One down…eleven to go.

This was such a stupid idea. At this rate, I won’t be finished until well into President Obama’s second term.

See, what I done is…I started a Master’s Program. Why? Who the hell knows. Sounded like a good idea at the time? Uh…thought it might make me more attractive to my wife (“Hey, you hunka-hunka burning intellect, what’s the square root of pi cubed?”) Don’t want to paint my office walls so I thought I’d use the paper of a degree.

Pick your reason.

The main question friends have asked is: will this get you a promotion or a raise?

Fuck no.

Come on, I work for a small county. I’ll get a pat on the head and they’ll move on to new business. Most of the county board of supervisors care not a single whit for education and my Sheriff’s Office is too small to move up the chain. It’s not like we have a forensics lab or a fugitive warrant section or an air division or homicide squad or whatever. We have radio, we have jail, we have road, we have investigations. That’s pretty much it.

So I did this for myself. Because I dig education and I believe everyone ought to learn as much as they can, that they ought to keep improving themselves.

It’s a twelve course program, done on-line at Aspen University. I’m doing it with Officer Friendly (the inimitable Ben Atkinson) and we just finished our first course, Criminal Law.

It was pretty cool, actually. There were eight modules and for each one, there were five questions that had to be answered. School rules said answer them in 200-300 words each.

Hah. When was the last time I wrote 200-300 friggin’ words? My theory has always been never use ten words where a hundred will suffice.

My first batch of essay answers ran about 12 pages. My second to last batch ran about 25 pages.

Hehehehehehe…200 words. Whatever. Kiss my Texas behind.

The instructor never sent Vito the Chopper to the front door with a note scribbled in blood, “Too much, boy,” so I didn’t worry about it.

Along the way, I realized that I believe American society is overcriminalized and that there actually are massive double standards in what we criminalize versus what we done and that there are victimless crimes (at least by the double standard of what is ‘moral’ and what isn’t.)

So I guess the class was a good one, ’cause it taught me stuff real good.

Next up, Criminal Procedure. I’ll do that one in August. Had to take some time off because I was burning myself at both ends (supply your own joke to that one).

Plus, the time off will give me a chance to get started on the second book in my new series. I finished the first one back in February and sent it up the food chain (first readers, agents, editors, publishers, etc). Still waiting for word to come back down the food chain.

So the next book is percolating and I’ll probably start writing next week. Then I’ll head to Mayhem in the Midlands in Omaha, drink beer and dismiss young writers with that pompous and sanctimonious tone I do so well.

Oh, yeah, I got a new job. I’m working part time in one of our small towns. Spent most of my first night in the rain, talking to a drunk and looking for the wallet he stole.

Good times, baby, good times.

…too busy, the fucker said. Yeah, thanks for that. Kiss my ass.

So, I’m officially old and here’s how I know:

1) Three days ago, after visiting the chiropractor for the third time in two weeks, I had to buy a back support cushion for my office chair. Yeah, only old people do that.

2) I rented the movie “Superbad.” One of the highest grossing movies of the year. Supposed to be excellent. It was an absolute turd on a plate. I love T and A movies and language doesn’t bother me, but this bore absolutely no resemblance to funny.

3) I was at Wal-Mart in the music section (and no, I don’t buy music from the Revelations Beast, but I do check it out sometimes) and there was a teen-aged girl going over things to buy with a Wal-Mart gift card. Her brother, help that he was, suggested a Styx CD. She said – and I friggin’ quote – “Eeeewwww, Mom likes them.”

Yeah, so does Trey, ya’ teen-aged skank. In fact, I have THREE of their albums. And yeah, I used the word album. Do you even know what that is? The only saving grace was that she also looked at Metallica CDs and I did recently purchase two of those.

So, can one of you guys send me an AARP brochure?

Hah, so the latest medical crisis in the Barker household wasn’t mine!

Hah! There’s a first for everything, I guess. This time, rather than being Trey with galactically high cholesterol or Trey with a ruptured disk in his back or Trey with a heart attack or Trey with friggin’ cancer, it was LuAnn with a broken wrist.

And obviously, I don’t wish that on anyone, especially the love of my life, but if it’s going to happen, better someone else, for once, than me! Really, there’s no good way to say that thought. I wrote that sentence about twenty times and it sounds awful every time. Whatever.

She was washing some windows and in our old farmhouse, the windows are pretty much original to the first time mankind climbed down outta the trees. Old, really old, in other words. They hang by a counterweight in the wall and most of them in the house are broken. So she had something jammed in there to keep the window up. Well, that slipped and down the window came, smashing both her wrists.

