A mathematician would dismissively tell you that you can’t describe one-half of zero. The project is absurd.

Yet civil courts, as a matter of policy, demand that defendants perform this nonsensical exercise every day.

This advice about telling “your side of the story about what happened” is offered by the California Court System, and it presumes that something must have happened to inspire some accuser to petition a restraining order. No tips are included about what to do if “what happened” was that this accuser had a malicious impulse to lie or is crazy.

I’m not a mathematician; I was trained as a critic. While a mathematician would almost certainly pronounce that trying to articulate one-half of nothing is meaningless and a waste of time (and then wave you away), a critic, arching an eyebrow, would tell you that the act of trying to articulate one-half of nothing raises the expectation that…