From the random bits of dreck in my My Documents folder comes this chemically induced gem from October 2004:
2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray
Do you realize that 2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray, Rodney Dangerfield, AND Jacques Derrida? I know lots of people croak each year, but this seems like an insane trio. Mind you, I was not any kind of student of Derrida, but there has always been something about him that made him easy to make a joke about despite microscopically minimal understanding of or even exposure to his work. And I dug that, and I thought he'd always be there for me.
And the other two ... my brothers. I debride necrotized tissue from my soul at their passing.
I had a dream about being in a half-submerged dumpster being towed by a tugboat in a blackish shallow bay, and in the deep end of the half-submerged dumpster was a giant octopus, snarling its obsequious tentacles up toward me, apologetically caressing me, cowering high in a dry corner.
See, I have this theory of information science that there are two modes: "needing stuff," and "finding stuff." And they are not necessarily, even not probably, simultaneous. So, what this leads me to, is the belief that bookmarking is an enormously important, and often overlooked, feature of a research tool. OK, so I spend an hour or two some night, or I hire a doe-eyed law school research assistant geek to write me a "memo" about it, god knows the cowering pre-pubes need structures like that, to look it up in my handy online research toolage ... OK, so, I found what I want -- now I want to fucking put a goddamn heavy rock here, or a giant magic marker arrow, or a festering monkey butt, I dunno, but what I want is to MARK this goddamn page, because I will be able to USE this page 1 million times during my career, like 80 times a day, because this passage here is the one I wanna quote, I wanna put it in every brief, I wanna fuck it with my trial advocacy, I wanna suck it with my appellate advocacy, and by god, by god, by ... god ... I had ...better .. be ... able ...to .. GET ... BACK .. TO .. THIS goddamn piece of text that I ...SWEAR ... I ... DID ... NOT ... HALLUCINATE ......... and if I can't find that fucking thing in one fucking second, I will cancel this piece of shit faster than I can insult the fuck out of your cheap piece of shit suit, you dickless loser.
2 comments:
Holy Fuck. This is almost my favorite post ever. It has to get in line behind the GBV in the Sin Twitties, but then, so does every other post of every other blog. 2004 is one of my favorite years (for obvious reaons) but it's also a year largely lost to me. Did I really give birth to two children? I vaguely remember downloading some songs off the internets that year too. But enough about me...more "information science." More Derrida blogging. More swearing. More more more said the baby!
Hey, very glad you enjoyed it, FM. The year 2004 was also before the evil YouTube vortex, which slurps up all the free time I should be using to do some writing beyond the "hey I attended a sports game" or "hey I attended a rock show" or "I like monkeys" level.
This is about as close as I think I can risk getting to the subject of research tools for lawyers ... must not breach the sacrosanct compartmentalism between the toy fun blog and my work job work work.
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