Aw, Shewt...

So, I've been learning a lot about myself lately.

One thing that I've learned, looking at my resume (as I have been doing quite a bit lately) is that I've had many jobs, but no careers. A dear old friend of mine has been trying to convince me that many people my age are this way, and that, if this were the 1920s, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

He's probably right on both points. A great many people my age flit from job to job, wandering directionless well into their late twenties, searching for a place where they fit, whilst spinning their wheels in a lot of places where they don't. And, were this the 1920s, I most likely would have apprenticed in some trade, and stayed with it for the rest of my life, or perhaps changed paths once, if at all.

This friend, by the way, decided that he wanted to be a physician when he was 24, requiring a post bac year to get himself up-to-speed. So I guess he knows what he's talking about. As much as anyone I know, at least.

But I still can't help feeling, I don't know, insecure. Singular in my inability to prove myself on a career path. Different. I guess that what comes from your parents telling you you're special, unique, apart. Didn't your parents tell you that, too?

And so I've got my job, and I'm using it as a place-holder until the career in law enforcement starts. To prep myself, I've been lifting weights-- turning my spindly little arms into, um, less spindly little arms? I've been running, jogging, sprinting, sit-upping....

Oh, and shooting.

A month ago, I had never fired a gun. Seven years ago, when I tried to become a cop the first time, I took apart a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and I put it back together again in a small classroom in front of a retired police officer. Oh, and I also did a fill-in-the-blank ditto sheet, identifying the parts of the gun. I never fired it. Realizing that I would be amongst individuals who are ex-Army types, and huntin' types, and people who've been popping off rounds since before they had any peach fuzz to speak of, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet.

Ha.

My wife and I are fortunate enough to live in what I feel is a sort of neighborhood that is on the cusp of upper-middle class. In any case, you have to drive for a while before you can arrive at a destination where people shoot guns on a regular basis. The closest firing range open to the public that I know of is around fifty minutes away. I've been twice, and Mrs. Apron went with me both times. The first time was after a very strenuous hike, and Mrs. Apron had slid down a rocky embankment, mostly on her butt, but some of it on her arm, which she managed to gash up.

"Did he do that to you?" the gun shop clerk asked with a wry grin on his face the first time we went. We were covered in dirt, gravel dust, and sweat. He was dressed in a denim collared shirt, denim shorts, and he wore a Glock in a holster on his hip. I guess it's like waitresses at Flingers needing to wear 36 pieces of flair. I was surprised he wasn't wearing 35 other guns. I'm sure there was at least one other one that we couldn't see.

Mrs. Apron vacillated on whether or not she wanted to shoot or watch. Finally, she capitulated. The clerk was very friendly, in spite of the Tea Party literature all over the place and a sign that said, "Gun Control = Two Hands on a Gun" and he didn't make us feel like the incompetent Jews that we were. He started us out on a .22 caliber handgun, which felt extremely dangerous.

Until we went back the next time and fired a .38. That motherfucker was big, and heavy, and loud.

Firing a gun is very strange if you've never done it before. Then again, I guess anything is strange if you've never done it before. While we were at the firing range the first time, I can remember putting the bullets into the gun and thinking about my "firsts." I couldn't remember the first time I was behind the wheel of a car, and what that felt like. I do remember the first time being behind the wheel of an ambulance, totally convinced that I would kill my partner, the patient, and myself. I remember the first time I had sex. Let's just say shooting the .22 went better. It lasted longer, too.

I felt much more confident the second time we went, and I kind of got a little smitten with the .38, even though the ammunition cost a LOT more. I'm, of course, ashamed about the fact that I enjoyed utilizing an instrument of death and destruction. In Tad Friend's book, "Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor" he writes of a choice abbreviation that his mother frequently employed: "NFOCD."

"Not For Our Class, Dear."

When I first approached my mother at the tenderish age of 22 and announced my intention to take the police officer exam and enroll at the academy, that is, essentially, what she said to me.

"That's not for you," she informed me seriously.

"Oh, it's okay for some other mother's son, but not for your son?" I asked, expecting that to be a retort that would sting her into a shocked silence. It didn't.

"That's exactly right," my mother replied, before descending into the basement to do laundry, which was, and still is her way of avoiding any unpleasantness more unpleasant than laundry.

She's doing a lot better seven years later. Now, she actually asks me questions about my preparations, she wants to know timelines and takes an interest in where I am faxing resumes and when tests are coming up. When I told her I had applied to the FBI, she didn't flinch. Maybe it's because I'm older, or because she's older, or because my middle sister is the squeaky wheel-- with a baby that my mother is basically raising and a marriage on its way to dissolution, and my eldest sister having moved back home under topsy-turvy circumstances.

"I guess I just don't know where to start worrying first," she told me this week.

"Oh, mom," I said, "you started decades ago-- and you'll never finish, so just kind of start in the middle, in the thick of it all. Maybe you'll stop worrying when you're dead."

She laughed.

"Maybe."

"I guess that's why some people call it their 'sweet release'," I said, pushing out the screen door after a brief visit with her and my nephew.

"Well," she said, ever the pragmatist, "I'm not especially looking forward to that either."

Feeling Generous?

You'd have to be made of a pillar of salt or some sort of titanium compound to not be extremely moved by the pictures and film that are coming out of Haiti right now.

And you're very nice, sensitive people, so I think we can all take that you are extremely moved as writ.

