Statistics

From the moment you come crying and screaming into this energy plane you are measured and weighed. Me, 9lbs, 13 oz., 21 inches. Extra appendage. He, him, his.

Your pediatrician spends the first few years of your life making sure you are developing properly, more heights and weights. And then other developmental achievements – spatial learning and innate intellectual abilities. All charted.

Explains why I haven’t been to a doctor in this century.

Then school starts, and we spend at least the next 13 years (including kindergarten), and often more – me, 21 – when you throw in Law School – continuing with the measurements. It’s worse now, given babies go to preschool as a one year old these days. Helicopter parents demand those measurements.

I’ve always hated report cards. Maybe because I spent the better part of my life purposefully rebelling against any person or organization that tried to make me a number, or, in the case of the infamous back of Catholic School Cardboard, a letter – D was a recurring favorite. Anything that tried to measure me against others.

Looking back on that now, I understand that my back-of-the-card rebelliousness arose from a deep buried fear of inadequacy. You see, I am a life-long sufferer of chronic Imposter Syndrome – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Nonetheless, I’ve always managed to test my way into advantageous situations – school, jobs, relationships – and yet always immediately felt like I didn’t deserve to be wherever I most recently landed. I was a fraud. As with most of the racey movies I watched in my youth, I snuck in the back door of the Cinema.

I’ve overcompensated by leaning heavily on a Rasputenesque charisma. It’s all in the eyes. Blame the penny and the Muse.

And the voices in my head have always slipped me the right answer I needed at any given moment. It’s all an energy field. Just open yourself to it.

But I’ve always known that this King has no clothes.

Now, none of this means that I don’t like to compete. When you grow up as a BIC in a family of aggressive siblings, you compete every day. I was blessed by siblings who lived by the code that no one touches a McCaffrey except another McCaffrey, and that should occur as often as possible. So, childhood was a daily battle royale for the necessities of daily living with survival going to the fittest, or in my case, the most cunning.

That aggressiveness tends to stay with you.

Four decades as a NYC litigator has established that I enjoy this winner-takes-all aspect of intellectually or verbally jousting with the other black knights on motion papers, during depositions and in courtrooms. But that outcome is never measured as a pre-assessed personal comparison among the lawyers or by the statistically established degree of your comparative mental acumen. Nothing matters until the battle is engaged. You fight with everything you have. The pursued outcome is granted or denied by judge or jury. Judgment for or against the client. You win or you lose. You take no prisoners. You never surrender. No one gives a shit about your personal statistics as a lawyer unless you lose. So don’t lose.

I know that lawyers like to judge their competitors, both professionally – school and firm – and personally – appearance, homes, clubs and clothes. Those that deny this are full of shit. But the average Joe or Jane in a jury pool, or the brilliant Clerk deciding most outcomes for the Judge, only care about the quality of your arguments. So make your best argument each and every time.

In short, the best measurement of someone is by what they produce over their lifetime. Judge me by what I’ve unleashed on the world. Not my statistics.

My greatest legacy is my blood family – kids and grandkids. Rebellious, intelligent, attractive, competitive, combative and always a little bit feral. All the credit for the best part of that belongs to Lisa, but I enjoyed watching it unfold.

Now my writing second act is also something that gets measured. More statistics to add to my lifetime of statistics. My books are measured against the thousands of others released on any given day. It’s a huge ocean with lots of currents.

Yesterday, the last(?) book of The Claire Trilogy – Where The Ley Lines Meet – finally appeared in public and was immediately measured by the Amazon logarithms and given its report card:

Seems like I snuck in another back door.

But I don’t want any of you, my fine, five readers, to judge my writing by this individual set of statistics. Don’t get me wrong, these numbers don’t suck, but they don’t tell the whole story of whether The Claire Saga is a success or not.

Only you, as the individual reader, can decide whether you have enjoyed your episodic escapes from reality with Claire the Mule and her motley crew of mystical misfits.

That is all that matters. That is my best argument.

So, now I have to return to life in the legal lane. A motion to draft. There will always be another black knight on the field waiting for you.

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Detective+%22I%27m+getting+too+old+for+this+shit&mid=FBE94BFBB132866C888BFBE94BFBB132866C888B&FORM=VIRE

But you fine, five readers need to get your skates on and attack the hill that we all like to call hump. Wave to Friday at its peak.

Hopefully, you are spending your free time escaping with the first four books of The Claire Trilogy, while you, like me, await your back-ordered paperback versions of WTLLM. For those of you who enjoy your Kindle, I hope you are fully immersed in the electronic version of the finale for Claire and her crew.

Not because I’m looking to pad my statistics, but, because, for the first time in my life, I believe I may have created a body of work that proves I may not be an imposter after all. And that doesn’t suck either.

So now I need to go cuddle some kitties and make my rounds.

But let us all make today a great one.