You Never Know What You'll Find

The biggest cliche, I think, about the show "COPS," which I don't mind admitting to you that I love with all my soul, are the "talking head" pieces that welcome the TV viewer back from commercials. If you still watch TV on a television, you know what "commercials" are.

The typical talking-head piece is filmed inside of a Ford Crown Victoria and it's a shot of the officer behind the wheel, and he or she briefly pontificates, in that cop sort of way, on some aspect of policing-- more likely than not, the "Reader's Digest" version of his or her affiliation with law enforcement.

"Well, I grew up in Fort Worth, and my dad was a cop, and his dad was a cop. I got three uncles in the Fort Worth Police Department, and my dog's a K-9 officer, so this kind of just seemed like a good fit for me. I've been on the job now for fourteen years and I love comin' to work every day-- every day is different. You never know what you'll find."

I've come to grips recently with the fact that they, the police, are never going to accept me into their fold. While I have written a book on their behalf, donated to their causes, penned passionate essays in newspapers, given speeches at police cafeterias and assembly halls, while I have shaken hands with precinct lieutenants and captains and even the Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, I won't be wearing their uniforms or enforcing their laws.

I do, however, work at a mental hospital, and as such I can faithfully state that their catchphrase, "Every day is different-- you never know what you'll find" holds true for me. When I slide my gold-colored key into that steel door in the morning, my coffee hot and my hair still wet, I can never quite tell what I will be greeted by.

"I'll never forget my first day here," a co-worker of mine said to me, half-wistfully, just the other day. "It was three years ago-- and the very first hour I was on the unit, this coked-up black guy wandered out of his room-- completely buck-ass naked-- into the hallway and started doing pushups. Then he stood up, peed into a paper cup, and drank it."

My first day was September 13th, and it's hard for me, almost three months later, to remember the exact details. But one thing I can say for sure: yesterday was different from my first day, which has been different from every other day since. On Sunday, I was running an art group for the acute ward patients. There was one of me, and six of them, seated around a long, rectangular table, making holiday cards. For whom, you might ask? Oh, well, one patient was making a holiday card for his daughter. Another patient made one for "the aliens." Another had a big bloody skull on the cover and was addressed to "obamanigger."

"I might not be able to mail that one," I told the patient in question. In truth, we're not allowed to mail anything to the White House, regardless of how the President's name is spelled.

While the patients were drawing, I had classical music playing and, for a rare moment, everyone was peaceful, focused, and content. And in walked Kim-Chee (not his real name!), a fifty-year-old Asian patient, wearing three pair of jeans. He had face cream all over every inch of his face-- maybe he had used five or six packets of it, and he looked like some kind of bizarre Kabuki performer from long ago, all you could see were these tiny little eyes peering out from behind this gloppy, white mask. Everyone at the table looked up from their holiday cards and turned to regard this sight. Kim-Chee looked back at us for a moment, the moment where I always wonder if something violent is about to happen, and then he turned around and walked out. My patients wordlessly returned back to their holiday cards.

This is one of the first jobs I have ever truly enjoyed-- which is funny, because I've had a lot of jobs in my life, and if you told me that I would enjoy being inside an acute mental institution, one of the most unpredictable and potentially violent places in the state, well, I would have told you that you were crazy. But I guess there has always been some part of me that thrives on a delicate mixture of predictability and chaos. The predictability is provided by the schedule, and the monotonous, mountainous paperwork, and the chaos is provided by, well, duh. But there's hope here, too-- it's not just about the zany antics and the unreal shit that they say, which shouldn't crack me up, but sometimes does. There is great, deft humanity here ensconsed within these cinder-block walls, and I'm privileged to be a part of it. You never know what you'll find. Sometimes it's an eerily familiar last name on the admissions sheet. Sometimes it's someone trying to choke themselves in the shower with a torn pillow case. Sometimes it's a faker, or a cutter, or a genius, or a soloist, or a racist. Jesus is here almost every day, in one form or another. A patient gave me a little card with his picture on it just yesterday. I put it on my wife's pillow.

