run-up to amateur night #1

I worked three of the final five days of Xmas. For the first time in several years, we had neither a suicide nor tragic death, nor a last-minute fire to ruin a family's holiday. So that was good.

Things I will leave blank since it's obvious what venom would follow:

idiots trying to blow up planes...

the illogic of the travel-safety oxymorons in after-the-stampede barn door shutting...

holiday travel in general, dubious logic of

stress and its malcontents

the pleasantries of getting where you're going and being with your people

'black' Friday (yes, that one STILL has me fuming)

the folks who've turned street-plowing into a devilish torture of those they're 'helping.'

chopping ice to protect people from falling down 13% grades to the sidewalk from the ice floe on my curb...

getting a nasty gram from the city seven minutes after the trash truck has complained that I hadn't shoveled a wide-enough lane, yet no love at all when their plows make the sidewalks/curbs/alleys inaccessible...

My first New Year's Eve at Station Five, we tailed a drunk driver, giving Dispatch updates of the driver's location. She asked, finally, if we were following the driver in our fire truck. 'Um, ... no...' Several hours later, we spied a drunk face-down in the snow outside the station. We went to check on him and called a squad to get him to detox and a warm bed. He was bemusedly belligerent and foreswore our help. Then he fell again and proceeded to crawl along the frozen, icy ground. We tried to help. He mightily fucked us off, so we let him be, standing across the street. If not for the pathos, it would have been humorous: his deliberate, almost campy insistence on crawling across the street--to spite us, he said. Except he couldn't crawl up the two-foot snow/ice drift. Up and down, up and down, up and down: he crawled up then slid and rolled back down. We went to help him when he rolled into the street, for fear a car (likely driven by a drunk) would crush him, thus ruining his awesome plan to spite us. Finally the police squad approached and our man jumped up and began waving impatiently for the cop. 'About fucking time,' he said. We looked at each other: rarely do people, no matter how drunk, diss us for the po-po. He told us off and started to tell the cop about how shitty we were. The cop sidestepped his embrace and slammed him against the hood of the cruiser, frisked him, and shoved him into the backseat. THAT'll teach him to spite the best non-judgmental social service he's got at two a.m. on amateur night... No love for the cats in blue, eh?