Orcs Don't Play Trumpets

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Mariachi

I fell out of sleep when the car stopped. The fluorescent glare of gas-station floodlights poured in, brewing muttered conversation and the acrid bite of tobacco smoke into a slurry of disorientation. The windows were down and even at four in the morning, the Texas air hung warm and dark and damp from our shoulders. The car emptied, three grown men unfolding themselves from the bench seat in the back. I had the foresight to call “shotgun” back in Houston. A battered passenger van sat alongside us at the pump; a dozen laborers milled about, crunching on bags of Doritos and speaking softly in Spanish. The curses, I understood.

* * *

Ten hours and a hundred dollars in bribes later, Eric’s dusty red Rav4 soldiered along beneath a 115-degree Sun. Shrubs, grasses and stunted trees hugged the ground around us—all shockingly green for a murderous Mexican August. The air conditioner fan roared, but it wasn’t near enough. Heat had long since pacified the conversation when the car swerved dramatically to the right. We flailed about and were pulled left again, correcting back to the center of the road as Eric cut loose with a stream of incredulous profanity. “The dogs,” he bellowed. “Dogs in the road!” And suddenly we were turning around, pulling a U-turn on the two-lane highway. “Horns?” asked Tim from the front, too distressed to recall his real name. “Look at this!” Eric insisted as we roared onward. The hazard came into view: three dogs in the center of the highway.

The one with the white-blonde coat was the biggest. She was dead in the road, the victim of a passing motorist. The others, black and brown, had discovered the body and were attempting to mate with it. The black one had summited the corpse and was working furiously. The last sat patiently in the median, intently focused on the proceedings. He was excited about the opportunity and didn’t seem to mind waiting. The asphalt’s heat rose around them in shimmering waves, and the iron-grey mountains of Monterrey lent a regal air to the proceedings. In the car, pot resin mingled with hours-old sweat. Brett insisted the little black dog was “lined up wrong.” I’ve chosen to believe him.

* * *

The house outside Cadereyta was all blinding white stucco and pastoral dreams. A fountain loomed by the front door, dry and spattered with road dust. Storm clouds had begun to churn in the distance. Our hosts came out, and we exchanged greetings in the withering heat. They introduced themselves with the names we knew; names attached to a lattice of ones and zeroes. This man was Modu; this one Plastico. We responded in kind, discarding the given names we’d used in the car. It was instantly comfortable. Snacks appeared in our hands: branded Mexican corn chips, all salt and chile and salt and lime and salt. There would be a mariachi band at dinner, they told us. When your World of Warcraft guild holds a retreat in Mexico, the focus is not on video games.

Twenty young men waited in the air-conditioned paradise past the iron doors, each sober and rowdy to his tastes. A few assembled a battery of computers against the wall; others napped on a flotilla of mattresses arrayed on the cool tile floor. We’d never met, but knew each other well. Someone pressed a cold Tecate into my hand and I sucked it down. A man from Singapore (by way of Malaysia, he explained, in a laser-etched English accent) introduced himself as Malicia. Not wanting to use a woman’s handle for the next week, I asked his real name. He wouldn’t tell me. Once, I said some intemperate things to Malicia. Feelings were hurt, so one man was my friend and the other my other awkward comrade. The second Tecate dripped from brown glass bottle to throat. I was feeling queasy.

Stepping out the back, I took in the expansive coral-painted deck. There was a pool, its bottom striated with dark blue tiles. Leaning against a tree, breathing deep to settle my stomach, I felt a hard wind pulling. A pair of threadbare ranch dogs sprinted past, nipping at each others’ flanks. The clouds had descended; tall trees with only a few penthouse leaves thrashed and screamed in the gale. I didn’t know the time of day. My stomach surrendered to the last sixteen hours of driving and heat and hunger, all of it capped off with two budget-priced beers. A peal of thunder sounded as I was on my hands and knees, and the dogs started yelping. The smell of rain was in the air and I stumbled inside. The mattresses were prepared to save my life.

* * *

Memo woke me up; a snaggletoothed young man with an easy smile and wide white eyes. Time to eat, pendejo. I stumbled after him towards the back door, peeling my eyelids back with fingertips to moisten my sandpaper contacts. The rain had come and gone, though giants stirred above us. Tables were set, with all the deck illuminated and coals smoldering in an enormous grill. The iron was raised with a hand crank, and Plastico rubbed it down with two halves of an onion. “It’s the best,” he declared. My guild was scattered between the tables, all adorned with bottles of tequila and more Tecate. ”Drinking Tecate is a must,” Plas explained. I said I’d already had some.

