SWAT Training

Before the knee injuries, shoulder muscle tears, back strains, and all the other general aches and pains that come with living on this planet for 50-plus years, there was once a time that I wanted to be on the police SWAT team. I was in my twenties, lean and healthy, and I still had that young person’s feeling of immortality. In other words, I was young and stupid.

The Hillsborough Police Department (HPD), where I worked at the time, did not have their own SWAT team. We were too small. With only 20 or so people working for the agency, it was not possible to fund and train our own emergency response team. Instead, we requested to be part of the San Mateo County SWAT team.

They trained us and, in return, we agreed to send SWAT trained officers to assist the County during any emergency call-outs. It was a good deal and benefitted both agencies.

HPD’s goal was to have two SWAT-trained officers on each shift. This was a bit tricky since most of our shifts only had three or four people total. Between trying to schedule time off for training and the high failure rate of SWAT candidates, we were lucky to have one officer on each shift with the desired certification.

After a few years with my department, I advised my supervisors that I was interested in attending the training. They put my name on a list, then told me that before I could go, I needed to meet certain physical requirements before I could attend the training.

I was told that I needed to be able to run 2 miles in under 15 minutes, complete 50 pushups in under a minute, complete 60 sit-ups in under 2 minutes, do two pullups while wearing a 40 pound backpack, and qualify as “marksman” in both the pistol and rifle.

With a bit of work, I was able to achieve each of these goals.

So, what made me think about SWAT physical fitness requirements after all these years? Let me tell you.

The other day, I got up and went for a two-mile run through my neighborhood. When I was done, I was feeling pretty proud of myself that I had finished the two miles in under 20 minutes. That was when I realized that I was still 5 minutes slower than my pace for the same distance 30 years ago.

That doesn’t bother me too much, especially since I know I’m fortunate to be running at all after the beating my body took for so many years. 20 minutes is a freaking Olympic gold medal performance for me these days. It did, however, get me thinking about the other requirements on the list and how well I have held up over the years.

I no longer hold “marksman” certifications at the range. I can still hit a target when I absolutely must, but my accuracy has slipped the tiniest bit over the past few years. In fact, the nicest thing one of the department range masters has said to me in years is, “Well, Sarge. I’ve seen you do worse.”

Not exactly SWAT-worthy I suppose, but at least I passed.

I can still do 50 pushups. It just takes me a few hours and several rest periods to manage it. Same thing with the 60 sit-ups, and that’s only if you count lying on the floor and bobbing your head back and forth as a sit-up.

I discovered that I can still do two pullups, but that’s if I’m standing on the 40-pound backpack instead of wearing it. I’m already carrying around an extra 40 pounds that I didn’t have when I was 25 years old, so wearing a weighted backpack is just redundant anyway.

Besides, I can’t think of a time in my entire career that I’ve ever run into a pullup emergency. I’ve never shown up on a call for service and had somebody say, “Officer, you have to save his life! You just need to grab onto that bar and pull on it until your head rises just above it!”

Not once in 25 years.

Basically, I’m not exactly ready to pass a SWAT physical agility test anytime soon. Not that I really have any desire to do so. These days, the only emergencies I have to respond to are mad dashes to the store because I’ve run out of something I needed to fix dinner. And sometimes, I’m not even up to doing that.

I’m just happy with my morning 20-minute run. I don’t need anything more.

If anyone is wondering whether I ever joined the San Mateo County SWAT team, the short answer is:

No.

The long answer is:

… No.

By the time my turn came around to go to training, my wife got a job in Sacramento and I had made the decision to move there with her. My bosses told me they were not going to pay to send me to training just so I could take that skillset to another agency. I guess I can’t argue with that logic. Why buy a chauffer a brand-new car just so they can drive someone else around in it?

Now, you’re probably wondering if I ever went to SWAT training with Sacramento County.

Nope. Didn’t do that either.

By this time, I had two little girls in the house. After spending every free moment of my time chasing EM1 and EM2 around, I decided occasionally getting some sleep was more important than joining the SWAT team.

I still think that was the right decision.

The sleeping thing. Not necessarily the having kids thing. The jury is still out on that one.

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Bad Odds

I read an article recently that said more adult children are moving back home to live with their parents than at any time since the 1930’s. They referred to these men and women as the “boomerang generation.” Well, I must live in Australia because I got boomeranged. Hard.

Now, many of you may think this is a good thing. You might believe that adult offspring living at home would be of great benefit to their aging and overworked mothers and fathers. They could help out financially by covering some of the bills, including food, power, and other necessities. They might lend a hand with the chores, taking on yardwork and housework so their rapidly deteriorating elders don’t wear out quite so quickly. They could even fix meals and run necessary errands.

