Rip Van Winkle, Esq.

 

The coat of arms of Yale Law School. In heraldryspeak: “Per pale Or and Sable, in dexter a greyhound gorged of a collar Gules, in sinister seven staples Or 3,2, on a chief Vert a crocodile Argent."

Ten years ago I flew back east for my Yale Law School 25th year reunion. I got a cheap red-eye flight to Newark, saw some Broadway shows, closed the sing-along piano bar at Marie’s Crisis in Greenwich Village, stayed in an expensive closet in Manhattan for a couple of nights, then took a train to New Haven.

One of the highlights of my law school reunion was when our class gathered in a classroom to share “two minute memoirs.” Jeb Boasberg, one several federal judges in the class of 1990, was timekeeper. (Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh skipped our reunion.)

I was one of the last members of our class to have kids. I shared my experience adopting three kids in my forties, then breaking up with my gay partner. I told my classmates the dirty little secret of divorce: alternating weeks is just about the perfect amount of time parenting. I could give the kids my full attention, then spend the next week recovering, working, running errands, and trying to be slightly fabulous.

I described my varied legal career in Seattle, plus five years in Chicago as a LGBT rights lawyer with the ACLU. I shared that I’d recently moved to the college town on the Canadian border where my parents have lived since 1981. My ex and his new husband had also moved to Bellingham, so we were all living nearby. As I told my Yale Law classmates, I’d found my dream job with the State as general counsel to Washington’s third largest university.

My “dream job” turned out to be a nightmare.

This week I flew back east for my Yale Law School 35th year reunion. Once again I got a cheap red-eye flight to Newark, bought tickets to Broadway shows, closed the sing-along piano bar at Marie’s Crisis in Greenwich Village, and stayed in an expensive Manhattan closet for a couple of nights. I took the train to New Haven on Friday morning.

On Saturday the Class of 1990 will be gathering to share “two minute memoirs.” Jeb Boasberg, now the Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court, will be keeping time once again. Here’s the story I’ll share with my classmates:

Stephanie Foo is a successful public radio producer who grew up in an abusive home. In her memoir What My Bones Know, Foo describes debilitating anxiety symptoms and relationship dysfunctions that sidelined her career. Eventually Foo’s therapist gave her the diagnosis that let her begin the process of healing: “complex PTSD.”

Soon after I started my job with the State, I began exhibiting strange physical and mental symptoms that eerily paralleled Stephanie Foo’s experience. A few weeks after my law school reunion, I met with my new Bellingham physician, who gave me the same diagnosis as Foo.

As the Department of Veteran’s Affairs recognizes, “Many traumatic events (e.g., car accidents, natural disasters, etc.) are of time-limited duration. However, in some cases people experience chronic trauma that continues or repeats for months or years at a time.” In 1988, Dr. Judith Herman proposed a new diagnosis of “complex PTSD.” Rather than a single traumatic event, complex PTSD is a consequence of ongoing trauma that occurs over an extended period, such as childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and religious trauma. Because these types of experiences tend to involve betrayals by an individual’s most trusted authority figures, the resulting symptoms focus on impaired interpersonal relationships, as well as anxiety symptoms that are similar to ordinary PTSD.

In my case, a toxic workplace triggered debilitating symptoms. But my underlying traumas involved growing up in a Mormon culture that denied the existence of LGBT people.

I have no memories of the last show I saw on Broadway. This week I was back at the St. James Theatre to see Kristin Chenoweth in Queen of Versailles.

Something happened to me since my last law school reunion that was more even more important than my disability diagnosis.

Every gay man needs a hot cop story. Mine starts when my kids took a roadtrip vacation with my ex and his husband during the summer of 2019. My older kids were about to start high school, and my son was starting middle school. We had been amicably co-parenting and alternating kid weeks for several years. But when they got home from their California road trip, my ex and his husband grimly announced they were getting divorced.

I was already busy coping with my disability and career frustration. My ex didn’t have a clear plan for the future. A few days later we were at the house having a painful discussion about what would happen next. We went out to the backyard to get away from the kids.

We were interrupted at a particularly heated moment when the doorbell rang. On the porch were two hot Bellingham cops. My nine-year-old son stood behind them on the front lawn. Apparently his bedroom window was open, and he’d overheard our argument. My son had never heard me raise my voice before. So he called 911, like they taught him to do at school.

My ex and I sheepishly explained the situation to the police officers. The parental conversation resumed more quietly. A few days later my ex moved across the country to start a new life. The kids occasionally visit him. Both my ex’s ex-husband and my parents still live in town, and they provide an essential safety net. But I’ve learned to parent alone.

For the last seven years, my life has centered on being a full-time single father. I’ve been lucky enough to raise a wonderful daughter, son, and child. One of each.