She called me at the store and said, quite non-chalantly, “I think maybe I broke my wrist. You wanna take me to the hospital?”

Easy as you please.

Are you kidding me? I whined and cried and nearly went into cardiac arrest whenever I had to give myself a pansy ass little shot. She breaks – no, not merely breaks, but shatters, said the doctor – her wrist and she’s as casual as can be. “Yeah, whenever you get around to it, maybe run me over to the hospital.”

I half expected her to finishing up washing the windows, maybe do a load of laundry, cook up some dinner, then kind of amble over to the emergency room.

I can see it now. “Yeah, doc, put a Band-aid on it, it’ll be fine.”

I, on the other hand, was more along the lines of: “What? A shot! Can I get a general anesthesia for that?”

She had to have surgery and then they put her in a splint and told her not to lift or write or damn near anything. It was her right hand and she can’t even hardly eat.

It has driven her slowly insane. Quite fun to watch, actually. See, the ol’ wife is about as independent as they come. And the fact that she has to ask me to cut her meat or help her put on her shirt is, for me, hysterical to watch. For her, it might well lead to my death.

At first, I thought she’d just shoot me. Grab up my service weapon and shoot it dry. And I could hear the sheriff asking her why she thought she had to reload.

“There were still some bullets and he wasn’t quite dead enough.”

Then I thoughts she might beat me to death with the splint. But I think now neither of those would be slow enough for her. I think she’d rather inflict something desperately slow and painful. Maybe a hanging where the knot on the noose didn’t quite knock me out, where I strangled instead.

So I’m enjoying myself, how she can’t drive or cook or whatever, and then it’s time for her to go back to the doc. And what does he do? Ruins all my freakin’ fun, that’s all.

Oh, yeah, she’s healing. Yeah, it’s getting better and stronger and all the rest, but where does that leave me? I mean, come one, hasn’t anyone thought of me in all this?

He took her out of the splint and said she’d be just fine. She’s not 100 percent yet, but she’s getting there. And all I can do is watch all the jobs I’d done slip away, back to her control.

It is a sad day today. I mean, yeah, good for her but sad for me. I mean, I had to depend on her for a year during the poisoning. She had to depend on me for…like…five weeks.

Let’s see…fifty-two weeks. Five weeks. Fifty-two. Five.

Not quite the balance I’d hoped for. Means she’s still got 47 more weeks worth of good karma than I do.

Damn.

Okay, so I had a sort of a brush with the Phelpians yesterday. You know, the whackos from the cult that calls itself the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas? Run by that creepy ass Fred Phelps…www.wbc.com…with the webpage titled “God Hates Fags.”

Right, the ones who protest the funerals of dead soldiers with signs saying things like “We’re glad you’re soldiers are dead,” and the ever popular “God is killing your soldiers because American tolerates fags.”

Wow, if what America does to gays is tolerance, I’d hate to see their definition of hate and oppression.

Okay, let’s understand, I didn’t actually brush the Phelpians yesterday, but I was in town trying to head them off at the pass. I volunteered my time, in uniform, to block traffic for the funeral procession and to watch and make that, once they left, they didn’t slip back in to disrupt the funeral procession.

See, we had a local guy die in a motorcycle wreck recently. He was up in Wisconsin without a helmet and had an accident. The guy was a lawyer and, from everything I heard, a nice guy. I think I maybe said hi to him once or twice over in the courthouse. Didn’t know him, didn’t know his family.

Also didn’t know he was a Patriot Rider.

Ringing a bell? The motorcycle guys who go to soldiers’ funerals to shield the grieving families from the Phelpians?

This guy was a Patriot Rider and so something like 200 other Patriot Riders showed up for his funeral.

As did 6 members of the “Fred Phelps there but for the grace of God and undegenerate DNA go I” club. They were coming to town, they announced, to protest the dead lawyer’s funeral. Because, they said, he was a Patriot Rider and therefore someone who condoned homosexuality.

Follow me, if you possibly can. He rode with a group that tried to give grieving families some peace during funerals of fallen soldiers, soldiers who, according to Fred and his Whelps, were murdered by God because America, as the bastion and headquarters of Godlessness, doesn’t round up its GLBT community, ride them in train boxcars, as did the Nazis, with Jews into a holding pen and shoot them as though they were cattle stricken with hoof-and-mouth disease.

I don’t give a crap what your political viewpoint is. I don’t care if you think W. hung the fucking moon or ought to be hanged by the moon, you don’t protest funerals. And you damn sure don’t protest the funeral of someone who wasn’t even in the very military you keep deriding. And you damn damn damn sure don’t protest the funeral of someone who gave his/her life for their country, regardless of the political realities behind that giving.

