Diary of a Madman......on Jury Duty

7:30: Entered the courthouse, single-file with the others.

7:53: Our ‘host’ talks for awhile; she let’s us know there's no escape unless you're a doctor or very, very old. I fill out forms.

8:01: I scan room looking for ‘people like me’. I see one woman on the other side of the room, citing her shabby-chic haircut as the giveaway.

8:03: I see a man who’s not like me, but I envy his mustache as it is curly and Germanic. I picture him with a goblet eating mutton.

8:04: People are stone silent in purgatory, save for a few conversations barely within earshot. They are always about other jury duty stories. Why do people think it’s interesting to share these stories for minutes at a time?

The conversations tend to go something like this:

My buddy in Buttfuck, Oaklahoma needed an excuse from court because he had an appointment at Fantastic Sam’s to get a haircut that day. I mean it took him hours to get an appointment and the judge still would not grant him an excuse!

10:01: There was a surprisingly engaging orientation ‘speech’ by a judge. She told us that we were not “special”. She said Federal court judges sit in this room sometimes, as do people such as Harrison Ford. She told us that the idea of a jury was started over 1000 years ago in England by “people and their neighbors” .

12:00-1:30: Lunch at the Disney Center. Thumbed through books at the broke-ass MOCA’s bookstore.

1:31: I really want to leave. I really want to kill someone.

1:32: Amused at man on my left who looks sort of like Captain Lou Albano sans the rubberbands.

1:35-3:00: Naptime.

3:01: Execute me, please.

3:30. They let us go....early!



Freedom '90—George Michael