Bloody Wisdom

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 30

"Punishment that hurts chases evil from the heart."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Tonight, I made a really good pizza.  Unfortunately, in the process, I almost grated my middle finger off.

I'm not being a baby.  It's a brand new grater, so it's extra sharp, and the cut is big and deep.  Three Band-Aids.  And it's soaked through.  

It's kind of hard to blog with an injury like this.  The bandaged finger keeps fucking everything up, and I keep trying to switch what my middle finger would do on the keyboard to my ring finger, but this runs contrary to what legendary pantyhose queen and emetophobe Mrs. Dougherty taught us in 6th grade typing class.

"F... J... SPACE!  F.... J.... SPACE!"

Really, kids-- that was a class.  And I'm old enough to have taken it on a typewriter-- albeit an electric one.  

So, due to the fact that I'm erasing every third I write and re-typing it, this isn't going to be a terribly long entry.  In fact, I think I've already done two this week, even if they were both about my father.  I was thinking to myself, as I was bleeding all over the bathroom sink, about my eldest sister.  I don't know if she still believes this shit, or if she ever really did, but she used to tell me that she thought, when bad things happened to people, that it was really God speaking through the dog-shit under the sole of your shoe, or the icy step that resulted in your shattered vertebrae.  Or the extra sharp cheese grater effortlessly skinning you alive while your two-year-old twins play happily over there at the table.  

And so I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about how much more attractive and seductive religion would be if it really was like that.  If death and mayhem and brain-dead mothers on ventilators and bastards getting whipped cream pies in their mush actually had some sort of logic to it, and not this kind of "we mere mortals cannot possibly know His reasoning" because that's kind of bullshit, isn't it?  We know.  We can know.  We can know that, when a nun gets run over crossing the Roosevelt Boulevard by some drunken Fishtown scumbag in a 1983 Firebird that that's kind of fucked.  

Unless, of course, she used to delight in beating the piss out of scared little gingers because their handwriting slanted a bit too sharply to the left, signaling that, obviously, they were combined with Satan.  Then I guess it makes sense.  Then I guess maybe I could stand behind that.  

Maybe this little accident tonight with the cheese grater is payback for how I used to imitate my elementary school principal in the playground during impromptu performances for my peers.  Maybe it's because I've never been to Israel or because I don't call my parents or because I think people who "can't eat gluten" are full of shit.  

GOD I CAN'T ST%ANSD ALL TEHSE TUPOS!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, that's what it's like without correcting every seven seconds.  

Fuck it.  IO'm doine.      

Show-Man

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 8

"A king sitting as judge weighs all the evidence carefully,

distinguishing the true from the false."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, they buried Ariel Sharon today.  It's okay.  You can make jokes about it because he's basically been dead for nearly a decade.  To call what he was since 2006 a "vegetable" is even kind of considerate.  There's way more vegetables I'd do it with before I'd be caught dead with that crypt keeper.

See?  It's funny!

The thing is, being a narcissistic prick, when I first heard of Sharon's passing, I immediately thought of my father.  Not who he is now, the Red Lubster-lovin', nearly bald, Americanized mush-pot carrying around a phone book-sized wallet held together by a rubber band-- the man he was: a mustachioed, dashing, olive-hued, Sabra-fucking, cigarette-puffing warrior of the desert.  I was thinking about that man.  

He served under Sharon.  Well, pretty much everybody did.  Still, I was thinking about who my father was in those days, and who Sharon was before he became a mean fat old bastard, and then a perpetual ICU patient.  I could ask my father, in fact, I think I have.  I remember driving along a winding road one day years ago, probably when Sharon first stroked out, and my father said that they had dispatched Sharon to Vietnam so that he could learn something about the tactics being employed there.  When Sharon returned to the Holy Land, he gathered thousands of soldiers around, my father included, and stated soberly and, like a true Israeli, that he had learned, "not one fucking thing." 

