LJ Idol Week 11 - I Fought the Law
o/` "Mama, take this badge off of me
I can't use it anymore.
It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door." o/`
----- Knockin' on Heaven's Door" performed by Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead
I've got a little confession to make...I regularly share my showers with US Marshal Matt Dillon or Texas Ranger Cordell Walker. It gets mighty crowded in there when Festus, Newly, and Trivette also show up. No, this isn't some sort of weird actor fetish or sexual tryst. It's not even a manifestation of a fan girl's juiciest slash fantasies.
I'm a writer --- a writer of Westerns modern and classic as well as a writer of good canon-following fan fiction --- and I get my best ideas in the shower. Oh, I've tried informing the good Marshal that soap bubbles are not the best or most permanent medium in which to jot down story ideas but he rarely listens to me. It would seem that lawmen have a stubborn streak a mile wide and when they have something to tell you, you'd better listen.
They never want to talk when I'm anywhere near the laptop. No, they always either whisper their stories into my subconscious as I'm drifting off to sleep or they corner me in the damned shower when I can't do anything but listen and hope I still remember what they told me by the time I get out. A friend, not unsympathetic to my problem, once suggested keeping some of those soap crayons in the shower and jotting ideas down on the tiles. That worked for a while until my husband got tired of looking at them (or got jealous of all those men in the shower, depending on whose side of the story you believe) and decided to give the walls a good scrub.
I never wanted to write for these men, never asked them to share my creative life. It happened, like most of the things in my life, by coincidence. I'd been creatively dry for about three years, had completely stopped writing. Most of my friends, connected in some way to the furry fandom, wanted furry stories. A significant number of them wouldn't read anything that didn't have graphic sexual content and I just didn't write that sort of thing. My poetry they considered a waste of time and my other writing interests a wasted effort. Only the furry mattered, and it had to be real furry not "humans in fursuits". My writing tended to be more about the exploration of the human animal via the medium of an anthropomorphic body than about real furries. Kafka's exploration of a human cockroach I could do. Kzinti or Sholans or Doonans? Forget it.
It might have gone on forever like that if it hadn't been for one small seemingly insignificant thing: a nasty thorn about an inch and a half long. Florida's a lot like I've heard Australia described: everything bites, stings, or scratches and a lot of it is poisonous. I got the thorn in my side doing yard work and it eventually festered into a raging MRSA infection which required both hospitalization and surgery. During my recovery, which took almost six months hauling around a device designed to pull closed the gaping wound and (hopefully) keep my innards from leaking out through the incision, I had a lot of time on my hands and I watched a lot of re-runs.
Walker, Texas Ranger bothered me. I'd grown up in the West; just about everyone knows about the Texas Rangers and many of the states in the southwest still maintain a ranger force of sorts. I'd watch Cordell Walker get into scrap after scrap --- shot, stabbed, blown up, thrown in rivers --- and walk out of the hospital after only a few days. I watched him enforcing the law with his fists, teaching in schools (WTF? they're just dumb blue collar law enforcement with special shiny badges, right?)...and it drove me nuts. I was seized with the urge to write a modern, historically accurate story line which would conform to human limitations and real law enforcement practices.
It was supposed to be a 3500 word short story to prove a point. Unfortunately, it didn't prove to be that easy. In the first place, the show's writers really had made at least a token effort at research. I found out quickly that yes, the Texas Rangers do have state wide and often interstate or international jurisdiction. I learned that they aren't limited to standard weapons and can use any weapon they can qualify on (including the Colt .45 Peacemaker Walker carries in the first half of the series). I learned that they aren't "just" law enforcement officers, that they have to have a bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university in order to even be considered for the Rangers. I learned that they often are a law unto themselves and the policy is still often to bring in their wanted "by any means necessary". Quite a few have martial arts training and most prefer to settle things with negotiation or fists before resorting to firing a weapon.
I even made a trip to the Texas Rangers Museum and Hall of Fame at Waco...and met a real live Texas Ranger. At this point, you should probably know that I'm terrified of law enforcement officers --- of anyone carrying a badge --- because of the way the officers in my home town treated me as an epileptic. I'd been jailed, sent to the psych ward, charged with assault and battery, ridiculed, kicked, and beaten. I'd been handcuffed while in seizure and the muscle contractions were so strong that they literally ripped my arms out of their sockets...while the good ole boys stood by laughing. It was back in the days before the Americans With Disabilities Act, when epileptics were still considered mental defectives.
The Texas Rangers turned it around as only real heroes could. I literally ran into that Texas Ranger at the museum, this one a captain (gold badge opposed to the silver one the sergeants wear). He was on duty, I suppose, because he wore his sidearm in addition to the badge and also his cuffs. He wasn't the only law enforcement officer I saw there either. Both tried to talk to me but the first saw immediately I was scared witless and after complimenting Freyja on her excellent behavior, withdrew to a respectful distance...but not before saying, gently, "Ma'am, all due respect, but if I was to catch whichever law enforcement officer mishandled you, I'd throttle him!" That...helped. I might be able to believe that good law enforcement officers still exist.
