Wednesday, August 30, 2006

OGLING REALITY

We have probably not been fair to Captain Ogle, ignoring him as we have even as from the cast of characters he appears to be the only one that is representing reality and is worried about the here world in any genuine sense. I mean Michael just cares about his career path, Lauren is fascinated by the possibility of a triple abduction murder case, Habakkuk is out astroplaining; while we are all trying to figure out what is going on here, and Ogle is the only one of us all that really cares for normal every day life and is trying to save it, and yet we hardly know anything about this Ogle the man.

Captain Ogle is tall, a six feet two inches tall black man, that is rather normal looking with large eye sockets but disturbingly smaller eyeballs. He has a strong sense of self; that is he seems to be aware of himself without having to ask the question “who am I?”, he is not insecure enough to be a reflective person; the Captain doesn’t go home to read “ten easy ways to become yourself” or “how to tantra your mantra”; Captain doesn’t read, he watches a lot of television, that is something him and Lauren have in common, the extent of his reading is memo’s, emails and reports; he loves, loves hockey, so he reads and watches just about anything hockey! hockey! He even ponders into the dangerously unpatriotic thought that he should have been born Canadian. I would add that he drinks a lot of beer, as most grounded spirits must, but I don’t think it will add anything or detract from his character relevance.

He was married, two times fast, has three children, a daughter that he adores from his second marriage and two boys from the first, which he has sort of abandoned, though he pays attention to them once every six months. Captain blames his work for this lack of parental attention towards his sons, and he also blames his work for the failure of his marriages, according to him, “cops are a special breed, they just shouldn’t get married.” That if they don’t get married then the special breed won’t reproduce and go extinct, this doesn’t hit him; or maybe, as he has well proven, they may reproduce anyway. When he weakens from his stance of lonely foot-soldier for the law he ends up dating the newest rookie, and this usually ends any possible success in the poor woman’s career. “Don’t date the captain is a wise saying that makes the rounds, but every rookie tends to think that they are making a wise move that will surely guarantee fast promotions; the truth is that they weren’t really cops.

Ogle knows nothing else but how to be a cop, and he has invested so much of his life in being a cop that everything that he relates to is out there, crooks, murderers, wife beaters, drug pushers, child abusers, and then there is the Law! Captain Ogle believes in the law, oh he thinks “the law is all fucked up!” but he dares not pass judgment upon it beyond commentary, he is after all, its enforcer. The truth is that he doesn’t know very much about the law, he has a couple of lawyers on staff that constantly tell him things like, “You can’t place Antoinette in that hut like wooden box, it is even against the Geneva convention, and it could qualify as torture.” The legal council staff were always irritated by Ogle because he always wanted to violate a law in order to enforce another one. “Captain you can’t place a wiretap without court approval, besides any evidence gathered without prior consent is inadmissible in court.” The captain simply replied, “I am not going to use the evidence from the wiretap, I am just using the wiretap to get to more pertinent evidence.” A lot of things went undocumented in Captain’s precinct, but he got the job done, he was admired as a results oriented cop, that led a group of officers that was always sweating to get the bad guys behind bars and often succeeded.

And so it is that our captain doesn’t have much internal soul and heart definition that we could much describe here, he is a rather shallow character as anyone that merely cares for the immediate reality would; and so it is rather amazing that Lauren has managed to get him this far, and that is a credit to her; but equally it is evidence enough, that he has always had a fondness for her, that he can not explain because that would require that he stop going to the shooting range on Friday nights, and that he stop bowling with some of the guys on Thursdays, and that he stop going to church on Sundays. Yeah, he went to church, and more often than not, and he liked it too, and his fellow parishioners liked him, and his pastor thought well of him and often invited him to the charity gatherings and festive activities; and somehow, even as ritualistic as the mass was, somehow when Ogle carried his bible, there too he carried his faith. There he somehow forgot that he was a cop, reading his bible he knew where the law came from, and reading his bible made him feel good, but he also knew that he did not understand it; and so he attentively listen to the sermons, to see if some how all those cries for more loving in the world, for greater decency to thy neighbor, for heeding the lord’s testaments, to see if any of it would some how ripen him into community with his own spirit and that of his peers. The intent was there.

And that is how real the external world was for Captain Ogle, and now, he was wholly unaware, as equally surprisingly so was his pastor, but now he was wholly unaware that Lauren, Antoinette and Habakkuk, were messing things up enough so that soon he would be involved with thundering unicorns, the sacred and forbidden statue, three hiding monks, two of which had women hair, and that was forbidden, and hopefully just hopefully if things could get real enough so that it would be something sensible enough for the captain to grasp, a triple abduction and murder case. Oh yes, Captain Ogle was dangling himself before a World Size Case, we can only hope that for the best of all, the Akashic Records are not wrong.