Complex PTSD symptoms occur when a victim endures betrayal by a trusted institution. I was betrayed by beloved Mormon leaders who refused to acknowledge that gay people exist, even as I shared my queer generation’s collective trauma from coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Fortunately, I’ve made huge progress managing my disability. I’ve even made my peace with the Mormons. A couple of years ago I drove my daughter to college in Arizona and visited Utah for the first time since 2006. I had a wonderful time showing my kids where I’d lived and gone to school, without experiencing nausea or chest pains like the last few visits. My mental desert has finally blossomed like a rose.

Unfortunately, other aspects of my disability have only gotten worse, particularly some of the physical side effects. After my healthcare providers figured out what was causing my debilitating symptoms, I promptly disclosed my PTSD diagnosis to my employers. When I sought a reasonable accommodation, they rejected my request. Instead, the State used my complaint about workplace homophobia as pretext for firing me. Even today, former Attorney General (now Governor) Bob Ferguson and his lieutenants publicly insist that I am faking a disability. As a result, I was effectively blackballed from the Washington legal community – another betrayal that triggered ongoing complex PTSD symptoms.

After my ex moved across the country, I focused on raising three teenagers as a single parent, finished my original legal battle with the State, and worked on my recovery from complex PTSD. A couple of years ago my kids said they were ready for me to find a job. So did my banker. Unsure whether I was fit to practice law again, I started volunteering a couple of times a month at our local low-income legal clinic. Helping ordinary people solve their real life problems restored my faith in the law.

Because I’ve enjoyed a remarkably diverse career, I’m the only volunteer lawyer who’s willing to meet with clients from any of our clinics, regardless of whether the cases involve Employment, Landlord/Tenant, Homeless Youth, Family, Indian law, Guardianship, or General Law matters. Working through clients’ family law problems has been particularly rewarding, and led me to new opportunity.

I’d applied for a lot of different kinds of positions over the last few years. The job search has been tough, particularly because I wanted a role that would let me stay close to my family in Bellingham and my friends in Vancouver. At the beginning of the year I applied for family law positions for the first time. I quickly was invited to interviews, then offered a job with a primarily online firm that covers the entire state of Washington.

Three times during the search process, people told me something like “We never get resumes like yours!” This is true in at least two ways:

First, most people with Yale Law degrees do not spend the decade of their fifties as disabled unemployed gay single fathers – living in poverty, relying on food stamps, and learning to navigate the mental health and legal systems. Today most of my disability symptoms are manageable, and I consider myself healed. But my strange mix of life experiences makes me a sympathetic and effective counselor for family law clients. I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by life and trapped in system that is beyond anyone’s control.

Second, I used to be a snob. Family is a low-status, low-pay corner of the legal profession. One of my small group classmates at Yale, the late Cheryl McCall, went on to be a prominent family law lawyer in Nevada. But I don’t know of anyone else who ended up in our low-class pink-collar ghetto. Somehow family law firms never get resumes from other members of the Yale Law School class of 1990.

Over the years I told a lot of other people besides my Yale Law classmates that the “dirty little secret of divorce” was how alternating weeks felt like just about the perfect amount of parenting time. It turns out I was wrong.

Becoming a father twenty years ago was the best thing that ever happened to me. But becoming a single father thirteen years later gave me the experiences of a lifetime, and left me with the kind of shared memories and relationships with each child that few parents will ever know.

Although many of our symptoms overlap, my complex PTSD differs from Stephanie Foo’s in one very important respect. Like many trauma victims, Foo’s symptoms were rooted in the pattern of abuse she suffered at the hands of her own family. I am a mental illness outlier because I was betrayed by two different kinds of trusted authority figures: first the Mormon priesthood leaders who told me homosexuality was a spiritual disease that could be “cured,” and then by the lawyers and judges who erased my disability and drove me out of the legal profession.

Families are forever. Fortunately, unlike most people who struggle with complex PTSD, I had then and have now the support of the best family in the world. I come from good people. And they taught me to be a great father.

Seize the Moment

This year for Oliver’s birthday I promised we’d see the Mariners. We didn’t make it to a regular season game. Instead, last Saturday I drove to Seattle to watch the Mariners’ first division championship series game in 24 years.

Our tickets cost exactly as much as each of the Broadway shows I’m seeing on the way to my Yale Law School reunion later this month. On the drive south we stopped at Alderwood Mall so Oliver could buy an unconscionably expensive Cal Raleigh jersey. After finding street parking on Capitol Hill, we took the light rail to T-Mobile Park. I ate a hot dog at the ballpark, then Molly Moon ice cream on the way back to the car. Detroit won 3-2 in extra innings. We got home at midnight.

