Nearly two weeks in at the cop academy and I’m not nearly so terrified.

Where last week I was nervous of offending a senior class member (Trey? Scared of offending someone? Come on…never happen), now I’m more closely aligned with my own long-standing DNA: if I offend you…rah, rah, rah, bite my hump.

In fact, I have a hard time with the whole senior class/junior class crap. A pile of the senior class members have taken it upon themselves to be as full of asshattery as humanly possible.

“Make a hole for the seniors,” one belted out yesterday in the hallway.

Make a hole? For people who’ve been in class six weeks longer than me? Hell, a whole bunch, of not most, of them don’t yet have a single day in at an agency and I’ve got three damn years. Yeah, I don’t think so. How about this, senior wretch? How about you lick the sweat off my…well, you get the picture.

What I love, in almost the same extreme that I hate the senior/junior class bullshit, is the classroom. The administration warned us, the first couple of days, that our first weeks would be massively front loaded with classroom days. Lots of law, lots of use of force, lots of officer presence and verbal judo and the like. Hours and hours and days and days of sitting in a class room, verbally tussling back and forth about what constitutes this crime or that, how this is mitigation or aggravation, use of a deadly weapon or simply the threat of a deadly weapon, how this person is in a protected class, how that person isn’t. Lots of Power Point presentations, lots of note taking. The kids – and the median age in my class is 22 – hate all the classroom work. Hate it with a seething, drooling, blood-spewing fury that I can’t begin to fully describe.

On the other hand, I love it. Love it love it love.

Call me a class room geek, I guess.

Always have been…though my Mama will dispute that because my high school grades were good only when it was a music class.

There are few things I enjoy more than learning and this is – so far – an incredibly intense learning experience. Some of this stuff I have direct experience with (many of the laws and elements of crimes and radio communications and whatnot) from working in the jail and some of it I have indirect knowledge of from reading or writing or riding.

I’m digging this whole thing. Way more than I thought I would.

I’ve even digging the physical training part of things, though to be honest, I’m having a hard time with it. Sucking wind most days, in fact. Sucking wind, actually passing out at one point, whining like a titty baby at most other times.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is the abundance of type A personalities, which makes sense if you think about it. We all wanna be cops. In other words, we all want to be in control. Ditto want A’s want. We are all, to some larger degree than the public at large, control freaks.

Not that that doesn’t fit me anyway. Hehehe, deny deny deny, but I’ve always been a bit of a control freak. Goes along with having a huge ego, I think. Being a writer takes both of those things. An ego large enough to believe anyone gives a shit what I write about – like now, for instance – and control freaky enough to want to create and direct everything that happens in my own little fictional world.

So last week, what drove me the craziest, aside from the military style discipline (what? Trey’s having a problem with discipline, with being told what to do? Shocking…SHOCKING), and a bearded man lecturing me on how and when to shave, was a feta-cheese bimbo.

We eat Bromley Hall, the campus dining hall. Good food. Lots of variety, lots of healthy stuff with just enough unhealthy but fun stuff to keep me interested. But within the first twenty four hours, I discovered that most of the sorority bimbos rarely — if ever — get out of their pajamas.

And I ain’t talking about breakfast time. I’m talking about all damned day!

At breakfast? Pajamas and house slippers. Lunch? Pajamas and house slippers. Dinner…at 5:30 p.m? Freakin’ house-slippers and pajamas! And one of them actually drags a bottle of Kraft Feta Cheese salad dressing down to meals with her.

Okay, lemme understand this. You come to university, no doubt on Daddy’s dime but you can’t actually be bothered to go to class (unless they’re wearing pajamas in class these days) and you are so contemptuous of what Bromley hall serves that you bring your own incredibly obnoxious dressing? I mean, it’s not even Ranch or French or anything normal. It’s freakin’ Feta Cheese. Come on, who eats that crap? I’m not even sure you can legally get that shit in Texas anywhere other than Las Colinas outside of Dallas.

So the other night at dinner, after after doing a mile of jogging, backward jogging, side to side right and side to side left, and skipping, then adding another eighth mile of lunges and finally, literally, passing out during PT then spending the entire rest of the day team-building and sitting in a class room…. In other words, after working my ass off for nearly twelve solid hours, I see this chick who can’t be bothered to go to class or get a job talking on a cellphone wedged between the side of her face and her shoulder WHILE SHE’S CARRYING A MEAL TRAY…UPON WHICH IS SITTING A BOTTLE OF FETA CHEESE.