Yesterday found me running art group on the acute ward again. An elderly man, white hair and a beard, frail and gowned with a flannel shirt on, too, was brought back onto the ward after being transferred here from prison. Who knows what he did. The nurse sat him down and covered his bare, spindly little legs with a blanket. As she did, she noticed that the front pockets of his flannel shirt were bulging impossibly. She told the patient to empty his pockets, and out came twenty or thirty ketchup packets, napkins, and plastic forks and spoons. She stood him up and had him reach into his diaper, which I thought was a little much, until he pulled out more forks and spoons. The nurse turned to me and we made eye contact as she picked up the utensils with a gloved hand, throwing them into a trash can nearby.

"Take your feet out of your slippers," she said to the patient, still looking at me. I smiled uncomfortably.

The patient sat down and slipped his feet out of his slippers. The nurse turned to me again.

"Are you kidding me? Really?"

She wrinkled her nose and furrowed her brow as she pulled out two sausage patties, one in each slipper.

You never know what you'll find.

DOGS: Bad Dogs, Bad Dogs-- Whatcha Gonna Do, Whatcha Gonna Do...

It's no secret that I love "COPS." I love COPS even more than I love Gilbert & Sullivan-- and I may be the only person in the whole goddamn world who can say that sentence in all seriousness. Give me a choice between a night at the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and a marathon of "COPS," I would be hard-pressed to choose those expertly-trained voices over a couple hours of baton-bashing, dumbass-tasing fun.

I mean-- a free night of Gilbert & Sullivan might sway me-- but opera tickets are expensive, and COPS is free and out on bail.

My wife is a "COPS" (and G&S) convert, I'm happy to say-- and I didn't even have to resort to the last-ditch tactic of cuffing and stuffing her... on the sofa in front of the TV on a Saturday night. She went willingly. Maybe she gets all misty-eyed and remembers the times when we were first long-distance dating and I would be watching "COPS" at my place in suburban Philadelphia, and she would be watching "COPS" at her place in Pittsburgh and we would discuss the various foot pursuits and felony car stops with intense sexual longing.

Like most couples do.

One of the things that my wife likes to poke some justified fun at are the police pontifications that inevitably occur at the beginning of each segment.

They're unscripted, but they might as well be, because they're all the fucking same:

I always knew I wanted to be a cop.

I got into law enforcement 'cuz I wanted to help people.

My dad's a cop, his dad was a cop, my uncles and cousins are all cops-- my wife's a dispatcher, my grandmother was a cop-- kicked the shit out of Al Capone once-- and my dog's a K-9 cop. My gerbil's a sergeant on the tactical entry unit of the SWAT team the next county over.

You meet a lot of interesting people in this job.

Every day you come into work, you never know what's going to happen.

It's that last one that gets me every time. Pal, nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen when they come into work. Yes, you might be getting mooned by a busload of drunken frat assholes from the local community college one minute and be arresting some banged-up hooker with tit-rings and anal leakage the next-- but, like, last week, I went to "Staples" and both of the black-and-white photocopiers were broken. Not only that, but the line at the post office was nine people long, and I had to take my bulk mailing in the next day, because, well, I just couldn't wait that long.

I mean-- I sure didn't know that was going to happen.

On Wednesday night, my wife and I got a puppy. Her name is Molly. She's very cute. God takes great pains to make puppies extra special cute so you don't beat their heads in with their empty food bowl when they hot-shit all over your brand new hand-woven oriental hallway runner.

I admit that I don't know what being a cop is like, but I suspect that, judging from the opening monologues diligently recited by police officers the country over that it's a lot like being the owner of a puppy.

"Every day, you never know what's going to happen."

Fuckin' aye, Ossifer. After a day or two of being a Puppy Daddy, I feel that shit. Hard. At 1:45 in the morning, I have also been known to step in it, bleary-eyed, on our bedroom floor.

On Thursday, I popped in on our little pup three times, to see how she was doing. We keep our veteran dog gated in the kitchen, because he has a nasty tendency to scratch/eat through doors when left alone, and so we thought we'd try gating our rookie dog with him until such time as we could procure a crate to crate-train the little Molly Monster. When I arrived home for Check-up #1, I entered the house and it was very, very quiet.

You never know what's gonna happen...

