I Fought the Law

I haven't had too much contact with lawyers so far in my life.

Except I lived with one for 18 years.

I now feel for those who go through divorce or anything where their personal life is raked over by people with an agenda.

I feel it is the opposite of everything I've worked on privately and professionally my entire adult life.

All our impressions, our working "models" of the world are wrong. We know this to be true. 

My. Your. Our internal map of the world is wrong. (This is not a new idea. It's fundamental Level 1 brain mapping).

But at least your map is better than it used to be and not as full as it will be.

There's nothing wrong with that sort of wrong.

It's right. 

It's only.

At times, after life, or death, we reassess our lives and our relationships. We might have friends and family to help us. There is even a process known as grief. People have written about it. Look it up if you like. Or don't.

At the very, very least it's an awkward, unpleasant time. 

Maybe your friends will stick with you. Maybe they won't.

Maybe your family will have some words of succour, or support, or context, or texture.

But somehow, if you keep looking under enough rocks, you will find something to flesh out your story, your reality.

You'll touch up your map.

And unless you give up, you'll go on. Your sands will settle. 

Your wounds will hide themselves underneath scars.

You will make sense of things. 

Not the sense.... but a sense. One that serves you. Inside. A commentary that will "do".

Unless of course someone comes to pick at it, to post maggots on the rotting flesh and keep it inflamed, to feed ammonia to your nitrogen-fixing detritus. Unless you invite the legal eagle to daily eat your liver.

Enter the lawyers to make your sense into unsense. To make it arguable, debatable, profitable.

Selling what you thought was the truth of your life as a commodity. As a writing exercise.

Hawking it between left and right, adding pinstripes and creating nothing of substance in the middle.

That gift you bought your relative? That was proof.

That kind word? That showed you "owe". Why would you have done it otherwise?

That holiday you sent them on? That was evidence.

That agreement you thought you had with them? Well, that was just a cynical ploy. (And they're not here to argue, anyway).

That commitment you gave? Oh, that was actually an indication of a right to an estate.

That time you went to a party? That was somewhere to troll for witnesses to testify to a new post-apocalyptic reality. To rewrite history in a land where the louder or most annoying voice wins. 

And the prize? A revision of your understanding of your life so far. (And cash, of course).

And everybody's opinions in our new revisionist world are equal, morally equivalent. When there is no test for proof, there is no test for honesty. Not for the first time in society, honesty is laughable, meaningless.

Only this week we've seen judges free terrorists because they bring a piece of paper (posted to them in error) that they can wave in court. I felt guilty playing my get out of jail free card at Monopoly.

Only today, I watched a youtube video today of a man punching a mentally ill person dead with one punch in the street. Four years, he got. He will be out in two. And we can watch the video. The dead man never raised his arms. The aggro was one-sided. He just got punched dead. That's all. In Britain, on our streets.

For the rest of us, on the milder end of the market with the law, for a four or five figure sum you can be given their opinion of what your relationship with, for example, your father was.   

And you better agree to it. Because "nobody wants to go to court".

And as the knives come out, you can convince yourself that maybe they're right. Maybe what you'd previously seen as shadows was the real reality. 

In time, you can rewrite an event.

In enough time, you can rewrite a lifetime.

Downgrade your thoughts, downgrade your memories, downgrade you. Who you think you are. And who you think you were.

It casts a shadow over every sunlit day you thought you had an understanding. And every day you wake up, the hungry eagles are still there.

And they peck for so long, with such attrition, with such patience, with such slow cruelty, such inhumanity, that resolution becomes impossible.

You don't even know what to believe any more.

You have lost track of who you are and who you have been so far.

In probate as in space, no one can hear you scream.