The guild leader—-a rich man, bankrolling this teenager's Valhalla—-stood up at the start of dinner to introduce the band. I am a Grinch when it comes to mariachi, all the noise noise NOISE. But with a gutload of corn and cheese to protect me, drinks kicked up with the music kicked. It was unlike any mariachi I’d heard before: soothing and busy, all jangling and buzzing strings beneath a brass-smooth tenor. The singer’s ululations bound up time like leaves of paper. Plas and Eric threw Memo in the pool about an hour later. The deck buzzed with light, and tiny insects cavorted overhead. The band played with barely a breath between songs, but never for a moment did they rush.

Something I didn't drop

I was privileged to interview Curt Schilling, former MLB pitcher and current head of 38 Studios--a video game developer. I was even more privileged to do it for The Atlantic, one of my favorite publications and someplace I've always wanted to work for. Hopefully I'll follow this up with more good ideas. Big thanks to my longtime friend Alyssa Rosenberg, who greased the wheels with the Atlantic and lent tremendous support while I was putting the piece together. Without further ado, A LINK TO ANOTHER WEBSITE:

Curt Schilling: From World-Series Pitcher to Video-Game Entrepreneur

A Sequence, in the morning

I open my eyes. Everything is blurry and that's a good thing. It means I remembered to take my lenses out. Sunlight is everywhere, pouring through the open door and window slats because I was way too drunk to close them. How drunk? The taste and total desiccation in my mouth says, "quite." A huge gap in my memory says, "very quite."

In the bathroom, my stream is radioactive yellow and practically viscous. That's how dehydrated I am. Somehow, I don't feel like shit. My stomach is calm if very empty. Back in my room, Bella's stolen my comforter and wrapped herself up in it at the foot of the bed. She's being so cute that I let her hang onto it.

Going downstairs for the first time, I see the handle of King's Bay. It's been left out, capless and very warm, standing next to a half-full glass of chaser and a single shotglass. There is, at most, twenty-eight percent of the bottle remaining. I cringe. Surely Nick and I didn't do all that ourselves. Maybe Alex drank with us. He probably didn't. Let the hazy forensic tour of the apartment begin.

There's a large paper map folded out on the table. It's an official map of Skyrim. We don't own that game. Yet here's the map, and on the table is a PS3 Skyrim case. I guess we own that game. Suddenly an epiphany: Nick's brother Zach came over last night and delivered it as a late birthday present. He came over around 9:30, after work. Now we're getting somewhere. He didn't drink with us, but I definitely talked to him about the latest EA/Visceral projects. I don't remember exactly what was said, but I definitely oozed over Dead Space and hit him up repeatedly for a writing job at Visceral. I wince, because clearly I was extremely drunk during this time. Chance I made a total ass of myself and Zach left laughing at me: 80%. It is, however, possible that I was functional during this time. I don't slur and have on occasion carried out perfectly normal conversations with people who had no idea what state I was in. Worst-case scenario: somebody I barely know things I am a drunken loser. That doesn't bode well for a job at Visceral, but did I have any actual tangible prospects there? No. Just gonna laugh this off.

I put the rum away and start to assemble the basic components of a meal I like to call "Corn Chex." My breakfasting efforts are cut short by broken glass all over the kitchen floor. Another epiphany: I broke a shotglass last night by fumbling it and knocking it to the floor. "SHIT," oy sez to moiself, "I can't believe I left broken glass all over. Thank God nobody was hurt." Then I recall something: I cleaned that glass. Inspecting the shards, I see that this is a DIFFERENT broken shotglass--it's smoked glass, not the clear painted glass from my little boo-boo. This makes me feel better in one way, and much worse in another.

After some sweeping, I take my cereal upstairs and fire up the Interwebs. The sun is shining and the house hasn't been this warm in weeks. I'm the only one awake, just eating my cereal and celebrating my good fortune at escaping from a brutal night more or less hangover-free. And then this great day crashes right into a lousy wall, because the first thing I see online is the news that Christopher Hitchens is dead.

