Libertine: On the Prowl

Vidi, vici, veni -- I saw, I conquered, I came. _______________________________________________________________

Letters to the Editor

01:18, 2008-Jan-31 .. Posted in writing .. 3 comments .. Link

When I was in college and for several years thereafter, I regularly wrote "letters to the editor", all of which were published. Most of these letters were in response to things I'd read in the paper that I disagreed with. In a very real sense, these letters were my precursor to keeping a blog; particularly my ranty entries.

Back then, writing a letter to the editor meant typing a hard copy letter on my typewriter, after first writing it in pen on a yellow legal pad. I never liked messing with carbon, so I either made a photocopy of the letter at the library, or saved the handwritten copy as my copy,

After mailing it, I'd wait a day or two to make sure they'd gotten it, then check the paper every day to wait for it to appear in print. When it did, I'd cut it out from the paper and save it in a scrapbook. I'd continue to watch the paper for several days, in case there were rebuttals to my letters, which happened from time to time.

All these years later, I'm amazed at my patience and how long the process took compared to now. Nowadays, I'll fire off a comment on a blog or a site like Alternet and it appears immediately. Rebuttals, similarly, can appear within a minute.

I've not written a letter to a traditional newspaper in over 20 years. The main reason for that was when I joined the police force in a relatively small community, I didn't necessarily want my employers to know my opinions on politics and other controversial matters. So, I reluctantly gave up my letters to the editor hobby.

I even remember the topic of my very first letter, written in 1977. At that time, the drinking age was 18 and my state was considering raising it to 19. As I was already 19 at the time, it wouldn't affect me, but I opposed raising the age. I pointed out that 18 year olds could be sent to war, get married, sign contracts, and so on, so it was not fair to bar them from drinking. I said that all rights and responsibilities of adulthood should be granted at the same age in order to be consistent and fair. If 18 year olds were "children" when it came to having a beer, then they ought to be considered "children" when it came to going to war. I don't remember the exact words, but that was pretty much the gist of it.

Have you ever written a letter to the editor?

Fatigue and Writer's Block

10:13, 2007-Jul-18 .. Posted in writing .. 0 comments .. Link

I'm very tired right now. For several days, I've been waking up after only a few hours sleep. I'm usually able to go back and get a nap and make up the sleep, but I've not had an entire eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for a couple of weeks now. Who knows why.

I didn't really have anything to write about today and my fatigue is making it difficult to come up with anything. If I'd already had an idea, fatigue wouldn't have kept me from writing about it, but it does affect coming up with something in the first place.

I tried to reproduce an entry I made on my Blog City blog that had a few large graphics. Unfortunately, they didn't fit well on this blog -- it cut off part of the image. Reducing the images would not help as the images had text on them that would have been rendered unreadably blurry if I had. So, I ended up having to delete that, returning myself to square one over what to do for today's entry.

Yawn. I think I'm going to try to go back and get some sleep if I can.

More Old Journal Entries

12:30, 2007-Jun-21 .. Posted in writing .. 0 comments .. Link

March 11, 1989
We brought in two feisty females tonight. They'd gone into a convenience store and started a fight there, knocking down product displays all over the store. One stabbed the other, then they ran across the street to continue. We found them in the kitchen holding each other at bay with knives; with one holding a baby. Of course, they insisted upon fighting US too and had to be dragged to jail, where they naturally refused to cooperate.

March 17, 1989
The night before last we had a woman call in to report a man jerking off outside her window. JB asked the dispatcher if the complainant could describe the suspect. There was a long pause on the radio (as the dispatchers paused to laugh their asses off, no doubt), then a dispatcher snapped back, "He'll be the one with his pants around his ankles with his dick in his hand", before giving details about his race, age, height, etc. I mean, just how many men did he expect to find at 4 in the morning out there jerking off?

March 20, 1989
JW was hurt pretty bad last night. He'd seen someone that we had an armed robbery warrant on and went to arrest him. The guy resisted him and they got into a fight, fucking up JW's hand -- he almost lost his pinkie finger. While he and the suspect were rolling around on the ground, his backup arrived and pulled the guy off him, who turned out to be hopped up on drugs.

They brought both of them to the hospital at the same time. One idiot nurse made comments about police brutality and the Captain climbed all over her, pointing out that this guy had held up people at gunpoint and had hurt people and that there was a badly hurt officer in the next room.

Later on, the jailers reported that he refused to go to court, threatening to beat up anyone who came into his cell.

March 24, 1989
All the loonies are out in force tonight. We have a regular nut who comes in all the time just to see if we're all right and then proceeds to talk about all her ailments and operations. She is harmless, however, and not all that irritating, like a lot of unbalanced people can be.

March 25, 1989
One of the dispatchers had a woman call all the way from New Jersey. She wanted to know if Jessica Hahn (from the Jim Bakker scandal) worked for one of our local radio stations. She wanted to ask her who had done her nose job! She went on to say she'd even called the Playboy mansion looking for her! Every time I think I've heard everything, I hear about something like this that shows me that I haven't heard everything and probably never will. Nuts are infinite in their ways to be nutty.

April 8, 1989
Some teenager missed the curve at the lake and drove his car right into it. We didn't know a thing about it until he showed up at the ER. A good part of the night was spent at the lake with wreckers trying to get the car out of the lake.

April 12, 1989
We've been having a lot of problems with the patrol cars lately. As an example, last night AJ had one run on him. As he was chasing the suspect's car, his car stalled out and he rolled backwards into a ditch. I can just see him now, beating the steering wheel, saying "Damn, damn, damn, damn", as he sat there in the ditch watching the guy get away.

April 21, 1989
We picked up a stabbing victim at one of the movie theaters. The guy had gotten stabbed somewhere down in the hood and his friends were trying to get him to the hospital when their car died in front of the theater. They called us and we took him to the hospital and caught the one who stabbed him shortly after that.

While all this was going on, a domestic argument call was dispatched. When the two officers arrived, they heard shots coming from inside the house, prompting them to call for backup. The entire shift rushed down there with the exception of one rookie who was left to watch the stabber from the incident above. It was close to shift change and the officers about to come on duty, quickly signed on duty and headed out there as well. All of us surrounded the house.

And the hero of the day turned out to be the one female officer on the scene, who was one of the two officers originally dispatched to the call. When the gunman came out of the house, she quickly tackled, subdued, and handcuffed him, ending the standoff.

Later on, she and the other officer originally dispatched came up to a group of us, holding up a screen door full of bullet holes, saying, "See, he really DID shoot at us!"