I had a bit of a meltdown while Chad Hall, a deputy from my own agency, told me to shut the hell up (though I’m not sure woman could actually hear me), and rushed me through my dinner and out of the dining hall.

Please, stop the madness.

Don’t buy Feta Cheese and don’t let your daughters carry a cell phone. And make them get dressed. For at least an hour a day, they should be in something other than pajamas.

Now, lastly this go ‘round, a bit of an apology.

Last time, I managed to offend a deputy at my sheriff’s office. AB was upset with me for saying that I’d be a real police when I graduated. She thought that somehow I believed working radio or the jail made someone less than a real police.

If that was what it sounded like, it was purely unintentional. Having spent three years in the jail, I know how hard that job is. I know what it’s like to fight with someone tweaking on meth or coming down off heroin or simply being drunk and stupid. I know how hard dispatchers work when every single cop in the county and all the towns are screaming over the radio for something, when 911 needs dispatching, when there’s a fire or whatever. So apologies for insinuating they weren’t real cops. They are. They absolutely are.

Okay, I’ve gotta go shine my shoes for tomorrow’s inspection. Yeah, friggin’ inspection. Come on, already, give me my certificate and lemme go catch bad guys.

So here I am: CopLand.

And no, not the crappy Sly Stallone crime movie.

Last Sunday, I started twelve weeks at the Police Training Institute — the main police academy — in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois.

But Trey, aren’t you already a police? Yeah, but on May 10, I’ll be a real police. I’ll be a grown-up, full-sized, big-boy poh-leece.

Cool.

But while part of me is incredibly excited, another part of me is incredibly terrified. See, I spent three years in the jail and my job was to warehouse people at the behest of another officer or the court or the State’s Attorney. Someone else — someone NOT ME — made the decision to arrest someone or sentence them or whatever the case might have been.

Now it’ll be me. I’ll make the decision.

What decision? The decision of whether or not to take someone’s liberty. To take away that most basic thing all people have – that thing Thomas Jefferson said was a right by nature — freedom.

And that scares the shit outta me. Yeah, yeah, I know, those convicted of crimes have forfeited, at least for a while, their right to that freedom. I get that, and I do – absolutely – believe there are people who should be locked away.

But the obviousness of some of those decisions doesn’t necessarily make them any easier. And it shouldn’t. Most crimes, believe it or not, are not black or white. Most crimes involve some degree of gray.

You discover, for instance, the victim was beaten because she walked in on a burglary at her house. The burglar was looking for money to feed a drug habit. Toss them in jail forever? Or maybe get them treatment so that the thing that caused the burglary – the heroin habit – is solved?

Degrees of gray.

And yeah, don’t send me a ton of email saying there are absolutes and offenders should be locked away forever. I believe that, too. The man who rapes and kills a five-year old boy should be locked away at the very least. The man who beats his grandfather to death for the money in the mattress should be locked away.

But there is more gray than one might realize.

What about the man who kills is father? Automatically a killer? Well, what if you knew the father had terminal cancer? What if you knew there was no way the father was strong enough to do the deed himself, couldn’t hold the gun upright? Now, is that murder or euthanasia?

Locking someone away, even if only for a short time, shouldn’t always be an easy decision, I think.

Yet as I write that, I think of cases where it is an absolutely easy, no-brainer decision for me. I catch a drunk driver, they’re going to jail, no question. But then I have thing about drunk drivers, don’t I? I have a thing about the kind of person who would get shit-face blitzed in the middle of an afternoon and run over my wife back in Lubbock, Texas or my mom back in Midland, Texas.

Most cops I know are black/white people. They believe in law and order and want things kept exactly as they should be. I’ve always been someone who found himself fascinated by a grayer world, by shadows and hidden bits and pieces.

So does that mean I’ll be a good cop? Or a bad one?

Hmmmm, the great question. One that will probably take years to answer.

And until we get that answer, we’ll have to live with occasional dispatches from CopLand. I hope to update twice a week, but I’m not yet sure what the schedule is going to be, other than extremely intense and wildly busy.

So while you’re waiting for another dispatch, go watch a great crime movie. Maybe “Love and a .45,” or “Truth or Consequences, N.M.”