I know my father killed people.  He's not the kind of veteran that you have to tiptoe around and never walk behind and never mention "the war" (there were a few, you know) but you don't exactly want to go around asking for gory details, just like I'm not too keen on hearing a Spalding Gray-like monologue about the night I was conceived.  This past weekend, while my wife and babies were visiting my parents, my father and my nephew put on a little show at the dining room table.  It consisted of two brightly colored rubber worms each inside a tall drinking glass, in front of which sat my father.  At the far end of the table sat my nephew, aged four, playing a plastic bugle, drums, Bosendorfer, a variety of musical instruments.  While he played, my father jerked and moved around spasmodically in his chair and tugged on two invisible strings tied to each rubber worm and made them dance with excitement.  My mother and sister and wife were laughing, and even my babies were smiling.  I was standing there, holding my daughter staring.  Just staring.  And all I could think was, "this man has killed people."  My father looked over at me and, catching my expression, he must have thought his performance needed a little bit more pizzazz, so he plunged one of the rubber worms-- the orange one-- straight down his throat.

"He's a total show-man," my wife said to me tonight as we reminisced about the snake charmer act while emptying the refrigerator of dead things.  She's right, of course.  I want to own the performing arts in my family, but any urge I have to get up in front of people and make a fucking ass out of myself comes straight from him, passed down through his crazy blood into mine.  It's in there-- it's all in there.  I'm just more subdued about it-- tempered by my mother's ceaseless shyness and introspection, calmed by living in a land that isn't under attack, or threat thereof, every moment of every day.  I don't need to let it all hang out at the supermarket-- it can wait for the stage.

Usually.

       

I want to go on record, at this point, by stating that I'm fully aware that this is the second post in a row about my father, and that's okay with me.  Frankly, I don't understand the guy one single bit, I'm constantly frustrated with him and confused by him, I'm always pulling away from him and running towards him at the very same time.  I'm embarrassed by him and obsessed with him.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Because he and I are one; show-men to the end.

Lunch Hour

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 7

"It is a wonderful heritage to have an honest father."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I worked downstairs on the unit, I took care to warn my supervisor.  

"I'm meeting my father for lunch today."

"Oh, shit," she'd say.  "I guess I'll take you off the schedule for the afternoon.  Just sit in here and update the treatment plans on the computer."

She knew.  Well, she learned.  After a while, it became clear that chances were better than good that I was going to come back into the chart-room at 1:00 ready to cut somebody's fucking head off.  Best to keep me away from acutely and persistently ill psychiatric patients.  Facilitating a group on Developing Patience probably wasn't such a hot choice for me to be doing after spending an unfortunate lunch hour inside my father's Buick, screaming at him and driving away from the park where we meet at top speed, thrashing the car into traffic, flogging the motor, crushing the accelerator under my foot as if it were an offensive cockroach.

Nowadays, for some reason, the lunches with my father have gotten better.  Maybe because life is less volatile now.  My brother-in-law has been dead for almost two years, just about as long as my children have been alive.  Sure, there are money woes and assorted travails and troubles, but, by and large, the sea is calmer.  There is less calamity.  Less emergency.  A dearth of drama.

Of course, he and I don't particularly need drama to go at it.

Last week, we met up at the park.  He brings the main course ("You bring a drink and dessert," he must always instruct via text the night before, as if I don't know the routine by now), typically from "Red Lobster", which he pronounces "Red Lubster", because I guess they don't really have much use for or occasion to talk about lobsters in Israel.  Anyway, we there we sit, an Israeli and his son, eating the most un-Kosher of bottom-feeding oceanic fare in his latest leased lux-o-ride.  Things always start off innocuously.  Some small talk.  Bullshit.  This, and that.  

Then, a hot topic is explored.  By him.

"So, how is your... therapy going?"

"Fine," I say.  Truthfully, I don't know how my... therapy is going, but I don't know what else I'm supposed to say to him, so, that's what I say.

"And your medication?"