As I made my way to the kitchen, I saw one big, gray head in the kitchen doorway, above the top of the gate. Ah, hello, Finley, you good, old dog. But there was no sweet, small, blonde head to be seen. Finley was alone in the kitchen, the gate was still up.

"Oh, my God," I thought to myself, "she's dead."

And so, as a cop would, I cleared room after room. Kitchen: clear! Dining room: clear! Living room: clear! I started up the stairs one by one, smelling something unfortunate. As I stepped on the fifth or six stair, I saw that little blonde head poking out. And then I saw her little chocolate muffin treats all over our rug. Oh, and a pee-pee lake in the office. She had pushed against the gate with her head until it made enough of a space for her to crawl under.

The second time I came home, she showed Daddy her new trick: vaulting clear over the gate like an Olympic hurdle star.

When you own a puppy, you come home and take stock. The snow shovel is on the ground. There's a wet spot on the couch. The rug's mussed up. The bathroom door is ajar. The old dog looks very disturbed. A sweater is on the floor. It smells like a nursing home. It's time to play everybody's favorite game: "Find That Shitheap."

Predictability, like the ho-hum, hum-drum of the cubicle/office/non-profit administration world, is gone-- at least, until she's housebroken.

Until then, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do....

If You Took My TV Away...

...I would cry.

And I didn't even cry at Aunt Mickey's funeral. But I would cry if you took my TV away.

Taking my TV away during the Olympics would be an especially cruel thing to do. If you took my TV away while the Olympics were on, I would not only cry, but I would set fire to your pubes and kick over all the gravestones of your ancestors and take a shit in your mailbox.

There would be Mad Apron. Mad, I tell you.

Some people are able to pinpoint exactly how much TV they watch in a given week. I really don't know how much TV I watch, and whether it's a lot or a little in comparison to, say, the average American my age or, say, the average 2-year-old. Honest to God-- last night, when my wife and I were driving home from a particularly putrid rehearsal, we passed a Scion xA being driven by a Brittany Spearsalike and there was a huge (for a car) TV screen, probably about eight inches playing some insipid children's crap to entertain her toddler in the back seat.

Her toddler, motherfuckers, her toddler. I'll bet, however much TV I watch, I watch less than that kid.

I enjoy an eclectic variety of programming.

COPS
The Today Show
Project Runway (love me my Tim Gunn)
Jeopardy!
Teen Mom (at least it's not "Jersey Shore")
Antiques Roadshow

Strangely enough, the only show on this list that I love unconditionally, without qualm or complaint, is COPS. I could watch COPS 24 hours a day, which I admit is a bit unsettling, but I like it for the same reason that the cops on it like being cops: because you never know what is going to happen, and even the most banal, benign situation can turn exciting in a heartbeat.

All the other shows that I watch, I watch with at least one great reservation. You know my beef with The Today Show, and that beef's name is (come on, say it with me now): "Meredith Vieira." Yes, we despise that leathery, sychophantic, post-menopausal twig-woman. Yes, we do.

Project Runway I am very much taken with. I love the drama, the cattiness, the gayness, the bleeped-out-ness, the Gunn-ness, I even love me some Klum-ness. But I cannot stand that product placement. The "Thank you, Mood!" and the Garnier hair salon, the Loreal Paris make-up room, the Bluefly.com accessory wall ("thoughtfully!") and the shots of the stupid HP compu-notepad in every fucking episode that none of the designers actually like using. The product-placement on that show is atrocious. Still, I make it work.

My problem with Jeopardy! is Alex Trebek, mostly. I don't particularly fancy his holier-than-thou attitude, and he's gay without being gay, and that's annoying to me. My biggest problem with the show, though, isn't even Alex, it's the terrible, awkward, stilted, painful interviews that he insists on conducting after the show returns from its first commercial break with the Aspergian, wall-eyed, socially-retarded contestants.

Alex: "So-- I understand that at one time you had a very interesting experience on a camping trip in the Kodiak Mountains..."

Dork With Ponytail and Buck-Teeth: "Um... well, yes, Alex. Actually, um, it was me and several of my Mensa compatriots... we, um, were doing a study on the effects of, er, high-altitude conditions on scrod and, well, um... one of us got a splinter and contracted AIDS and, well, we forgot the scrod back at our lab and we, er, ended up watching old "Golden Girls" episodes on my my friend's iPhone. Well, he's not actually my friend. But I secretly love him."

