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.

Statistics 101

 

Bear and Buster are social creatures. They particularly love interacting with our collegiate neighbors next door at Western Washington University. College girls love sloppy dog kisses, and college boys share leftover junk food. After months of lonely frolicking on the empty quad, Bear and Buster were glad to see a few students return to campus last month. 

 

So far classes are mostly online. Faculty and staff are still working from home, and only one of the dorms is inhabited. The dogs usually have the lawn to themselves. Nevertheless, these days as we walk through campus we often encounter a handful of students doing student things. Bear and I already have gathered enough data to make some observations.

I can report that Western has successfully socialized members of the community to follow at least two of the three “Ws.” (I can’t speak to their hand washing.) We’ve definitely watched a high proportion of earnest social distancing and mask wearing.

 

For example, if Bear and I time our evening walk correctly, we will encounter a jazz combo jamming on the plaza in front of the library. (Look, a tuba – that’s how you can tell you’re at Western.) 

Note the drummers have their masks on. And all the musicians are at least six feet apart.

The compliance rates for masks and social distancing remain high even when students engage in vigorous activities. Almost everyone wears masks as they walk through campus. In fact, we counted over 80% of cyclists and runners wearing masks. The number for trapeze stunts and games of “Four Square” approached 100% masked.

Of course, millennials are still millennials. If they’re not actually touching a ball, they’re touching their phone.

 

As Bear and I walked through campus on our last sunny warm day, we saw twenty or thirty students hanging out together or lying on suitably distanced blankets. Alone or together, busy or relaxed, at least half of them were staring at their smart phones.

 

I surreptitiously took the next photo at the park. As you can see, the masked photographer is taking a picture of the picture of the sunset on his phone.

Even at earnest WWU there are outliers. Me, for example. I have my mask ready in case Bear and I stop at a coffee shop, pub, or bookstore. However, because of the cumulative damage to my nose from PTSD and trichotillomania, I can’t breathe if I wear my mask while walking the dogs. 

 

Occasionally on our maskless walks through campus I’ll get confused glares from brainwashed students. If anyone asks, I tell them about my disability, and explain the situation would be different if I were indoors, or bunched together in a group. When I see others outdoors without masks on, I try not to judge. Unless they’re wearing MAGA hats. 

 

One final piece of data:  last week Bear and I saw a student zipping by on his skateboard. I wanted to flag him down and ask why he was wearing a mask but not a helmet. But he was too busy listening to his phone. 

Too Big to Fit Under the Bus

Lawyers make mistakes. Obviously everyone else makes mistakes too, but lawyer are more neurotic about it.

Lawyers also lie. It’s an occupational hazard. The challenge is dealing with lawyers who make mistakes, then won’t stop lying about their mistakes. And then about their lies.

Lawyers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office make a lot of mistakes. That’s partly a matter of statistics – the Attorney General’s Office is the largest law firm in the state, with over 500 lawyers. Even if each lawyer in the office committed only an average number of mistakes, it would add up to a lot of malpractice.

Unfortunately, as a result of inescapable structural problems, the State’s attorneys commit substantially more than the average number of lawyer errors. Under the Washington constitution, only the Attorney General and his assistants can represent any state agency or state official. That might have been an effective model a century ago. But as with Washington’s inadequate education funding and its regressive tax system, the single-law-office approach to the State’s legal problems is woefully outdated. 

Decades of denial and political stalemate have left the Attorney General’s Office overextended and under-resourced. These systemic challenges explain in part but do not excuse my former employers’ egregious pattern of blunders, such as the inept handling of my disability accommodation request; the advice to release thousands of prison inmates early; the illegal destruction of evidence in the Oso landslide litigation; the aggravation of problems in the foster system; and the erroneous deadlines included in the State’s COBRA notices.

I’ve been observing the Washington Attorney General’s Office for three decades – as a member of the bar and the public, as opposing counsel, as an employee, and now as a whistleblowing litigant. 

When I was involved with the bar association I worked closely with several assistant attorneys general, all of whom are fine lawyers. The last few years have taught me the excellent lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office I worked with while in private practice were the anomalies. Plus I was naïve. Experienced practitioners and judges corroborated my subsequent observation that although the 550 lawyers in the office include some exceptional attorneys and many dedicated public servants, unless they’re assigned to one of those high profile cases that burnish the office’s public reputation, the vast majority of the State’s lawyers would never meet the standards of any other legal organization I have ever been associated with.