I would be telling a slightly different story if the Mariners had won. But despite the disappointing final score, I had an amazing day. 

The first time I saw a Major League Baseball game I sat in the owner’s box at the old Kingdome. I was spending my last summer of law school working at the Seattle law firm that represented the baseball team. Mariners’ Night was one of several recruiting boondoggles the firm used to lure summer associates into accepting jobs after graduation. It was like watching professional athletes play in your living room.

I never became a big baseball fan, but during my years in Seattle I took advantage of other opportunities to see the Mariners. I usually sat in some law firm’s less glamorous skybox, or in infield seats with a good view. Eventually I brought my children. One year Oliver and I went to a classmate’s birthday party in his family’s season-ticket-holder box. And when Seattle Men’s Chorus sang the national anthem at Safeco Field, I bought two extra tickets to the game so I could bring along my father and my son.

I moved to Bellingham a decade ago to take what I thought was my dream job as chief legal counsel to Washington’s third largest university. Unfortunately, then-Attorney General (now Governor) Bob Ferguson had created a homophobic and abusive workplace. My co-workers’ conduct triggered debilitating physical and mental symptoms.

My doctor promptly diagnosed me with complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rather than resulting from a single traumatic event, C-PTSD is caused by an ongoing pattern of traumatic experiences, such as sexual abuse or childhood neglect. In my case, the original PTSD symptoms were the result of growing up in a Mormon culture that denied the existence of LGBT people. Later, my symptoms were amplified by the legal system’s refusal to acknowledge I have PTSD. Even today, Bob Ferguson’s lieutenants publicly insist that I am faking a disability.

At the end of 2023, I made a list of that year’s ten most triggering experiences. The worst event occurred while I was waiting in the veterinary Emergency Room with a seriously wounded Bear, while I happened to receive notification of a particularly dishonest ruling by a lazy judge. Most of the other triggering events that year involved misconduct by the State’s lawyers. But one outlier on the list stood out: I had a complete meltdown while playing a board game at my parents’ house. I thought I’d caught my son cheating.

With my healthcare providers’ help, I’ve learned how to tease out the relationship between past traumas and present triggers. For example, after my Family Game Night meltdown I remembered the only time in my life when I hit someone. I was a freshman in the Honors Program dorm at Brigham Young University. While playing a boardgame involving the War of the Roses, I became convinced one of my floormates had cheated.

For various reasons, I grew up without becoming properly socialized to deal with competition in a healthy way. I never learned proper boundaries. Instead, I became a sore loser and worse winner. I treated every competition as either meaningless or a matter of life and death.

I’ve learned to live with my disability, slowly finding healthy boundaries. Nowadays I can help clients in their contentious family law litigation matters without losing my own perspective on life. And I can play or watch intense games and enjoy the experience – win or lose.

I’ve seen a lot more plays than baseball games. So have my children. When I was a lawyer in Seattle I had season ticket subscriptions at multiple local theaters. I often found it easier to take one of the kids instead of getting a real date.

The Christmas before covid, my mother bought tickets to the Broadway tour of Dear Evan Hansen for my daughter, nephew, and me. When we got to the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Eleanor said “Papa, I’ve never sat in the balcony for a play before.”

Oliver chose our seats to last weekend’s Mariners game. When we got to T-Mobile Park, I realized that in all the professional baseball games I’ve seen, I’d never sat behind the outfield before. I loved our seats – it turns out a baseball game is more interesting when you’re looking toward the batter. Maybe someday I’ll learn to be a great parent without being such a terrible snob.

My ex and I amicably alternated kid weeks for years. As I wrote in Peak-End Parenting, “All I need to do to ensure my kids end up with memories of an idyllic childhood is to make sure each kid week includes some memorable peak experiences, and that we end the week on a high note.” It worked: while we were waiting for the playoff game to start, I asked Oliver what he remembered about our prior Mariners games. He said, “We always had box seats.”

Then seven years ago my ex moved across the country, and I became a full-time single parent. We spent most of this era living in poverty. During those years I learned to live with serious mental illness while being relentlessly attacked by the State’s lawyers. My new goal is for the children to grow up without being irreparably scarred by their childhood traumas. Fortunately, I have the support of the best family in the world. And even though I’ve failed at almost everything else in my life, I was born to be a father.

During the Mariners game I posted a much-liked picture on Facebook showing Oliver and me at T-Mobile Park. One friend commented “Great day except for the final result....” Actually, I had an amazing day. I think Oliver will remember it that way too. Regardless of the baseball score.