It seems appropriate, somehow, to emerge from a drunken stupor to this news. Hitchens may, after all, have been the world's greatest functioning alcoholic. The sheer amount of punishment the man put his body through, over thirty-plus years of massive drinking and smoking, should have made his career impossible. Some people, it turns out, are just that goddamned brilliant. Hitchens himself said that the lifestyle was what gave him the energy to do his work. Maybe that's true, and he wouldn't have been the same without it. Trent Reznor's career is doing just fine since he put down the bottle, but as far as I'm concerned the genius is gone. Sure, the mechanical genius of assembling notes and crafting songs stuck around. A sober Hitchens would likely have kept his terrifying powers of language. But his erudition and wit weren't what made him great. It was the soul of the man, this cantankerous disheveled drunken genius (if you've ever seen him on TV, he was probably tipsy) who wouldn't let anyone get away with anything, who believed completely in himself and dared the world to prove him wrong. They couldn't--he was just too fucking brilliant.

I never met the guy. I could have--we share a mutual friend--but never asked for an introduction or made any effort to meet him. That's not my style. I figured it would eventually happen; just given the loose connection, I would eventually find myself in a room with him. When he was stricken by cancer, I knew that had been a mistake. Which, having written it, strikes me as kind of a shitty selfish attitude--oh, well. The man was about nothing more than honesty. And maybe it's because I'm an over-educated atheist contrarian asshole who loves nothing more than to tell other people how WRONG THEY ARE, but I felt a real kinship with this man. I never met him and if I had, I wouldn't have had much to say. He probably would have found me boring, like the other six billion people whose company on the Earth he drank to endure. But I've had the good fortune to meet a few truly brilliant people in my life, and selfishly it's enough to be around them for a little bit.

One sentimental note in eulogy: Chris Hitchens was a character, he had style, and he had such an overpowering presence with that deep scotch-and-fags baritone that we lose the real person there. This was a man who lived and loved and drank and smoke and fucked and married and changed diapers and cleaned vomit and wept over dead pets and demanded that Andrew Sullivan kiss him "with tongue." This was a real man with a family who knew him as a real man. Keep it in mind; this was a titan, not a god.

I deeply admired Chris Hitchens. Sometimes you just see yourself in a person, even if that person is better and smarter and more accomplished than you'll ever be. He was a tremendous inspiration for my own writing, though I've never imitated him--and how could I, hailing from a totally different culture, continent, and generation? The man's greatest inspiration was P.G. Wodehouse and his greatest foe was Henry Kissinger. I can't relate to that and it would be dishonest and phony (lord, did he hate those qualities) to try. But I've been thinking a lot about the future in the past few months, and to see a man like this leave the world crystallized a little something in my head ("With all the pot you smoke, I bet a lot of you is crystallized!" yuk yuk yuk)

American society is decaying. I feel this strongly enough that I'm confident asserting it. It's not just us, and it's not cause of THAT BLACK NIGGER BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (if anything, that very imperfect man is one of the few real hopes we have). I think if you're under 30 or over 50, and you're not too busy taking trips to Vegas or buying Tahoe ski condos or engaging in the richie-rich fun time summer camp that is business school, you can feel it too. It's getting worse, though I'm not sure why. When somebody talks on TV, I can feel it getting worse. When Hitchens talked, for my part it was a giant ray of light cutting through darkness. In the Internet age, everyone's a liar. Everyone pretends, because the pouring of all our many identities into a single online persona forces us into dishonesty. It keeps us safe and sane, but it's collectively destroying our society. Ditto the automation, the numbers, the relentless engineering optimization that seems to drive every enterprise. An ad spot on the radio, at the very least, has the intimacy of the DJ's voice. He is trying to connect to you, investing his credibility in a product that he seems to earnestly hope improves your life. But a spot on Youtube is loaded with keywords, annotation, a hundred different optimizations to increase the odds that a machine will place the product in front of you for consideration. ADVERTISING, that most soulless of enterprises, has lost its soul. I'm sorry if that seems like a digression, but I'm just trying to explain in words what I feel, with rheumatic certainty, in my bones.

There you go, Hitch. I said "rheumatic certainty." I'm sorry the rest of us weren't easy to deal with. And with this written (I cried only a little this morning at the news, and not at all during this composition), I'm going to have a drink. The rum should be cold again, by now.