The systemic malpractice problems at the Attorney General’s Office are not simply a consequence of its inadequate funding and constitutional limitations. The office’s hierarchical bureaucracy and rigidly authoritarian culture are an invitation to disaster. Ironically and tragically, these institutional traits also resonated with my experiences as a gay Mormon youth, and were the initial triggers for my debilitating PTSD symptoms.

Three years ago, I started this blog and filed my lawsuit against the outside lawyer-investigator my former employer hired to justify my termination. At the time, I thought My Story was about the challenges facing disabled and LGBT individuals. 

There’s no need to repeat the unpleasant details of my workplace experiences, which relate to other legal claims and other stories. No disabled or LGBT employee should have to face an abusive and discriminatory employer. Predictably, I reacted to my horrifying experiences in two lawyerly ways:  I filed a sexual orientation discrimination complaint, and I submitted a formal disability accommodation request to HR. 

On March 7, 2016, the Attorney General’s Office retaliated by isolating me on an abusive “home assignment” that lasted long enough for them to fabricate sufficient evidence to justify firing me. Since March 7, 2016, no one from the Attorney General’s Office has ever acknowledged any wrongdoing whatsoever. None of my former colleagues has ever expressed any concern about my health, or my family’s dire situation. The lawyers in Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office are moral failures by any measure.

Three years later, My Story is no longer about my supervisors’ initial failure to welcome an openly gay and openly disabled employee. Now the story is about what the lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office did after they realized they’d made a couple of big legal mistakes. 

The State has a rigorous government contracting process. After going through these procurement requirements, my employers hired the State’s chosen private investigator to handle my complaint of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Then someone within the Attorney General’s Office decided it made sense to combine the investigation into my narrow sexual orientation discrimination complaint with a second assignment. He asked the same investigator to evaluate a secret litany of complaints from the supervisors who had already decided to get rid of me – even though the contractual Work Order only authorized Defendants to conduct an investigation into my allegations regarding discrimination based on sexual orientation, and even though no one bothered to tell me they’d changed the scope of Defendants’ investigation. Any competent employment lawyer would tell you that was a big mistake.  

Despite the fog of mental illness, that spring I managed to do one smart thing:  I used my savings to hire an experienced Seattle employment lawyer who specializes in disability accommodation and discrimination to represent me in my dispute with the Attorney General’s Office. I didn’t ask her to handle my pending sexual orientation discrimination complaint, because that’s one of my own legal specialties. Based on what the Attorney General’s lawyers and their investigator said, I assumed the investigation into alleged sexual orientation discrimination by my supervisor was separate from any issues related to my own conduct and my disability.

Hiring a disability lawyer interfered with my employer’s secret plan to use their investigator’s report as a pretext for firing me. Rather than change their plan, however, the Attorney General’s Office’s made an even bigger error. In violation of the ethical rules governing all attorneys, the lawyers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office denied me the benefit of the disability attorney I hired to represent me for the specific purpose of engaging the Attorney General’s Office in a good faith dialogue about my continued employment and potential accommodations of my disability. 

Of course, I never knew about either legal mistake until a year and a half after my termination, when Defendants belatedly produced undeniable evidence in my lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC, the second sleaziest law firm in Washington after the Attorney General’s Office.

If you’re looking for evidence to back up my accusations, here’s a sworn declaration I filed with the Washington Supreme Court that outlines the facts, including copies of each of the incriminating emails begrudgingly produced by the Attorney General’s Office in response to my unyielding requests under the Public Records Act.   

The lawyers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office figured out that they’d made a couple of huge mistakes by May 3, 2016. That’s when the junior lawyer assigned to my case must have realized she should have told my disability attorney and me about the expanded scope of the investigation, and she shouldn’t have directed her investigator to interrogate me about the subject of my representation by counsel without first getting permission from my lawyer. At least May 3, 2016 is when we know she told her supervisors what happened.

When the folks at the Attorney General’s Office uncover a horrendous legal mistake, their response typically comes from a familiar playbook. Usually they’ve already resorted to a favorite strategy by now:  throw someone under the bus.  

