It’s Friday!

Truth is, ever since I retired, every day is Friday. What I mean is that before I hopped off the legal hamster wheel, I used to doom scroll through each week from Sunday to Friday. Once Friday arrived, it did not matter what else was happening in my life, I had survived the legal workweek and made it to another weekend. My childhood American education system had emotionally instilled an ineluctable calendar of five days of school and two days of weekend.

(Note: During the first half of my four decades as a lawyer, my employers did their very best to obliterate Friday from my calendar because, like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the powers that be in law firms did not believe in weekends. Saturday and Sunday were just a 48-hour pool of additional potential billables. During the second half of legal career, I managed to wrestle back those precious days into sacrosanct status. But I digress.)

Friday is pure magical potential. Like Christmas Eve.

And the best thing is that despite my change in employment status, Friday has not lost any of its magic. Nature abhors a vacuum, so Friday’s magic has just infected all of the other days like a happy virus. Now I wake up every day with childlike anticipation just waiting to see what the Universe has in store for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have responsibilities. I am the caretaker of Claire and her Casa Claire domestic, feral and mystical minions. All need to be tended to with religious fervor. But that is a labor of love that fires my passion and feeds my creativity, so, with the exception of my Sisyphusean “Honey Do” List, which has mystical regenerative powers, I never work a day in my present life.

Yesterday was a perfect example. My major task for the day was to take the completed November election ballots Lisa and I received in the mail and deliver them to the voting box behind the Berthoud Library. Since I like to make the most out of my trips into town, I took along my fully executed contract for my Berthoud Library author’s series presentation re: Free R.A.D.I.C.A.L. and Spark of Faith on January 23, 2027, 2 pm, so I could hand deliver it to the wonderful Library ladies. I have found over the years that if I don’t do things when I first think of them, they have a tendency of disappearing into the mañana black hole:

I now wear just a writer’s hat, and, as I don’t have Oprah touting my shit, I always have book marketing on my mind. Even though Free R.A.D.I.C.A.L. and Spark of Faith don’t physically publish until January and May 2027, respectively, the former is available for pre-order – https://a.co/d/0ei1H46o (Kindle)/ https://a.co/d/01x8c5ba (Paperback) – and the latter goes live for pre-orders in early January. Given Claire’s Theorem of Relativity –

Claire’s Theorem of Relativity – The Wise Novelist

January will be here before I know it. So, given that I was going to be in town, I figured I would also stop by the offices of the Berthoud Weekly Surveyor, our local newspaper to see if I could interest them in doing a follow-up marketing story on the progression of my writing career since The Wise Ass first arrived on the scene.

Debut novel by local author blends fact and fiction – Berthoud Weekly SurveyorBerthoud Weekly Surveyor

I subscribe to BWS which arrives in my roadside mailbox each week. Reading an old school print newspaper allows me to exercise my newspaper folding skills that I employed for four decades on a daily basis while riding through the bowels of Manhattan on extremely crowded – think sardine can – NYC transit subways. (Note: the NYC subway system plays a significant role in the storyline of Free R.A.D.I.C.A.L.)

Proper newspaper folding, like Origami, is really an art: love and taste: the subway fold

Well, I drove through the two oldest blocks of downtown Berthoud searching for the storefront entrance of BWS and actually missed it on my first pass. I considered dropping the idea into my mañana black hole and continuing West through the edge of town, across 287 and back home to Casa Claire.

But then I remembered that there was only a maximum of twelve editions of the newspaper I could possibly hope to wedge my story into before both books would be selling so I made the next right and parked on a side street and walked back to old town’s main street.

When I found and entered the newspaper’s offices, I was met by a youngish – I’m guessing mid-forties – man sitting behind one of the desks.

He introduced himself as Evan Reilly, the recently appointed Editor of BWS.

But there was something familiar to the cadence and tone of ER’s speech pattern. Like mine, it had softened a bit under the Colorado patina, but it was there. A Targarian level nasal novelty that can only be uttered by a true New Yorker.

ER was a once-upon-a-time Brooklyn Irish Catholic!

When one meets a fellow New Yawker in the wilds of NoCo, it brings out the best and worst in them. As an example of the latter, I was again slinging all iterations and tenses of the “Fuck” imprecation like hosts and holy water at high Sunday Mass.

A Fan-fucking-tastic Word: The Linguistic Versatility of Fuck

Now normally when I slip back into colloquial New York vernacular, my talking speed triples from the slower pace you will find in most earthly languages – due to the strong influences on machine-gun tempo from the ubiquitous and angry native Italian and Spanish languages skillfully adulterated by English that permeate the five boroughs of Gotham. In New York, people give you very little time to verbally covey a thought, before they draw conclusions and act upon them. Using a well-placed “fuck” in a sentence is an acceptable shorthand that works like a verbal game of chutes and ladders that gets you through a three-hour explanation in five minutes.

Now in all fairness, ER did not match my potty mouth. But I could tell that he appreciated hearing the mother-tongue shared so fluently and eloquently by his matching verbal dexterity in slipping in his own responses like a kid engaging in double-Dutch jump roping on the street of New York.

For me, my conversation with ER was like falling off the polite language wagon as easily as Tommy Gavin relapsed into alcoholism, chronic infidelity, and survivor’s guilt in that wonderful NYC-based series, Rescue Me.

https://youtu.be/ho_ZJIaAO1Q?si=DJqlW6FIcNfW7o6G

Fuck that, all four wheels came off.

And it was fucking cathartic.

Anyway, when it was all said and done, ER said he would consider doing an interview. Fingers crossed.

I have been on a New York high since my encounter. My Thursday embraced a Friday magic.

Well, you fine, five readers – Claire’s Theorem – The Wise Novelist – can embrace Friday’s magic by slipping into one door at work and exiting another just as soon as enough people to provide an alibi affidavit see you at the office.

The weekend awaits us all.

And no matter what else we get up to, let us make today a great one.