"Well, I'm on a new medication called Viibryd, and I guess it's working," I paused to consider a shrimp on my fork that appeared inordinately large for a joint like Red Lubster, but then I realized that it was two shrimp sixty-nining each other.  I frowned.  "Actually, I don't know if it's working."

"Well," my father, the girdle-manufacturer, said, "just don't let him increase your dose-- I talk to a lot of people and they all say that's the worst fuckin' thing they can do."

I closed my eyes.  There is no way out of this: the car, the conversation, the family, the vortex, the galaxy.  There is no way I can't challenge him.  There is no way I can shut up.  There is no way.

"Oh, you talk to a lot of people about psychiatric medication?  Like who?  The Syrian guy who cuts your fabric?"

And now, in case you missed it: it was on.  

"Well, are you still depressed and anxious?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Listen, Mummy-- do you really think that you--" he stopped himself.  Restraint is anathema to my father, so I cannot imagine what inappropriate thing he actually stopped himself from saying, only instead to say, "you know 90% of the people out there are depressed and anxious."

"Really?  Wow.  I don't recall reading that statistic from the National Institute of Mental Health.  Does it hurt your hemorrhoids at all when you pull your stats out of your asshole?"

He laughed at that.  It was a sign that I was winning the most absurd argument I've had so far in 2014.  

He relented, but the damage was done.  Him changing the subject at that point was about as effective as someone who has just hit your car massaging and kissing your smashed fender, but it's at least better than them backing up and ramming into you again.   

Don't get me wrong: I love my father and, clearly, he loves me.  He also loves to make up statistics, and he's been doing that for a long, long time (his favorite is that "80% of cops are corrupt", but I've also been treated to "80% of teachers are a fuckin' retard", "90% of people in this country don't know shit from NOTHING!" and "90% of priests will fuck up a little boy" (in my father's lingo "fuck up" means "molest", not "emotionally disturb", though I suppose the one inevitably leads to the other) and, believe me, I'd love to read a research paper written by my father in his younger academic days:

"Copernicus thought the earth revolved around the sun, but 90% of people thought he was fuckin' retard who didn't know SHIT FROM NOTHING!"

 I don't know what it is about us that creates conflict and tension, though I'm sure some independent third party watching it from a location of relative safety could figure it out in approximately seven seconds.  Feel free to clue me in yourself if you've got a handle on it.  

Maybe it's because he is so firmly entrenched in his own reality-- where his statistics are viable and his memory is infallible.  How he remembers it is law.  I tried to explain to him, during this particular "mental health" lunch, about how I've been this way for a very long time.

"I never slept.  I would stay awake in my bed, terrified, staring at the ceiling, until the sun would start to shine outside my window, and then I would let myself fall asleep for maybe two hours before I had to wake up for school.  I'm talking about how I had black circles under my eyes in my second grade picture because I didn't sleep.  I would call out for Mommy, just to hear her voice telling me she didn't want to hear my voice till morning, just so I knew she was still alive."

"Well, I never knew that."

"Of course you didn't.  You were fucking asleep.  Besides, I wasn't calling out for you anyway.  And anyway, by the time you were ready to wake up, I was falling asleep."  He stared at me.  "This went on for years, Dad."

"I didn't know-- I mean, if you say it, I guess it's true."  This is, of course, precisely the thing someone says when they think you're probably full of shit.

"It doesn't matter now," I said, "I'm thirty-three."

"How do you sleep now?" he asked.

"I have two-year-old twins," I said, "I don't sleep now."

"Well, you know," he said with a small smile, "neither do 90% of people."

Smacked Ass

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 13, Verse 1

"A wise youth accepts his father's rebuke;

a young mocker doesn't."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Sometimes, in life, you're just chatting away with your barber, and the subject of corporal punishment comes up.  Maybe, another month, you're talking about capital punishment.  Who knows how these things happen?  

They just do.

