“Where’s the fire?” or “Charles Dariush in Charge”

Updated at 1:08 p.m. CST – The picture is on the paper’s Web site but will only be up today. The site is http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/. If you don’t see it, I’ll show it to you some time. The paper’s site is subscription only, but if you really want to read the story behind it, let me know and I’m sure I can work something out.

I pulled the weekend shift this week. I also got to work on Christmas (new guy gets it). Holiday time counts as overtime. More hours mean more money. More money means I can actually have proper drapes for the two windows in my apartment, instead of two panels meant for one window being used for one window each. This is the sacrifice you make when you have a cat who tries to kill either you or the blinds.

Saturday was kind of nasty, with a late-breaking story falling nastily into my lap. Sunday, I rolled into work at about 5 p.m., did the police record rounds and came back to the paper to type those up. I also had a surprise press release from the Kentucky State Police to type up into a quick news brief, but I figured that was the extent of my surprises for the night.

Wrong.

Digression: Since I started with the paper four months ago, I have maintained a simple system. About once a week, I have to do what we call “late checks.” This is where, at about 9 p.m.ish, the reporter assigned to late checks for the night goes in, calls the sheriff and police in town, plus the city and county fire departments and ambulance service and the emergency services for the surrounding counties. If nothing happens, it takes 15 minutes. If something happens, you can be there for an hour or two.

Every time I have late checks, I say to myself, “Nothing bad is going to happen.” So far it has worked. Only one time on late checks I have had something bad happen, and that was the night I thought to myself, “You know, I’m kind of bored. I wish something would happen.”

Idiot.

So tonight, I was about to do late checks, but hadn’t yet said “Nothing bad is going to happen” when the newspaper’s imaging specialist, an older guy, comes out.

“Did you hear about the fire on the scanner? They said it was out in the county, but they were having trouble finding it.”

Crab-cakes.

After calling the local dispatch and finding out that, yes, there was in fact a fire going on, and yes, it’s fairly big, I piled into the company’s car (which is pretty sweet, hellooooo Pontiac G6) and took off for the far southeastern edge of the county. Twelve miles, a nasty country road and near-totalling of the company car due to a stupidly placed fork in the road later, I made it to the scene of the fire.

I hate covering fires, or at least I hate covering one aspect: The people. I always feel like a vulture, coming to someone’s home and taking a picture or asking them questions when they have to be feeling absolutely craptastic.

Turns out the home destroyed by fire belonged to a fireman. The two people who were foolish enough to say “irony” to me when I told them this were rewarded with the phrase, “No, they don’t know what caused it.” They both called me a dork and lame, but I still think this joke is funny. Anyway, the fireman was very nice about it all and held it together way better than any other person I’ve seen watching their house burn. But something also happened that made him and his family open up to me a little bit.

Short story: I was an idiot.

Long story: I’ve never shot a night-time fire. This led to me shooting a lot of pictures and wandering around a lot to shoot from many different angles. As I came back around the house, I neglected to realize two things. 1) I was in the direction that the firefighters were pointing their hose, though it was pointed up, so I thought I was safe. B) What goes up…

By the time I heard the gravel under my feet squishing in the mud under it, it was too late, and I got a nice shower of delightfully cold hose-water. Add that to the sub-40-degree temperatures and it was downright icy.

Fortunately, one of the family members or friends (I never got his name) who I came across right after that was sympathetic to my plight and let me use his sleeve as a drying cloth for the water on my lens. Without him, I never would have gotten the shot that went on the front of today’s paper.

Strange but true: Life seems to work out.

I’m going to sleep now. See you folks in 2008.

“I can has anger management?” or “What’s wrong with my brain?”

Kitty checklist for the week:

1) Attempt to kill the brown man (check)
2) Make the brown man pay attention to me (check x10,000)
3) Take a dump behind the couch again
4) Teach the brown man to do something constructive (check)

I have absolutely no idea what to do with Cyrus. He often is lovey-dovey, usually when I get home from work or when I open the door to let him in after I wake up in the morning. He regularly falls asleep at my feet on the bed when I’m reading or hanging around. He likes to play fetch with his ball (which has a bell inside it, so it gets confiscated at night). He also learned to jump from the top of the fridge onto my shoulders. The majority of the time he is a very lovable, fun cat.

