Langen and McAlenney

After reviewing weeks of trial transcripts a rare and intimate portal opens. I step through the threshold and soon realize this is how life really happens, and how it gradually, almost unexpectedly, can veer out of control... Meanwhile, barbers oil their electric razors. Soldiers play cards. Modern day musicians check emails backstage. The pilot calls his wife. Angels spin their wheels. They were all just killing time and she was cognitive dissonance. Collective dissonance closed. No one went there anymore. The coffee sucked and was too expensive. Last of the last. Old whiskey and Port wine casks and all. Shelves were bare. Wallflower tucked in the corner. Here she comes now. What will she say when she stretches her gorgeous wingspan and opens her mouth to sing? We embrace in a cool room and in the mirror I'm staring at myself in the crook of her neck, smiling. Her eyes closed as I search her back for scars from where they removed the wings just before she landed by the second hand springs. On the way to the beach it was a monsoon and the sky never did recover. By then it was sunset and a knock at the door. City folk eyes wide inside the giant liquor suburban liquor store in a strip mall. I bought a Double Magnum of something German and white, crackers and some horseradish cheese. We were hanging with this famous family. They were notorious for squatting inside multi-million dollar mansions on the coast. I'd met the father in Paradise Waters with a baguette under his tanned arm and turquoise tennis shirt. They were busy exploiting an ancient property law loophole allowing them to live lavishly. We drove out to the Palace of the Brine. But by the time we got there they knew we were there due to serious imperfections in the phone taps. We were discussing ever so ardently the true concept of Spanish tapas. Something crisp and fried and usually for breakfast with garlic-fried rice and fried eggs, along with a chili-vinegar dip of some persuasion or sort. Served as a proper Spanish-style tapas with alcoholic drinks there is also a sweet variant of tapa, with the sugar added last so as to avoid a burnt taste. When we kissed her lips tasted like sweet calamansi and at last I understood the concept and it didn't mean anything. It was a concept for the sake of having a concept. A story; a history; a tale. These things don't just simply fall from the sky - but this one, this one did. I sat calmly listening to the judge carry on about four counts of securities fraud. Insider-trading cases reached an all-time high last year. Most of the cases have received scant notice, having been overwhelmed by the economic crisis. Even then, most defendants settle the cases long before they go to trial - so in the public eye it's almost as if they never happened. "As to the remaining counts, for Mr. Jones, Mr. Langen and Mr. McAlenney there are several substantial legal issues that we believe will result in a reversal of conviction on appeal," the attorney said. Mr. Jones held an important post at Graham & Bartelsman. Langen and McAlenney were nothing but also-rans in this story - Jones was the big fish and the judge knew it. He had a special book reserved to throw at Jones. See, Mr. Jones advised companies doing mergers about how to combine work forces and as a senior partner, he was privy to "flow" - code name for the secret dope about companies that swings billions of dollars of stock value in a day. Eventually Mr. Jones and his girlfriend settled into a comfortable day-to-day routine in their respective offices in New York and Havre de Grace, staring at the same Yahoo Finance screen. "Look honey, Honeywell looks like its almost making a heart today." She was sweet. What she was seeing was a V-shaped valley during mid-day trading. But this was modern day romance. Soon Mr. Jones' name began circulating on "watch lists" at the unromantic SEC, which compiles data about suspicious trading around merger deals. Months later as they lead him away in handcuffs he mouthed "I love you, angel" and the jury sighed maybe they had made a mistake. The two were obviously in love.