If you know me at all (and, just so you know, you do) you probably know that I've gone to the same barber who gave me my first non-mommy-spinning-me-around-on-the-toilet-and-giving-me-the-Moe-Howard-special haircut.  He's closing in on eighty, but even over half-a-century of ardent cigarette smoking hasn't dulled his good Italian looks.  Of course, the false teeth help.  

Anyway, today, as my locks were tumbling down around my plastic gown and onto the floor below, waiting to get swept away by the slightly overweight broom princess, the subject of corporal punishment came up.  I have no idea how.  These things, as I may have alluded to earlier, just happen.  Like pimples.  And jokes about dirty vicars.  And people who like Jodie Foster maybe a little bit too much.  

So this thing happened today, and my barber was telling me what the problem was, as he saw it, with corporal punishment.  Oh, boy, I thought.  Here we go.  

"It's that so many parents these days hit their kids out of anger," he said.

Right, I thought.  As if you're going to discipline your child with your hand out of compassion, or slight hunger.

And I was thinking to myself at that moment: well, old buddy, you've got a wide breadth of vocabulary on you.  You've got tact and style and a fine ol' way a' talk that makes people feel right cozy like: are you going to use your tasteful, carefully-selected words to gently offer this aging hair care professional whom you've known all your life a different perspective on the world?  Are you going to judiciously counter his views and proffer your own kinder, gentler ways as a fitting substitute for the barbaric practice of physically harming your own children to prove a point or drive home a particular lesson?

Want to know what I said?

"Well, right.  Because, when you're angry, you're just not in full control of all your faculties, and it would be easy for a parent to go too far."

"Exactly!" he said.

Snip snip snip.  

Snip.

Internally, I shook my head.  To actually do so would have caused unfortunate and undo damage to my do which, to be honest, doesn't look so hot anyway.  I wasn't internally shaking my head at him-- at his truculent insistence that there is nothing wrong with laying a hand on your child, (you know, as long as you're not angry) but at myself, for essentially agreeing with him, and validating him.

Look, I get it.  He's nearly eighty: his spanking days are over.  That came out wrong.  (So did that, but you know what I mean.  Perv.)  But it's not about him; it's about me.  About my spineless reluctance to avoid confrontation.  To abhor it.  To run screaming from it.  Well, silent screaming.  Real screaming would engender too much chance for confrontation.  Someone might yell at me to "SHUT UP!" and then, well, that's a confrontation.  I have strong opinions, but don't always have the willingness to back them up, especially if it's involving someone I care about.

You know, like my barber.

Can't we just have a conversation about how annoying it is to drive down a highway with the setting sun directly in your fucking face?  That's something we can all agree on.  And it doesn't involve hitting defenseless children who are under your care and it doesn't involve hurting anybody's feelings or making anybody mad or making anyone sweat or causing undue stress or concern or even the slightest little teensy weensy bittle tittle of discomfort.  Because driving into the sun fucking sucks, and you know it and I know it.  

Even my barber knows it.  He also knows that, every two months or so, my eyebrows need to be trimmed.  And that breaks my heart in a way that I can't really fully describe to you.  I don't want to grow old.  I don't want to spank my children.  I don't want to be angry with you or my barber or the sunset or my children or my father or his father, or yours.  

Snip.

A Good Vomit

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 25

"Anxious hearts are very heavy, 

but a word of encouragement does wonders!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Scott Stossel, already the editor of "The Atlantic", and the nephew of the mustachioed TV journalist John Stossel (not sure which of those two distinctions is more meretricious, depending upon the quality of John's uncle-tude) is on the road to getting appreciably more famous.  He just wrote a book about his anxiety, his innumerable therapeutic and psychopharmacological interventions, and his significant phobias, the most severe, according to Stossel, is emetophobia: a fear of vomiting.  

Stossel hasn't vomited since 1977 (he knows the exact month, day, date, and time-- I don't) and he also knows that he hasn't vomited since then, and he also knows that the fear of this thing he hasn't done since Gerry Ford was in office is irrational.  He knows all that.  He's a pretty smart guy.  Funny, that the editor of "The Atlantic" is a smart guy.

