Decent pants

I called M yesterday from work to ask him how is day went and to see if he was feeling better (he's had stomach issues almost all week). He sounded amped up and said he'd had an interesting day. Why's that, I asked. He said he came within two pounds of trigger pull of killing a guy. He told me all about it while I sat at my desk with web designs and red pen in hand, half-heartedly pretending to work. Yesterday the jail accidentally released a guy on a large amount of cash bond that his family paid. The reason releasing him was an accident was because he was wanted on parole violation on his murder charge. Oops. I think it pays to find these things out about a person *before* you release them on high-cash bond...

Anyway, M and some other dude had to go out into the gnarsty parts of the city (see post from a couple days ago) with a list of addresses at which this guy has been arrested (and it was quite a long list) and track him down. Normally the city cops would handle tracking down criminals, but when somebody at jail, which is run by the sheriffs, fucks up, it falls to the sheriffs to un-fuck things up. When they found him, of course he had a gun on him, and was reaching for it when M and his partner told the guy in no uncertain terms (i.e., drew their guns and pointed them at the guy's chest) that making any further movements would result in his instant death. Lucky for the dude, he stopped moving and laid down on the ground like the nice officers told him to.

I can't really imagine the drama involved in this situation because I've never had a gun pointed at me. I've been scared and thought I was going to die before in various situations (a tornado, some near-misses on the highway, lung collapse/cancer scare, the usual), but the threat has never been directly from another person who obviously wanted me dead. I imagine that puts a different spin on things, as it seemed to for M, who was amped all evening. He was glad today to have an easier assignment (go to a nursing home that's currently housing an ill inmate and make sure the ill inmate doesn't do anything illin' to his fellow nursing-home patients--ah, our tax dollars at work).

Tonight is my tenth high school class reunion. Everyone I've told about it has been surprised that I'm going, saying I'm not the reunion type. I don't really know what that means. My high school class was freakin' huge, on the order of more than 500 students, and I'm sure I'll meet new people at the reunion, people with whom I have this giant thing in common but with whom I've never had a conversation. Also, I'm somewhat eager to see if the quote-unquote "popular" kids show up, because I feel fairly certain that most of them will be past their prime already, whereas I was a geek-o-saurus in high school and am finally now getting into my stride in life. (Although that's to be debated, because lately I just feel like a giant fuck-up headed for utter disaster, about which I'm refusing to blog.)

At any rate, I imagine tonight will be an amusing time, and lead me to make interesting (to me, at least) observations about the nature of twenty-somethings who survived their high school years at my school. My high school was something of a local anomaly, and is to this day. It has a large base to serve, about 2,000 kids, and it serves all kinds--those from affluent areas, kids whose parents buy them cars and pay for their education and who have trust funds, and it also serves kids from one of the poorest municipalities in greater Cincinnati. My graduating class was split almost evenly at 49% Black, 49% White, and 2% other. There was a lot of racial tension at my high school (and still is). When I was there, we had a full fleet of security guards, but now they have armed officers on the premises during all school hours and at every school function. I'm not sure what triggered the switch to armed officers; it could have been the incident where the one kid almost killed the other kid with a baseball bat outside the gym but instead just broke his leg and scattered his teeth in a bloody arc across the floor, or the time one of the music teachers walked into the cafeteria and got his face smashed and his cheekbones broken by a table full of kids from that poor area, or the gang incident where some kid got thrown through a plate-glass principal's office window, it could have been the race riots, or it could have been the fact that in one school year alone there were more than 3,400 "disciplinary incidents."

Anyone who managed to navigate all that and be successfully alive enough to come to a tenth-year reunion is bound to not be a boring person, in my opinion. And that's why I'm going. I only really kept in touch with one person from my graduating class, and she's the one I'm going with. She keeps talking about how she's worried none of "our people" (meaning the theater crowd, I think) will be there and that we won't know anyone, but that's what I'm hoping for. I don't want to know anyone.

I now have to get off the computer and go out into the commercial wilds and find myself some decent pants to wear tonight, since all my pants are not decent and the attire is "dressy casual." See what happens when you work at a company where you get to wear jeans and t-shirts and flip-flops every day? You wind up with nothing decent to wear to your tenth reunion. Speakin' of which, my lil' company has been nominated as one of the best places to work in the city. That's kinda cool. I imagine it's because they let us drink at work sometimes. And we can always wear flip-flops. And we have a kick-ass office design that won some awards. And all that crap.

Okay. Must away.