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Idiot criminal in the back seat of my patrol car, shaking his head at his own stupidity: “I don’t do drugs anymore, so I can’t blame
any of this on drugs. Apparently I’m just a stupid dumbass when I’m sober, too.”

Midnight: My shift ended an hour earlier and I’m home in bed, trying to get some sleep because my next shift starts in the
morning. Unfortunately I was in a high-speed pursuit just a couple hours earlier and I’m learning that it takes more than a few
hours to digest and dissolve all the adreneline still in my system. This experience was repeated several dozen times during my
career – not the high speed chases part, but similar heart thumping situations like suicide calls, messy car accidents, combative
resistive violent suspects, and close calls. Part of being a cop means losing a lot of sleep.

Also part of being a cop: having a lot of police-related dreams at night. For better or worse. Ususally worse. Any kind of stressful
police activity you can imagine…yeah…that’s happened in my dreams. Literally hundreds of times. When they got too intense,
I’d wake up and put an end to the dreams to stop them. Or when the police-related dreams were just normal and not bad enough
to wake me up in the middle of the night, I would make an effort to try and not remember them when I did wake up. More than
once I’d joke with other professionals that I’d gladly participate in a dream-exchange program – they could have all of my exciting
police dreams and I’d take their work related dreams – accounting or banking, garbage truck driving, retail sales…anything
would be better than having stressful dreams involving getting violent with bad guys, you know?

Back in the old days when just about everybody’s car had a metal antenna pole for their analog FM radios, there were these
things called antenna balls that some people stuck onto the tops. Orange Unical/Union 76 were the original and most popular
ones back in the 1970’s, eclipsed in popularity by Jack in Box antenna balls in the mid 1990’s. Google it. Anyway, one day
somebody called 911 to file a theft report, I took the call, and listened to an irate person tell me that this was the third goddamn
time somebody had stolen one of their Jack in the Box antenna balls from their car while it was parked in a public parking lot
and now they wanted the police to Do Something About It Already.