February 10, 2022
Ever since I started keeping my diary of remorse, my remorse has evaporated. The answer to a personality problem or spiritual malaise is to keep a diary of it because then the quantity you are quantifying seems to disappear. Therefore I should go on to keep a diary of other troubling quantities. Such as Diary of Lassitude, Lack of Motivation, Failure to Act, etc.
The lockdowns start and stop and then I go back and forth to my odd and unlikely hometown. I see that my interest in my volunteer job (of monitoring justice in the New Orleans criminal courts) is largely prurient. For this I should have remorse but don’t. When I get my docket in the morning I compare it to all the other dockets, pining that they are more exciting. Judge DeBoes has murders, rapes, and kidnappings on his docket today, not to mention a case of False Personation (???), Malfeasance in Office, and False Imprisonment, but I am not assigned to his courtroom. My consolation however is that today I am in the courtroom of the piping mad personality-ridden Judge Hollingsworth.
The defendants in New Orleans always have names like:
Jockward Jones
Curry Carter
Stokes Meilleur
King Malveaux
Narvelle Perrin
Bingo Fox
Margaret LemmonierAnd the judges have names like that too.
Talk about a vanished world. The grandiose criminal court building. The old-time bars and cafés amid the greenery.
From “Diary of Remorse.” Published in Paris Review, no. 241, Sept. 2022.
Biblioklept 