But don’t take my word for it. Just four months before the Attorney General’s blunders in my case, the public learned about a very similar incident of legal malpractice. Relying on incomplete legal advice from another Assistant Attorney General, the Washington Department of Corrections released thousands of prisoners early. Governor Inslee subsequently commissioned an outside investigation into the scandal. Pages 36 through 39 of the final report offer a damning view of the Attorney General's Office. According to footnote 15 of the report, within six weeks the junior attorney was no longer employed by Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

As the Seattle Times reported, that was the same playbook the Attorney General’s Office followed when a young Assistant Attorney General missed the appeal deadline for a $17.8 million verdict against the State. The office put new trainings and policies in place, and a junior employee was blamed and fired. No doubt the same thing has happened to numerous other lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office when the State was caught getting got the law dead wrong. Statistically, it’s the biggest and clumsiest law firm in the State. There will always be someone to throw under the bus. 

After four years of increasingly embarrassing revelations, the Attorney General’s Office still hasn’t publicly identified a scapegoat in my case (other than blaming the victim, of course). Why not?

Perhaps it’s because the “junior attorney” involved was not some newly hired law school graduate. To the contrary, she was an experienced employment lawyer, with the office’s most distinguished title of “Senior Counsel.”

Or maybe it’s because her supervisor, the lawyer who made the bone-headed decision in March 2016 to secretly expand the scope of the lawyers’ investigation beyond my sexual orientation discrimination complaint, was a big man – the Division Chief of the Labor & Personnel Division.

You can’t make this shit up. But let me add one more fact. March 2016 was a busy month for the State’s top employment lawyer. In addition to bungling my case, the big man was promoted to Chief Deputy Attorney General.

A very big man indeed. Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s #2.

My lawyer and I had no idea about any of this at the time. Rather, I learned about the Chief Deputy Attorney General’s involvement eighteen months later, when Defendants belatedly produced a copy of what turned out to be the first of many incriminating emails. I figured out the wrongdoer’s identity when I deciphered the recipient’s address on the email:  “shanee@atg.wa.gov.” “ShaneE” is Shane Esquibel – Bob Ferguson’s long-serving Chief Deputy Attorney General. 

I barely knew who Mr. Esquibel was during my employment with the Attorney General’s Office. In 2016, I didn’t realize he was involved with either my sexual orientation discrimination complaint, or with the disability claims my employment lawyer was pursuing on my behalf. To the contrary, as I wrote a couple of years ago in “Mapping Mistakes,” the State’s lawyers and their investigator successfully concealed the Chief Deputy Attorney General’s role until October 2017. Since then, the Attorney General’s Office has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid scrutiny into Mr. Esquibel’s conduct.

I’ve learned to be patient. And I’ve done a lot of work over the last couple of years. Eventually, someone in authority will pay attention to my story. 

In the meantime, all the key evidence is tidily arranged for an aggressive journalist, smart lawyer, prudent politician, or honest judge to examine. Every road leads back to the same incriminating facts:  blunders by lawyers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office, followed by an increasingly clumsy cover-up.  

The truth is too big for the Attorney General’s Office to fit under their bus.

Opening the Sluices

During World War II, my maternal grandfather Hyrum Boyd Phillips was a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. His father, James Wilford Phillips, worked on the Panama Canal as a young man four decades earlier.

Hiram M. Chittenden served with the Army Corps of Engineers a generation before my great grandfather. During his long career, Chittenden worked on projects across the country, including many of the original improvements in Yellowstone Park. In 1906, Chittenden was appointed to head the Seattle District of the Corps of Engineers. He designed the waterway that connects Lake Washington with the Puget Sound. My map collection includes a 1907 copy of Chittenden’s canal proposal.

Lake Washington is the largest lake in the state. Before Americans invaded the Pacific Northwest, the lake’s surface was 30 feet above sea level. The lake emptied at its marshy south end into the Black River, which joined the Duwamish River before meandering into Elliott Bay. 

Nearby Lake Union was 21 feet above sea level, and drained into a protected salt water inlet to the west. The future location of Seattle’s Ballad neighborhood was a native village named sHusHóól, meaning “Tucked Away Inside.” Paler folks named the sheltered inlet Salmon Bay. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Chittenden’s ship canal changed everything. 

