entries from my notes, con law day 1

I cannot maintain for long this voice of simple, literal, dolorous sentences about slight movements that weave into extended metaphors using the past and present, storytelling and contemplation, sensation and feeling. The metaphors never say what I want them too, I offend when I mean to encourage, and then I scramble to clean up the fallout. We all know how long half-lives are for radioactive material; the damage stays on.

So I think I would do better to stop searching for symbolism in my life and then writing uncontrollably about it. It is in my nature to write bright, extremely clever, lighthearted crap. So I now return you to the morning’s notes, taken during Professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s review of the federal judicial power:

Gina works the diner all day. One of her customers, Customer, grabs her hand as she approaches his booth and forcefully demands a date with her for the following evening. Gina politely declines, and wrenches her hand away, perhaps more forcefully than she needs to. She feels a twinge in her ulna. Customer leaves by paying the check mostly in dimes and nickels, and leaving $.04 as her tip, causing Gina to experience nausea and premature menstrual spotting. Gina leaves the diner at the end of the day and drives her old Cutlass Sierra to meet her boyfriend, Tommy, where he is on strike at the docks.

When she pulls out of the parking lot, her front right tire, manufactured by Kumho Tires, sold by Searcy’s Distributor to Slocum Auto and then to the used Cutlass distributor from whom Gina leased her car, blows. Although Gina has had training as a NASCAR driver, not even a NASCAR champion, and certainly not Gina in this case, could control a Cutlass with a blown tire, and she careens into a nearby building. The building is an inn hosting a convention of common carriers. No one inside the building is hurt by the accident, but there is extensive damage to the building. Innkeeper angrily runs outside toward Gina, waving a copy of his accident insurance policy, demanding settlement. Gina stumbles of her car with a dazed look, and Intervener, a Good Samaritan who is on her way to check whether Gina is hurt, accidentally kicks Innkeeper in the shin as he stalks by. As a result, Innkeeper declares, “Intervener, everyone knows you’re a leperous crone!”

Graham Greene, an upstart journalist sipping a venti half-caf latte at a café nearby, overhears Innkeeper’s shout and mistakes Intervener for a famous movie star who has recently purchased Brownacre, a toxic waste dump that leaches chemicals into the groundwater at the edge of town. The next day, the Town Inquirer publishes a news story on the movie star’s putative leprosy, and an accompanying editorial lambasting her as a leprous carpetbagger for her recent property purchase.

If, decades later, Graham Greene, spurred on by his successful reportage on the leprosy crisis of the late 2000s, wins a Pulitzer and publishes a well-renowned treatise on investigative journalism, who will prevail in a negligence suit brought by Intervener against NASCAR?

1. NASCAR, because Intervener had a duty to mitigate.
2. Intervener, unless NASCAR committed a battery on Gina.
3. Neither. Because of the political question doctrine, the courts may not intervene.
4. Hearsay.