So death and taxes are life’s only certainties, eh? Yeah, right. I’d heard that so many times that I was almost — almost — persuaded it’s true. But recently, San Diego Superior Court gutted my take on that folkloric theory, in the form of an innocuous-looking summons delivered to my house uneventfully with some other innocuous-looking mail. Jury duty. The cantankerous fly in the workaday ointment, coming and going as it ever-lovin’ pleases, without the stingiest regard for the circumstances of the folks on whom it lands. If you’ve ever paid in to Social Security in any form, chances are you’ll be tapped at some point, probably when you least expect it. Sheesh. At least the Reaper has the grace to announce himself (or sometimes, anyway). And with taxes, the infernal April 15 due date is etched in stone as well as in the public consciousness. That summons was my ticket into the human race — a race I initially figured I’d rather sit out. I’d soon learn that that “stingiest regard” thing was a product of my own ignorance. The local selection process isn’t as arbitrary as all that. To sit on a jury, you do have to be 18 or older and a resident of San Diego County and conversant in written and oral English. And the summons does reflect that the Court makes concessions if your service will cause an economic hardship or some other major lapse in your quality of life; the powers that be can also arrange for you to serve in locations more convenient than those on West Broadway Downtown. And to boot, once you’ve done your duty, you won’t be called for at least a year. But whatever the Court may be, it’s not omniscient by any stretch. Accordingly, my stated reasons for requesting deferral fell on blind eyes after I mailed my summons back in. At 7:45 a.m. one day early last month, I found myself in a cavernous lounge in the Hall of Justice Downtown with about 250 other hardy souls, each of whom may also have had pressing business the Court would kindly preclude. After a brief introductory film and a formal welcome from longtime Superior Court Judge Charles Gill, you’re left with all the time in the world as the courtrooms determine the size of the day’s juror pools. I opted to reread a book on Robert Louis Stevenson, my patron saint (that’s to say favorite author), and his brush with civil unrest during his days as a late 19th-century resident of Western Samoa. New French-built roads in the region, he observed, overran sacred burial spots. European clerics were “educating” the natives in the “correct” ways of worship and obliterating a culture in the process. Young boys were taken from their homes as those same holymen forced their indoctrination. “Soul murder,” Stevenson called it, adding that he found it tantamount to a military incursion. A military incursion indeed, its planners oblivious to the concept of due process and fair representation. The kind of representation the Court was making its best effort to effect that morning. And just as Stevenson bristled at the inequities in the South Seas, he’d have delighted in the democratic conduct that undermines them. An hour passes, then another. A disembodied voice cranks out the day’s first litany of names over a state-of-the-art loudspeaker; a 100-minute lunch break follows. Two more rosters are called by quarter to 3, at which time the stragglers — including me — are dismissed, free and clear for at least 12 months. I grab my book and beat feet to my car, proceeding to salvage the rest of the workday. But only then do I realize I’m in a profession with a job description not unlike that of an impaneled juror. Try as I might, I can’t reason away my initial disdain for jury duty while pretending to uphold journalism’s tenets. Stevenson had a law degree and wrote plenty of newspaper pieces in his day; it’s a cinch he felt the same way. And what’s good enough for him should certainly be good enough for me. Man, I wish I’d been called. Just wait’ll next year.