On the east side of Seattle’s isthmus, the Corps of Engineers dug the Montlake Cut to connect large Lake Washington to small Lake Union and Portage Bay. To the west, the Fremont Cut replaced the stream draining Lake Union with a navigable channel. And where formerly salt-water Salmon Bay connected with the Puget Sound, the Corps built a pair of locks, a sluiceway, and a small fish ladder.

In July 1916, the engineers closed the gates at the western entrance to the newly-completed locks, and let water flow west through the Fremont Cut. Freshly desalinated Salmon Bay rose nine feet to meet the level of Lake Union. 

Click here for the Seattle Times’ cool before-and-after sliding version of these graphics

While engineers construct a dam, they build a temporary “cofferdam,” a watertight enclosure that is pumped dry during construction. On August 25, 1916, the Corps of Engineers breached the cofferdam protecting the Montlake Cut. Water poured through the gap into the finished canal. Over the next few months, Lake Washington’s water level gradually fell nine feet, permanently altering the lake’s 72 mile shoreline. The spillway at the west end of the locks became both lakes’ sole outlet. The Black River dried up and disappeared.

The last surviving member of the Shilshole native community, “Salmon Bay Charlie,” was forcibly removed to make way for construction of the locks. Hiram Chittenden died in 1917, three months after the Ship Canal’s dedication. In 1956, the canal locks – no longer “Second to Panama” – were renamed in Chittenden’s honor.

Everyone more or less adjusted to the new normal. Except for the salmon.

This week marks three years of blogging, with 300 essays published on this blog so far. I lost track of the total word count long ago, but it’s probably approaching 400,000 words. Collectively that’s somewhere between the size of Middlemarch and Gone With the Wind.

Appallingly, my published blog posts are only tip of the writing iceberg. I already have another three hundred individual MS Word files containing draft essays, book chapters, and book or article proposals, with titles ranging from “Oliver Votes for Asparagus” to “Me Too, Bruce.” At this rate I could keep publishing a couple of blog essays each week for another five years, even if I had no new ideas, and completely ignored current events.

Instead, as a result of my much improved mental health, the writing muse has picked up the pace. For example, a couple of months ago I woke up with the idea for “If Love Were All,” and published the final essay three hours later (choosing the pictures took 45 minutes). Last week I wrote “Buster is the Weakest Link” in my head during a four mile walk with Bear. 

Meanwhile, my gay Mormon PTSD memoir, Anyone Can Whistle: a Memoir of Showtunes, Religion, and Mental Illness, finally took shape last month after I poured its extra chapters into my other book projects. FYI, all the sex, drugs, and other fictions filtered into my gay Mormon novel, The Word of Wisdom.

In addition to the fun writing, my life also remains flooded with wordy legal filings. Fortunately for everyone, improved mental health reduces the number of PTSD-fueled rants against injustice. My long monologuing letters to opposing counsel are down to a pithy two pages or less each, tossed off between Zoom writing classes for myself and home schooling sessions with my children.

After three decades of debilitating writer’s block, I marvel at my newfound ability to sit down at the computer and just write something. For example, I wrote my entire Supplemental Brief for the Washington Supreme Court from scratch in two days, well before the due date. I should apologize to all my clients in private practice who were told a project like that would take at least two weeks to do well. 

My increased efficiency and capacity arrived just in time. Even as the State’s stubborn denials result in additional legal proceedings, I’ve learned how to juggle numerous hot water balloons.

We think in metaphors. As I wrote last year in “Indoor Plumbing,” flow metaphors provide the most useful models for describing how my writing process works. At the same time, writing has also become the most useful proxy for my thinking process – such as the interaction between my conscious and unconscious mind, and the current status of my ability to think and communicate effectively.

Looking back at my blog output over the last three years, I recognize another important recurring theme:  quantum leaps. I’ve come a long way since my PTSD diagnosis in November 2015 and my suicidal nadir a year later. Much of that progress has been gradual. But as I wrote in “Nonlinear Thinking,” and as we’ve all learned from epidemiology recently, some events trigger exponential rather than merely linear change.

Starting with my Court of Appeals victory in September and the Washington Supreme Court’s favorable ruling in January, through gay Muppets and fierce Canadian drag queens in February, I’ve experienced a quantum leap. It shows up most obviously in my writing. Since the first of the year, I’ve regularly published two substantial blog essays each week. My legal work is going well. My other writing is coming along well, too. Most importantly, my family is thriving. Despite all the massive changes to our lives over the last few years, this winter the kids and I finally achieved an equilibrium. As I wrote at the beginning of March, I finally felt Better-ish. 

