\nSo, in a few years’ time the length of my life since graduating college will be equal to the length up to that point.
And you only have to fudge a little to the dividing line being the personality change, which makes them work as two distinct chapters in life.
And now that I’m all perfected I get another one and a half such chapters of viable life.
And then hopefully a half chapter where I’m still mentally together enough to sit in a sunlit room playing SNES JRPGs.
And I’ve been here, on [tumblr], for about half this chapter, so I have it in me to do that again about three more times in my life.
Huh!
I mean by age my dad’s at the end of the equivalent second further chapter and he’s still working so maybe four more times. He is noticeably less on the ball but hell I was only half-here for 2021 and I got by.
One thing I have come to appreciate is that for a county lawyer like him \u2013 and he might be last of a dead breed, starting practice in the ‘60s under an old-school system that was not too rusty when exurban development poured new life into it in the '80s \u2013 lawyering wasn’t all that much about brilliant mastery of the law (thorough, maybe) as in balancing the interests of local power centers as a sort of contractor courtier. He (and through him the firm-clan) would hire out to the school district, and the beer distributor, and the Cold-Eeze guys, and various land-owning widows, etc., etc. and like, would attend to their interests, which included like filings and suits at the courthouse, but more broadly minding the acts of every other actor in their various spheres of interest, at least any so substantial they involved their own involvement with the court (and thus, the reasonably tightly-knit legal community)
And so really, performing the role doesn’t demand mental sharpness so much as continuing to exist as the same actor in the reputational system, so it really is one you can ride into the ground I guess.
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