So as you’d have it, I recently turned 30.

Of course, with such a development, there were consequences: the all-night carousing has less appeal, the eyes have narrowed slightly, lines are appearing stubbornly in the my brow, my body is sore for days when I fall… I fart more, etcetera.

These things weigh heavily on a man’s heart. The Door’s Jim Morrison once told a crowd to meditate on their eventual end before a famous performance of the “The End.” I guess that’s the crux of it: a finish to this life. Meditate on it. Think about it.

If you think long enough certain questions arise between heart palpitations and flashes of white light, vast nothingness and being born again: Am I happy? Is what I’m doing worth it? Is there a value to how I’m occupying my time during this short visit to Earth? Do I like this bearded longhaired man in the mirror staring stark naked back at me at 6:31 a.m. on a Thursday morning?

“Keep doing what you’re doing, and the money will come. Follow your passion,” my woman-friend says to me.

The money, ah? Is that what I’m after? Probably. It’s hard to say because I’ve never had The Money. But the great fear for me is after the money is obtained, after the car(s), the job, the house(s), the wife (wives), kid(s)… after the sights have been seen, the ambrosia tasted, the sweet wine drunk from the Great Cup -- will it be enough? Or will the hungry black bear in me be ever hungry and always search for the unreachable majestic berry?

One could say this existential angst; this early morning ennui I feel is the luxury of an industrial nation, a symptom of the West’s rude liberty to over consume, and with that comes a poverty of self. Maybe this mini-life-crisis is nothing at all, a mere myth even like a recent NPR article portrays. Let’s not go compensate with that red muscle car just yet, Shane.

What ever you want to call this feeling of unrest hardly matters, what does is what comes next. What do you do?

I don’t know what to do, so I go looking.

What draws me to journalism is the ever-present hint of danger and a sense that you have an inside view on what’s really happening in this life, a finger on the pulse of the Hindu God Shiva’s flux of destruction and creation; one is a messenger peeking behind the curtain, seeing the puppet masters pulling the tangled and gnarled strings; you are the unmade face who watched The Potter pull the original rib from clay.

Like journalism, police work has a similar flavor: the feeling of danger and being privy to what’s happening. But there is also a power, an elevated assignment of control that is alluring to some.

“Perhaps, even me,” I say as I write this.

In the police role, Jung’s helper/hero archetype, one is not only an observer to the Great Shiva flux, one is an armed participant precipitating circumstance and hopefully for the good.

Of course in my recognition of my 30th year, I was curious. So I booked a Seattle Police ride-along with the North Precinct for the third watch, meaning the officer I accompanied started at about 7:30 p.m. and usually works until 3 a.m. The “night shift.” I figured there’d be action.

I showed up early and killed time in the lobby. And what did I find in this peculiarly vulnerable moment of vocational unrest? An SPD recruiting brochure.

The pay-graph caught my eye immediately. It said officer’s salaries start around $70,000 to start after the academy. After five years on patrol it’s gradually bumped up to $90,000 a year. Then an officer can make a move to be a detective. Benefits. Paid sick days and vacation. Retirement. It all sounds good to me. After a few preliminary tests, a thorough background check, months of training at the State academy and specialty training in Seattle, followed by a probationary training period, I could be an officer of the law in Seattle. Damn.

My, my how the mind wandered far from that lobby.

Around 8 p.m. a tall officer came in from the rain outside. “You must be Shane?” he said, and greeted me kindly with a smile. I shook his hand and folded up the brochure to put it in my raincoat.

After a quick introduction and a few emergency formalities, we got going and he merged onto the interstate toward our first call of the night. Some hooligans were having an illegal fire. It was surreal being in the passenger seat of a patrol SUV. The metallic voices dinned from the police radio in an almost foreign tongue. A wilderness of lights rioted across the dark dashboard. I recognized a keyboard…hmm… a monitor that much I was sure of, but the rest of the darting lights and screeding symbols was an alien landscape of color and wonder. I might as well have been at the helm of a flying saucer.