I was having a panic attack when I ran into the Texas Ranger --- too many new things, too much excitement, too many people being gentle and kind instead of ridiculing me. The Texas Ranger held me tongue tied. He greeted me, asked if I was enjoying myself, and then moved on. It took me a moment to realize I'd been in the presence of a living legend. I would have liked to have asked all kinds of questions but I was too shy.
100,000 words and several side stories later, What Price Humanity? is one of my best literary efforts. More importantly, doing the research helped restore law enforcement officers to a position of trust in my world. The Texas Rangers I'd met were truly the epitome of the lawgivers of the west: polite to the women, strict in their enforcement of the law, and a credit to their communities. From them, I got something I'd never received from the local police officers in my home town who treated epilepsy as though it were a crime: an apology for their brutality and a chance to find out that not all law enforcement personnel were like that. All because Cordell Walker wouldn't take "no" for an answer and wouldn't get out of my shower.
Marshal Dillon came along after our first trip out West. We'd weathered over in Hays, Kansas during the blizzards of 2006. I'd remembered the town being mentioned in the old Gunsmoke episodes and wondered how far we really were from Dodge City. I wanted to go there, just to say I'd been there I suppose. We didn't make it that trip...or the next one...but the Kansas prairies had worked their way into my heart and my imagination.
I struggled hard against that one, booted him clean out of there several times. Friends who knew of my love of the west and my red hair took to calling me Miss Kitty (a nickname I still think is undeserved, considering I wear a lot more flesh and she usually wore a lot less clothes). My "cowboy" herds code, which is law enforcement of a different sort, but the end result is the same: lots of forgotten special occasions, broken dates, the occasional broken heart, and never knowing when work will intrude on intimacy. I started watching Gunsmoke and tracked down a bunch of the radio episodes. I discovered far too many similarities between my personal life and the life of one Miss Kitty Russell and US Marshal Matt Dillon. I also discovered that a lot of the episodes had been left open ended or unfinished. I found myself with another lawman --- and sometimes a deputy or two --- in my shower.
The law, in this case, has plainly won. I've given up suppressing the story ideas and kicking US marshals, Rangers, and deputies out of my shower. It's a genre I seem to have a talent for and I can't wait to see what my lawmen are going to whisper in my ear next...after I've had my coffee please. Even the lawmen know better than to come between a woman and her coffee.
I can't use it anymore.
It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door." o/`
----- Knockin' on Heaven's Door" performed by Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead
I've got a little confession to make...I regularly share my showers with US Marshal Matt Dillon or Texas Ranger Cordell Walker. It gets mighty crowded in there when Festus, Newly, and Trivette also show up. No, this isn't some sort of weird actor fetish or sexual tryst. It's not even a manifestation of a fan girl's juiciest slash fantasies.
I'm a writer --- a writer of Westerns modern and classic as well as a writer of good canon-following fan fiction --- and I get my best ideas in the shower. Oh, I've tried informing the good Marshal that soap bubbles are not the best or most permanent medium in which to jot down story ideas but he rarely listens to me. It would seem that lawmen have a stubborn streak a mile wide and when they have something to tell you, you'd better listen.
They never want to talk when I'm anywhere near the laptop. No, they always either whisper their stories into my subconscious as I'm drifting off to sleep or they corner me in the damned shower when I can't do anything but listen and hope I still remember what they told me by the time I get out. A friend, not unsympathetic to my problem, once suggested keeping some of those soap crayons in the shower and jotting ideas down on the tiles. That worked for a while until my husband got tired of looking at them (or got jealous of all those men in the shower, depending on whose side of the story you believe) and decided to give the walls a good scrub.
I never wanted to write for these men, never asked them to share my creative life. It happened, like most of the things in my life, by coincidence. I'd been creatively dry for about three years, had completely stopped writing. Most of my friends, connected in some way to the furry fandom, wanted furry stories. A significant number of them wouldn't read anything that didn't have graphic sexual content and I just didn't write that sort of thing. My poetry they considered a waste of time and my other writing interests a wasted effort. Only the furry mattered, and it had to be real furry not "humans in fursuits". My writing tended to be more about the exploration of the human animal via the medium of an anthropomorphic body than about real furries. Kafka's exploration of a human cockroach I could do. Kzinti or Sholans or Doonans? Forget it.
It might have gone on forever like that if it hadn't been for one small seemingly insignificant thing: a nasty thorn about an inch and a half long. Florida's a lot like I've heard Australia described: everything bites, stings, or scratches and a lot of it is poisonous. I got the thorn in my side doing yard work and it eventually festered into a raging MRSA infection which required both hospitalization and surgery. During my recovery, which took almost six months hauling around a device designed to pull closed the gaping wound and (hopefully) keep my innards from leaking out through the incision, I had a lot of time on my hands and I watched a lot of re-runs.