It would be very easy for me to write some desperate-sounding, hyperbole-laden plea begging you to send money to aid the thousands and thousands of people who are without food, water, shelter, proper medical assistance or hope. Blogger makes it pretty easy for even technological blunderboobs like me to plop "Donate Now" buttons all over this site and hyperlinks directing you to the American Red Cross and other various relief agencies whose sole mission in life is do-goodery and beg you to send anything, whatever you can afford to the people of Haiti.

But, and it sounds terrible to say this, that's just not me.

Now, before you bitch me out in the comment section of this blog and write angry letters to Lord Jewdemort demanding that I be excommunicated from Heaven and my own home, I ask you to just please hear me out.

Large-scale tragedies are too big for me. At forty pounds underweight for my height, I'm a real small fry. I can't comprehend the big numbers-- maybe this has something to do with my deficiency in mathematics, but I find it almost a total impossibility to comprehend and wrap my skinny, boney little head around a calamity like this.

I can't do it. And maybe that makes me an insufferable asslick, and, if that's the case, go ahead and call me that. You wouldn't be the first-- not even this week.

I can remember going to college with crunchy people who would have jumped right on this earthquake, in fact, many of them are doing so now, even though they're a little more crinkly around the eyes and wizened than they used to be, back when they wore baggy corduroys, dreds, and carried around filthy Nalgene bottles festooned with Amnesty International stickers. They're on Facebook now (I have 267 Facebook friends, you know, and I regularly communicate with approximately four people-- one of them being my wife) donating their statuses to the Haiti earthquake, putting up desperate appeals for funding through your cell phone company or through UPS, even though most people write comments under these statuses claiming that these are nothing but frauds and schemes designed to take advantage of people with filthy Nalgene bottles.

Which I find sad and a little bit pointless.

When I worked on the streets as an EMT, Katrina beat the everloving shit out of New Orleans. My ambulance company got organized and sent dozens of ambulances down South, manned by many of my coworkers and friends. If I weren't affianced at the time, I said to my supervisor, I'd go. Of course, when my friends and coworkers returned, they told stories that made me glad I hadn't. Their radios didn't work with New Orleans emergency dispatch frequencies. They didn't have GPS and routinely got totally lost looking for unfamiliar addresses in a foreign environment. Some EMTs and paramedics resorted to sleeping in their trucks because their motel rooms were virtually uninhabitable. They ran out of supplies, got into fights with New Orleans EMS crews, and with each other, and the relief effort mounted by my former ambulance company was generally regarded in the end as uncoordinated and bungled.

When I looked at pictures of the cortege of ambulances headed down I-95 emblazoned with our company's logo, I snarkily snarffed, "It looks like charity, but it smells like a publicity stunt."

Geez, what an asslick.

I'm disenfranchised, too, I think, with all the media coverage that is being filtered, sifted, sorted, and exploited by the American media. Tallies of how many Americans have been injured or killed, profiles of Americans who have lost legs or have no contact with their adopted Haitian children. Americans who are missing. It's a little much and, while I realize that we are in America and that these are American media sources, I think it's presumptuous to assume that the only thing Americans care about are whether or not there are Americans affected by a tragedy. Why are we not able to feel for and empathize with people of different nationalities, and worry about them and their welfare?

That said, I'm not going to be sending any of my fungible funds that are earmarked for charitable endeavors to Haiti.

Why? Like I said-- it's just not my thing.

Many of you know what my cause-de-plume and charity-of-choice is: fallen police officers. My wife calls it my "fetish." Well, if it is, it's my number one. And I have a number two, too: wounded police officers.

On Saturday, January 9th at around 2am, Anchorage Police Officer Jason Allen was sitting in his marked patrol car finishing up some paperwork on a domestic assault call. A dark colored sedan pulled up next to his cruiser and someone opened fire on the officer, striking him five times. Officer Allen had absolutely no inkling of what was happening to him, he never had a chance to draw his weapon or take any action to defend himself-- he was taken completely by surprise in a totally unprovoked act of violence, hatred, and cowardice.

The occupants in the dark sedan got away, speeding off into the frigid Alaska night.

The bastards who shot Officer Allen are still on the loose, and Officer Allen is still in the hospital, only moved out of ICU a day or so ago. I know it's difficult for lots of 20somethings to muster up the gumption to give a rat's ass about anyone who dons a blue uniform and pins on a badge every morning, but if ever there was a time to stand up, it's now.

There's two funds to which you can make a contribution in support of Officer Allen, the victim of a senseless and rage-filled act of brutality. If you want your efforts to go towards finding the shitheads who opened fire on him, there's the Jason Allen Reward Fund. If helping to assist with his gigantic medical bills, and unmet costs for his family, there's the Jason Allen Family Support Fund. There's only one way to support either, or both, and that's by dusting off the old checkbook and writing a check to:

Key Bank, Anchorage
601 W. 5th Avenue
Suite 100
Anchorage, Alaska 99501

In the memo section of your check, write either "Jason Allen Reward Fund" (if you like catchin' bad guys) or "Jason Allen Family Support Fund" (if you like, um, supportin' families).

I don't know if anybody writes checks anymore. You might feel kind of old-fashioned doing it, but I hope you don't think I'm presumptuous in saying that you'll also feel good, too. I'm hopeful for Jason Allen's recovery. I'm hopeful that they catch the shooter(s), too.

And, even though I'm all curmudgeonly about it: I'm hopeful for Haiti, too.