They contract it out — to us — In my duties as a police officer I am often required to take what other industries might call “continuing education” or “recertification” courses. I had to do so last week for a “conducted energy weapon” (CEW) that the agency is adopting. If you don’t know what a CEW is, “Bro,”…

You’re never in the moment but also you are — Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my life’s most memorable and poignant moments and how I chose to deal with them. In my essay, Waiting for the Wrong Moment, I provide a few examples. These moments and the spaces between them are how we perceive life. …

It’d be a lot easier if there were — There were some peculiar people in the “neighborhood” where I grew up. Beaver Cleaver and Marcia Brady would have run screaming from the hot mess that was my street. …

Almost all of them anyway — People regularly bemoan their mother having thrown out their childhood comic book collection. It’s as though everybody thinks they had an Action Comics #1 (the debut of Superman) hidden in the stack of Archies or my favorite, Mad Magazine. I am certain my trove contained no such forgotten gems. That…

Where angels fear to deplane — It seems like every other ad I see is a charity asking for money. In these times of want and woe, we need to be more generous with one another and to think more deeply about the world we want to create. Sometimes it’s hard to know where your hard-earned…

Powers & Knowledge Far Beyond Younger Men — A curious and interesting thing happened recently. My cellular telephone, Internet, home phone (don’t ask) and satellite television provider, AT&T decided it would be a fine time to take a rest from pushing all those ones and zeros through their wires, towers, and air. If you’re under twenty and reading…

Sometimes it’s best if you lose your dinosaur — In a recent essay I wrote about Clayton Moore, the actor who famously played the Lone Ranger. Moore’s autobiography is titled I Was That Masked Man, a play on “Who was that masked man?” a recurrent question in the Lone Ranger series. As I wrote that essay, I thought a…

Social power, tyranny and the limits of justice — In the first part of this essay, we traced the development of the Southern sheriff archetype in popular culture. Just the term itself, ‘Southern sheriff’ conjures a very specific image. The image is often of a white, male, who’s a bit overweight, frumpy, sweaty, indolent, and quick to anger. He…

How popular culture caricatures Southern law enforcement — For those readers who live in the United States, when I write the words “Southern sheriff” most of you probably have an immediate and likely similar mental image. Almost as long as there have been motion pictures, Southern lawmen have been the target of parody, lampoon, and vilification. To be…