Now, maybe I’m just an eight-year-old at heart… No, actually, I am an eight-year-old at heart.

The point is, I’m a little giddy, and here’s why.

“Dear Fire Ops 101 Participant,

Congratulations!   You are registered for the PFFW Fire Ops 101 event in Madison Wisconsin. We are thrilled that you have agreed to join us for an experience you will never forget.  Your mission (and you chose to accept it) A day in the life of a firefighter and paramedic.  On May 12, you will be fitted for turnout gear, wear an air mask, ride a fire engine, conduct a victim search, feel the heat of a back draft (simulated), perform defibrillation on a victim of cardiac arrest and much more. Sound exhaustive…it is!  Each adrenalin-filled moment will give you a small taste of a firefighter and paramedic’s day on the job. We will even give you a Helmet with your name on it that you will wear during the event and get to take home with you!”

I’m a lucky boy.

You’re familiar with the term “Closet of Mystery?”

A lot of people have them. It’s a place for you to chuck all sorts of just STUFF, and eventually it grows in mass to the point where it has its own gravitational pull and begins to suck things in that you KNOW you didn’t put in there yourself, but they somehow wound up there anyway. Eventually, the closet’s gravity well punches through the space-time continuum and opens a wormhole to someone else’s closet of mystery, at which point you can abandon all hope, not to mention the laws of physics.

Yeah, I don’t have one of those. All of my closets just contain clothes or cleaning supplies or the occasional skeleton.

But I do have a “Bookshelf of Intrigue,” and tonight it coughed up a gem that literally had me rolling on the floor in laughter — my buddy Clinton’s birth certificate.

You see, my littlest sister is graduating from high school in three weeks. On top of getting me all choked up with pride and old-cootdom, Taylor’s big weekend also requires me to partake of a sort of tradition in my family — the graduation letter.

When I graduated from high school, my old man and my sister Katie both penned me heartfelt letters that I carried off from smalltown Wisconsin to the great big, scary U of W. Those letters sat on the shelf above my desk, next to my coffee maker, and they got me through some scary times that freshman year. Then, when Katie graduated three years later, she got a bunch of letters herself. I like to think mine provided her with some valuable insights that helped her achieve the degree of success she did.

(On a related note, Katie also graduates from the University of Wisconsin this month, but we don’t write letters for college graduations. We party).

So now that Taylor is UW-bound as well, it’s incumbent upon me to write an appropriate tome. But I’m not often stricken with sentimentality out of the blue, so I decided I needed to dig up those old letters from my past as a source of inspiration tonight.

I knew they were somewhere on (or in) my Bookshelf of Intrigue, and so the hunt was on.

Now I’ve had this bookshelf since I got my first apartment in college, and I’m quite fond of it. As with all my favorite pieces of furniture, it cost me virtually nothing. The company my parents work for (and I at several points have worked for as well) was having a used corporate furniture sale for employees, and I picked it up for four whole dollars.

I wrote a check.

Over the years, it’s taken its share of abuse. Its shelves hold not just an impressive collection of books, but also old notebooks, cookbooks, forgotten folders, yellowing newspapers with my byline, my important documents file, some board games, a pouch of dice, a box of crayons, an array of stickers, a pair of motorcycle helmets, some shiny Mardi Gras paraphernalia, a collapsible kite, extra parts from my drumset, some spare leads for a long-lost battery charger and untold other treasures just waiting to be unearthed.

I wasn’t quite sure where to begin looking for the letters, so I started at the bottom, with the intention being to work my way up. It’s a minor decision that ultimately may have had a major impact for the better on my buddy Clinton’s life.

I shook out all my old college notebooks to see what fell out, which was a big mistake. I found myself amused and distracted for a good 20 minutes by a number of notes, photos and syllabi that accumulated in front of me. Then I moved on to the accumulated folders on the same shelf. In one, I came across a bunch of old travel documents from the cruise I took more than two years ago, right before I started my job at the radio station.

