I Am Daydreaming About Law & Order

You think I am kidding, but I'm not.

A few years ago, maybe half my life ago, I was in love & there were bunnies who held my held my hand & I sang each morning when I woke, & it was special song, not unlike those cell phone rings that only young people can hear, except my songs were beautiful to people who were in love, & to those who weren't, it induced fits of nausea & vomiting which are more common to those who have radiation poisoning.

Anyway, it ended (as it does), & I was a broken person. While I have always been a hungry-to-voracious reader, I found that people were constantly writing about relationships. Either the beginning or the ending, but any talk of relationships in any form - poetry, plays, novels - it made me physically ill & plunged me more deeply into unhappiness than before. (Also, the products were misleading. I tried to learn what we talk about when we talk about love in Raymond Carver's book, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," but I could never figure out what exactly he was talking about, & I realized that I just want to hear any more damn talk about love, goddamnit!)

So, visiting my moms, I picked up a Sherlock Holmes collection by Conan Doyle, &, reading through it, I realized, "Hey! Sherlock never talks about love! He fucking hates it!" So I began to devour detective literature in earnest. Because there, even if love somehow plays a part in the murder/crime/whatever, it's the crime that counts. You can ignore the syrupy lovers. (& in the hard-boiled stuff, like Spillane, it's more about sex than love.)

I was so happy when, about seven or eight years ago, I discovered Law & Order on TV. I liked the fact that the shows were plot-driven, that a lot of the "crime solving" was in the police procedural vein, & especially that, like in real life, you found out details of the lives of the main characters incidentally. (Incidentally, I love Vincent D'Onofio's character in the the L&O: Criminal Intent show mainly because of his Sherlock Holmesian qualities, which some people don't like.) (Also, I rediscovered the brilliance of Columbo & appreciate it on a very similar level.)

I am a much happier person now, though I never quite regained the big heart I had in that early relationship that went bad, but I more than ever love mystery stories & good tv crime drama. That's not why I was daydreaming about Law & Order today, though. It's even more sinister.

I was thinking how much I truly like the characters, how sad I am when they "die" or "move on," & how sometimes the fate of these fictional folks moves me much more than people in my real life. If I "knew" the fictional characters in their fictional worlds, I'm not sure they'd like me very much, but that's also true about a lot of the musicians I deeply admire. (I have a feeling I'd spend most of my time with Dylan restraining myself from punching him. & I think John Lennon would think I was a douche.) What all this means is that I spent some time today, usually on smoke breaks, thinking about people who aren't real & comparing them to people who are, but whom I don't generally care about as much as the made-up characters on the tv.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with Self Help Radio, of course. It's just a thought I am having, a snapshot of my day. But it might be an insight into my obsessive nature with regards to music - because there are songs that have moved me more powerfully than events "in real life." I feel a fundamental truth in human creation - even if I don't get that a lot from regular ol' humans.

Did I mention KOOP's Fall 2006 Membership Drive? We have two more days to go. Please think about giving something to the station - also a creation - that I dearly love. As well, if you can do it during my show from 4:30 to 6:00pm CST tomorrow, it would be cool. The toll free number is 1-888-917-5667.