Jury duty, pt. 3

Deliberations
Remember when I said "and here my troubles began?" Normally you're only allowed to use that phrase once in a single product, but I think it applies here. I didn't know what I was about to get into; I thought the case was a fairly simple issue of judgment behind the wheel. It turns out that nothing is simple when people are asked to decide something, and certainly not when they've been given a whole week's worth of information to process on their own. The first day, we had only an hour before the building closed. We spent it selecting a presiding juror (a "foreman" in less-progressive states) and agreeing when to show up the next day. We also took a brief vote on the first question on the verdict form. The way it was set up, if the first question (to paraphrase, "did this bitch do something wrong?") were answered in the negative, we could go home immediately. No question of damages, breaking down culpability, or anything. That sounds great, but when you've spent so long on something you want to see it through and get your way. At least, I want those things. I've been described as something of a jerk.

During the five years and change I spent playing World of Warcraft (admittedly, I did other things during this time like graduate from college and start my career and have a girl ruin my life), I learned about the human race's infinite capacity for fucking up. It turns out that no matter the stimulus or piece of information presented, people have ways of seeing it differently. This might be a triumph of diversity or a testament to the spectrum of the human condition if it weren't for the fact that so many of those interpretations are wrong. The initial vote was split 6-6. It sounds awful, but this was a civil trial so only nine jurors needed to agree on any given verdict question. The way you're supposed to do it, you vote on one question at a time because the questions are set up in a logical order. The idea is to isolate debates on one question at a time, focusing on a single issue and eliminating the idea of "trading" votes on one question for another. It's a good idea. It doesn't work for even an instant.

Realizing that consensus needed forging, I went to work. I had specifically not put my name forward for presiding juror, because I anticipated having to argue with my fellow jurors (in legal parlance, "motherfuckers"). So I started pushing; clearly, to my mind, the defendant was negligent in driving. She chose to go through the yellow, and the video showed an easy window for the SUV to turn left. Remember, the SUV driver had settled already for an amount we weren't allowed to know. So what if the defendant had her line of sight blocked by another car? Going through the intersection when you don't know if anyone is turning left? That's actually worse to my mind, but I grew up in Boston where we actually take responsibility for our decisions. Californian drivers disagree. A Boston driver, tasked to explain all his on-road actions in retrospect, can do it. A Californian won't recall a single thing that happened, but will swear they hit their brakes. It's the ultimate description of why Californian drivers are awful: they think brake lights are fucking deflector shields.

So I went to work. I established that even 1% culpability from the defendant was enough for a "Yes" vote on the question of which this bitch fucked up. That got two votes; the rest were a group of four people. Among them, two old men, one Chinese lady, and a mom. It is not, in retrospect, surprising that these people would choose to defend poor driving as "normal." Four people were dead-set in their opposition to a single iota of responsibility for the defendant. Their resolution clearly bonded them to each other, in the worst and most predictable fashion. Has anyone else noticed that the phrases "worst" and "most predictable" describe 96% of human behavior? I needed one convert.

"Why can't you see how WRONG you are?" Or, how to swing a jury in four hours
People rarely make arguments based on substance. Most of what a given human being believes is a pungent stew of tribalism, emotion, and self-interest all coated with the veneer of calm consideration. If somebody's got a rational basis for 20% of what he believes, that's a reasonable person. Moving from this base, I started the process of persuasion. Defensiveness is one of the most intractable of human emotions, and when trying to turn over somebody's position you need to be careful. The natural human tendency is to retreat from any information that contradicts already-held belief, and so to convert somebody I couldn't engage them directly. In this, I had an unwitting ally: the "leader" of the other faction, a jowly red-faced 50something gentleman. He wasn't going to move; he was way too stubborn and way too emotionally invested in this case. But that gave me an easy target: somebody with whom I could aggressively disagree and not worry about permanently losing his vote. He was lost already, so I could drive a wedge between his extreme position and the rest of his faction. I attacked the unreasonable guy, and spared the folks who might swing. The key was just getting those "attacks," out. I use scare quotes because none of this is personal; I actually like this gentleman.