Isn't it?

My former best friend was, and, I'm assuming still is, an emetophobe.  I lived with him for a few years and, as far as I can recall, it didn't impact our friendship too much.  It's interesting, looking back on it, that, for someone with a deathly fear of rauwlfing, he sure ate Papa John's pizza a lot which, just thinking about it, makes me want to throw up every inch of my intestines.  

As I was listening to the interview with Stossel on "Fresh Air" today, I, of course, thought about my former best friend.  My ex.  Whatever he is.  And I was intensely annoyed that I couldn't enjoy a simple radio interview with this intelligent, very talented, not altogether funny freak without that enjoyment being intruded upon by memories of my former best friend.  I can picture him, standing in our dorm room, grinning, the same way he used to when he was in fourth grade, when we first met.  He has big teeth, and big, black hair.  I wonder if any of it's gray now.  I can see him in his black jeans, white t-shirt and white socks.  He wasn't exactly a fashion plate.  Black sneakers.  Black Tague watch. 

I remember.

I guess he won't ever get his chance to write his book about emetophobia.  Of course, I'll never get to write my book about anxiety, about obsessive compulsive bullshit, about dysthymia, about worrying I'll be found out as a fraud and a phony and a bastard and a mean, yucky meanie man.  

Stinky butt.  

I don't want you to know the truth about me, and yet, it seems like all I do is graffiti it all over your face.  And mine.  There's graffiti over the map of Israel and it's telling my terrible story and I hope it diminishes my glory so you will finally know and stop reading this blog and leave me alone and think to yourself, "Jesus, he really was right."

Maybe that's the only thing that would make me truly happy: for you to go away.

Please, don't go.

I wasn't just annoyed, of course, about being forced to think about my old best friend, but because Scott Stossel's bankrolling his mental illness, and, gee: I'd like to do that.  That'd be swell!  Sign me up.  I want.  He's smarter than me, but I'm funnier.  I'll even pull down my pants to prove the point.

Christ, he's not even really Jewish.  Where does he get off anyway, pretending to be anxious?  Come on, man.  

I want to show him.  I want to teach him a lesson.  I want to go to his book signing in my neighborhood.  I'll sit in my car in the Barnes & Noble parking lot with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (dark meat) and eat that shit in under two minutes flat, wait in line with his book clutched to my chest and then, when I get up to him, I'll fucking throw the hell up all over him.  Then we will see what's what.

Then I'll have something to write about.  You know, for money.

A grand adventure.  A good vomit.  A tall tale.  That's what my life's missing.  It has all the typical stuff, the peaks and the valleys, but there's nothing there that's really ZING-KA-ZOING, you know what I mean?  Nothing that really grabs you by the lapels or the taint and pulls you closer and says, "Now, listen here, my darling; this is a tale that ought be told for approximately a $250,000 advance."  

And maybe that moment will come and maybe it won't.  Maybe I won't need a Colonel's Original Recipe bucket to make it all come true for me and for my family, and, if it doesn't happen to me, for me, for us, well, I will have to be okay with that, like I've had to be okay with so much.  Like we all do.  We can't all have John Stossel for an uncle, and we can't all hide our stinky butts from the world or hang onto our best friends like our childhood dollies forever.  All we can do is what we can do, and that will just have to be enough.  It will have to be enough for you, and, I guess, for me, too.  I suppose, as long as I have you, I'm good.

Anxious, but good.       

Peter Pan Advice

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 3, Verse 21

"Have two goals: wisdom-- that is, knowing and doing right-- and common sense."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I don't have to write a snide and sardonic post about how New Year's Resolutions are junk and bunk and baloney and bullshit.  That won't get me any props or pussy or points.  It just isn't necessary.  You know.  I once "resolved" that, when my old dog died, I would get a dog that wouldn't shed.  In April, we brought home a Basset Hound and, every week, our vacuum cleaner sucks up enough dog to make a canine shag carpet for the set of "That '70s Show," so I think we all speak the same language here.  