And then, there’s the other side to him. That’s the evil, biting/scratching, I will do destructive things to hurt you kitty.

On Friday night, I was in my room, dozing, when I heard a terrific CRASH noise. Cyrus has learned that if he does something that results in a loud noise and then hears me coming, he needs to run and hide, because he’s smart. Too smart, actually. He’s also clumsy, like me. He knocked a bottle of Lemony-booze stuff that I got in Italy off the top of the fridge. Thankfully, it was in a tin, so the amount of glass everywhere was minimal. But I didn’t know what he had broken, and automatically assumed it was my new lamp, so I rushed out into the kitchen headlong, hit the puddle and fell, bruising a rib and banging up my knee. I’m lucky I didn’t end up taking glass to the face.

Bad kitty.

I was on the verge of tears as I cleaned up the mess (both from the pain and the loss of alcohol) and embedded a shard of glass in my foot for good measure.

But that’s probably the worst incident so far, so if that’s the best he can do, I’ll be just fine. And just for good measure, here’s a list of my own:

Things the kitty fears:

1) Vacuuming
2) Flatulence (this was an accidental discovery for him)
3) Saying of the word “No!” or general movement in his direction with an annoyed/angry look on my face
4) Anything involving the spray bottle

Probably the question I ask him the most is, “What’s wrong with you?” But I should also be asking myself this question.

As of late, I have been having really strange, vivid, acid-trip like dreams. I mean, we’re talking weird. There was one about how my apartment had an extra room on it, which turned into a porch at a cottage in the woods. Then there was the one where the Magazine Man came to my graduation and I realized I wasn’t wearing pants (when in truth it was shoes I wasn’t wearing at graduation). Last night it was being trapped in an alien spaceship with nothing but a bowl of fruit, and the aliens looked strangely like Joseph McCarthy. Maybe Cyrus is poisoning me or something, but I don’t know. I’m at a loss to explain them. Anyone want to take a crack?

That’s all for now. If anyone feels generous, a stir-fry recipe would be nice, should further kitty disciplinary action be necessary…

“Closing the book” or “New faces on the right”

Many of you have been asking for this, so here it is: The Nurse’s reply.

First of all, I hope you are doing ok. And now…
I am so incredibly sorry for the pain I unknowingly caused you. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that I NEVER did anything to try to hurt you; that´s the LAST thing I ever wanted to do. I really had no idea of your feelings when you first told me. But since you too had dated someone during our friendship, it never crossed my mind anything more with us. I also treasured you as my friend. And I can´t begin to tell you how much it hurts to know I have caused you pain.
I completely understand your position on the wedding and please forgive me for being so blind to the situation. I am so incredibly sorry. Please overlook my mistake and lack of insight.
As to Jeremy, we didn´t start dating that soon. It´s only been 7months. We were just friends and things sort of changed when we learned of each others goals and everything. But I completely never knew that you felt this way. And I am soooo sorry.
I hope you respond to me. I do pray for you, Dariush. I never changed in how I felt for you as my friend.
Hope to hear from you soon,
The Nurse

Now, in case you haven’t seen it, go back to the last post and read the most recent comment. The Vogue Rogue, who I will just call The Rogue for short, is a friend of mine and has been for some time. Her mother is a fairly regular reader, but this is her first time commenting. She was the one who tried to get me to see through The Nurse right from the start. Me, being Mr. Naive, pretty much ignored that advice, and in retrospect, it was a stupid, stupid move. The Rogue was right all along, and has proved to be a far better friend than I ever realized.

Having read her comment really has put it in perspective for me… For the first time, I feel like I can walk away from this and not feel like the bad guy. Call me foolish, but that’s part of why I found it so hard to let go. That’s not the case any more, and I have The Rogue to thank.

***

In other news, some of you, (Mom, Dora, Linda) need to stop with this nonsense about what I was called as a child. Seriously. Stu, don’t encourage them, either. Please? Good gravy, what’s wrong with you people?