It took about four hours to hem him in. I could have done it faster, but part of managing the jury room is not talking too much. If you're seen as dominating the discussion to an unreasonable degree, folks will resent you. The key is to pick your spots: arguments you can make and win, to which you'll really commit. If a point of discussion is secondary or tertiary to your main point, sit and keep your mouth shut. It's important to let people talk and feel like they're contributing, even if what they have to say is stupid or irrelevant.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the Filipina grandma was just the worst. Between her and the heavily-accented Chinese man, it was a circus of non sequiturs. They would insist on getting an un-interrupted chance to speak, and then spend two minutes making some point that mattered not a bit to ANYBODY and typically mis-interpreted the last 30 minutes of debate. These people are on juries all the time. Thank fucking Christ they started on my side. I'll note, the Filipina grandma was against me until I explained what a "no" vote on the first question actually meant. Again, these people serve on jury. It's probably best to avoid any crimes for this reason.

Eventually, I had the other side pinned down: an assertion by Max that ANY conduct that's legal cannot by definition be negligent. The defendant, in the absence of any left-turning vehicle, could have gotten four wheels in the intersection. Therefore she couldn't be at fault; not even a little. If you're thinking "that's absurd," you are correct. Welcome to Team Tony. Once this was on the table, I turned the screws on the young mom: couldn't you take plenty of legal actions in the presence of your children that would be inappropriate, unreasonable or negligent? Of course, the answer was yes. Faced with the contradiction, I expected her to double down. I expected to drive home really fast on the lunch recess to do shots of rum and lament the human condition, but NOT SO. This woman actually flipped her vote along with another gentleman. After four hours, I had finally shrunk the opposing argument to the size where I could throttle it with my bare hands.

Downhill
And with that, the baby had crowned. This was the single hardest question for us to answer, the question that determined the rest of the case for the most part. Over the next few hours we hammered out some damages; it wasn't difficult once we agreed to some basic parameters. The Bloc of Four was always a problem, and remained pretty resolute that zero damages could be considered. They were hanging together at this point basically out of tribalism and admitted as such; it was not enough to force some self-evaluation. At the point where you realize you're making arguments based on an emotional attachment to prior arguments...well, I don't know what you're supposed to do at that point. Either change your tune, or set yourself on fire.

We didn't award many damages. I'd have liked more, but we always had to get at least one vote from the Bloc of Four and the numbers got skewed downwards to something pretty minimal (but something we could live with--this motorcyclist got seriously injured through no fault of his own). The plaintiff had screwed up himself, eschewing some diagnostic tests that probably would have revealed some lasting damage. I don't know how you spend that much time and money on an injury lawsuit without getting a fucking MRI, but that's what happened. The highlight of this second act was the leader of the Bloc of Four stating, in all seriousness, that he didn't think the defendant's negligence (remember, we've agreed to this and it's part of the official record) contributed to the plaintiff's injuries. At the point where we've agreed the pickup truck was negligent, and it plowing into the SUV caused the injury, how could anyone argue this? His verbatim line: "maybe the sidewalk impact caused the injury." Where did the kinetic energy come from to propel him to the sidewalk? Christ. Luckily, this was far too stupid for the others in the Bloc and we got some headway.

When all was said and done, we knocked on the door and told the bailiff we had a verdict. He had to open the door, naturally, because we were locked in the room by law. Doesn't seem fire-safe, does it? We came back into the courtroom and the judge read the verdict. No palpable reaction from either party of their lawyers, though the defendant's lawyer asked that the jury be polled. What's that? Well, it turns out that in California you can ask for a reading of the verdict with every juror chiming in to say if he voted for it. Not a big deal in criminal trials, as you might imagine, but if a civil lawyer gets a chance to drag out the proceedings he's honor-bound to take it. So everyone had to go through every line of the jury form stating whether they voted for it. I said "correct" every time; the opposition leader might have said it once on a minor question. I got what I wanted. And isn't that what justice is all about?

Side note 1: The lawyers wanted to speak with the jurors outside the courtroom after everything was done. Most jurors went home; I stuck around, since I'd invested so much time and effort already. The lawyers were great; legitimately interested in what we thought of their performance and what we'd found persuasive. They were very friendly with each other, and disclosed that the original settlement (with the SUV driver) had been $100,000. Additionally, everything from the collision to the plaintiff's medical expenses had been covered by ample and generous insurance. Why then, you might ask, did we go through all this bullshit? Because children can't agree on anything and need grown-ups to make their decisions for them, apparently.

Side note 2: in the hallway outside the courtroom right before the verdict was delivered, we saw the judge. Prior to that point, he'd always been up on his bench (throne, if you'd prefer). He would enter and exit the room through a door behind the bench, so he seemed very mysterious and powerful. Or some shit. Anyway, this was the first time I'd actually seen the man standing there. He was maybe, generously, five foot five. I pictured little pointy shoes beneath his robe. They'd have bells on the toes, but they'd be taped down with black electrical tape to keep from jingling while he walked. Gotta maintain decorum.

