Chapter 3
Seeing as Absaroka County, Wyoming, has had for the past two years the highest per capita murder rate of any jurisdiction on the face of the planet, it has become a safe haven for your more run-of-the-mill criminals. In the past four weeks I have interacted with all manner of scofflaw moron, not one of whom seemed to pose a threat to my life. It's amazing what that shift in focus will do for your chi or whatever.
Sometimes now in between the cows blocking the highway and some drunk dude peeing in the alley, I look out the window down at the square, at the throbbing heart of Durant. I watch people living this particular moment of their lives, and I develop an opinion based on the three minutes I observe them smoking a cigarette on a bench or chasing after a plastic bag carried off by the wind. I'm the judge, and they don't even know they're on trial. Talk about power. This very moment will forever define them in the eyes of someone they see in the grocery store once in a while but can't place.
I imagine my Aunt Maria standing there with me, reminding me of one of her mantras: If you don't know, you can't care. She tells me this conclusion I come to in the three minutes I watch means nothing. Those three minutes aren't them. These five minutes aren't you.
After I judge them, I judge me. Same deal, pick any three minutes. You, of course, know them better than I do: There's me, arriving at Room 32, participating in the depravity, sleeping with a man I strongly suspected was married, disrespecting the badge. Or me, focused on the job, focused on myself, callously walking through the middle of a ceremonial dance at the Cheyenne beauty pageant, and for what? Or me, shamelessly coming on to my boss, suggesting I'd be willing to go there, desperately playing him for a reaction that might fill the void, wasting something that could have one day been so beautiful if I'd only been patient. Never thinking of the consequences. Those are the five minutes by which I am judged most harshly. The judgments are fair, but the minutes aren't me. Still, I can't unring the bell.
You think you and I are so different. You're wrong.