I’m all for protests and giving full throat to the First Amendment, all for it. My DNA bleeds First Amendment. But there is a time and place for everything and even a time and place that can be edgy and startling, but a funeral ain’t it. With the freedom of the First Amendment comes, I think, the responsibility of the First Amendment.

Flag burning, for instance. I have no problem with that. You wanna fry up the flag, have at it. But I also understand that if you’re going to exercise your right to do that, you have to understand that it makes quite a few people crazy and they then have a right to protest your protestation.

With freedom comes responsibility.

LuAnn, my wife, wanted to organize a counter protest. And she would have done it brilliantly, gathering up all her Princeton lefty cronies and all the gays and lesbians in town (and yeah, for those of you reading this who live in Princeton, there are quite a few gays and lesbians…suck it up and deal with it) and marching right the hell into the midst of the loony fringe and kicking their asses…verbally and spiritually…not violently…I don’t think.

But LuAnn decided that a funeral is NOT the place to protest.

Besides, the funeral was attended by 200 bikers…one of whom actually had a baseball bat strapped to his handlebars. Hilarious, that. There was no way the Phelpians were going to get any sort of rhythm in Princeton.

At first, according to Officer Friendly, they were quite polite. Yes sir and no sir and where do we stand sir (there is a 200 foot stay away protest law in Illinois) and “We only want to let people see our signs, nothing else.”

But then, when the bikers got there and the cops got there and the family got there, they started singing. Patriotic songs with all the words changed to reflect that God does, indeed, hate all fags and faggots and rump rangers and butt pirates.

And who came to the rescue? The Princeton Fire Department. They drove two giant firetrucks right up between the Phelpians and the church. And when the singing got louder, they revved those giant firetruck engines.

A brilliant stroke on all fronts. No one inside could hear or see the Phelpians and the Phelpians themselves were ecstatic because they had caused such a commotion that cops AND firemen had to come deal with them. Mission accomplished.

But the sad part is this: of the six, three were children. Standing alongside the adults, waving signs, screaming that all faggots were going to hell and God hates anyone who even knows a gay person and who knows what all else.

Officer Friendly told me it was the most depressing thing he’d ever seen. “How can anyone have that much hate inside them?”

I had no answer. I’ve heard them on TV but I’ve never seen them live. I’ve never had to hear the rawness of it.

Who did have at least some sort of an answer for him?

Irony of ironies, the local LESBIAN pastor. She was out walking and stumbled across the funeral and the protest. She asked Ben what was what, he told her, and she knew instantly he was upset. She calmed him down, basically told him not to sweat them, they’d be gone pretty quickly and that they weren’t even remotely Christian, regardless of what they called themselves.

But I don’t think she had anything to say about the children. What can you say? They will be just as warped, just as twisted and broken, as the adults shepherding them around the country to various protests. At less than 10 years old, those kids are probably lost forever.

And that’s the saddest part of the entire affair. Not the horror of protesting a funeral, not the horror of shoving a family’s collective face further into the pain and ache of losing a part of themselves, but that those children have never had any part of themselves.

At first, I couldn’t tell what was going on. I was at the jail and LuAnn was in the lobby. Crying, very nearly hysterical.

“William is dead,” she said, burying her face in my shoulder.

“What?”

“William is dead.”

Then there was nothing but heartbeats, some hers, some mine, trapped between us and filling the lobby with a harsh thunder.

A car crash. Two sixteen-year old boys, neither wearing their seatbelts. They slammed into the back of a grain truck, left no skidmarks.

William, LuAnn’s nephew, drove, still giddy about recently getting his driver’s license.

No skidmarks. And going fast enough to tear up the back axle of the truck they hit.

No skidmarks.

They didn’t even see it coming. One minute they were gabbing, probably talking about girls, maybe changing one CD for another in the stereo. The next?

No skidmarks.

William was a good kid, had been as long as I’ve known him. Once, about ten or eleven years ago, LuAnn and I had traveled from Colorado to Illinois to see everyone. William, all of maybe five, had latched on to me and dragged me to a local park. We played on the swing and ran around, had a high old time.

Two days later, just before we left, I heard William on CB radio that connected my in-laws’ place with the farm a few miles away. “Little guy no go home. No, little guy no go home.”

I was little guy. To this day I’ve no idea where that came from, drawn up from the depths of a kid’s imagination, I guess.

A few years later, when the family came west to Denver to visit, William got a little crazed when it seemed like his dad was going to get on my motorcycle and take a ride. Didn’t want Daddy riding without a helmet, I think.

Wanted him to be safe, to survive the ride, come back still the Daddy.

And now Daddy is still here, but William is gone.

