pancake landscape: part 2

Here's what I covered and wrote last night and thus it ran today. Newspapers are magic. Instant publication! Instant gratification! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

The Young Entrepreneurs who already know more about business than I do. I had to Google "overhead costs" to make sure they were what I thought they were. And they were, but I still had to double-check. Sad.

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Pancakes tomorrow! I invited my neighbor to come by for breakfast and help me consume them. Even if that doesn't work out, I'm still making pancakes.

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So you can't tell, but about fifteen minutes have just passed. In those 15 minutes, three or four police squad cars, one ambulance, a tow truck and a fire engine pulled up outside of where I live.

I'd just returned home from a meeting. I'd written up the meeting story and picked up some more flour from the grocery store. Nothing beats whole wheat pancakes. But anyway: POLICE DRAMA! Did I really want to tangle myself in a possible messy, newsy situation? Not really, but I was so curious. I knew if I went outside I could walk straight up to that crowd of policemen and ask questions and they would pause in their dispatching and law-laying-down and polygraph whatsits and answer them, cagely maybe. Still: information. It's a terrible lure and I'm a dumb fish.

Curiosity warred with fatigue

My sinful desire To Know won the day.

I spent a few minutes on the balcony pretending to smoke a cigarette while mapping out the situation before I went down. Then I got a pen and grabbed a notebook at random. It happened to be a paisley green, floral-ish, very horrifyingly girlie leftover from when I was 15. How do I possibly still have it? Lord knows. I flipped it open to a blank page so the cover wouldn't show. The last thing I need is an officer of the law judging me for my notebook choices.

As I walked down, I was reviewing in my head what Tim Harrower told me in his text books about being a reporter on the scene of anything. Find the fire marshall! Don't disturb the bodies. Something like that. Remember your training, Luke. Etc. Instead of being suave and professional, I just asked the first person in a button-up shirt what was going on and he pointed me to an officer who pointed me to his shift supervisor who asked if we could step out of the rain so that his hearing aid didn't go phzzzzzt. I think I met him over the summer while covering a semi-truck jack-knifed in the middle of a residential road. His name sounded familiar.

Anyway.

The situation: single vehicle crash. Meaning, some poor tree/bush is bearing the weight of another being's folly. Police arrested a grandma-type (as best I could tell in the dark and the rain) older lady on DUII charges. Let's see...it's...Wednesday?...yes, Wednesday night. There's a good chance she might even stay in the jail until morning. It caps at 60, so (for example) on the weekends overcrowding means people rarely stay in for very long...maybe not even twenty minutes on a rough night.

No story will come of this. It will be another log entry in tomorrow's paper. But I don't think I could have slept tonight if I hadn't gone out there. Now I can rest easy, all virtuous and stuff.