Side note 3: The fact that I was selected for this jury reflects poorly on the judgment of both attorneys. Having a juror like myself in the jury room--an outspoken, opinionated, educated person feeling no compulsion to listen to trial lawyers or bought-and-paid-for "expert witnesses"--is exactly what they should try to avoid. The court system treats the decision-making process like a dangerous weapon, so why give that dangerous weapon to the guy with the crazy eyes fingering it hungrily? I love to argue and take the process very seriously. You don't want me on your jury. On the upside, if I'm ever put in the box again I can get out of it. A brief recounting of my past jury-room experience should be enough to send any halfway competent lawyer running for the hills.

Last thoughts
First, I think the civil trial system is bullshit. If a citizen is asked to serve on a criminal jury, that's a public service. You're acting as a check against arbitrary action and helping to ensure your own protection by jury trial (should you ever be accused of a crime like possession of all the drugs you typically possess). But whom was I serving all those days and all those hours? It wasn't the state; it was the plaintiff, the defendant, and their lawyers. Dispute resolution is a specialty that lawyers pay thousands of dollars for; but why bother when we can just ask the addled Filipina grandmother and the over-opinionated metalhead to do that work for free? Juror compensation needs to be higher in general, but it really should be higher for civil trials, since the plaintiff and defendant can just pay out of pocket. That would provide a powerful incentive to resolve disputes before reaching trial, which is something I think we can all get behind. If your issue is that important or you have that much money, take it all the way. I guess this is my point: lawsuits can be valuable, but this one sure wasn't.

All that time, all that public and private expenditure, to try and wheeze a little better result out of the system than you might have got otherwise? Ugh. The upside is that I think justice really was served: though the letter of the law favored the defendant, she fucked up in a major way and put other people at risk. Somebody was hurt, and damages will be paid. At the same time, the breakdown of blame we did at the end favored the extremist "zeroes" of the Bloc of Four. The total restitution paid by the defendant will be about $5,000, paling in comparison to any of the legal expenses or even the cost of hiring one expert witness. Everyone loses, and those fuckers deserve it for not coming to a settlement. By the way, the proposed settlement before the trial was $25,000 (we couldn't know this in the jury room, obviously). The plaintiff turned it down, thinking he could get more in a trial. I would have actually liked to see him get more, but FUCK YOU for turning down that kind of cash with a hundred-grand already on the table.

Which brings us to the final lesson of this long, long tale. I'm very happy if you read this far, because I know it's been long. I'm not even sure how interesting this is to an outside observer. I know I learned a lot from these experiences, but the crucial lesson is really the repeating theme of human existence: everything is terrible, and people fuck everything up. If accused of a crime, I would absolutely want a jury trial. But I would be terrified of the bored-looking stooges in that little wooden box.

Life is great and worth living; everyone should keep living it. But please, PLEASE try to think about what you're doing. Just try to be less of an asshole. Except if the folks on the other side of the jury table are WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Jury duty, pt. 2

The Trial
The trial started on Friday, the prior two days consumed entirely by jury selection. The jurors assembled outside the courtroom at 9am; I was still uncomfortable talking to any of them. One of the old guys was basically Butters from South Park, aged sixty years and made less adorable. The dorky hopelessness was all there. Still, if you wanted to talk to anybody it had to be one of the old guys. The old ladies would chatter amongst themselves in Tagalog and everyone else was absorbed in her cell phone. I had my book and headphones, which together provide a pretty airtight seal against human interaction. This makes my life better in so many ways, and I figured there'd be plenty of time to get to know these people.

Complicating everything was a series of admonitions that the judge stated before EVERY recess: don't do any independent research, don't talk about any aspect of the case especially with your fellow jurors, and (most importantly, quoth he) don't form any opinions in your spare time. This was a recurring theme of jury service and the judge really took pains to stress it: not developing opinions. It's an odd request to make of people whose lives you're hijacking for the express purpose of forming opinions, but it reveals something larger about the justice system. They're very aware of the fact that they need jurors to resolve disputes and keep the entire system running, but they're terrified of the actual decision making process. In theory, you're not supposed to form any opinions until the whole trial is done. Only once all the evidence has been presented and the closing arguments made, and only once all the jurors are in the deliberating room, are you supposed to form ANY opinions. The government would like you to remain a blank-slate drone who absorbs the information presented to your stupid face, right up until you're all locked together in the jury room (yes, they lock the door). They treat the decision-making process as though it were live explosives, rolling a grenade into the jury room before sealing it off and plugging their ears.

