Not beyond the pale, but peeking around the corner in Normal entries

I’ve got shit to do tomorrow. I know, weird, right? But it’s true just the same. If things work out well instead of flash fiction I will be covered in wet dirty dog hair, but even if that’s not how things work I have shit to do just the same. I suppose I could write a flash now, but I’m in the wrong headspace. That shouldn’t even be a thing. The space in my head is limited, there being just the one delivery system for oxygen and, god willing and the crick ain’t swold, there isn’t a vacuum, and oxygen is the closest thing to space in my head. It’s the wet kind of oxygen, cellular level shit doncha know. That’s right; I went all biological on asses, collectively and singularly.

So I signed up for Hulu sometime last month. I have just cause to bitch. A cop needs just cause to search, all a citizen needs to bitch is be born. In fact the way Ob’s do it, or did it, is to give a citizen something to bitch about the second out of the womb. The medical excuse they use (or used, I haven’t been to a birth in a long ass time, and my own kids were hippie births at home) is to clear all the wet oxygen out of the lungs, but I think it’s to give the citizen instant insight into what fresh hell they are being born into. I took this kid to visit his old man in the federal pen. I forget why exactly but he spanked his kid at the visit. I had the guards haul him off. He explained over his shoulder that he wanted his kid to associate bad decisions with, then he paused, I was expecting the word consequences, he used a shorter word; Pain. Later, at the trial, over the phone in the federal pen he threatened my life, my children’s life and my wife’s life. I would have paid him for the latter at the time.

So, here’s my major problem with hulu, every idea I have that I want to search is not on the site. Every god damned one. So I’ve been watching the suggestions that come up, which aren’t suggestions based on similar shows just suggestions based on partial word matches. I was trying to find Life on Mars for a friend and it gave me Life. I’d never heard of the show, it seems to have had several seasons, for all I know it’s still on. I was, and still am, briefly, for another few weeks, married to a chronic channel surfer. I know of a lot more shows than I’ve ever watched or that I’ve watched five minutes of. Never heard of it. The premise is this cop was set up, twelve years later they discover he’s innocent; he gets a fifty million dollar settlement and a gold shield. The schtick is that he listens to Zen master tapes and says cryptic shit that is supposed to be Zen, it’s not tiresome often enough for me to quit watching it and now and again it’s a bit brilliant, I mean the script or a sub plot, mostly it’s a cop buddy show with a schtick that doesn’t work very well.

I know, it would have been type casting to have cast an Asian guy, I guess the same was true with casting a Carradine in Kung Fu, but Christ, would they cast a white guy as an uncle tom, a steppin’ fetchit, a badly dressed huggy bear style pimp? Forty five years or so Martin Luther King was shot, he had a really cool speech about looking forward to when a man is not judged by the color of his skin but the character of his heart. I paraphrase. Yeah, being afraid to cast someone who culturally might pull off Zen as a prison defense mechanism is --- well it’s not that. I kind of like the actor, but he’s stiff and I can’t imagine him not balking at some of his lines. What is supposed to come across as Zen comes across as a concussion.

But, ok, let’s say there is a character like that and you’re trying to make things seem real. You know what bugged me about Colombo when I was a kid? That his colleagues always questioned his intelligence and methods. You’d think after seeing this guy solve a homicide a week for several seasons they’d know how he operated. For that matter Perry Mason too, though no one ever thought of him as quirky or stupid when he did weird shit the DA and the judge were always aghast, the very DA that lost every case to Perry. In the real world that DA would be out of a job.

For some reason in Life the cases are always wacky like plain old murder wasn’t enough or the laws of averages were such that this guy and his partner just drew the weird cases. X-files made sense as far as drawing weird cases, regular detectives in the LAPD homicide squad (incidentally, except for the CO, they seemed to be the only two not in uniform, at least in their prescient). However, there’s enough police procedure stuff to give it the right feel (unlike, for instance, any cop in a Dan Brown book. Not only do all the cops and security leave two civilians alone in the Louvre to touch the Mona Lisa, but the art historian tracks obvious clues that had been around for centuries to other art historians and no one bothered to make connections that all but have a big red X painted on them).

I almost wrote a flash on a particularly dumb line in one of the episodes of Life “There’s something wrong with that guy” “He’s dead” “I know, but he’s really dead” In my head the CO brings him to talk about that being the entirety of the report, the guy transferred from Narcotics, the CO asks “Do your reports read; ‘The perp was stoned. Really stoned.’” I had worked out a whole flash getting progressively sillier, mocking Life. Of course an ongoing subplot was dude tracking who set him up.

It’s late, for me, I’m losing my track, I have a kindle fire HD and the newer nook, a cell, a laptop and my old hand rolled Frankenstein of a desk top. I can watch anything I want on any of them, or all of them at the same time. I have to conclude I must want to watch this show. Adam Arkin is the sidekick who was in the joint for embezzlement. Oh, I know why I told a federal pen story. They made the federal pen look scary and prison rapey. I’ve been in a few federal pens, except that you’re less likely to get early release I don’t think there’s a con anywhere that wouldn’t rather do federal time. Cleaner, safer, less crowded and a much different type of population. The worse sort of prisoner is a lightweight trying to be a bad ass, they are angry and have something to prove. Murderers know why they are in prison, for instance, in a state or county holding cell, they don’t fuss much, they have a vested interest in the environment, it’ll be their last home. The guy in on a parole violation for smoking a doobie or not contacting a hard ass PO, he’s got a hard on for everything. They never show jail like it is. Jail like it is is pretty boring.

Ok, I’m spent.