I've never been too good with goals, either.  For three years, I ran a group called "Community Meeting" from 9:30-10:00 where patients were made to come up with their two goals and their "method to achieve."  Most mornings, for most men, the goal was "go to groups" and the method was "just go" and going around the room of fifteen men took approximately four minutes.  It took me longer to read out the schedule of activities for the day.  Some days, if I was feeling frisky, I would try to drag it out by trying to extract more substantive goals from the moderately less recalcitrant in the room, or try to spark conversation among the group.  But, most mornings, I let it go, and group ended in under fifteen minutes.  It was embarrassing for me, but nobody seemed to care.

I remember one Community Meeting not too long before I left the unit where a patient and I were talking about his goals.  He was being discharged that morning and I mentioned that his goals were all the more important because he was leaving the structured environment of the hospital, and I talked about how discharge isn't really the end of something, it's the beginning, and a particularly psychotic and physically imposing patient stood up and started screaming at me, getting inches away from my face, roaring about my "PETER PAN ADVICE" and I just stared at him, waiting for the crushing blow to my jaw, not because I had balls, but because I didn't know anything else to do at that particular moment.  Some patients started telling the trouble-making patient to shut the fuck up and leave the room.  When he didn't, many of them did.  Some of my colleagues eventually came in and escorted him out.  Something I couldn't do myself.  As I tried to keep my trembling internal, I continued the meeting for the "benefit" of the three or four patients still left in the room.  For my own benefit.  For my own pride.

I had no business being in that room, not on that day, or any other.  My goal was the same every day, just like theirs.  My goal was to get out without being found out.  Without getting knocked the fuck out.

Getting out.  

Come to think of it, I don't exactly know how I've done with aspirations either.  I'm not sure I know to what I aspire.  I don't know what I'm reaching for, or striving for.  Ascending towards.  What is that, exactly?  My aspiration was never to own fifteen-or-so cars roughly as many years, but it turned out that way.  I never aspired to write grants, but I did want to be a professional writer.  So I guess this is the funny, not-so-funny way of that particular aspiration getting worked out while getting gummed up in the works.  I never sat around dreaming about having twins, but here we are.

Here we go.

Wishes are another thing.  Whenever I find myself before a birthday cake, I'm always closing my eyes and wishing for no harm to come to me or anybody I love.  The people whom I love.  I wish I loved more people, or I wish the people I loved knew how ardently I love them.  You can't let people know how much you love them, even if you love them hard and hot and feverishly and fiendishly, because people don't understand it when you tell them and if you try to make them understand it just comes out all bungled, like Clouseau trying to walk importantly into a room.  It just doesn't work.  Because there's a trick step and Cato's always around the corner and there's a vase on the floor and a there's a bermb and it's going to blow your little yellow skin off and I'd take a bullet for you but that sounds ridiculous and silly and you're Tess and I'm always guarding Tess.  

Always.

I guess all I can say is that, in 2014, I'm going to try to be more tolerant.  Of white people.  Because, Jesus Christ; they say some really fucking stupid shit.  You know? 

In Valor There Is Hope

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 6, Verses 12 & 13

"Let me describe for you a worthless and a wicked man:

first, he is a constant liar; 

he signals his true intentions to his friends with his eyes and feet and fingers."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Somewhere around 2003, I stopped going to police funerals.  I think, from 1999-2003, I had attended maybe 6 or 7 of them, from start-to-finish.  And that's no small feat, seeing as these are all day affairs-- especially the Catholic ones.  They go on forever.  When you ask 10,000 cops to come and accept Communion, you're pretty much guaranteed to be there, sitting on your bony ass in that pew for around four hours.  Getting from the church to the graveyard, in a procession of thousands of police cars, typically takes two hours just by itself, even if the cemetery is only a few miles away.  