Fascinating. Will somebody please shove a pickle fork through my left eye now?

Teen Mom is almost the perfect show. It's got comedy, drama, little sluts running around half-dressed, behaving badly and screaming at their martini-loving mothers. What's not to like? However, there are far too many commercials. It's an hour show, and there's around sixteen minutes of actual content, if you can call it that. And that's not cool. Plus, if there's going to be that many goddamn commercials, they should all be for local gynecologists offices, Pampers, and Nuva-vag.

Antiques Roadshow is a show that I thoroughly enjoy, even though it tends to be soporific, and I admit that it's hard to justify liking a show that you can fall asleep during, but I really do love it. Maybe I'm just a sucker for an early 20th century 18-karat white gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, but I can't get enough of that shit. I don't like the following things about Antiques Roadshow:

1.) When people bring in shit that they think is old and find out it's fake. I know you'd think I'm the kind of asshole who would revel in other people's embarrassment, but really, I don't. I get so embarrassed for them it's hard for me to look at the TV.

2.) When people say, "Oh, I'd never sell it!" after hearing that their signed Babe Ruth jit-rag is worth $7.6 million dollars. Fuck you, you saggy old lizard-- of course you're going to sell it.

3.) The segments that they do half-way through the episode where Mark L. Walberg interviews some dried-up motherfucker about goddamn windmills or boot spurs or something. And who the fuck is Mark L. Walberg anyway?

The Saturday Night Demons

My wife and I have a dirty little secret.

No, no-- don't get too excited. It doesn't involve water-based lubricants, unmarked DVDs, or mysteriously-stained tea-towels wedged in between our bed and the wall.

We watch COPS.

We don't do it every Saturday night, though. I mean, we're pretty cultured folks. We go to the opera and the theatre and folk music concerts-- sometimes we go out for dinner or take walks, but, when we happen to be at home on a Saturday night, say, after a fucking exhausting day of assembling eight foot tall bookshelves and schlepping forty-some-odd boxes of books downstairs to then fill the fucking bookshelves which have been sitting in a state of disassemblage for the past six months, well, sometimes you just want to flop down on the couch with some mango lemonade and watch some motherfuckers get tased.

Just like my wife didn't come into our relationship knowing anything about Herbie the Love Bug or Gilbert & Sullivan, she wasn't a COPS watcher before she met me. That's okay, I didn't know anything about baking or www.craftster.org before I met her either, and look at what a happy convert I've become.

I can't say why particularly my wife enjoys watching COPS. I know she gets excited and scared, she gets very adrenalized when there are high speed pursuits and dangerous take-downs of people who are obviously on hopped up on drugs. There is always a little bit of weirdness in the atmosphere when we watch COPS because, in 2003, I went to the police academy with every intention of becoming a police officer. I trained hard to get in shape for the rigorous physical tests, I ran at a local track every morning and I even visited with a physical trainer who gave me advice on how to "cheat" the bench press that I would eventually fail, resulting in my voluntarily leaving the academy.

Prior to that, though, I took written examinations for several police departments, and scored in the 99th percentile for one of the departments. I also, fearing the ridicule I knew I would face at the academy when the question "Has anybody in here never handled or fired a gun?" was asked and my gangly, scrawny arm would have to reach for the ceiling, took a private class where I learned all about gun safety. I got to disassemble and reassemble a 9mm Glock. I even took a fill-in-the-blank test on gun safety and the names of all the different pieces of the gun.

"True or False: Showering with your gun is a good way to keep it clean."

Just kidding, but it was kind of like that.

I always have very mixed emotions when I sit down to watch COPS. It's a bit like confronting my demons from the past. At 29, I know it is something I will never be. I made my decision, and that was that. I was close, but never that close. I went to an interview with a local sheriff's office wearing a gray three-piece suit, for Christ's sake. The sheriff, a female, didn't know exactly what to make of me. It didn't matter, they wouldn't hire anybody who hadn't been through the academy. What did I know? Some departments hire you first and then send you to the academy, some want you ready to hit the streets. None of them, I think, want you in a three-piece suit.