Walker, Texas Ranger bothered me. I'd grown up in the West; just about everyone knows about the Texas Rangers and many of the states in the southwest still maintain a ranger force of sorts. I'd watch Cordell Walker get into scrap after scrap --- shot, stabbed, blown up, thrown in rivers --- and walk out of the hospital after only a few days. I watched him enforcing the law with his fists, teaching in schools (WTF? they're just dumb blue collar law enforcement with special shiny badges, right?)...and it drove me nuts. I was seized with the urge to write a modern, historically accurate story line which would conform to human limitations and real law enforcement practices.
It was supposed to be a 3500 word short story to prove a point. Unfortunately, it didn't prove to be that easy. In the first place, the show's writers really had made at least a token effort at research. I found out quickly that yes, the Texas Rangers do have state wide and often interstate or international jurisdiction. I learned that they aren't limited to standard weapons and can use any weapon they can qualify on (including the Colt .45 Peacemaker Walker carries in the first half of the series). I learned that they aren't "just" law enforcement officers, that they have to have a bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university in order to even be considered for the Rangers. I learned that they often are a law unto themselves and the policy is still often to bring in their wanted "by any means necessary". Quite a few have martial arts training and most prefer to settle things with negotiation or fists before resorting to firing a weapon.
I even made a trip to the Texas Rangers Museum and Hall of Fame at Waco...and met a real live Texas Ranger. At this point, you should probably know that I'm terrified of law enforcement officers --- of anyone carrying a badge --- because of the way the officers in my home town treated me as an epileptic. I'd been jailed, sent to the psych ward, charged with assault and battery, ridiculed, kicked, and beaten. I'd been handcuffed while in seizure and the muscle contractions were so strong that they literally ripped my arms out of their sockets...while the good ole boys stood by laughing. It was back in the days before the Americans With Disabilities Act, when epileptics were still considered mental defectives.
The Texas Rangers turned it around as only real heroes could. I literally ran into that Texas Ranger at the museum, this one a captain (gold badge opposed to the silver one the sergeants wear). He was on duty, I suppose, because he wore his sidearm in addition to the badge and also his cuffs. He wasn't the only law enforcement officer I saw there either. Both tried to talk to me but the first saw immediately I was scared witless and after complimenting Freyja on her excellent behavior, withdrew to a respectful distance...but not before saying, gently, "Ma'am, all due respect, but if I was to catch whichever law enforcement officer mishandled you, I'd throttle him!" That...helped. I might be able to believe that good law enforcement officers still exist.
I was having a panic attack when I ran into the Texas Ranger --- too many new things, too much excitement, too many people being gentle and kind instead of ridiculing me. The Texas Ranger held me tongue tied. He greeted me, asked if I was enjoying myself, and then moved on. It took me a moment to realize I'd been in the presence of a living legend. I would have liked to have asked all kinds of questions but I was too shy.
100,000 words and several side stories later, What Price Humanity? is one of my best literary efforts. More importantly, doing the research helped restore law enforcement officers to a position of trust in my world. The Texas Rangers I'd met were truly the epitome of the lawgivers of the west: polite to the women, strict in their enforcement of the law, and a credit to their communities. From them, I got something I'd never received from the local police officers in my home town who treated epilepsy as though it were a crime: an apology for their brutality and a chance to find out that not all law enforcement personnel were like that. All because Cordell Walker wouldn't take "no" for an answer and wouldn't get out of my shower.
Marshal Dillon came along after our first trip out West. We'd weathered over in Hays, Kansas during the blizzards of 2006. I'd remembered the town being mentioned in the old Gunsmoke episodes and wondered how far we really were from Dodge City. I wanted to go there, just to say I'd been there I suppose. We didn't make it that trip...or the next one...but the Kansas prairies had worked their way into my heart and my imagination.
I struggled hard against that one, booted him clean out of there several times. Friends who knew of my love of the west and my red hair took to calling me Miss Kitty (a nickname I still think is undeserved, considering I wear a lot more flesh and she usually wore a lot less clothes). My "cowboy" herds code, which is law enforcement of a different sort, but the end result is the same: lots of forgotten special occasions, broken dates, the occasional broken heart, and never knowing when work will intrude on intimacy. I started watching Gunsmoke and tracked down a bunch of the radio episodes. I discovered far too many similarities between my personal life and the life of one Miss Kitty Russell and US Marshal Matt Dillon. I also discovered that a lot of the episodes had been left open ended or unfinished. I found myself with another lawman --- and sometimes a deputy or two --- in my shower.
The law, in this case, has plainly won. I've given up suppressing the story ideas and kicking US marshals, Rangers, and deputies out of my shower. It's a genre I seem to have a talent for and I can't wait to see what my lawmen are going to whisper in my ear next...after I've had my coffee please. Even the lawmen know better than to come between a woman and her coffee.