Don’t you people have real jobs? (Instead of blogging, anyway.)

I am a lawyer and have been for almost 20 years. I graduated from a good law school, where I was on one of the law reviews. I’ve spent my career primarily in civil litigation. I’ve tried dozens of cases – addressing all sorts of issues – to juries and judges over the years and won the majority, maybe even vast majority, of them. I can write – anyone who hangs here knows that. I live and work in a major metropolitan area (which I will leave unnamed for sake of my own pseudonymity). I am a sole practitioner. I am a good lawyer.

Right now, I have not had appreciable work in about 8 months. I have made gross receipts (before expenses) of qualify-you-for-food-stamps-and-welfare next-to-nothing so far this year. I have missed seven consecutive mortgage payments. Within the week I have to file an answer to the foreclosure lawsuit seeking to put me out in the street. Happily, I own my car, so if need be I can live there. I have had my credit card turned off for over three months. I had the cable TV turned off before Christmas. What money that came in over the winter went to keeping the heat, light, phone and internet up and running and the dog fed (lest she start eating the furniture).

I answer the want ads. I chase after non-existent job openings. And (just the latest iteration) I watch walking turds like Bill Kristol get piles of money – $250k this time – dumped on their rancid asses so they can spew more of the same kind of propaganda they have in the past. I won’t even compliment his work by calling it a blowjob telling the rich and powerful how wonderful they are – blowjobs are supposed to be enjoyable and reading Kristol is anything but.

Don’t tell me to get a real job – tearing apart the Rethuglican chicanery is about as real as it gets. It just doesn’t pay the bills.

So, if you’re getting paid to work, be glad for it. And don’t make light of it or of those of us who spend too much time on the blogs, because we aren’t getting paid. (In money, at any rate.)

Some years ago, I went to Valley Forge. Valley Creek, which runs through the National Park there, is actually a trout stream, though an obscure one. And I love to flyfish. By the way – I have not been able to go fishing at all this year. I cannot afford a license.

Anyway, Valley Creek and Valley Forge are beautiful in that inimitable way that the rolling hills, deciduous trees and old stone buildings of Eastern Pennsylvania are. It’s a real study in green. And then, while standing contemplating both the fishing and the scenery, one remembers that scene was at one time the crucible in which were smelted and refined the values and virtues EW, Bmaz, the commenters, you and I are all trying to defend and express against the thugs who would take this country and the world back to a time of demented absolute monarchs, unalloyed might-makes-right, and fraud as the currency of the realm. And we are trying to raise up the society in which we live and work to better express those values of individual rights being superior to the government, objective justice reigning, honesty over chicanery, and equal protection of fair laws applying to everyone equally.

I won’t take up the mantle or title of being in the same room as the soldiers and families who wintered at Valley Forge – even if one could do that for themselves it would not be the kind of thing I would do for myself because that’s the way I am. But I can say, in some dim way, I can empathize and understand them better. I haven’t had to wrap rags around my feet against the snow. My little dwelling was proof against the winter storms in ways theirs were not. But I can, like they did, look at the cozy cossetting of the forces arrayed against them in support of injustice – the wingnut welfare and lush think-tank jobs of today the rough equivalent of the warm taverns and houses of Philadelphia then – and, in a way, be glad I’m out here in the cold. Because that warmth has a price I’m not willing to pay.

Why dontcha throw some coin from that full-time real job of yours to support the fund Jane’s set up so Marcy can do this full-time?