***

This is going to come as a surprise to many of you (Dr. Mom, no driving 3 hours to kill me).

When I “graduated” in May… I only walked (wearing no shoes) across the stage. I was still enrolled in two classes that I was supposed to finish over the summer.

Then I got a job and that fell through.

But last week, I took my final exams and I said goodbye to my college days. It’s really over now. Strange…

***

To the right, you’ll see a few new faces, all of them under Compadres.

Allie is an old friend on a new site, Dancing Robots. She’s a great photographer already, and she writes pretty well too.

Blair is someone you haven’t heard of before out of me. Though I worked with her for some time, I never really got to know her very well. So when I started reading her blog, let’s just say I was blown away. Go read, but have hankys nearby, either from crying out of sadness, crying out of joy or crying out of laughter. She’s that good.

Speaking of good, right after her are Britney and Elliott. I can’t talk about them separately because I can’t decide which is the better photographer. Britney was working at the Kernel when she was our high school intern. Now she’s a freshman and she’s already placing in the top 20 in the nation in the prestigious Hearst journalism competition. Elliott placed in that top 20 also, and though he’s one of the more eccentric Kernelites (but in a fun-loving way), you can see from his photos that he sees the world in a way that many of us can only dream of. When Elliott takes a picture, I often feel like a blind person seeing color for the first time. Expect great things out of either one of these two. If one or both wins a Pulitzer, I will laugh, point and say I told you so.

Finally, there’s Kristin Sherrard. Kristin worked with me on The Kentuckian, the UK Yearbook. Above all else, she wants to do better in everything she does. She writes. She shoots photos. I honestly cannot begin to predict where she’ll go, because her future is so great, I don’t even know where to start.

“When giving up on someone is a good thing” or “Rooshie reveals his crushes”

Yes, as you can see from the title, I’m just going to go with “Rooshie” before my sister can tell anyone about any of my childhood nicknames. Dora, I swear by God and Sonny Jesus, if you tell them what my nickname as I child was, I will unleash the fury of a brother who has never had a victory over you. Ever. There’s some pent-up wrath awaiting you if you choose poorly.

Moving on.

I have an e-mail I want you all to read. You already know what it says, but work with me here.

Hey there, stranger! How is life?
Well, I was wondering if you would be interested in doing my pictures for my wedding and how much you would charge. I hope this is still your email. Let me know what you think.
luv
The Nurse

I’ve spent a lot of time ignoring this e-mail, hoping that not replying to it was as good as telling her no. But it’s not. So I composed a reply. It took me a while to send it (literally, ten seconds ago), but I did. Here’s what I sent.

The Nurse (I actually put her name here, but you understand),

I’m not really sure how else to say this but straight out. I’m not at all comfortable with photographing your wedding.
In the past, we were good friends and I did it all because I really did care about you, not hoping for something out of it. Later, I found myself developing deeper feelings for you and I asked you if it might be possible for something to happen out of the friendship we already had. You said no, and I was fine with that. The goals you had in mind made sense and I didn’t want to stand in the way of that at all.
Three months later, you were dating Jeremy. Now you’re getting married.
To say that I wasn’t hurt by the turnaround there would be a lie. At Crystal’s wedding, I was down because of that, and it still hurts me to think about it. I wish it didn’t, but wishing doesn’t make it go away.
I honestly hope that you have been ignorant of my feelings throughout all of this. To think that a person I cared for as much as you would go and consciously hurt me as much as you have is too much for me to bear.
I don’t want you to think about this too much. I’m trying to move on and you’ve got plenty of good things to look forward to. I wish you and Jeremy the best, I really do. But as for the wedding, I’m sorry, I won’t be there.

Dariush

I don’t know what she’ll say or do… She still has a lot of power over me, far more than I’d like… I’m trying to give up on her, but when you loved someone the way I loved her, unconditionally and as a friend whom I never expected to have this happen with, it’s hard to let go. But I am. And I’m finally okay with that.