You might think that.

And you would be terribly wrong.

I have two adult children living with me these days. EM1 is 23 years old and firmly entrenched in my home. She treats her bedroom like an apartment and has even changed the locks without providing her landlords a key. Landlords she doesn’t pay rent to.

A few weeks ago, I asked EM1 to pick one night during the week to plan a meal and cook dinner for the family. Instead of actually doing what I asked, she did nothing all week, then on Friday suddenly said, “Oh, I guess it’s my night to do dinner.”

She then told me to pick a restaurant, go online to order what I wanted and pay for it, then schedule a pickup. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t consider this to be “fixing dinner.” It’s more like Uber Eats, only with a shittier attitude.

And when she went out to pick up the food, EM1 decided to stop for coffee on the way home just to make sure everything was good and cold when it got to us.

This is her idea of “helping.”

But I have actually sort of gotten used to EM1’s particular brand of B.S. It is the younger kid that suddenly presented us with a whole new set of challenges this year. EM2 will be 21 in a few months. She is attending college, but her school has gone completely virtual. EM2 moved out of the dorms and back home with us so she could save money and try to shorten my life.

Although classes are online, she still drives to school on most days so she can hang out with her college friends while she studies. I am not sure of her reasoning for this other than perhaps some strange desire to cost us gas money and put wear and tear on the car. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why, instead of staying in her room and opening up her laptop to attend class, she feels the need to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes to a friend’s apartment so she can open up her laptop to attend class.

But I have never understood how this kid’s mind works. This is the same child that wandered into our bedroom at 10 o’clock at night while my wife and I were trying to sleep and started singing a song from her favorite cartoon. Despite harsh words and a few thrown objects, she didn’t stop singing until the entire song was done.

To clarify, this wasn’t several years ago. This was just last week. (And the cartoon was We Bare Bears, just in case you were wondering. I have no idea what the name of the damned song was.)

This is my life with adult children in the home. No extra help with chores or running errands, just nonstop tests to see if I can keep my sanity or if I’ll finally break and fire up the chainsaw I keep in the garage and try to bring the house down around our ears. At the moment, the odds are about two to one in favor of the chainsaw in case you wanted to get your bets in.

Just the other day, I was in the kitchen washing dishes and loading up the dish washer. I probably spent twenty minutes boiling my hands in hot soapy water before I finished the stack of plates and silverware that had accumulated in the sink over the past few hours. I turned off the water, grabbed the bag out of the kitchen garbage can and took it outside.

When I returned, I found a dirty dish and a fork sitting in the sink.

EM1 was sitting on the couch watching the latest installment of some Korean soap opera. I asked her in a very pleasant voice, “What the f—k is this?”

She turned and asked what I was referring to. I asked her why there was a dirty dish in the sink, and with a look that suggested she couldn’t believe I was bothering her for something so trivial, she told me it was from her lunch.

I took a deep breath then clarified that I wasn’t really asking where it came from, but rather why didn’t she bother to wash it. She told me, “I’ll get it later.”

I asked, again very politely, “If you didn’t want to wash it, why the hell didn’t you at least hand it to me thirty seconds ago while I was washing all the other dishes?”

She shushed me, then turned the volume up on the television set.

For anyone who is wondering, EM1 is still alive and breathing. I’ll admit however, that it was touch and go for a moment.

But maybe we should up those odds to three to one in favor of the chainsaw.

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Three Years

Birthday cake with candle shaped like number 3

This week marks a milestone for Deep Dark Thoughts. As of today (or close enough that nobody cares) DDT is officially three years old!

I thought for this post I would skip the normal attacks on my family, friends, and career, and instead just take a moment to enjoy the accomplishment. In 2017, I started ranting about my misdeeds, mishaps, misfires, and life in general, and here I am in 2020, still at it. To be fair, I’ve been ranting about all of those things my entire life, I just made it official three years back when I began posting online about everything (and everyone) that gets under my skin.

I have never had any difficulty finding things to complain about and, let’s face it, this past year has been an absolute treasure trove of torment and annoyance. Between the garbage going on in the world around us and the fact that my adult kids have both come back home to live with me full time, I need the outlet DDT provides to me more than ever before.

And everyone out there who reads this blog gets to suffer right along with me. Misery loves company, I guess. Well, I hope you are all willing to endure it a little longer because I don’t think I’ll be stopping this slow-motion train wreck anytime soon.

