I wrote this Christmas night, 2006, from the front seat of the rig, parked outside a Denny’s that was pretending to be festive. Inside, families in wrinkled sweaters poked at dry turkey plates under fluorescent lights. Outside, the city felt hollowed out. Like it was holding its breath, waiting for the holidays to pass.

I wrote this on Christmas Eve after coming off a shift that felt anything but festive. The city was quiet, but not in a peaceful way. It was the stillness that settles in right before something breaks.

That shift was chaos from the first minute. I don’t even remember signing on—I just remember sirens. One call bled into the next, like someone had flipped the city’s crazy switch and snapped the handle clean off.

It was the kind of cold that made your bones ache. The kind that seeps through three layers of uniform and settles in your spine like a bad decision. Every time the doors opened, it felt like Colorado itself was trying to kill me.

I wrote this after a 24 that felt more like 48. I had just gotten home, dropped my gear at the door, and stood in the kitchen staring at the microwave like it owed me something. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t tired in any useful way. I was just… unmoored.

I’ve stopped trying to make sense of how people end up in the back of my ambulance. That used to bother me. Now I just observe. Like a field biologist, but with more blood and fewer funding grants.

It’s not what you think, I promise.

I wrote “Paper or Plastic?” after a call that left me shaking my head, standing in the middle of some stranger’s shattered life with nothing but a red biohazard bag and the sense that I was pretending this job made sense.

I wrote “I Saw the Future” after a long day that left me feeling less like a medic and more like a piece of outdated equipment someone forgot to upgrade. That particular call had been ridiculous—something about the system trying to chart us in real time while we were still on scene. And the software? It froze. Because of course it did.

I wrote “Uhm, Excuse Me? I Am a Rock Star” because I was pissed off and needed to laugh at the job before it swallowed me whole. It came after one of those absurd, completely mismatched calls where you’re sent in expecting chaos and instead walk into the bizarre circus of someone else's poorly managed life.

I wrote “Five Weeks From Now It Won’t Matter” during one of those shifts where the weight of it all had me dead behind the eyes but still somehow moving. It was the kind of day where every call felt like a variation of the same script: someone yelling, someone bleeding, someone demanding something that didn’t exist. And all of it—*all of it*—was urgent in their world and meaningless in mine.

I wrote “Cheeseburger-Flavored Bread” after a stretch of shifts that blurred together like a fever dream of bad smells and worse decisions. I was somewhere between burned out and numb, trying to hold onto a thread of humor before the job stripped it away completely.

I wrote “Cheetos” on a night when the absurdity of the job finally boiled over into something that wasn’t just funny—it was necessary. It had been one of those days where I could have either laughed or scream, and I didn’t have the energy to scream anymore.