The trial actually started, even before opening arguments, with a playback of a video. To set the scene, this was a three-vehicle collision at a major intersection with a four-way traffic light and no protected left turns. There was a control camera at the intersection, so the accident was captured for all to see! They ran through the tape a few times, which was nice because there was a lot to look at. An SUV trying to make a left turn has to wait for the yellow to go. As she goes, a pickup truck trying to make the light blows through the intersection and strikes the SUV. The SUV's rear swings around and strikes a motorcycle stopped at the red light, blowing the rider off his bike. And...scene.

Opening Pitch presented by Geico
The opening arguments are sort of confusing; they're talking about evidence that'll be presented and witnesses that will be called to prove X and Y and such. About half these things actually happened during the trial, and by the end the claims had shifted. So, tip for future jurors: spend this time daydreaming or examining the faces of the court staff for funny faces. They didn't want us taking notes during the lawyers' arguments (not evidence, they said), so doodling was hard. The biggest highlight of the opening arguments was the defendant's lawyer, who had giant coke-bottle glasses and an annoying habit of walking around the entire courtroom while he spoke. In high school speech competitions, there were certain kids who actually spent time working on their speech-walking. They'd hit certain spots on the floor for each part of the speech, and it ultimately described a weird kind of triangle where you ended up at the exact same spot you started. If you plotted it out, it looks like an Illuminati pyramid with the start/endpoint being that laser-eye at the apex. This will all be covered in National Treasure 3. Or The Da Vinci Code 3. Or Deus Ex 3. Or some shit.

Side note: if there's anything we should have learned from the past few years, it's that major international conspiracies are just as impossible as alien visitors. I mean "impossible" in a physical, scientific sense: just as the aliens are constrained by the speed of light, any conspiracy is naturally constrained by the incredible human capacity for fucking up. The world economy is crippled by problems that we know how to solve, but can't convince ourselves even exist. These people are not capable of grand, intricate conspiracies. They can barely tie their own shoes or keep their hands off big-butted Sofitel staff.

The plaintiff's lawyer was an unfortunate-looking man. It's not easy being a short, pudgy, middle-aged Jew, though Jason Alexander seems to have had a good run for the last thirty years. He was not a handsome man, a little rodent-y, but this guy did himself no favors. He sported a greasy, pencil-thin mustache. His tightly-curled Jewfro hair was a little long, but it was a weird length. It was cornrow-length; as though his neck were his legs and his hair were a pair of capris. It was pulled back into a natty little salt-and-pepper knot at the back of his skull. My father sports a ponytail that I'm willing to defend; this was not defensible from a man who actually has a full head of hair. Between the strange bun and the little mustache (not to mention the garish yellow ties and vests that made him look like a penguin), it was a comedy of unforced errors. Speaking of which, he was unable to pronounce any of the medical terms deployed in the case, like "encephalocele." The defendant's lawyer had only a little more medical knowledge, but he could at least say human words with his mouth. After the opening arguments (mercifully brief), we started with witnesses.

The evidence
The witnesses themselves weren't too remarkable. There were only about half as many as promised, and for that I'm extremely grateful. The trial proceeded at the glacial pace demanded by our somnolent judge, who really struggled to stay awake in the sessions just before and after lunch. He had a great face when the sleepies got overwhelming: a sort of grouchy, old-man-chewing-even-with-no-food-in-there set to his jaw. The old guys in the jury had similar problems, but everyone else was really professional. The court reporters were highly competent and totally silent at all times, which was extra scary because they wore a LOT of makeup and had earrings as big as my fist.

Being in court wasn't as bad as I thought; having recently been through secondary school and college, I'm accustomed to the idea of sitting in a chair and taking notes while somebody drones on for ninety minutes. And thanks to the schedule of the court, you never go much more than ninety without a break (appropriately called "recess"). Lunch was ninety minutes on its own, which was enough time for me to drive home and make a sandwich and play with my puppy. Being a juror in the County of San Mateo pays a grand total of fifteen dollars per day, plus mileage. It's insulting to actually think of it as pay, so I consider it a per diem. Specifically, it pays for transportation, lunch, and the booze you'll need every night when you get home.