I didn’t respond to any of the comments you folks left, and I know that bothered some of you. It wasn’t that I wasn’t appreciative of your support. I am. It wasn’t that I wasn’t paying attention to your advice. I was. I just needed some time to think this through and sort it out. Each and every one of you and all my friends and family have stuck with me through all of this, and I cannot even begin to thank you. But I will try. Thank you!

In other news, today is Blog Crush Day!

Last year I totally violated the spirit of the rules and had a bunch of people on the list, simply because I 1) had so many people I enjoyed to a superlative degree and B) because I didn’t want anyone to feel hurt.

Well, I’m not doing that this year, but it doesn’t mean I love any of you any less. I’m just being selective because I’m forced to.

Bree Barton, COME ON DOWWWWWWN!

Bree is someone who found my blog in a way that I’m not sure I understand. At all. Whatever the reason behind it, she’s quickly become a favorite blogger whose only shortcoming is that she can’t write often enough for me (though I suspect that I am quite lacking in that department also). She’s literate, she uses good grammar (like an English major should) and she’s funny. Her way of story-telling generally leaves me in suspense as to what I’m going to feel at the end of the post, and often it isn’t just one emotion. I guess I just like to be surprised.

So that’s that folks. A chapter of my life coming (hopefully) to a close, a few words of admiration for a fellow blogger/writer and all is right with the world.

“There isn’t enough super glue in the world” or “Sunshine, stat”

I had to go back hunting in the blog archives to set the record straight on this. In my mind, it hasn’t been that long. It hasn’t been enough time, and a shadow in my mind whispers that it will not be enough time for some time to come. If ever.

In October of 2006, I leaped. I fell.

Many of you remember The Nurse and the stories I’ve told of her. She was my best friend. I was there for her more than I ever thought I could be. Foolishly, stupidly, hopefully I asked her if there was the possibility of building on that friendship, making it into something more. She said no. I smiled and said it was okay, even though my heart was the last china saucer in the set as it hit the floor and was nothing but stardust and sadness, all broken apart and nearly impossible to put back together.

I used to be whole, better than this, confident. Sure I was chipped in a couple spots, but those were just introductions to stories that helped you understand me better. Now, you can see the places where I’ve broken, been pieced back together not quite well and missing a few shards that just never were the same after I got dropped.

To hear me talk about it, you’d think it was so much more recent…

And then, three months after I leaped and fell, she began dating another guy. The once-broken me was taken, dashed to the floor again, and then hit a few times with a hammer for good measure. More of me is missing, more of me doesn’t fit together quite right. More of me just wishes someone would sweep me up, throw me in the trash. I need to start over. I need to be whole. Pour me in the fire, recast me. Make me whole again!

Saturday, I got an e-mail from her. I’ve been getting fairly regular e-mails from her. She’s a missionary in Bolivia, doing the work that she originally said was one of the reasons that she didn’t want to date anyone. Those e-mails are like squeezing a lemon over a paper cut. I can see her smiling as she writes them, totally unaware that one of the people she sends these e-mails to is waiting for to lose my desperate, sweaty grip on the rope holding up all the weight. It’s swinging from the ceiling by a cheap, frayed rope, all the rage and sadness and feelings of hopelessness, enough to kill a man who’s not careful.

And then she steps in and pulls the knife. She doesn’t even know it, or at least I pray that she could never be cruel enough to do this. She’s getting married.

She doesn’t cut the rope. She stabs me right in the chest with it. She wants me to be the wedding photographer.

Time is frozen, and so are my emotions. They’re still up there in midair, tumbling down ever so slowly. I’m still standing beneath them, and there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get out from under them before they take me with them in a bloody, messy crash to the floor like a baby grand piano, with all the potential in the world to be a part of something beautiful or to be destroyed in a horrible, mangled, useless mess.

I don’t know what to do. When she said no, I was numb. When she got the boyfriend, I was angry. Anger got me through for a while. Then it switched to fear. I’ve been afraid of relationships, even the merest possibility of them, all these months. Now fear is gone and everything is coming crashing down. I’m still standing underneath it, but not the hapless, clueless person who never sees it coming. I know it’s up there. I just can’t move.