The Boys Who Lived

Vancouver Men’s Chorus is busy rehearsing for our June concerts. (Tickets are on sale at the chorus website.) This year’s theme is Totally Awesome ’80s. We will be singing songs by Cyndy Lauper, George Michael, Eurythmics, Madonna, Tina Turner, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Whitney Houston, and more. There will be synthesizers, dancing boys, and big hair. 

I spent the 1980s as a clueless high school student in small town Utah; as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea; as an overachieving student at Brigham Young University; and as a liberated law student at Yale. I’m like an episode of Stranger Things – 80s music is the soundtrack of my youth. 

More than music and mullets, my relationship with the 80s is defined by one essential fact: I came out of the closet in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. 

I recently read a collection of essays with the title Between Certain Death and a Possible Future:  Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. These writers speak for my generation:

Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations - the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer.

I arrived too late for the fun. Instead, I threw myself into activism. I joined the ACLU of Illinois as Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS Project at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The Project’s founder, John Hammell, had recently died. Many other pioneering Baby Boomer gay activists were dead, dying, and/or burnt out. Stalwart lesbians and unprepared young gay men filled their empty shoes. 

Some people see personality types through the prism of birth order. As the first of four brothers, I exhibit many “eldest child” behaviors. But when it comes to my gay tribe, I’m part of very specific cohort:  the traumatized gay boys of Generation X, stumbling through life as perpetual younger brothers to the men of the Stonewall Generation. 

This photo of San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was taken in 1993, twelve years into the AIDS epidemic. The seven men in white are the original members of the chorus. The 115 men in black represent those who had already died. 

Trauma warps memory. As I learn to live with complex PTSD, I’ve discovered a handful of revealin gaps and glitches in my recollection of past events.   

For example, the quietest moment in our 80s concert occurs during “Eulogy.” Seattle Men’s Chorus commissioned this song in 1985. I have sung and heard “Eulogy” countless times since I joined my first gay chorus three decades ago, including at various memorial services. I’ve repeatedly listened to SMC perform “Eulogy” on their classic Pink Album. 

Nevertheless, I have no memory of the song. All I can tell you is that it repeates the word “Onward.” Every time VMC rehearses “Eulogy,” I feel like I’m sight-reading a shocking new testament of grief. By the end of the song I’m silently weeping.

Many of the boys died.

The theme of VMC’s June 2018 concert was Gays of Our Lives. As we read through “I Shall Miss Loving You” at our first rehearsal, I realized the last time I’d sung the song was eighteen years before, at my friend Jim Palmer’s memorial. We sang together in Windy City Gay Chorus during the 90s. The miraculous new HIV/AIDS medications came along too late to stop the disease’s progress through Jim’s body. Still, he wanted to see the new millennium. He barely made it. 

I was thirty-five years old. Jim was thirty. I weep every time I try to sing these words:

I shall miss loving you.

I shall miss the comfort of your embrace….

I shall miss the joy of your comings,

And pain of your goings, and, 

After a time,

I shall miss loving you.

Boys like Jim died from AIDS, suicide, drugs, and other causes. Somehow, some of us survived to tell the stories. 

In September 1914, soon after Britain suffered the first casualties of the Great War, Lawrence Binyon published “For the Fallen.” The poem’s fourth stanza has become known as the “Ode to Remembrance”:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Some of the men lived.

In 1981, a pioneering national tour by San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus inspired gay choruses to form in cities including Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Vancouver. Forty-four years later, our founder Willi Zwozdesky still conducts Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Willi is the senior conductor in the LGBT choral movement.

VMC has never sounded better. We continue to attract talented new singers. At our recent rustic retreat, Millennials and Gen Y gay boys joined in the skits, rehearsals, and comradery. We listened to our elders around the campfire, and serenaded our conductor with his favourite song.  Along with Willi, a handful of other survivors have held the chorus and the community together through five extraordinary decades.

I am growing old. But the men of the Stonewall generation will always be older than me.

Starting Over

 

For New Year’s, we had the highest tides I’ve ever seen in Bellingham. For Christmas, we were snowed in by a freak ice storm. For solstice, I was trapped at home with covid. 

 

After a long hard year, Bear and I found ourselves surrounded by gloom and doom. But the end is finally in sight.

 

Hope comes more easily in springtime. Five and a half years ago, in May 2017, I emerged from the fog of PTSD and embarked on a couple of hopeful adventures. 

 

First, I filed a lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace, PLLC. They’re the supposedly “independent” private investigators the State’s lawyers used to justify firing me from my position as general counsel to Western Washington University. Despite the impact of living with PTSD, I thought the Ogden Murphy Wallace lawsuit would let me use my legal skills to clear my professional reputation and protect my family.