Now, I didn't stop cold-turkey, mind you.  I tapered by going to a service or two only, and not staying for the cortege and burial.  Then I hit a couple viewings, and I went to a few of those maybe in 2005 and 2006.  This was back when I was an EMT, and I would go in my uniform, a black strip of elastic covering the center of my meaningless star-of-life badge.  

It's a weird part of my life to reflect on, looking back at it.  I would take off entire days from college classes to go down to Philadelphia, or Baltimore or... wherever to stand with thousands of cops from Maine to Texas to California, all lined up like tin soldiers, ostensibly to "mourn" somebody they never knew.  Of course, all cops "know" each other, or they think they do.  I started going to police funerals as research for a book I was writing during college.  But, once the book was researched, written, published, and released, I kept going.  Kept hearing the bagpipes and the crying widows and mothers, kept sitting up straight and standing up straight and watched pictures of handsome young men holding their families on a big screen TV.  Standing out in the rain.  Standing out in the sun.  

I guess you might say I got caught up in the poetry of the whole thing.  The ceremony.  The tradition.  It's alluring.  Police funerals always draw the media who come out and plant themselves in front of the church door to snap that all-important picture of the beautiful young widow clutching feverishly onto her freshly fatherless children.  Bonus points if one of the kids is a boy and he's wearing his daddy's hat.  The newspaper photographers stick themselves up on highway overpasses to get the perfect shot of a thousand patrol cars lined up with their light-bars ablaze.

With the exception for the weather and the color of the home-team uniforms, one funeral might just as well be interchangeable with any other.  The deceased officer and his/her family is stripped of any personality and individuality.  All the eulogies are the same.

"A cop's cop."

"A hero."  

"The bravest.  The finest."

"Let us remember him/her not for how s/he died, but how s/he lived."

They all quote "In valor there is hope."  Tacitus said that.  He was a historian of the Roman Empire, who, I don't think, knew any cops.  

After going to my fair share of these funerals, I don't know if there is hope in valor, or in anything else.  I started getting a bad taste in my mouth.  I started wondering about where everyone went afterwards.  Did they go out drinking?  Did they cavort in their hotel rooms?  Where five or ten or twenty thousand uniformed men and women surrounded the widow and her family for a couple hours, where was everybody a month later when she is on the floor of her bedroom sobbing and pounding the floor with her raw and furious fists?  Is the Patrolman's Benevolent Association there for her then?  Are cops from Canada there when she has to send her kids to school in the morning?  

Everybody goes away.

I started to wonder about these men and women whose burials I bore witness.  Who were they?  Who were they really?  You hear about their dozens of commendations and their awards and their stories, but, when a police officer gets killed, you never read about their civilian complaints.  You never read about their disciplinary record.  Can it be that only the bravest and the finest get felled in the line of duty?  That somehow the scumbags and bastards and maybe the just kind of average officers get found out and excommunicated or at least quietly put out to pasture?  Maybe this is just my good old fashioned paranoia, but is there some kind of unspoken rule in the media that whenever a police officer gets killed, his or her disciplinary record is sealed, shielded from the press, obscured or discarded because, really, who would benefit from tarnish on an already bloodied badge?  

There once was a New Orleans cop named Antoinette Frank.  She wore a uniform and drove a black-and-white and made traffic stops and arrests, just like any other cop's cop.  One night in 1995, she participated in a robbery of a Vietnamese restaurant, where she worked part-time as a security guard.  She and her partner-in-crime Rogers Lacaze shot and killed some of the restaurant staff (all family), and she also killed former partner, Officer Ronald Williams.  

When I read about Antoinette Frank, I couldn't help thinking-- if she had been killed the night before the Vietnamese restaurant heist and murders, thousands of police officers from all over the country would have descended upon New Orleans and mourned her as if she was their brother or their sister.  If it had been a different time and in a different geographic area, I might have been there, too.