Three Years

We confess to not having much use for media people. For the most part, they're liberal tools with an agenda. There are a few who make the effort to see both sides, but they're rare nowadays. Janssen at the Sun Times did the old one day media course at the Academy and came out with an understanding of what cops do. Kass shows flashes of the old newspaperman instincts.

But this piece by Nickeas in Chicago Magazine is the culmination of three years working nights at shooting scenes and fires and fights and all sorts of crap, citywide. He was outside the tape for most of it, but he was there, doing his job and watching cops do their jobs.

He doesn't paint a pretty picture either. It's ugly. It leaves scars. The last portion of the article is how he found it hard to relate to normal life after seeing three years of shit:

• For three years, I’d inhabited a world separate from the one my friends lived in. On the train into work on summer Fridays, the other passengers dressed up for a night out in Wicker Park or Lake View, I’d sit there preparing for my shift, checking Twitter to see where people were getting shot or where people were calling in gunfire. I’d vacillate between wishing I were out with my wife and just wanting to start working.
  
  There’s not a relationship in my life that is stronger now than it was when I started covering violence. I don’t remember when I stopped giving honest answers when people at dinners or parties asked, “How’s work?” The truth is a conversation ender. I’d start a story, see things getting awkward, then power through it, apologizing at the end. It’s an isolating job. Part of leaving nights has been learning to move past that, or deciding whether to even try. Maybe it’s not healthy, but writing about violence feels like what I should be doing. It feels normal. It’s what I want to do. I want to help the city understand a little. That’s important to me.
  
  The winter after I’d finished working overnights, Erin and I were sitting on our couch, drinking wine, catching up. I was trying to explain to her how that three-year stretch had felt like a fever dream, an otherworldly odyssey, and how the world had throbbed around me while I learned to keep my eyes open. For three years, I hadn’t been home on weekends, and when I was home, I was in a fog. The closest to alive I felt during that time was in moments of fear and stress. That had become life.
  
  I said all this to Erin, telling her I’d packed a lot of living into those three years.
  
  She looked at me and asked, “But what kind of living?”

Now imagine making a career out of it.

[Disclaimer - some of our number have met Nickeas on a few crime scenes. He's a personable guy. We've gotten his card a few times as he passed through.]

[Also, Nickeas is not related to the copper of the same name. We've seen this comment numerous times in the past.]