We'll work it out.

Last night I half-expected Steve the Lieutenant to put me on the rescue squad (the heavy rescue/extrication/firefighting unit, not to be confused with the organization known as the Rescue Squad) as an observer, just to lock up my interest in taking a firefighting course. Instead, I was put on the medic unit, which has its own allure. I've considered taking Paramedic classes next year, and riding the medic unit always tempts me thusly.

Firefighting or Paramedic? Neither are exclusive, of course; I can continue to run medical calls if I study firefighting, and I can study first one, then the other. But either one will take significant time, and I'll have to prioritize. The medic unit sees the most serious, life-threatening calls, and offers the possibility of really helping patients in a life-or-death emergency. The rescue squad extricates patients from car wrecks, assists firefighters, and may be the first unit to enter a fire in search of trapped people. As simple-minded as it might sound, it all kind of boils down to saving people. I don't know what piece of errant DNA or dramatic early-childhood experience makes me that way, but that is my desire and I intend to continue to fulfill it.

Susan and my mom are among the people who've gone on record in opposition to me becoming a firefighter. As people who would be traumatized by my death, they have every right to expect their feelings to be heard and respected. I honestly don't know what I'll do. But like most everyone, I believe I have the luxury of time - months, years - to figure it out for sure.

Last night, we were riding an elevator up to an emergency and found the car stopping at another floor short of our destination. The doors opened, and we all looked out with mild urgency at a man in a suit. He did a double-take when he saw us crowded inside, in our uniforms and with a cot that was loaded with equipment. Nonetheless, he started forward, intending to squeeze in with us. "Sorry, you'll have to wait for the next elevator," one of the crew members said. As the doors closed on his face, we could hear him saying plaintively "But I waited a long time for this one..."

It's been hard to keep up with the Tales as much as I would like. Every day it seems I spin a wheel of fortune and let it tell me whether I should devote my attentions to my EMT class, duties at the Rescue Squad, my day job as a freelance designer and web-developer for small non-profits, my relationship, writing pithy little essays, hatching farfetched e-commerce schemes, fantasizing about saving people from burning houses, practicing good hygiene, or working on my long-delayed praying mantis garden sculpture. I just keep spinning and spinning. So I'm going to chill on the writing for a couple weeks, and come back refreshed just in time for the millennium catastrophe to wipe out my entire website.

Funny, but when I say good-bye to something, however temporarily, I always think it will turn out to be forever.

Here's a bit of the story thus far. I left my job at a small nonprofit a little over a year ago to start my own tiny company. My girlfriend Susan quit her job at the same dot-org a couple months later to join me. Now we work with many of the same people we used to, but we decide when it's time to close the office and go to a movie. Sometimes it's around 3. Sometimes it's closer to midnight. We love our jobs. We remain perpetually astonished that we can work and live together and yet still, somehow, continue to enjoy each other's company.

Sometimes -- in the afternoon -- I sit at my desk and drink a beer while I work. This one freedom more than makes up for any of the financial insecurity that comes from owning our own business.

I was an Emergency Medical Technician several years ago, and loved it so much I doubted I'd ever do it again. Rescuing people was like witnessing the passing of a God -- both rapturous and terrible. It swept into my life and took me over with the power of a religion. I was a fundamentalist -- but the holiness I had discovered was not in a book, but in a wound.

When I went away to Senegal, my certification lapsed. I spent three years in the desert and came home on the coldest night in the last twenty years.

One day in 1998, I was walking down 18th Street and saw a woman have a seizure and fall face-first on to the pavement. She probably recovered fully, but I never did. When I moved to help her, I heard the hymns of my old religion ringing out all around me. I held her head gently, and talked to her as the seizure passed. I saw her blood, seeping from a cut on her forehead, wet the black pavement and watched the body's texts unfold again before me.

It was a momentary disruption of her brain's electrical impulses, the breakup of an established pattern. It takes a little while for such subtle interference to jump from one individual to another, but my own rhythms eventually began to alter. I quit my job and started the new business. I moved in with Susan, although I'd doubted I could successfully manage to live with anyone, and vice-versa. I am recertifying as an EMT, and volunteering on a busy nearby rescue squad. Maybe I'll come to know the truth in fire, too.

I made a rule with myself never to erase or edit what I've already posted in the Tales of Sin and Virtue. Sometimes, after a particularly revelatory or melodramatic entry, I've regretted that rule, but I've never broken it. Eventually I will, though, just because I can.

Here's a picture of me.