Despite what you have been reading from me lately, there actually has been some good news in my life, so I thought I would share that with all of you. I’m getting older and I’ve been drinking a lot more in the past couple of years. That’s it. That’s the good news.  I figure if I keep it up, I will probably be dead soon and that’s good news for all of us.

I will be gone, which means I will stop writing this blog. That also means all of you get back five minutes of your day on Thursdays. Win-win.

All kidding aside, thank you to everyone who has been reading, and especially to those that occasionally take a moment to send a kind word my way to let me know they enjoyed my directionless, meaningless tirades.

I plan to continue this blog for a while yet, but I have been considering making a few changes. I have been thinking about opening up this space to other writers who would like to share vignettes of their lives, offer new viewpoints to consider, or just rant about their own personal pet peeves.

The rules will remain the same. No religion, no politics, and no topics that in any way have any meaning in our current society. Uninformed, unenlightened discourse fueled by anecdotal evidence will be the only content acceptable in these pages. And, above all, I will continue to try to find the humor in the misery around us.

I haven’t completely made up my mind on which direction I will eventually go with this, but I am curious to know what any of you may think on the matter. I really want to hear from you. Comment below or send me a note or email and give me your thoughts. Is my lunatic fringe musings sufficient for a while longer, or is it time to hear some new voices? I’m okay with either direction and promise I won’t be upset if a few of you are tired of my pedantic complaints and ready to see someone else’s pedantic complaints.

Actually, I can’t promise that. As you may have noticed, I get upset easily and anything is fair game for Deep Dark Thoughts. I do promise that I won’t call you out by name, however. I can come up with a neat new nickname for you and nobody will know who you actually are. Just ask EM1 and EM2 about that.

Seriously, though, I do want to hear your thoughts about opening up DDT to other writers.

That’s it for now. Thank you for three years of your patience and tolerance, and I hope you’re willing to stick it out for a little bit longer. If you haven’t been with me that long, feel free to check out the archives and see what I was up to three years ago. (Hint: it’s going to look an awful lot like right now. The only difference is the kids have gotten a little older and grown a bit more sophisticated in their abilities to piss me off.)

Next week, things will get back to normal as I once again complain about how useless my children are. Stay tuned and check back in next Thursday. (Spoiler alert: my children are really, really, really useless.)

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Trivial Matters

As we do many nights of the week, my family and I were all seated around the living room watching our evening episode of Jeopardy! I was doing pretty well in several of the categories and I had just correctly answered a Double Jeopardy question that the contestant on the television missed. (C’mon man. Who doesn’t know that Robert Heinlein wrote the book Starship Troopers?) My daughter, EM2, looked at me and said, “Wow, dad. You’re pretty good at trivia.”

I thought about her comment for a moment and realized that yes, I was pretty good at trivia. I also realized that the statement wasn’t really a compliment.

I know a lot of stuff that nobody else cares about and has never done me any good in the real world. I don’t know how to rebuild a car engine, fix plumbing, or run electrical wire, but by God, I sure know that Myron MacLain created Captain America’s first shield, and is credited with inventing adamantium steel.

And I can tell you that the word sarcophagus is based on the Greek word “sarkophagos,” which means flesh-consuming. (I know. Gross, right?)

But what good is knowing a bunch of trivia? None at all. It’s even in the definition of the word trivia: “pieces of information of little importance or value.”

My brain, for some reason, just tends to hold onto little pearls of wisdom that nobody else wants to hear about. I can barely change a light bulb, but I know that the first commercially viable light bulb filaments were made of bamboo. Anybody care? Anyone? No?

Didn’t think so.

I don’t even seem to be able to retain useful trivia. I’m terrible at geography. I don’t know state capitols, the locations of major rivers, or even the location of most countries on a map outside of the USA and Canada. These facts might actually have some relevance in my life if I could retain them for longer than three seconds. But when it comes to information I wish I could remember, I seem to have the memory capabilities of a gold fish.

However, the words to the theme songs for Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and The Beverly Hillbillies I will have on lockdown in my brain for the rest of my life. I will most likely be lying in my deathbed, singing to the nurse as she turns off all the machines in my hospital room, “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named, Jed…”

What can I say? I think there is something very wrong with the memory synapses in my brain. I imagine normal people’s brains as a series of drawers. If there is something you want to remember, you stick it in the drawer and it’s there for you the next time you come looking. My brains is just a bunch of shelves. Trivia facts are flat and heavy. I put them on a shelf, and they stay there forever. Important facts are round. Those suckers roll right off and fall on the floor the second I’m not paying attention.

