Look at this beast. It’s called a safety squat bar, and it’s so goddamned big and heavy it won’t fit into a photograph straight on. So here’s another angle.
It was just past eight in the morning when they got to the Presbyterian church. It was the sixth church they’d been to that morning, driving around and relying on Spencer’s memory of churches he’d seen around town during his nighttime wanderings.
Sal shook his head, disappointed. “I told you, it has to be Catholic.”
“I grew up Methodist.” Spencer turned out of the parking lot. “I always thought a church was a church.”
Spencer closed his eyes and the sensation of spinning was replaced with one of acceleration. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were on a steep drop on a roller coaster. His heart, lungs, and stomach felt flattened against his shoulder blades and spine.
He felt a sensation as if his mind were being pulled out of his body through a straw, and his pure consciousness, disconnected from his corporeal form, was hurtling through an infinite tunnel of time and space. For what felt like an eternity, he continued to rocket through complete darkness until he began to see a flickering pinprick of light in the endless field of black. As he continued to move toward it, he realized that this infinitesimal point of light, surrounded by endless fields of all-consuming darkness, was his life.
Spencer could tell that Sal was still pissed at him as they played basketball. The court was one he’d found during his nighttime wanderings. It was surrounded by a grove of trees, which served as a kind of courtyard for a nearby cluster of university administrative buildings. The offices were closed for the weekend, but their burning white surveillance lights threw strangely angled shadows onto the court.
I started building out my home gym in 2018, the Spring before my second child–Bee–was born. I figured it would make it far easier to get in workouts–with both my then-two year old Gee and a newborn Bee–if I could just go outside to my detached 2-car garage and bang out some sets.
Welp, the other shoe has dropped. Two top law firms–Kirkland & Ellis and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison–are working for the Commerce Department for free, presumably working up trade agreements in connection with the president’s blatantly illegal tariffs. Previously both Kirkland and Paul Weiss cut deals with the administration after it levied punitive executive orders against them, with the firms pledging eight-figures worth of pro bono legal services and cuts to their DEI programs.
After Spencer downed his bottle of Robitussin, they drove, skirting the edges of town, where the strip malls gave way to surrounding crops of corn and soybeans. They came across a 24-hour Meijer and wandered through aisles of blinding white fluorescence until, chastened by the black surveillance camera domes on the ceilings high above them, they hurried up to the automated checkout counter with their chosen wares: Spencer, a new Spalding basketball; and Sal, a mango he’d been carrying around the store clutched against his chest like a newborn. Then they got back into the car and headed back toward campus, taking bites out of the orange-green skin of mango and spitting chunks of pulp out of their windows. They laughed deliriously as Future’s “I’m Trippin’” played from Spencer’s playlist.
As a former BigLaw associate and employment lawyer, I had thoughts on the recent discrimination lawsuit against McDermott, Will, and Schulte (known as McDermott, Will and Emery until a recent merger). You can find the lawsuit here, and it is a doozy.
RayDorl.com 