 

Second, I started publishing essays on this blog. In Phase I of blogging, covering posts in 2017 and 2018, I took advantage of my newfound freedom from thirty years of writer’s block by exploring a variety of topics and styles. My favorite essays about family were “I Come From Good People” and “Sure of You.” My favorite essay about brains was “Inside Out.” My favourite essay about Showtune Night in Canada was “Six Degrees of Kristin Chenowith.” Thanks to the mysteries of Google’s algorithm, the three most viewed blog posts were “About My Yale Classmate Brett Kavanaugh,” “Thing 1 and Thing 2,” and “Fifty Shades of Green Gables.”

Phase II covered posts in 2019 and 2020. I got more ambitious about extended storytelling and the craft of writing. I published a week of “Rock Bottom Stories,” as well as other connected essays about topics like my dramatically improved mental health, various besetting plagues, and the comforts of dog ownership. For the first time I confronted my experiences as a gay man coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I wrote about the traumas and triggers I’d experienced while trying to shine a spotlight on dishonest government lawyers. 

Frankly I got carried away with that last topic. Sleazy lawyer stories were taking over the blog, like an oversized moon whose gravitational pull turns ordinary tides into tsunamis. When I looked at the statistics for 2020 I was aghast. I vowed I wouldn’t start Phase III until I freed myself from the power of the Lawyer dark side. 

Over the last couple of years, most of my writing ended up in other places besides this blog. But I’m proud of the essays I published here as well, including deeper explorations of community, family, memory, and mental illness. By joining The Narrative Project, I learned about the craft of writing, story-telling through trauma, and finding a writer’s life and community. I assigned myself a graduate reading list in psychology and neuroscience. And I observed my thoughts and feelings through hours of mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. 

 

Along the way, I slowly learned to clear my head. I’m still oblivious to lots of important things, starting with everything social, particularly with the gays. But eventually I learned to think clearly by thinking like a writer, not a lawyer – at least, not like the kind of lawyer Attorney General Bob Ferguson would hire.

In November 2017, King County Superior Court Judge John Ruhl dismissed my claim against Ogden Murphy Wallace on a legal technicality.

 

It was important technicality. Washington law immunizes whistleblowers from liability for claims based on their communications to government agencies. One of the questions before the court in my case was whether whistleblower immunity applies to paid communications by government contractors, like Ogden Murphy Wallace’s supposedly “independent” investigation report attacking my character and competence. In August 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that government contractors can’t be sued for injuries that are “directly based” on communications like the Ogden Murphy investigation report. 

 

Our busy trial judge was so focused on the whistleblower statute that he overlooked my other claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace – the ones that weren’t based on any protected whistleblower communication, such as the investigators’ repeated lies about their contractual assignment. Unfortunately, everyone else in the legal process was also distracted by the shiny statutory construction bauble. I spent the next few years trapped in a Kafka-esque struggle to find a state tribunal that was interested in hearing how the State’s lawyers and investigators colluded in government contract procurement fraud, civil rights violations, and ongoing acts of concealment and obstruction. 

 

After losing my state court claim against the OMW Defendants in the trial court, then winning, then losing, then winning, then losing, I lost my original lawsuit for good in June 2022 when the Washington Supreme Court declined further review.

The most interesting event in my state court lawsuit occurred on October 20, 2017. The day before my response was due to Ogden Murphy Wallace’s whistleblower immunity motion, the defendants produced a suspicious document related to their investigation:  the only surviving copy of the 3/16/16 “Investigation Scope Email” from Ogden Murphy investigator Patrick Pearce to the State’s employment attorneys. This smoking gun email revealed I was the victim of a wrongful termination cover-up scheme involving senior lawyers at the AGO, including some of Bob Ferguson’s top lieutenants.

 

While my original lawsuit against Ogden Murphy wound its way through its doomed appeal, I began tracking down additional incriminating evidence through Public Records Act requests and administrative complaints. Unlike Ogden Murphy, I’m an actual whistleblower. Meanwhile, the State and its co-conspirators continued to execute their strategy of stonewalling, gaslighting, and spoliation.

 

The State refused to respond to my notice of claim and mediation invitation, and threated to sue me instead. So in April 2020, I filed another lawsuit in state court, this one against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, Western Washington University, and their corrupt employees. I was shocked when the State Defendants chose to remove all of my damage claims to federal court. I felt like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Before I tried to repackage myself as an appellate lawyer and judicial candidate a few years ago, I spent two decades managing complex federal litigation at Bogle & Gates, the ACLU, and Davis Wright Tremaine. I’m much more comfortable litigating in federal rather than in state court.