I wish I knew why my mind worked this way. Maybe it was physical trauma. Perhaps when I was very young, my mother dropped me on my head during an episode of Jeopardy (which first aired on television in 1964, can you believe it?).

Most people hear that the ancient Egyptians were the first culture to domesticate cats over 4000 years ago and think, “Hmm. Interesting.” Then completely forget all about it.

My brain says, “Well, I better file that away for later because it just might come in handy on a long family car drive when I’m just about ready to kill one of the children.”

Being good at trivia does not make me better at my job, put food on my table, or keep me safe from predators. What trivia does, is that it tells me “Predator” was a 1983 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger made his movie debut in “Hercules in New York” in 1970. And let’s not forget that Hercules (also know as Heracles) was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman.

I can go on. I know you don’t want me to, I’m just saying that I could.

If I had lived in the early days of human existence, I probably wouldn’t have survived past my first decade of life. While all my friends and family were hunting for meat and figuring out which plants were safe to eat, I would have been pondering why my fingernails grew so much faster than my toenails.

It’s likely my life would have ended while staring at a flower and thinking, “I wonder why the bees like the purple flowers better than the yellow ones?”

Everyone else would be thinking, “Why is he just standing there? Doesn’t he see the Tyrannosaurus Rex about to eat him? Shouldn’t he be running by now?”

Before anyone starts sending me e-mails telling me that human beings and T-rexes were never alive during the same time period, yes, I am aware. Of course, I know that.

It’s trivia.

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Get a Real Job

Recently EM2 asked me if there were any chores around the house that she could do to earn some money. I told her there were plenty of chores to do inside the house and out in the yard and I would be happy to make up a list for her.

She asked how much I would pay her, and I said I’ll pay you the same rate I got when I was a kid. I’ll let you live in my house rent free and let you eat my food.

She didn’t like my answer very much.

I know better than to let my kids do any work for me. I learned my lesson a long time ago with EM1. Most of the time, when she “helped,” it ended up making more work for me than if I had just told her to sit on the couch and not move.

I recall one instance where I told EM1 to take my car to the gas station and fill the tank. I gave her $10 for her time and told her to use my credit card to pay for the gas. She drove away and didn’t come back for two hours. Apparently, she had a few errands to run and figured that was a perfect time to do it. She even used my credit card to buy herself lunch, get some “cute shorts,” and pick up coffee for herself and EM2.

The car had less gas in the tank than when she left, my credit card had three extra charges on it (not including the gas), and EM1 still had the original $10 I gave her sitting in her wallet. I felt like I had just fallen for some sort of Nigerian Prince scam.

My wife thinks I’m being cheap, and I should pick out a few tasks for EM2 to do and give her some money. Of course, this is the same woman that will give me a “honey-do” list a mile long and when I ask why, she says, “because you love me.”

Seems a bit of a double standard.

Anyway, I caved, as I usually do, and I told EM2 she could help me do some work in the yard and I would pay her for her inexperienced, mostly useless, assistance. Yes, I used those words. She pulled out her phone, glanced at the weather reports to check the temperatures for the next few days, then said, “No thanks. How about something in the house? Maybe I can vacuum the carpets?”

I didn’t realize there were stipulations to her participation. I wonder how well this is going to work for her when she is out in the real world, working for an employer that doesn’t find her as cute and charming as I do, and she tries to tell them, “It’s too hot, so I’m going to stay home, today. But don’t worry, I’ll vacuum my carpets to make up for it.”

I never got handouts from my dad when I was growing up. If I asked for money, he always gave me the same speech. “Go out and get a real job and earn your money like I do.”

Okay, this isn’t totally true. I do remember one time my dad actually offered to pay me for some yardwork. He told me to go out in the front yard and pull weeds out of the lawn. He told me he would pay me 5 cents for every dandelion I pulled. I grabbed a paper bag, gloves, and this weird, weed-pulling tool that looked like an overbuilt screwdriver with pitchfork points at the end, then I went to work.

I recall pulling a few dozen dandelions and, as I went, I would take the weeds that had already blossomed into white, fluffy dandelion heads, and blow the seeds all over the lawn. My theory was that if I was only going to make 5 cents for every weed, then I would need to make sure there was always a steady supply of new weeds growing to guarantee future money.

It was pure genius.

At least I thought it was until my dad came storming outside and screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” That was the end of that particular workday. It was also the first time I ever got fired from a job, and it wasn’t even a “real job.”

I don’t think I got paid for the weeds I had already pulled, either. Very disappointing.