Days later, pandemic closed the schools and the Canadian border. And cancelled chorus, and sports, and travel, and art, and life. Suddenly I found myself without enough fingers to plug all the leaky dikes.

Here’s where quantum leap connects with water works.

All the Leishmans of Bellingham are desperate for something new to binge watch. Fortunately, each of the new streaming services has been competing for customers by offering free trials. So far I’ve watched the first two episodes of Belgravia, some Schitt’s Creek and Pennyworth, all of Star Trek: Picard, and the first season of Star Trek: Discovery.

In Star Trek Discovery, the ship’s security chief is a hot guy who suffers from PTSD. The also crew includes a gay couple, with the engineer played by Anthony Rapp and the doctor played by Wilson Cruz. (As usual, Cruz’s gay character tragically dies.) In the climactic episode of Season One, the USS Discovery is trapped in a parallel universe. To save both universes, the crew must ignite a massive explosion. Unfortunately, the resulting surge will destroy the ship. Fortunately, Rapp’s engineer character figures out how to ride the wave from the explosion and escape back to our universe.

As I was researching the history of the Hiram Chittenden locks, I came upon this additional picture of the Montlake Cut opening in August 1916. The photo reminded me of Star Trek Discovery.

After the failure of two earlier cofferdam attempts, the Corps of Engineers finally completed excavating the Montlake Cut in June 1914. However, the empty Montlake canal remained blocked at both ends by wooden gates for another two years, awaiting the construction of foundations for the drawbridge across the ship canal. In an eerie premonition of the region’s feckless transportation planning, Seattle voters refused to approve any bonds funding bridge construction until 1915. 

Coronavirus’ arrival a century after the last flu pandemic didn’t remove any of the existing pressure on my plague-filled life. To the contrary, pressure has only increased on everyone. Like the crew of the Discovery, I had no alternative to riding the wave. 

Happily, after a few weeks of false starts we’ve achieved a new equilibrium at our house. It turns out I made some sound investments in mental infrastructure. I don’t expect the new normal to last a century, like the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Hiram Chittenden Locks. But I’m confident the center will hold.

Click here for more entries from Roger’s Plague Journal

Beyond Bardolatry

The Bible of Bardolatry

Yale humanities professor and literary critic Harold Bloom died last October. That makes me the biggest bardolator alive. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

We English Majors have been worshipping the Bard of Avon for a long time. In his succinct biography Shakespeare, Bill Bryson describes a student play performed at Cambridge University around the time of Hamlet’s London premiere:

The Return from Parnassus contained the words ‘O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I’ll have his picture in my study at the court,’ suggesting that Shakespeare was by then a kind of literary pinup.

It’s not just a crush on a cute writer. [Ed. Note: The cute writer.] It’s a lifelong crush on the works of William Shakespeare – the entertaining plays, the gorgeous poems, the supreme use of language, the inescapable influence on culture, the endless insights about psychology, art, literature, history, killing lawyers, humor…. The list goes on and on.

What sets my devout bardolatry apart from your garden variety fanboy is a shared timeline. Shakespeare and I were born exactly 400 years apart. That makes it easy to figure out how old Shakespeare was at each point in the chronology of his life and career.

According to the parish records in Stratford, William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, with April 23, 1564, traditionally recognized as Shakespeare’s birthday. I was born four centuries and a week later, on May 2, 1964. 

In 1587/1987, we were twenty-three years old, and lost.

In 1596/1996, we were thirty-two years old, and making a name for ourselves in the world.

In 1603/2003, we were thirty-nine years old, busy with our big city careers and our country homes.

In 1620/2020, Shakespeare had been dead for four years, and I’m hiding indoors from the plague.

English Majors are notorious for seeing themselves reflected in their favorite characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Professor Bloom tended to identify with Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra. But the greatest bardolators also find parallels in the few factual fragments about the playwright’s own life that historians have uncovered.

In my case, it’s not just the Class of ’64 timeline thing. Or theatre, or literature, or hostility to lawyers and bad acting. What little we know about Shakespeare himself is eerily familiar.