I won’t cry and yell and howl about how unfair life is. Life is what it is: fair, unfair, frequently ugly and sometimes beautiful. Maybe my Catholic mother-in-law is right and William is in a better place. Then again, maybe he’s no place.

All I know is, this place is less interesting because he’s not in it.

Wendy Wasserstein died today.

Who?

If you aren’t much into theater, you probably don’t know the name. She was a Pulitzer-winning playwright whose first novel, “Elements of Style,” is scheduled for an April publication.

I have to admit I don’t know a ton of her work, but I do know her 1993 play “The Sisters Rosensweig.” For a production in Denver a few years ago, I designed the lighting.

I never talked to her, never emailed her about her writing or cancer, nothing like that. I knew of her without knowing anything about her, didn’t even see enough of her plays to get a sense of what was going on in her head.

What caught my eye was not only that she died, but that she died of lymphoma.

In today’s earlier post, I talked about bitching about the minor stuff. This is the kind of thing that proves to me my situation is fairly minor. I’m griping about getting some shots and now Wasserstein’s daughter, 6-year old Lucy Jane, has no mother.

Ah, Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

Dripping in subtext, rife with political statement hidden in the clothing of historical drama. Superficially, it was about the witch trials. Subtextually, it was all about McCarthy, the modern American witch hunt.

Writer Robert Ferrigno’s new novel “Prayers For The Assasin,” is just as full of subtext. While I don’t care much for the novel itself — the storyline is servicable, the characters almost compelling in a straightfoward way, the situations and plotting and pacing all competent if cliched and stereotypical — I was interested in Ferrigno’s hidden story.

In 2040, America has had a civil war, triggered by backpack nukes detonated in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The north and west is now and Islamic state, with the south a Christian nation — peopled with stereotypical and easy to write rejects from “Deliverance,” which annoys the shit out of my vague southern-ness…not all of us in the south or in Texas are redneck squirrel hunters who suffer from massive homophobia and like our women barefoot and pregnant while our blacks are in the back shack or the fields.

But the hidden story of Ferrigno’s novel — that of the fundamentalist religious police the Black Robes — tells the tale here.

The religous police in this book are what Americans have come to expect from fundamentalist Islam: women told to stay indoors unless they have a male relative for escort, women beaten for not obeying, women stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage even when that sex was rape, men with multiple wives, men pulled off the street — disappeared in the vernacular of Auguste Pinochet’s regime — for idle speculation, for speaking against the religious or societal edicts of Islam.

But at the same time, those religous police are our burgeoning cadre of religous police. In the book, the Black Robes are extreme in both thought and belief and action against those who disagree with them.

Take a look around.

Look at this place where a thirty year Marine veteran is called a traitor and coward for asking questions about the war, where a former attorney general spends nearly $7,000 on a robe to cover the bare breasts of Scales of Justice statue because he’s embarrassed to have those boobs in pictures of him at press conferences. (I guess the robe was less expensive than simply moving the press conferences to another part of the building.)

Take a look at a place where, even if you supported the war in Afghanistan but question the war in Iraq, you are called unpatriotic, “dishonest,” “reprehensible,” a place where corporations are terrified of, and refuse to, sponsor the Museum of National History’s Charles Darwin exhibit because that exhibit would take a long look Darwin’s work and his legacy, where auto makers are forced to abandon advertising in gay magazines because of threatened boycotts.

When did it become okay to say, “You disagree with me so I’m going to post your personal email and home address on my website so you can get harrassed and threatened?” (as Ann Coulter to a woman who had the temerity to question her).

When did it become okay for your beliefs to take precedence over mine and for you to attack me personally because of it?

How much longer will I be able to say what I want? How much longer will I be able to write what I want?

There is a great chill in the air.

George from Sleepless in Midland asked the obvious question. In my previous post, I mentioned a now-convicted residential burglar who had blasted me with a bit of honesty about Snickers.

George wrote: “Let us know if this guy asks you to bend some rule for him and then gets angry when you don’t.”

Never happened, believe it or not. Never made a sound, never asked for a favor.

In fact, after finishing his time in my jail and before moving on to another county jail for yet another residential burglary charge, he let me know there were a few minor items of contraband in his cellblock.

Can’t figure out quite why, but I’ll take it.

For a guy who busted into houses, took whatever he could find, he was brutally honest about really small stuff. Thing is, I don’t know why. Can’t figure out why he’d suddenly be honest. It freaked me out then and it freaks me out now.

In the end, I guess, it doesn’t really matter. He’s gone, I’m still there and I’ve got a ton of new burlgars to deal with.

I just have to make sure I count my Snickers bars better.