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Journal writing is a bitch, the straight day to day sort of shit. Weird as it seems after eighteen years of keeping an online journal, I don’t much care of the core of the idea; not in general, but personally. I’ve kept journals ever since I was kid, hundreds of analog journals that I’d leave in … other places. But they had cartoons in the margins, poetry, unsent love letters, just about anything you could do with pen and paper except real events in a direct manner of speaking.

I actually took a class at PSU in journal writing, padding my GPA. I think it might have been the first time I kept a journal with real events, sort of. The teacher wrote poems about birds so the text book was Audubon’s bird guide, but, we didn’t have to watch birds if we didn’t want. I didn’t, but I also knew he wanted nature shit, so I’d take a hike, halfway through I’d sit on a log and write about what I’d seen and how I felt, and sometimes just make up the rest in a banal sort of way.

The stuff I want to write about is stuff I don’t want to think about, and, if I weren’t so preoccupied I might could come at it sideways in a fictional sort of way. Once upon a time I could write stuff out for the explicit purpose of no longer having to think about it. I’ve been back here for almost six years and the feeling of haunting my own childhood hasn’t worn thin yet. Some days it’s thick and crumbly as aged cheddar. Details come back and there’s nothing I can or want to do with them, they don’t care.

I drove past this round-about near the old pump house and remembered being stopped by one of the local cops I didn’t know. I was with my friend, of sorts, Popeye, may hell be his kind of place, and it was 3 in the morning and we were about as sober as a meercat in heat, but that’s not why we got pulled over. Collectively I don’t think this town has been sober since 1959-ish when MAC became MSU. No, like so many other times in so many other places, we were stopped because I looked like the suspect. Popeyes dad was the head of the Michigan State Police, like the state of Michigan not the university. It made him cocky. Whenever I was with him the local cops weren’t familiar with the name or told him then it should be easy to get out of the mess when the paper work was done.

Popeye wasn’t used to how often I got pulled over for looking like the guy and he started shooting off his mouth. We probably would have spent what was left of the night in a holding cell but a call came through that ‘the suspect’ was spotted somewhere. If I hadn’t been standing on the roundabout I would have put even money on ‘the suspect’ that was spotted being me. It made me think of the one cop in town who had it in for me and that led me to think of things I’d rather not think about.

Long story short just to get to why the cop had it in for me; a case came up involving several men from a local TV/Radio station and minors, sex for drugs, toys for sex or drugs that sort of thing. Someone had tipped them off, or, rather out of guilt or vengeance, told them the tale. Led by the one cop they fucked up the investigation and, after the trial, I told the one cop that. I didn’t tell him how he fucked it up legally, the judge did that and, at greater length, the DA. I told him how he had alienated most of his witness’s. I had been co-operative, was eager to testify, and he damn near had me tell him to fuck off. He used intimidation and threats instead of … well, anything. His investigation was bad and his tactics with potential witnesses was ham fisted at best. I told him that, and I told him that in an objective and straight forward way and told him he was treating abused minors like perps.

From 75 to 78 that son-of-a-bitch pulled me over every damn time he saw me. It’s not a very large town. If he had been a smarter guy he actually could have caught me shit, I did a lot of shit, sometimes he pulled me over on my too or from doing shit, but, his intent was to harass, I’m not sure he even knew I did a lot of shit. He did know that the enforcers for the pedophiles thought I had been the informant and that I was regularly threatened from the moment the case was opened until the trial ended, about a year. Threatened with weapons, likely not registered weapons. If he were a smarter and still an asshole he could have just followed me as walking bait to catch some general bad element types. If he were a smarter man I would have almost considered that he fucked the case up on purpose.

Oh, shit, this is in danger of becoming an orphan. I got distracted by a crisis in text and lost momentum. If I left parts out I either meant to or hadn’t got there yet and now I won’t. That case might have been what made me well suited to Permanent Planning in child sex abuse cases, it’s not what qualified me, but it’s what gave me the predisposition to investigate properly.