 

However, it turned out removal was just another short-sighted stall tactic by the State’s lawyers. I didn’t realize cases in the Western District of Washington were paralyzed because our court had the most vacancies of any federal court in the country. After the rest of the baby boomer judges all retired, Judge Richard Jones and Judge Ricardo Martinez held down the fort alone for several years. Our Washington senators and the local legal community succeeding in preventing Donald Trump from making any judicial appointments to fill the vacancies. My lawsuit against the State slowed to a crawl as unfortunate collateral damage. We didn’t even have a trial date or a case schedule.

Once several Biden judges were confirmed, however, the federal court finally returned to a normal litigation schedule. The two-year delay gave me enough time to improve my mental health and to gather a mountain of incriminating evidence. On September 23, 2021, Judge Jones denied the State Defendants’ long-delayed motion to dismiss my claims. Instead, the judge granted my motion to file a detailed amended complaint that includes new damage claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace as well as against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, WWU, and their employees. 

 

It’s as if all the frustrations of my original state court lawsuit never happened. Now we’re on a regular federal court litigation schedule. This month we’re waiting for Judge Jones’ rulings on the State Defendants’ frivolous Third Motion to Dismiss (here’s my response and their reply) and the Ogden Murphy Wallace Defendants’ motion to dismiss some of my new claims (here’s my response and their reply). Depositions in the Federal Lawsuit are scheduled to begin in February, with a jury trial set for January 2024 in Seattle.

I billed more hours of legal work in 2022 than any year since I was a young litigation associate – plus walking at least six miles a day with Bear to keep my head clear. I also had oral arguments in at least ten court hearings in 2022, which sets a personal record. The hearings were all in my Public Records Act case in state court, which is set for a bench trial before Judge Mary Sue Wilson on February 6-7, 2023, in Thurston County Superior Court. 

 

In 1972, Washington voters enacted the most transparent government accountability law in the nation. I’ve submitted dozens of requests to state and local agencies under the Public Records Act. With the sole exception of the Office of the Governor, each agency acknowledged my PRA requests within five days as required by the statute. In October 2020, I emailed the three public record requests to the Office of the Governor as directed by its webpage. The State’s email servers diverted my emails as “junk.” About the same time, the same thing happened with my emails to addressees at several other government agencies – apparently someone put my name and website on some kind of internet “no-fly” list. 

 

Sadly for the Governor’s Office, the Assistant Attorney General assigned to communicate with me on behalf of the State has a bad habit of ignoring my emails, regardless of whether they end up in his inbox or his junk folder. By the time his clients and his supervisors realized their lawyer dropped the ball, they’d already incurred millions of dollars in potential statutory penalties by delaying the Governor’s response to my public records requests for over a year.

 

Once again, the State and its lawyers refused to take responsibility, instead blaming me for their communication errors. So I filed a separate Public Records Act lawsuit against the Governor’s Office. We’re scheduled for a two-day bench trial in Olympia in February. Here’s my lawyer’s Opening Trial Brief.

In August 2021, the world seemed to be approaching the end of the covid pandemic. The Canadian border finally reopened, at least to visitors who uploaded their vaccination status and recent negative test results to an app. Vancouver Men’s Chorus began rehearsing, but only masked and in limited numbers. 

 

We also seemed to be approaching the end of my lawsuits against the State and Ogden Murphy Wallace. In the federal lawsuit, Judge Jones recognized my disability and granted the reasonable accommodation I requested. In my original state lawsuit, the Washington Supreme Court rejected Ogden Murphy Wallace’s claim that lawyers are above the law. 

 

However, we were actually far from the end – both with the coronavirus pandemic and with my efforts to hold the State and its lawyers accountable. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. But as Winston Churchill would say, we finally reached the end of the beginning.

In 2021, two longtime members of Vancouver Men’s Chorus commissioned a new work by our resident accompanist and composer Dr. Stephen Smith. They wanted a song that would express the hope and joy the choir felt when we were finally able to sing together again after eighteen months of pandemic isolation and silence. Stephen chose to set to music an 1899 poem by Thomas Hardy. Hardy was one of those gloomy Victorian who looked at the bleak modern world and sighed, yet somehow managed to find hope. 

 

The original title of “The Darkling Thrush” was “The Century’s End.” Stephen arranged the four stanzas as a unison chant, then a two-part duet, then a trio, then with all four sections of the chorus in full harmony. Hardy’s poem begins in desolate twilight, with a storm approaching as “every spirt upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly “a voice arose among the bleak twigs.” An ancient song thrush “chose to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.” In Stephen’s arrangement, the thrush’s song is a fiddler’s reel. In the wild, the male thrush uses his distinctive song to attract a mate in the dark.

 

In the folklore of the English countryside, the thrush is known as the bird who sings in the darkest hour. At the conclusion of Hardy’s poem, the narrator recognizes “there trembled through his happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.” 

