Jury Duty Log: 06-10-2025
It's not so often that I am summoned by authority.
Tuesday, June 10th, 2025
cue: svu DUN-DUN
8.42 AM
I’ve reported for Jury Duty. So far all this has entailed is passing through security (the guys over there were friendly enough, I felt like a fellow denizen; I wish we could feel like this around cops because what’s a cop who’s not a fellow denizen? there are too many of those…) and taking a seat in this massive waiting room.
The room is more of a hall than a room. It’s filled with airport seats. They’re all facing a court bench at the front. It feels as impersonal as a hospital waiting room, but significantly less intimate, also. It feels like State (finally) divorced Church, but now State is stuck in this limp rut because he doesn’t have the ability to imagine breaking (out of) the shell their relationship left behind. Church walked away with charisma and vitality and alimony. She’s skilled at wielding beauty and magnanimity to belie her utter selfishness. That’s one of the things that drew State towards her – he sought to learn her ways of self-preservation and maybe they could’ve even joined forces, but the whole seeking-a-quality-in-someone-else-instead-of-manifesting-it-in-ourselves thing is usually doomed to fail. Every time State thought they were consummating really Church was consuming him because State, like so many immature adults out there, has never really committed to the practice of maintaining healthy boundaries, which requires/reinforces a sense of self. Now State, with such little sense of self, rendered brittle by his insecurities, keeps posturing about his power instead of actually wielding it.
And here I am sitting in his bland-ass nave.
It is remarkably quiet for the number of people in here. No chatter.
I’ve forgotten my water bottle at home and I can’t help beating myself up for it – I forgot the tissues I was planning to bring, too. I’m wondering if I should’ve brought more things to keep myself occupied. I’ve got my phone, but I’ve also forgotten my charger, so I need to be sparing in using it. I don’t like to be on my phone so much anyway. I’ve also got this notebook, my pencil pouch, and a Charles Baxter book on writing, ‘Burning Down The House’. When making my selections for the occasion, I figured that this curation of diversions would force (not force, really) encourage me to write more than I’ve felt so bothered to lately. I guess I was sort of parenting myself, which checks out now that I’m thinking about it – Amma and Nanna raised us with habitual productivity. Anyway, sitting here now I just feel like I played a bad trick on myself. I was thinking about downloading some Stephen King book on my Kobo. Why the hell didn’t I do that? I didn’t even bring my Kobo. Koboboschmobo.
My throat tickles. I really wish I hadn’t forgotten that water bottle. I even filled it with warm water before I left!
I feel the urge to cough, but I’m trying to cough as little as possible. It feels shameful, a little bit, to be coughing in such a big room full of people. I had planned to bring a mask, but I forgot that too.
And I’d stood waiting for the train for 8 minutes.
It’s just now 9.00 AM. I was wondering if at any point something would happen – a woman has just walked out.
10.10 AM
Time has passed a little quicker than I though it would. The woman who walked out (The Officiant) has just once again disappeared behind the wooden doors.
When she first walked out, and since then, The Officiant sent quite a few people behind those doors (if you need your summons printed, if you don’t live in Brooklyn, if you’re not a US Citizen, if you have trouble with basic English, if you have kids or other people to take care of, if you’re a student, if your paperwork is incorrect, if if if if if…). Some of them come back out. Most of them I haven’t seen again.
We watched a couple of videos – one on our abilities/responsibilities as jury members, what the process of selecting a jury involves/might be like, and another on implicit bias (from the Perception Institute). I thought both videos were well made. What really bothered me was the videos’ rhetorical premise that nobody in that room/watching the video wanted to be there. I disagree with being reactionary towards civic apathy.
Anyway, now I’m kind of browning out and just blathering. I went to the bathroom and feel relieved and slightly decongested. Brought back some toilet paper so at least now I have the option to blow my nose. Eventually I will figure out where to get some water. Honestly right now mostly I feel like dozing off for some time………
Some directions with the paperwork – fill this out, tear this off, come place in baskets up front. Then everyone was checked in and now we’re all just waiting, again.
It is so quiet in here…
"the excitement of unsubstantiated generalities"
– Gertrude Stein
"the bliss of escaping from codification and definition altogether, by dispersing and scattering oneself through the codes..."
– Fred Pfeil
deniability
↳ contemporary disavowal movement
↳ narrative dysfunction
closure ⇔ source of responsibility
no source of responsibility ⇒ conspiracy
"In our time, responsibility without narrative has been consistently displaced by its enigmatic counterpart, conspiracy."
– Baxter, p4
conspiracy ⇔ narrative repression (repression of who-has-done-what)
"The result of dysfunctional narrative... is sorrow, I would argue that it is sorrow mixed with depression or rage, the condition of the object, but in any case we are talking about the psychic landscape of trauma and paralysis."
– Baxter pp4-52.05 PM
Just got back from lunch and my water fountain/bathroom rounds. I went to a soup dumpling place on Montague, near Dr. Coren’s office. When I got there I saw someone – I immediately recognized him, but wasn’t sure who he was. Either my neighbor’s ex-boyfriend or his twin brother. I figure it was the ex. We both asked for a table at the same time and were seated just two tables apart; he didn’t show any recognition, but it had that casual contrivance to it. I guess he doesn’t know that I don’t know much about the breakup. Seeing him today has piqued my interest in the matter, but only slightly.
A fellow jury duty report sat at the table next to me. He paid me no attention. Eventually a friend joined and, if I gathered correctly, he is a doctor. I didn’t think that when I first saw him, but it tracks with his outfit and general demeanor.
It had been raining a lot before we left and the construction workers on the roof across the street (I made sure to pick a spot by the window) had disappeared. I watched all the equipment and materials get drenched and wondered at how they accounted for/managed the rain, figured they’d have to come back to this part of the building once it dried, but – they’re back out there already, and in bigger numbers than before (5-7 people vs 2-3).
Most people have resumed their seats from before the lunch break, though there are a few new faces in the vicinity. More laptops out. Aside from some of the clickety-clackety going on around me, it is even quieter than before.
Someone has come out to call some names. The list was short and he finished by the time I finished writing that sentence.
I wonder if I will be called today. I would love to serve on a jury!
4.29 PM
Did not get selected for the jury. It was a doozy of a case. Judge Rao seemed very cool.
Voir dire highlighted quite a few characters in my jury selection pool. So many people named anxiety/aversion to violence as a conflict of interest that Judge Rao at one point had to clarify that while it was normal to have an emotional response to the nature and facts of the case, that emotional response could/should not preclude people from being good jurors.
There was one girlie who took the opportunity to state her prejudice against cops – she was dismissed. As we filed back into State’s nave to await physical dismissal, I approached her and asked her if she knew about jury nullification. She said yes and that she was planning to use that if the cop thing didn’t work, which tells me that in fact she does not know about jury nullification so much as she maybe knows about jury nullification vibes. You have to make it onto the jury to exercise jury nullification…
My favorite character was the middle-aged South Asian woman who, while most people were presenting scheduling conflicts, took the mic to say she wouldn’t be a good juror because she was a “very judgmental person”. Judge Rao, who truly held it down the whole time, asked skeptically if that meant she couldn’t be a fair and impartial juror, even if Judge Rao instructed her to. “I don’t know…” Auntie responded, “I don’t think so… I’m too judgmental. Like sometimes I even just look at someone’s face and I think I don’t like them, I don’t want to listen to them, I don’t know…”
Auntie was also dismissed x