But I often think of what might have been. Like any job, of course, there would have been good days and bad days. One of the officers on COPS tonight, during the trite, 20 second soundbytes they run of them pontificating for the benefit of the cameraman and sound guy stuffed into the back of the patrol car said, "We use a team approach on our shift. It's the same guys all the time, and each of us has their own particular strengths." I wonder what they would have said about me. What would my particular strength be? Expecting and preparing for the worst? Maybe. More likely it would have been talking to people.

It's funny, because I really hate to talk to people. But, when I do it, when I have to solve a problem or resolve a conflict, I can cut through bullshit and be very direct, while still maintaining compassion and preserving someone else's dignity, even if I think they're full of shit. A suspect in a domestic dispute tonight on the show freaked out at his girlfriend because his one-year-old kid's shirt had a crease on it.

"I was in the navy, you know, so appearance, you know, how you look is really important to me," said the d-bag, who, by the way, had a lip-piercing.

The cop who dealt with him was huge, with a neck the size of an oak tree, and he spoke in a very short, clipped way, a gruff way, a mechanical, bored way. I was disappointed. I wanted to yell, "Put me in, Sarge! I want to talk to this guy."

Really. I wanted to really talk to him. I wanted to talk to him about his girlfriend, about his son, about life. About what really matters in life. I wanted to ask him what he does when his one-year-old son throws up on himself, or shits himself-- what does he do-- have sixteen new outfits for the kid to wear each day? Does he have a fucking fit every time Junior drools on himself? Life's too short, friend.

So much of law enforcement is about talking, and I think people forget that. All they see is takedowns and writing tickets, but it's mostly about talking. And that's what I wanted to do-- put on a uniform, get out there in a big, comfy car and talk to people. I wanted to do the thing I hate doing most, because I might not like it, but I am good at it.

But I have this blog instead.

Thanks for listening.

The Craigslist Killer

They caught him.

Shemales, masseusses, whores and trannys rejoice. All those who provide "erotic services" in New England area hotel rooms for money: you are now safe at last, and you have the Boston Police Department to thank.

Well, you're safe-er, I guess.

It's funny, the Craigslist Killer (isn't the media so undyingly clever?) does not fit the profile of what the American populous expects a Craiglist Killer, or any killer for that matter, to look like. We expect killers to be, um, I don't know... unwashed? Er... stark, raving, looneybonk? Uh... black?

(Uh-oh, another blogger who "tells it like it is!" EEP!)

Seriously, though, people are as surprised that someone as successful and good looking as Philip Markoff can kill as they are that someone as frumpish and awkward looking as Susan Boyle can sing. When people don't fit into stereotypes, the American public just goes ape. We don't know what to do.

"But... he was going to get married in the summer...."

"But.... he wears his Abercrombie sweater tied around his shoulders...."

"But.... he was going to be a doctor...."

Well, guess what, homies: rabbis kill their wives, priests finger boys' buttholes, cops use excessive force, and doctors are not so nice sometimes too.

Ever hear of Josef Mengele? 'Nuff said.

People like the Craigslist Killer shake us out of our state of complacency, where everything fits just right and the people we see are who we think they are, or who we want them to be. But, really, this guy is just a hapless schmuck like the rest of us, who probably had one too many student loans to pay, and bills for his impending marriage to his All American Girl looming overhead like a sword of Damocles-- and he made the decision to get some quick money by robbing some less-than-proper folks and, in doing so, became one himself. Especially when one of them made the mistake of resisting or fighting back. Oops! You're dead.

It's time, though, for people to stop being so stunned and shocked when these good ol' boys from "the top of their class" wind up in handcuffs. They're nothing special because their names were on the Dean's List a couple years ago. They're just shitheads, the same as the ones you see getting jacked up against Crown Vics outside trailer parks on FOX every Saturday night. The only difference between them is that Bobby Deans List has the means to facilitate a veneer to fool and obscure that Jamal Drop Out does not possess.

We really show ourselves to still be an inherently racist society when our mouths hang agape everytime a clean-shaven white kid gets busted. People, get over yourselves and get over your love-affair with the crew-necked, crew-cut, crew-team American boy.

He ain't home.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys...

I love watching COPS.

