Having just arrived at the heels of adulthood, I found myself really wanting God. At first I faked faith, and it was convenient in the military for me to lie about having been saved for the sake of getting in good with my evangelist Christian superiors. I made up a story of salvation, one wherein [...]
Read more →It’s midday in Carol City, a squalid inner-city neighborhood in Miami, Florida. The school bell rings and a crowd of children push and shove each other out the entrance doors of the neighborhood middle school — a small, windowless blue-gray building, overwhelmed by the tiny classroom portables that clutter its surrounding crab grass fields. The [...]
Read more →There is a strange interplay written throughout the Qur’an between the ostensibly conflicting notions of freedom and predestination. It is often an even self-conscious friction, portraying in one line an image of a humanity moved by its Creator and in the next, one that moves itself. The individual lines in the Qur’an are called ayahs [...]
Read more →Law is a curious game. It outwardly proclaims to represent in theory the very thing it rejects in practice. In law, as it exists on paper, we are either following or breaking it; everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. But we humans are the ones who apply it, and [...]
Read more →It was that fucking I.T. geek. The dithering, over-analytical, demon-spawned sophist of a man he was, we were in that hot, cramped room for almost two days now with no end in sight because he refused to take a side. Fresh from the jury box, six of us thought the defendant was guilty; the other [...]
Read more →Truth, it turns out, becomes subjective once it enters a courtroom. How can I honestly and reasonably judge something diluted by persuasion and interpretation, as all law is? Who am I to decide what is and what isn’t, and upon what logic do I found my estimation of circumstance? It’s a DUI trial, wherein the [...]
Read more →I’m feeling overdressed. I wore business attire, as my summons said I should—a dress shirt, creased trousers and a tie—but at the courthouse today I was surrounded by T-shirts and jeans. I have the feeling that there are other people who want to be there even less than I do. An off-duty judge came down [...]
Read more →When I read my jury duty summons last month, I did so with great hesitation and anxiety. I had never received a notice before, having been enlisted in the Marine Corps since 18 and therefore being rendered ineligible for jury duty for most of my adult life. But I’m out now, and just as soon [...]
Read more →So, I’m elated. Alma Mater, in Her Infinite Wisdom, has decided to shine her light on me and accept me as a student at Columbia University starting Spring 2011. It’s time to pack my bags again, as has become my biannual ritual, this time bound for my surrogate hometown in New York, N.Y. As my [...]
Read more →Daniel got lost in the soiled scene taking place on the tracks beneath the subway platform at 51st and Lexington. He stared at two rats gnawing hungrily at the mangled corpse of a third and thought about the idea of progress. We’re dirty things. We started off on all fours like all of God’s creatures, [...]
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