 

Even when the days get shorter and the nights get darker, we know the light will return. Let us begin the new year in kindness and hope.

March 2023 litigation update:

My lawsuit asserting claims against the Office of the Governor under the Public Records Act was set for trial on Monday, February 2, 2023. However, on the Friday before trial we learned we'd lost our slot to a three-week jury trial involving bull-goring injuries and cattle prod experts. Instead, we held our two-day bench trial on May 1-2, 2023. Closing arguments are scheduled for May 25, 2023.

Something Rotten

At the end of July each year, my mother and her friend Carolyn spend a girls’ week at a condo in Vancouver’s West End. They watch the fireworks, shop on Granville Island, and walk along the seawall. They also attend the summer musicals at Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, where the nonprofit Theatre Under the Stars has been producing shows since 1940. 

 

This year TUTS presented two shows in repertory. The first, We Will Rock You, is a British jukebox musical featuring the music of Queen, with a thin plot about a dystopia where music is forbidden. The second show, Something Rotten!, opened on Broadway in 2015. Brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom struggle to find success in an Elizabethan theatre scene dominated by William Shakespeare’s rock star status. Christian Borle won the Best Supporting Actor Tony for his portrayal of Shakespeare as a preening but insecure narcissist. 

Seattle Men’s Chorus singing “A Musical” (2016)

Desperate to get an edge over his rival Shakespeare, Nick Bottom offers his life savings to a soothsayer in return for learning what kind of theatrical production is guaranteed to succeed in the future. The only oracle Nick can afford is Thomas Nostradamus, an undistinguished nephew of the famous French seer. Thomas’s predictions turn out to be accurate but slightly garbled. In Something Rotten!’s show-stopping production number, Thomas convinces Nick he can succeed by introducing the world’s first musical. 

 

In 2016, Seattle Men’s Chorus conductor Dennis Coleman retired after thirty-five years with the baton. That was also my first year in Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Instead of singing with SMC, I drove to Seattle with my daughter Eleanor to see the “Everything Broadway” show. Both of us were riveted by SMC’s performance of “A Musical.”

This summer when my mother mentioned she had tickets to Something Rotten!, Eleanor and I immediately played her the original cast recording of “A Musical,” including this classic excerpt:

 

THOMAS:       Some musicals have no talking at all....
All of the dialogue is sung
In a very dramatic fashion.

NICK:              Um, really?

THOMAS:       Yes, really.
And they often stay on one note for a very long time
So when they change to a different note, [finally changing pitch] you notice.
And it’s supposed to create a dramatic effect
But mostly you just sit there asking yourself
“Why aren’t they talking?”

NICK:              That sounds miserable.

THOMAS:       I believe it’s pronounced Misérable.

Songwriters: Wayne Kirkpatrick / Karey Kirkpatrick        

A Musical lyrics © WB Music Corp., Mad Mother Music

Sure enough, my mother and Carolyn loved Something Rotten. (Mom’s review of We Will Rock You: “It was loud.”) I got a ticket to Something Rotten for the last Wednesday of the summer. As I reported on Facebook, the show was delightful.

The key to surviving Facebook is to remember you’re not the target audience in Facebook’s business model – you’re the company’s product. Facebook’s actual customers are paying advertisers. In a popular and apt metaphor, the rest of us are merely a herd of cattle on display. 

 

I’ve run the numbers, and I’m pretty happy with our bovine arrangement. As far as I can tell, the algorithm has never lured me into buying anything. Instead, Facebook serves as a convenient communication platform and auxiliary memory bank. After posting pictures of children, dogs, and travel for fourteen years, I can now rely on Facebook for daily reminders of happy times.

 

For example, according to Facebook I was at the Saint James Theatre seven years ago waiting to watch the original Broadway cast of Something Rotten!. As I wrote at the time, “Shakespeare has always been my idol.”

I’m lucky I have Facebook to remind me – because I don’t have any memory of being at the theatre in New York. In fact, other than the songs I heard on the original cast album, I didn’t remember anything about the show before I saw it again in Vancouver last month.

The last time I was in New York I was on my way to New Haven for my 25th year law school reunion. This was just a few weeks before my new Bellingham physician told me my weird recent symptoms added up to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and serious codependency. My disability diagnosis changed my life – but not as much as the abusive behaviour of my employers. 

 

PTSD is a disease of memory. As Bessel van der Kolk observes in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” Sometimes trauma results in disassociation or repression, leaving no accessible memories at all. More often, trauma prevents key brain modules like the thalamus and hippocampus from integrating our experiences into “normal” memories. According to Dr. van der Kolk, “the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces:  images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

When I realized I had no memory of seeing Something Rotten! on Broadway in October 2015 – even Christian Borle’s Tony-winning portrayal of my idol Will Shakespeare – I went back to my collection of Playbills to figure what else was missing. 