Even though it's silly and predictable. Lots of people probably wouldn't think a show about police work could be predictable, but it is. There are three "incidents" per 1/2 hour show. The first incident is almost invariably a high-speed vehicle pursuit. This gets the adrenaline going, and will sustain you through the relative banality of the second incident, a domestic or a drug call, and the third incident, a domestic or a drug call.

The little monologues that these poor police officers have to suffer through delivering at the return from commercial break are as predictable as they are deadly:

"Well, I've known I wanted to be a police officer since I was (insert single-digit number) months old. My (insert any number of male family members) are cops-- I've got (insert slightly smaller number) brothers who are sherrif's deputies over in (insert name of some bullshit hicktown) County. There's over (insert very large number) years of law enforcement in my family. I was in the (insert branch of U.S. armed forces) prior to joining the police department. I love my job, there's always something exciting and different and the people of this city are basically (insert untrue, positive-sounding adjective)."

But that's COPS in a nutshell. More people these days are getting tased instead of shot, so I guess that's a good thing.

Sometimes on the show they will mix it up a little bit and devote an entire episode to a sting operation, where the police are working to get the drop on a suspect. They find the scummiest looking officer in the narcotics squad, tell him to stop shaving for a week, dress him up in a wife-beater and a pair of shat-in jeans and have him walking around selling drugs to the kindly townsfolk who are out... well, looking for drugs. Once a sale is made, an army of unadorned Crown Victorias come from out of nowhere and the druggie is efficiently whisked away, clearing the scene for another bust.

Rarely, they'll do reverse prostitution busts where they pad a female officer's bra and shove her in a duct-tape mini-skirt and red vinyl heels to go parade along some shitty street and pick up the local horny bastards who are looking to bust a cheap nut.

Just this morning, Mrs. Apron and I got into a rather heated discussion about the merits of these types of operations. Our debate was prompted not by an episode of COPS (yeah, we watch it together-- that gay or something?) but by a news report about a dentist who was arrested by police after the dentist had arranged to meet a "14-year-old girl" for sex. Of course, there was no fourteen-year-old girl, it was police officers posing online as a 14-year-old girl, presumably clinging to a sheet of common interwebisms like "ROFL" and "WTF?" to augment their assuredly stunted online tweencabulary.

While Mrs. Apron obviously has no love for pedo's, she made the argument that this style of policing was entrapment.

"Um... yeah, it is," I said. "So what?"

She claimed that at least some of the individuals arrested for crimes online may not necessarily have committed those crimes, or planned to commit those crimes, if the situation itself had not been there, i.e., if these police officers weren't posing as a vulnerable, lascivious 14-year-old girl, might this dentist just have kept going on practicing non-pedo dentistry in peace and harmony with the rest of the non-fondling world?

"So much of what I've learned about crime is that it's situational," she said. And indeed she is right about that. A crime is committed by a poor person. Let's say someone lost their job, and then they lose their house, and their car, and their means to get food. Well, sure, that person is going to steal. And, in order to steal, because stealing's dangerous, might he not try to procure a gun? And, in the course of stealing while being armed, might he not encounter a situation where the gun will be used? He might.

Mrs. Apron is right, of course-- crime is situational but I have to believe that, if these touchers and tweakers have the motivation, the lust and the drive, they will find and seek out a situation through which they may carry out those desires, whether the police are out there or not.

Just like the fact that so much of crime is situational, so much of policing is responsive-- and that has to change. The days when officers sit on their doughy asses or drive around the parks and cemeteries at night and just wait for the radio to crackle so they can hit the lights and gun the engine are over. With information technology and creative thinking, there have to be better ways to utilize law enforcement resources. Police respond generally after a crime has been committed, when there's a victim crying in a corner or lying, bloody on the ground. After the victim's dealt with, the police then go out and hunt for the offender. Wouldn't it be great to snag an offender without having the victim?

I don't believe the argument that trapping suspects by foiling them or presenting them with bogus situations is unethical, but I'm very curious to open this up to you readers to see what you think.

Here's my final two cents: if you go trolling the internet looking for jailbait, you need to know that you're playing Russian Roulette-- maybe it'll be what you think it is, and maybe it won't. That, frankly, is your problem.