Now that I’m the adult, I have a better understanding of my dad’s mindset. Why should I pay EM2 to do a job I can do myself without costing me any money? Or perhaps, more to the point, why pay her to do something that I was going to ignore, anyway?

Sure, I could offer to pay her to pull cobwebs down from the ceiling, or arrange the pantry in alphabetical order, but what’s the point? I don’t care about either one of those things, and it wouldn’t bother me if neither one of them ever happens.

Maybe I should just cut out the middle man and give her ten bucks to sit on the couch and watch television.

It would be cheaper than sending her sister out to gas up the car.

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Weekend Getaway

A week ago, the entire extended family drove up to Ice House Reservoir to spend the Labor Day weekend camping. 16 people spread out over three campsites for five days of campfires, food, drink, and loud conversations; it’s a tradition we have been following for more than 20 years.

Before driving up to the campsite for the weekend, my wife was going to work for half of the day on Thursday. I would load up the truck and trailer with firewood and enough food and supplies to keep all 16 campers fed and alive for five days, then when my wife got home in the afternoon, we would drive up into the hills to meet up with the rest of the family.

That was the plan.

As we all know, plans are only perfect on paper right before real life gets in the way.

Thursday morning, my wife woke me up from a sound sleep to tell me we had a problem. Sitting up and trying to figure out why I wasn’t still unconscious, I heard her say,

“I don’t know what happened. The garage door isn’t working. I think it’s broken. I have to go to work now. Bye!”

Then I was alone in our bedroom wondering how I was going to explain to a group of upset campers that their supplies for the weekend were all trapped in my garage with my truck.

Why is it that I only get bad news first thing in the morning? If I’m awake before my alarm goes off, it’s always because something or someone is broken, about to explode, sick, or actively on fire. Why can’t, just once, I wake up to news like:

“Honey! Get up! We just won the lottery!”

Or maybe:

“Hey dad, get up! I just rented an apartment. I need you to help me move out of your house!”

But no. I’m never that lucky.

I woke up, threw on some clothes, and wandered out into the garage. I discovered that one of the four heavy-duty springs that lifts and lowers the door had broken apart. I tried disconnecting the garage door from the opening mechanism and raising it manually, but the door is a custom-built, barn-style metal door that weighs about two-hundred and fifty pounds. It didn’t budge.

The truck – and five days-worth of food and firewood – was not going anywhere soon.

I went back in the house and found one of the cats sitting in the hallway, staring at me with a look that clearly said, “I thought you were leaving. Why are you still here?”

To be fair, I believe that is the only expression the cat is capable of making.

I ignored the cat’s rude behavior and grabbed the phone while beginning a search online for garage door repair companies. The first company I called told me they were much too busy to help before Monday morning. That was too late. By Monday morning, there would be a large group of people up in the mountains eating dirt and tree bark while planning how long they would torture me before allowing me to die.

I tried another company. This one didn’t even pick up the phone when I called. I left a message for them to call me as soon as possible, (just FYI, I still have not heard back from them two weeks later) then moved on down the list to company number 3. This time, I finally had some luck. The owner of the company picked up and said that he could be over in about an hour and would be happy to replace the garage door springs.

True to his word, less than an hour later, a work truck pulled into my driveway and a very friendly gentleman by the name of Nick stepped out. Less than two hours later, I had a working garage door and our family camping trip was saved.

I thanked Nick profusely for coming out on such short notice, and he smiled and told me it was no problem. He was glad he could help. Then he handed me a bill for seven-hundred and fifty dollars.

Apparently, garage door springs are made of gold or some other precious metal. That, or they can only be forged in the volcanic depths of Mordor. I can’t think of any other reason that four springs would cost almost a thousand bucks.

I almost told him to take his springs back and rebreak the door, but I didn’t have time to argue about the price. I was still under a deadline and needed to get myself up to Ice House. So, instead of following my first impulse of curling up in the corner in the fetal position and pretending everything would go away if I ignored it long enough, I pulled out the checkbook and wrote a check for more money than I paid for my first car.

The check may or may not have bounced by now, but that is a problem for another day.

I finished loading the truck, hooked up to the trailer and, as soon as my wife arrived at home, we took off for the campgrounds. Although it was a rocky start, the trip itself actually went pretty smoothly. Everyone had a good time, and there was plenty to eat and (more importantly) drink.

We arrived back home on Monday, dirty and tired, but in good spirits after enjoying a pleasant weekend with the whole family. It was good to get away, but it was also nice to be home.

As I walked into the house, I found the cat in the hallway staring at me with a look on her face that clearly said, “I thought you were leaving. Why are you still here?”

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Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

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