Hernan Cortes shipped cacao from the Yucatan to Spain in 1585. Francisco Hernandez published “General History of the Things of New Spain” [sic] in 1556, and asserted that cacao excited venereal appetites.

— Robert MacGregor, Chocolate as an Aphrodisiac: Are Green M&M's Randy Candy?, 2 Contemp. Legend 44, 44 (2012)

MacGregor appears to have conflated two books here — the General History of the Things of New Spain is Sahagún’s, and Hernández wrote the Natural History of New Spain, which wasn’t published until long after he died. Cortés, for his part, had been dead since 1547.

Anywayser, this is believed to be the earliest writing by a European on the subject of hornification by chocolate. It was followed by others, including a friend of Thomas Hobbes, the Marquis de Sade, Casanova (who used chocolate to seduce his more difficult “targets”), to name just a few.

If you want more on that,

James Runcie provides another romanticized history of chocolate as an aphrodisiac in The Discovery of Chocolate. (2001). His main character, Diego de Goday, is given the elixir of life in a chocolate drink. A young Spanish conquistador with Cortes, he lives from the early 16th century to the present. From 1518 he travels through time and space and meets iconical, important figures in the history of chocolate: Sacher of Vienna, Fry of England, Hershey of America, and Marquis de Sade. Throughout the novel he is consumed with a passion to perfect the taste and influence of chocolate. He understands chocolate to be a magical substance and witnesses all the human passions and the obsessions chocolate has inspired from its earliest days.

— Robert MacGregor, Chocolate as an Aphrodisiac: Are Green M&M's Randy Candy?, 2 Contemp. Legend 44, 45 (2012)

Green, by the way, was also often associated with women, fertility, sensuality…. Emeralds were supposed to have the ability to speed up childbirth.

In the 1990s, Wendy Jaffe decided to capitalize on this whole mythos. She started a company called “Cool Chocolate Inc.” which had only one product: “Green Ones.” It was basically a green M&M — well, except that it was disc-shaped — and she even admitted that green M&Ms were the inspiration.

Mars (the corporation) sued her and shut her down.

Here’s where I think things get a little interesting. Later on, in January 1997, Mars leans into the whole thing, launching a commercial where Dennis Miller (the comedian) interviews the first female M&M character, “GREEN”. She was pouty-lipped, very feminine, and had long lush eyelashes.

Miller asks her, “Is it true what they say about green M&Ms?”

“What have you heard?!” exclaimed the green candy, shocked and defensive.

— Robert MacGregor, Chocolate as an Aphrodisiac: Are Green M&M's Randy Candy?, 2 Contemp. Legend 44, 49 (2012)

So Mars shut down Jaffe for selling the legend. Then Mars itself went on television and sold the myth.

That’s why, I think, Bambi never heard of it. Rumors stay alive because somebody has to tell it to you. But once Mars was telling it — on national TV, with eyelashes — nobody else needed to pass the rumor anymore. The campaign eventually ran out of gas and there was nothing left underneath it. My friend grew up with a green M&M whose entire personality was the punchline of a joke no one had ever told her.

Except that afternoon somebody did. A stranger shouted it across a room at a volume you could hear all the way back to the 1970s. Which is a little different from how I learned it, in whispers and giggles in a high school hallway from an old girlfriend, sometime around 1975.

So: how old am I? Old enough to have gotten green the right way.

Ok. This may not last. So read it while you can. (I’m playing the scarcity angle there, see?)

This Substack is born of ennui. I’m getting old. I’m tired of writing things that feel like “work”. And I already have two other Substacks that are “work”.

And although only one of those two — Probable Cause, a.k.a., Probable Cause Media — is actually really related to my work as a criminal defense lawyer, the other — Reading the Tape — focuses on “reading the tape". The name originated from the idea of old-fashioned ticker tape readers from the stock markets. I’ve expanded the idea slightly to talk about “reading the tape” in various areas of life. Essentially, learning to recognize patterns not just in candlestick stock charts, but in anything else where you might find patterns.

But both of those Substacks are, therefore, somewhat limiting. And writing for them sometimes feels like “work” more than fun. So I want something more “free form” and without limitations on what I can write. Something to break down the ennui. As Bobby McFerrin famously sang in the late 1980s: “Let’s turn that frown upside down!”

I’m also big on cool names, imagery, and what some would call “branding”, though. It appeals to my creative side. So when I started thinking about what to do to create this new writing space, Coffee and a Corndog popped into my head.

Every morning lately, when I arrive at my law office, the first thing I usually do is have a breakfast of coffee and a corndog. My office manager thinks it’s nuts. She also apparently doesn’t like the smell of corndogs (which I just learned yesterday when I told her I was going to start this new Substack).

In any event, the idea of coffee and a corndog just struck me as whimsical, funny, and as having at least a modicum of potential. People frequently get together over coffee and just chat. So I thought about my coffee and a corndog and a Substack where I could just chatter.

Or, as my friend Marcos Dorado would say, “yap.”

That’s what I’ll do here. In that sense, I expect that this Coffee and a Corndog Clatch will possibly end up looking a bit more like a personal journal, or musings. Maybe I’ll pontificate. What I hope not to do is procrastinate. Since there are no limits to what one might discuss over coffee and a corndog, I am not limited on topics the way Probable Cause and Reading the Tape limit me.

I also think that posts here can be shorter since I’m not really planning on building complex arguments or talking about new pattern recognizationators. (Yeah, I did make that word up. You can do that at Coffee and a Corndog!)

Anyway, that’s the plan.

Pontificate; do not procrastinate; populate this place with posts.

Peace out.

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