I had a bad day at work today.  Or perhaps I should say, bad day in court.  But I’m not here to talk about that.

It used to be that if I had a bad day I could sit at my keys and just let my consciousness subsume into the keys.  Put the rage on the page, if you would.  Nowadays, I’m bound by my duty as an attorney and my oath as an officer of the court not to say anything about it.  There’s exceptions – I could talk to my spouse and the like.  And my coworkers, for the most part.  But really, that’s not really how I get my catharsis.  I don’t want to talk about it.  I want to take it and transform it, distill it, subsume it beyond just facts into words, into something that I can hold up and call beautiful while at the same time I can hate it to the very core of my being.  I want to transform it from an experience in my head into an object that I can cast out of myself, like some exorcised demon allowed to thrash and die in the wilderness outside of me.

But I’ve taken an oath that those demons die with me.  I cannot tell you why the system doesn’t work.  Oh, I could abstract things.  I could lie.  I could make things up.  But if I did then everything I wrote would be open to the question of not just objectivity, but the prism of fiction.

But truth is often worse than fiction.  That is the purpose of fiction: to provide something for us to escape into.  But we cannot escape truth.