“To believe is one thing, to witness is quite another, Scully.”

What’s impressive is that officers not only speak the language but also integrate a daunting matrix of information while speeding toward potential danger. A dispatcher says one thing. The computer says another. Then the situation at a scene can be completely different. Meanwhile an officer needles through the traffic situation on the streets like a chef dicing onions. Every nuance of an incident is on the fly, a grinding mad chaos in the flux.

Arriving at the first incident felt a lot like deer hunting. I grew up “stalking” deer in the cab of a Ford pick-up truck with my grandpa on the forest services roads in Northern Minnesota. “Road hunting” we called it. Now, driving up to the scene of a reported illegal bon fire in a park felt a lot like slowly creeping through the Tamarack at dawn, watching for a white tail to erupt from the darkness through the field theater of headlight beams.

I won’t deny that walking with officers through a dark park in search of other human beings was exhilarating and at the same time horrifically frightening. A raw new layer of reality revealed itself with the pleasant sent of burnt wood. It was all too visceral, unpredictable and wild. There is an atavistic borderland out there between ecstasy and terror; an anticipation of violence like the feeling of coming rain: an intuition. I speculate soldiers feel it the first time (or possibly every time) in combat. I crossed into it in that park and some warm, unseen and grizzly thing -- a force brushed against me. I half shuddered at first, but after that noticed my vision changed. It was sharper. The dark was not so cold. The rain not so dark.

Slowly after that something else happened, too. A mindset seeped into me as we patrolled. Human beings, out there on the streets, under the sterile half-light of street lamps, waiting at bus stops, sauntering in dark alleyways, all became suspect to me.

“What’s she carrying?” I asked myself. “What’s he running for? Who’s he running from?”

I felt the echoes of hunting again. I was a hunter.

During that shift we responded to roughly six calls in all. It was a mid-week night and raining. Slow. Still, patrolling the streets of North Seattle in a marked police SUV, I got just a taste of being official, powerful, clearly identifiable and with a purpose: not one inch above the law, but as The Law. There was a strange ringing clarity inundating my ears, jamming up my mind above the chatter of the police scanner. After watching the officer calmly interact with citizens then jump into the SUV to fire the engine RPMs while ripping through an intersection at face-theft speeds to a potentially dangerous scene, I can’t even begin to understand what it takes to do this night after night. I can only speculate like a blind man touching a sun-warmed red rock at the Grand Canyon, the deep sensation of freedom, fear and staggering obligation of duty and responsibility officers must feel while wearing that badge. Certainly, absolutely, the heaviest weight officers bear is not their armor.

Seeing officers work in their own realm (behind the curtain) with the threat of real danger changes one’s notion of “cops.” I laugh now at citizens who say what should be done in police situations while firmly grounded in the protection of hindsight. I think of my own hesitation, the fear that rose up in me when the officer said, “You’re welcome to get out of the car,” as he opened the door to approach a dark scene. Now when I hear big talk, I think of the darkness in the park and the helplessness I felt being unable to see past the officers a few feet in front of me. A cold blade, a piercing gunshot, maybe even a rabid mouth full of broken teeth could have come from any direction, yet they moved ahead into the black space. It’s their job. There should be an extra zero at the end every one of those salaries in the brochure.

I used to read a lot of the Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. Bukowski said that given the chance he would have been a journalist. He seemed sure of it. After the ride-along with SPD, I’m not sure about much anymore. I do know that writing this piece felt good and that one should see the forest for the trees even when wading through a patch of blackberry bramble. Indeed, with the thorn comes the berry.

One time out hunting my grandfather said, “If it feels good, do it.” Don’t get excited you libertarians, to me it means follow your gut. Follow your own dharma. So, maybe, I’ll try on journalism for a while longer. It might look better sporting crows feet. Let’s see what else happens behind the curtain. Wait and observe. Certainly, there’s a little more time before the myth of a mid-life crisis sets in. Or, I could always lease a ruby red Dodge Charger and try night crawling.