You and me and the devil makes three.

I am learning to dislike Monday nights. Monday night fallout, some of the guys call it. The weekends are generally busy in my line of work, especially when we're on midnight shift. Especially in the summer. Days blend into each other for those of us on patrol, Friday, Saturday, Sunday kind of lose the power they once held in our lives. Generally they are just another day on patrol, and usually indicate a heavier work-load. But for the brass upstairs, Friday, Saturday, Sunday still have the same sense of holiday as they do for most every other 9-to-5'er. Which is my verbose way of saying that when you are promoted off the street, you get weekends and most major holidays off.

Which also means that the weekend belongs to us on patrol, the meat and potatoes of the department. And it gets busy, and it gets crazy. Sometimes.

And then comes Monday, always. And the brass. They come in from the quality time spent with families, from projects completed, picnics attended and friends visited. Groggy-eyed, coffee mugs clad in hand, they review the record of what our department accomplished over the weekend. This is what most of the guys refer to as Monday morning quarterbacking, and is where (in my estimation) 80% of the strife between upstairs and down is born.

In the academy, when we reviewed training tapes of line-of-duty shootings and traffic stops gone horribly wrong, they were always viewed first with the caveat that officers have to make split second decisions in rapidly evolving situations and it would be wrong for us to sit here and critique everything that the officer should have done differently, from the comfort of our sterile classroom. The mistakes were usually obvious because we had no adrenaline pumping through our veins, no fight or flight kicking in, no back to watch. I always felt like we should have just watched the video clips in silence, as a way to bear witness to the life of each fallen brother or sister, while at the same time creating file folders in our brains lest we find ourselves in similar situations out on the road.

I was driving around very early this morning, looking for criminal activity afoot, and I found myself thinking that the promotions might be too costly in the end. You trade in your boots for wingtips, your office no longer requires gasoline and you miss the sweet sound of the first birdsong at 0330 hours on summer mornings.

I ran it by my mentor and he agreed wholeheartedly. And I have not known him to be wrong.

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Sometimes when we are together I don't know who is the captain and who is the ship. It's like being a teenager again with the way that I forget my inhibitions. And when you don't know how to leave, I know that it's the same for you. There is some kind of magic in the summer air so late at night. I can only imagine what autumn will bring.