 

The only other show I saw on that trip was Fun Home, a musical based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir about growing up in a repressed and dysfunctional environment (she was raised in her family’s funeral home). While Bechdel was away at college, her father killed himself rather than come out of the closet. 

In contrast with Something Rotten, I remember seeing Fun Home on Broadway. I’ve also read Bechdel’s graphic memoir. But my memories of both are fragmentary.

Theatre Under the Stars

Early in his career, Sigmund Freud successfully treated hysteria patients who had PTSD-like symptoms. Freud reported his patients could not access traumatic memories because of the “severely paralyzing” effect of strong emotions like fright and shame. Freud concluded “the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.” 

 

However, as Bessel van der Kolk observes, when “faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna – one, he noted, that would implicate his own father – he quickly began to retreat.” Freud shifted his emphasis from real-world childhood trauma to “unconscious wishes and fantasies” like Oedipus complexes and penis envy. A century later, the leading psychiatry textbook in 1974 stated that “incest is extremely rare,” while opining it probably “allows for a better adjustment to the external world,” leaving “the vast majority” of underaged victims “none the worse for wear.” 

 

Since then, we’ve learned PTSD is very real, and that it’s not just a soldier’s disease. Here is Dr. van der Kolk’s call to action in The Body Keeps the Score after four decades treating trauma victims:  “Child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.”

 

My childhood best friend Paul killed himself a few months after he was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. In a pioneering study by Dr. van der Kolk and his Harvard colleague Dr. Judith Herman, 81 percent of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder also had histories of severe child abuse. On my way to see Something Rotten!, sitting in line at the Peace Arch border crossing, I read more details about the study in The Body Keeps the Score. And I remembered various odd things Paul said or did over the years. Suddenly I made the horrifying connection – my friend Paul likely endured abuse while we were in elementary school together.

Christian Borle and "Will Power" on Broadway

When I visited New York in October 2015, my PTSD diagnosis was still a few weeks away. But I was well on the way to rock bottom. Even after Theatre Under the Stars refreshed my recollection, I still can’t remember seeing Something Rotten!.

 

I can think of several explanations for the memory gap. The first is the general effect of my disability. As a wrote in “Better-ish,” although many of my fuzzy memories from that period finally snapped into place, others never did. Instead my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It was like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752. Nevertheless, there’s a silver lining:  I remember half as much Donald Trump presidency as everyone else.

 

Another possible explanation for erasing Something Rotten! is my obsessive relationship with Shakespeare. For example, the best class I took at Yale Law School was Hal Bloom’s graduate Shakespeare seminar. My bardolatry goes beyond ordinary English Major fervor. I was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare. (To the day, after adjusting for the switch to Gregorian calendar). All my life, or at least from 1964 to 2015, I could easily compare myself to where Will was at a particular age:  having his three kids in Stratford during the ’80s, writing classics like Hamlet in the ’90s, retiring to the country in the aughts, and dealing with poor health in the teens. Shakespeare died in 1616, on what would have been his 52nd birthday. On that date four hundred years later, senior managing lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office realized the State’s employment lawyers and their investigator had broken the law and discriminated against me. Rather than correct their errors, they hastily terminated my employment and embarked on the triggering coverup that continues today. My life stalled at age 51. As my health and career unraveled in 2015-16, I felt more doomed that Will Shakespeare. Now it feels like the clock has started again.

But there’s a third explanation for my memory blocking out Something Rotten!. As I sat in Malkin Bowl last month, I recognized some of the characters and plot developments from listening to the original cast album. For example, during Act I, Will Shakespeare’s rock-star narcissism was predictably charming. I was also prepared to see Nick Bottom weave his soothsayer’s misleading fragments of prophecy into the fiasco of Omelette: The Musical. (It’s no Springtime for Hitler, but it’s no Hamlet, either.) What surprised me was Shakespeare’s pathetic efforts during Act II to re-ignite own creative fire. Eventually Will is so desperate he steals Nigel Bottom’s brilliant draft script of Hamlet. After Omelette: The Musical bombs, Shakespeare conspires with the authorities to banish Nick, Nigel, their wives, and the soothsayer to America in order to cover up his own plagiarism.

 

Why did my memory block out the entire show, including the fact I saw it on Broadway? Because Something Rotten! centers on writer’s block. And finding your own voice. Which turns out to be how I finally worked my way through complex PTSD over the last few years. I still don’t remember anything from the first time I saw Something Rotten!. But I’m happy so many of the other rotten things from that time in my life are finally beginning to heal.

Daniel Curalli as Will at Theatre Under The Stars