Somehow I ended up guarding this evening. There's a beer dance in town tonight and no-one wanted to work. I had another one of those "How the hell did I get here" moments as I was walking down the hallway to check on folks. We actually had some laughs, tonight, as there were two sober weekend sentence servers and then a drunk got brought in midway through the evening. He was very voluble, and spent some time trying to persuade me to marry him. He talked me into singing him a lullaby, because he said he couldn't go to sleep without music, and once I had sung to him he actually went to sleep. The sober guys just thought all this was hilarious. They were ribbing the drunk guy because he hadn't even made it to the beer dance, got arrested before it started, but he took it pretty good.

It was funny, too, because when they first put him in the lock-up, he poked his head out the little window and said to me, "What side are you on?" I said, "Do I have to pick a side?" He said, "yes." I said, "What side are you on?" This stopped him cold, pretty much killed his line of questioning, as he didn't have an answer for it.

I was thinking about it later. Am I on any side? What sides are there? I used to think I had to pick a side, but somehow the boundaries get blurred. I have no objection at all to taking care of the folks who are staying in cells. I made coffee for them and talked to them. Fed them their dinner. Listened to their fears about their children. Basically acted as if they were at my house. Even pushed the tv over so they could watch the hockey game. I can do the job without being mean or nasty. The other day I answered the phone and the person on the other end was complaining about somebody I know. (She's drunk and she won't leave) I said, "Put her on the phone." Then I said to her, "Hey, it's Kate. You don't really want the police to come down and pick you up, do you?" She said no.