For example, Will and I each had two daughters and a son, born a couple of years apart. Our fathers are both named John. They grew up on farms, but moved to town where they became successful businessmen. 

Bryson identifies a key developmental milestone I share with Shakespeare:  “something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was twelve, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs and stopped attending meetings.” In 1976, when I was twelve, my father quit his job in Vancouver. My parents moved to Utah and ruined my life. Totally similar to whatever parental blunder traumatized moody tween Shakespeare. (As a Gay Sitcom Dad raising two teen-aged daughters, I happen to be an expert in adolescent drama.)

Fortunately, both William Shakespeare and I recovered from our youthful traumas. As we entered our fifties, we walked away from successful public careers in the big city, and moved eighty-seven miles north to be closer to our families.

Shakespeare family coat of arms

My Bellingham doctor diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in November 2015. Earlier this month, I wrote in “Better-ish” about some of the recent improvements in my mental health:

Now I feel like myself, even when I feel unwell. The good news is that most of my fuzzy memories have finally snapped into place. The bad news is that my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It’s sorta 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.

A few days later, after all the public libraries in Bellingham closed for coronavirus, I borrowed a stack of books from my mother. I’d recently finished her copy of Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants and passed it on to my pre-pre-med daughter, so I grabbed a few more volumes from Mom’s shelf of the complete works of Bill Bryson. (My mother and I tend to be completists.) 

Considering how many books about Shakespeare I’ve read over the decades, I can’t believe I hadn’t already noticed Bryson’s slim Shakespeare on the shelf. And I can’t believe I hadn’t already made this startling connection: 

Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, which wasn’t created until 1582, when Shakespeare was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 23 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May.

But wait, you point out, didn’t I just say my birthday is May 2, not May 3? However, I was born at 11 pm in Mountain Time Zone. Which in Stratford-on-Avon would be at 6 am on May 3.

So I really was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, at age fifty-two. Four centuries later, I didn’t die at fifty-two. Instead, I lost my mind when my employers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office placed me in an abusive and illegal “home assignment” in retaliation for seeking a workplace free from discrimination. 

It’s been four very hard and plague-filled years since April 2016. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, these days I’m doing better-ish when it comes to the things that matter most to me, like my family, my writing, and my mental health.

I’ll always be slow about certain things. I didn’t start any of the most important stuff in life until I was a couple of decades older than the prodigious William Shakespeare was four hundred years ago. If nothing else, that means it’s too late to compete with Shakespeare in the youthful fatherhood or romance departments. Like my other favorite author, Jane Duncan, hopefully I’m a late bloomer as a writer, too.

Still, William Shakespeare and I already have numerous traits in common. Two daughters and a son. A lifetime in theatre/gay men’s chorus. Ex-farmer fathers named John. English Major stuff. Disasters. (Nostradamus would say the Globe Theatre burning down in 1613 corresponds to a landslide destroying my dream house on Whidbey Island.)

If you survey the histories of our respective eras, you’ll also see how Shakespeare and I each survived multiple waves of the plague. In fact, just like Will and Kit experienced during the bubonic closures of London’s theatres four hundred years ago, as I write this paragraph it’s a typical Wednesday – but I can’t drive north for Vancouver Men’s Chorus rehearsal or for Show Tune Night. The border, the theatres, the chorus, the schools, the bars, the churches, and everything else in Canada and the States are closed because of a pandemic.

Regardless of our many similarities, there will always be two key differences between William Shakespeare and me:

He’s an immortal genius. I’m not.

He died at age 52. I didn’t.

Which means historians can argue over yet another intriguing fact about Shakespeare that no one will ever know for sure. Could he have made it to age 55 after surviving the Mormons, the gays, midlife Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, single parenthood, and a plague of dishonest lawyers? Because I did.

Here are links to more of my “Doppeler Effect” essays, describing other individuals whose lives have paralleled and/or crossed particular threads of my own story: 

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Gay Mormons" (9/11/17)

“I am Rob Lowe” (9/20/17)

“Chorus Minivan Dad” (3/6/18)

“My Best Friend Paul” (6/7/18)

“About my Yale Law School classmate Brett Kavanaugh” (9/24/18)

"Crossing Paths" (10/7/18)

"Crazy Mormon Mommy Bloggers"  (6/5/19)