Three things can happen: I can step out from under this. Someone can jump in and save me, but that puts them at risk, since a friend in straits such as mine isn’t a friend, but is really just a big sucking leech. Get him better and then burn him off before he kills you, bleeds you dry. The last option is just to let this take me out. Life, literally, will still go on, but I won’t be the same. I could recover. I might never recover. I don’t know what will happen.

But one way or another… Something is going to happen.

And God help me, I still haven’t written her back to say if I’m going to shoot that wedding or not…

“Oh the places I go” or “At least my blood type explains my optimism”

I saw an opthamologist treating a patient last week. The lady has macular degeneration and the doc has a needle mere inches away from her eyeball.

I hate needles. My fear of needles and recent events of the past month have led me to a great distrust of female practitioners of the medical arts. Not because they’re female mind you, but because every time I’ve gotten near one in the past month, they’ve stuck me with a needle or something else sharp.

Needles scare me. I could never get a tattoo or a piercing or be an intravenous drug user. If I get a shot, I have to watch, because that’s how I deal with this fear.

And then the doctor says a phrase that involves the words “little” and “quick.”

These are words that I’ve come to associate with doctor damage control. What the doctor is basically saying is, “Okay, I’m doing something that could potentially make you very afraid or panicky, but I don’t want you to know it, so here, focus on me saying nice-sounding words.”

I honest-to-God almost passed out as I saw that needle go into her eye.

In the past three months, I’ve learned more about medicine than I thought I ever would. In fact, though I’ve never told my parents this, I secretly hoped a career in writing would take me away from all the Hells of medicine that I recall from my childhood, especially the hours that they worked and how much I hated having to be away from them.

And needles too. I hate needles. And yet, three different times I’ve worked on a story that has ended up with me getting stuck with a sharp thing and either something has been injected into me (flu shot… wouldn’t it be so much cooler if I said ‘radioactive experimental serum to make me superstrong and buff like a steroid abuser/comic book superhero?’ But without the spandex.), or blood has been taken out of me (diabetes test and blood typing test).

Side story: When I found out my blood type, I immediately called my mom, knowing full well that I can’t turn down a good opportunity to mess with someone. Let’s just say, “I got my blood type results back and someone has some explaining to do” isn’t her favorite way to be greeted via the telephone.

Back on track, I’m looking back on college journalism classes and realizing just how much they told me about that I didn’t understand. One of my favorite professors, who shares his name with a popular character from the old TV show “M*A*S*H*” tried to drill into each and every one of us the fact that this is not a job. It’s a calling, as he used to say.

I’ve written stories of great sadness. I wrote about a woman who lost her husband, a soldier in Afghanistan, to a heart attack, and had his whole family surrounding me, telling me stories and laughing along with them to hear just how much that man loved Christmas and his family.

I’ve written stories of unbelievable happiness. A regional trainer for a local chain-owned restaurant overheard a customer talking about his 27-year-old son’s need of a kidney, and the trainer volunteered to give one of his own, saving the son, who just became a father himself.

About once a week or so I go to the local jail, the local police station, the local sheriff’s office and I pick up arrest forms, police reports, jail intake logs. I write about the lowest of the low, people so wrapped up in self that they put their lives and the lives of others at risk, or take from others without considering what is really going on.

I love to tell stories. This is what I do. But even the storyteller has to feel the emotion from the story he tells. If I don’t feel that emotion, I can’t work. There’s a difference between being unbiased and being fair. There’s no such thing as unbiased. I will always feel an unreserved dislike the act of drunk driving, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t understand that the people who do it are, in fact, people, loved by someone and deserving of every last ounce of effort and fairness I can muster. Sometimes for me to be fair in telling the story, especially the saddest of the sad and the happiest of the happy, I have to feel the emotion. I can’t write any other way.

Whenever I go for a long stretch without a good story to tell, I start to feel tired, run down, used up. But all it takes is one good story, one good person to restore my energy, and more important, my faith that there are plenty of good people out there doing good things. Once you know that, you can hope, and once you can hope, you can wake up the next day without hating your life.

This is how I do it.

But paying bills is still lame. And cleaning up frosted flakes off the floor at 2 a.m. when the cat knocks the box off the fridge is too.