I had jury duty this week. Everybody seems to hate jury duty, but I was looking forward to it. I consider jury duty to be a chance to escape the pressures of my job and family. I showed up at 8:30 in the morning with a cup of coffee and a Snickers bar and sat down in the big room to wait for my name to be called. I wanted to be alert because the last time I had jury duty, they called my name when I was sleeping, and I failed to respond, so I got yelled at by the bailiff. I didn't want that to happen again.

It was very peaceful in the big room. There was almost no noise except for the lady saying that she would start calling out names as soon as the judge came and talked to us. The chairs were very comfortable. I drank my coffee and ate the Snickers bar and tried to read the paper. Then I fell asleep. I woke up sporadically during the next two hours with an increasingly stiff neck and a growing sense of numbness. At some point, the judge came in and talked to us, but I don't remember what he said because I was pretty much asleep. I don't think I would have even known that he was the judge if he hadn't been wearing what looked like a judge's robe during the brief periods that my eyes were open. That, combined with the fact that I could vaguely recall being told that the judge was going to talk to us made me think he was the judge and not just somebody who was talking to us. Then, later, the lady started calling names and I think I woke up to listen, although I'm not sure because I was really enjoying the sleep, despite my stiff neck. I may have missed some names or a speech by somebody else, but I doubt it. I'm a pretty light sleeper these days, which was not the case three years ago when I had jury duty. Back then, I was still drinking and I could sleep through just about anything. It doesn't matter anyway; the important thing is that the lady eventually called my name, I heard it, and I got up and walked into the small room where the lawyers were going to ask us questions. I took a seat in the back of the small room. There were about twenty-five other people in there with me. I looked at them for a little while and then I fell asleep again until the lawyers came in.

I listened to the lawyers' questions in a trance-like state. When it was my turn to answer, I noticed that the front of my shirt was wet because I had been drooling. This confused me a bit and I lost track of my thoughts. I had planned to say that the fact that I broke my neck in a car accident when I was five years old made it impossible for me to judge a personal injury case fairly. I knew that this would disqualify me from the jury, and that I would then be allowed to go into the big room and sleep some more. The whole thing was in my mind, waiting to be said, and it was all true. I just had to say it. But I didn't say it, and I don't know why. Instead, I answered the lawyers' questions, trying, I guess, to sound like I didn't have any opinions about anything. In my head, I had started telling myself that if I got picked for this jury, it would be a quick case and I'd be done with my jury duty faster than if I had to sit in the big room for five days never getting picked, which is what happened when I was here three years ago. This is what I told myself, but I don't understand where the idea could possibly have come from because the last thing in the world I wanted to do was finish my jury duty quickly! What I wanted to do was the exact opposite--I wanted to go back into the big room and sleep for as long as possible. I would have been happy to have had my jury duty last for a month or longer because I can sleep in that big room and I can't sleep anywhere else because my extremely wakeful baby keeps me up all the time, as I know I've said before, but I'm going keep saying it, because it is the central fact of my life.

So why did I answer the lawyers' questions this way? I don't know. It's a mystery to me. It would have been so easy to talk about my broken neck and then go back to the nice warm chairs in the big room and get some more sleep. But I didn't talk about it. And the lawyers, except for twice asking me to stop mumbling, seemed very happy with my answers to their questions. They picked me for their jury and told me to come back the next morning. I was shocked. As I walked out, I looked into the big room and wondered why I wasn't in there sleeping. I decided that maybe it had something to do with my family and my job, and this sense of responsibility that they've forced upon me. I knew I couldn't afford to just sit there for five semi-conscious days like I did three years ago. I knew that getting on a jury for a simple case and getting the whole thing over with as quickly as possible was the right thing to do because my life has changed and people need me to go to work and come home and clean the encrusted applesauce off the high chair and not just lie around in a municipal courthouse. I knew this and I accepted it. And I acted accordingly, even if I didn't quite fully understand it at the time, or feel happy about it now. I guess that is part of what it means to be a responsible father. The other explanation for my behavior is that I'm a weak person, a very weak person, and that I don't know what I want or how to accomplish it. This may be true, but I'm not prepared to deal with it right now, so I'm trying to ignore it.

In any event, I came back the next morning with another cup of coffee and another Snickers bar. This time I wanted to stay awake because I assumed that I was going to have to go sit on a jury and decide whether Mr. Zukowski had really injured his shoulder falling down the stairs at the 59th Street subway station. I sat down in the big room to wait for the lady to call my case to court. I waited and waited until it became clear that they weren't going to call us anytime soon, so I decided to try to get some sleep. But I couldn't do it. I closed my eyes and nothing happened. I remained awake, listening to the faint ringing in my ears and the grumbling stomach of the strange woman who was sitting next to me. After a while, I began to wonder if that grumbling wasn't my stomach, so I tried to concentrate on it. Whoever's stomach it was was making terrible noises. I began to strongly suspect that it was mine, but I'll never know, because the lady announced that Mr. Zukowski had settled his case and we jurors were free to go. So that was the end of my jury duty. I had screwed up and missed a chance to sleep more.

I don't know what I learned from this experience. For a little while, I thought that it might be a watershed moment in my life where I started to just accept all my new responsibilities and give up on everything else, but I don't think it's actually working out that way.