She is watching the detectives.

The detective (guys) from my childhood and teenage years: Banacek, Columbo, Kojak, Rockford, Mannix, even Perry Mason -- I watched them all, and some I still do. I miss Banacek, I really do though I just read the shows are being released on DVD. They are set in Boston...Boston, California, that is, but I love that George Peppard.

Most of these guys had some sexy thing going for them, okay, not Barnaby Jones, but they were all smaht, and that gave them some appeal. They figured it out by looking around carefully, asking questions, standing still in trenchcoats or in other ways pausing for affect. They just picked away at the knot of a crime and followed the threads that all led to...the perp. Then, they went out for drinks and laughed until the frame freezed.

The murderer was right in front of them the whole time. They knew, you knew, we all knew but we let it go to watch the insides of their heads work. That plus just a bevy of great baddies (guys), some double entendres with buxom babes, a few car chases, punches and at least one hilarious run/fall down a hill (Columbo).

They could size someone up in a few seconds. They made it look so easy! Of course, it was because these were hour long stories, but still I was impressed. I did not understand yet the complex but similar patterns of human nature, especially when it came to evil. I "understand" it now but I am much more enamored of the complexities, and this can still get me in some trouble.

We're so small really. If you put one hand on your chest and the other on your back you're holding yourself, in a sense. That's small. We're not contained in that space, of course, we've got our thoughts and feelings and our energy, man, just spread out in blobby, moving contours. It amazes me how we all live here, relatively, sort of, together.

How does someone decide to act on their evil thoughts? To steal money or to kill someone? Or kill themselves? It's faskinating.

There are plenty of true crime shows on TV about ordinary people deciding to off their spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, and managing to put together a plan and do it and then they are caught. Often it's because they were just STUPID. I mean that in the nicest way possible. When it's all laid out in a docudrama, it really is a dumb plan. Obvious.

But apparently, in that state of mind, there is a weird way the ego is huge but the person thinks it cannot be seen. It's like when kids play hide and seek and close their eyes and think you can't see them.

Jack, you're it!

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