PROLOGUE

“And you may ask yourself,
‘Well, how did I get here?’”[1]

How did I get here? Yes, that’s the question.

Others have been here before me: “Bartelby the Scrivner.” I, too, know that brick wall outside the window.

Dickens wrote eight hundred pages in Bleak House about a lawsuit that never ends, that goes on and on, like a workday in a law office, proofreading trivia that will matter to no one the next morning.

Kafka took a degree in law, worked briefly as a lawyer before going onto the equally arcane world of insurance, all of it an experience of the absurd that informed his blessed writing.

Marcel Proust said, “In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.” [2] It’s good he didn’t have to support himself – he would have quickly choked to death on the atmosphere.

I’ve worked in a law office far longer than I ever hoped I would – have you, too? What have I really wanted to do with my life? Become a famous writer and free myself from the monotonous, 9-5 tyranny of office work. That hasn’t happened.

I currently work in a large anonymous office in an anonymous city in an anonymous country. Yes, I’m protecting myself. I know how sharp a shark’s tooth is. All names have been changed to protect the guilty and thereby protect me from lawsuits, from which only lawyers almost ever benefit.

Yes, how did I get myself into all this for over eighteen years?

“My god, what have I done?”

_____________________

[1] “Once In A Lifetime”, Track 4, Remain In Light by Talking Heads, Sire Records, 1980.

[2] Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International: New York,
1997), 12.

[3] Op. Cit., "Once In A Lifetime".