The evidence was unremarkable. Honestly, we could have decided the case with a reading of the relevant laws and a copy of the video. The expert witnesses were a mix of doctors and "accident reconstruction specialists," which I guess is a thing these days. It sounds like a good gig; regardless of the economy, people will keep fucking up and crashing their cars. They helped to establish some basic facts, but nothing that ended up mattering in deliberations. They were paid hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to appear and say these things, in addition to the thousands they billed for their preparatory pre-trial work. If I make $200 a week I'm happy. Just keeping everything in perspective.

These witnesses established that the defendant (the pickup truck driver; the SUV driver had already settled for an amount we weren't allowed to know) could have stopped for the yellow/red, but chose not to. They also established that her line of vision was blocked by other cars, so at the point where she saw the SUV she couldn't have stopped. Essentially, both of them made poor decisions. As for the medical evidence, the plaintiff had three main problems: headaches, shoulder pain, and a testicular surgery he'd undergone following the accident. That's right, we got to talk about balls. A lot. The surgery was for a pre-existing condition that was non-painful but wacky: essentially, harmless golf-ball-sized cysts inside the scrotum. There were all kinds of lost-wages and economic harm claims, because the plaintiff was a small business owner. It was a mess, and there was a lot of repetitive testimony that shed remarkably little light on everything.

The defendant's attorney was enamored with his deposition book, and during every cross-examination would try and needle the witness about any semantic differences between his testimony and his deposition from a year prior. UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY, as he said. He really liked that phrase. I imagine it's the lawyer equivalent of those giant foam noodles people brought to the local pool. You know, the ones that every young boy in history has immediately picked up and used as a comically floppy sword? The lawyers are the young boys, swinging these weapons that don't hurt anyone but land with a satisfying THWACK. PERJURY. HAH! I see the appeal, but it was a singularly un-appealing tactic for the jury. This isn't a boxing match; we're not keeping score and awarding you points for landing a blow. Between the video (which I thought showed terrible judgment on the defendant's part) and her lawyer's skeevy tactics, I wasn't sympathetic to that side. OH NO I FORMED AN OPINION!



Kyra Sedwick is the Closer, even though it looks like her mouth could unhinge and open like a python's
Closing arguments. These were absolutely brutal, and the fact that they were at the end of the trial didn't help. At least the witnesses were being asked questions, so the back-and-forth kept everyone awake. In the closing arguments, the lawyers just get to talk for basically as long as they want. In the past, this took days. It's the only part of the court system that's gotten faster over the years. The plaintiff's closing argument was a full hour and I thought that was bad; not so. The defendant's lawyer took over two hours for his closing argument, though to be fair he knew there was a brief rebuttal coming. He spent the entire two hours talking in circles, walking in circles, and engaging in bait-and-switch sophistry. Those semantic differences between the witness testimony and their depositions? MAJOR ISSUE. His first declaration: "this case is about two things: fear and greed." Two minutes later, he's telling us to "pay attention to the scientific details in this case." I'm sorry, there was no expert witness to explain to me the science of FEAR AND GREED. When the man thought he was making a particularly clever point, he'd get this little smirk just so we'd know how clever it all was. He also took a shot at a vacation the plaintiff took with his children when he was "supposedly disabled." Really, you're going there? I know we've been given instructions not to consider sympathy, but it's hard NOT to feel sympathy for this man when you're being such a dick to him.

Eventually it was over; the plaintiff's rebuttal to the defendant's enormous closing statement was a brutally efficient rebuttal. He hit every major point in a fraction of the time I thought he'd need. It was a shining moment of competence, which was frankly startling given how badly both lawyers screwed up their arguments with regard to the medical evidence. Trial lawyers are just highly-trained arguers; you'd think their expertise in the subject would really matter, but it turns out bullshit is a kind of universal firmament. We were read a final round of instructions by the judge (ninety minutes of lowest-common-denominator bullshit) and whisked off to the jury room. This has already been long, and I'm leaving out a ton of events because I wasn't actually doing anything for them. We're nine days plus a weekend into jury duty, and I've spent the ENTIRE TIME just sitting there quietly taking notes. In the third part, I'll detail the deliberations. Spoiler: I owned face.