I had been 22 at the time, I was feeling like I was on top of the world and it was going to be a while before I got to take a vacation. So, I booked what would come to be known as the “Blitzkrieg Cruise” between Job A and Job B and invited my best buddy and at-the-time roommate Clinton to come along. Like a good best buddy, he accepted.

I chuckled for a second and was about to toss the now useless folder of travel documents in the recycling bin, when nostalgia kicked in. I pulled out the collection of airline ticket stubs and snickered again, thinking of the airline delays that nearly ruined the entire trip and the 95 mile-an-hour cab ride from Orlando to Port Canaveral that saved the day. I paged through the cruise itinerary, then laughed out loud when I saw the bills we ran up charging to our room cards.

And at the very back of the folder, I found an envelope labeled, in simple print, “Clinton.”

I gasped, and tore it open. Inside was Clinton’s birth certificate, used in lieu of a passport to get him onto the ship and out to the Bahamas for the trip. He had asked me to hold it for him with the rest of our travel documents, but never asked for it back — not when we returned from the trip, not when we unpacked and not when we moved out of our place on Chandler Street and went our separate ways for housing six months later.

Somehow that oh-so-crucial document survived the move and nearly two years in the miasma of my Bookshelf of Intrigue intact. I gave brief consideration to auctioning it off to the highest bidder, then called Clinton up and delivered the good news — that he’ll once again be properly documented if he ever decides to get a passport, get married (I think), run for elected office or, presumably, die someday.

On a related note, I did eventually find the letters I was looking for. They were tucked away inside the “A Man, a Can, a Plan: 50 Great Guy Meals Even You Can Make” cardboard cookbook my parents gave me as a half-joke when I went off to college. I read them (the letters, not the recipes), teared up a little, then slipped them inside a more appropriate receptacle and tucked them reverently back into the Bookshelf of Intrigue.

That way, I’ll know where they are the next time I need them. Sort of.

I’m a firm believer that we’re repeatedly presented with a simple choice in life, every day: “Go big or go home.” And as door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah’s witnesses and curious Alderpeople can attest, you’ll seldom find me at my home.

So I’ve got to respect the 25-year-old Antigo man whose going big at the Mifflin Street Block Party last weekend landed him in Madison Police spokesman Joel Despain’s stack of incident reports – to a point, and not nearly as much as I respect Joel for going out of his way to tell the story simply for the sake of being able to write what he did. Joel’s a busy guy, but he clearly subscribes the the mantra this blog takes its name from.

The story is as such: Antigo was among the hoards of revelers that packed Mifflin for the annual beer blast and got themselves good and overserved. Except, unlike the vast, vast majority of partiers, Antigo wasn’t out to just have a good time. He wanted to start something.

He was “obnoxious” and “rude,” and went out of his way to start a fight. Keeping with the “Kumbaya-Over-a-Kegger” atmosphere of the celebration, the attendees of the house party Antigo was at didn’t let themselves get provoked, but did show him the door in no uncertain terms.

Hellbent on finding a fight and now with a sizeable chip on his shoulder, Antigo set off down West Wash, only to bump into a group of three guys that were happy to oblige him.

The next thing he knew, Antigo was waking up at the hospital, still drunk, still surly, and now with a respectable goose egg to boot. But he wasn’t about to let respect for medical professionals or common decency stop his rampage. And here, I’ll let Joel Despain’s masterful storytelling take over.

From incident report 2010-116431:

“When he regained consciousness, he became very combative, to the extent that three hospital security staff members were needed to restrain him. An officer tried to ask the man: What happened? How were you injured? How did your tooth get chipped?

“The victim responded by swearing at the officer, indicating his injuries occurred when he had sexual contact with the officer’s mother.”

You’ve got to admit, the guy has spunk. I say we award this man a medal for “going big,” and then make him “go home” by banishing him from the city forever. And while we’re at it, Joel Despain gets a ribbon for greatest paraphrasing in the history of police incident reports, ever.

A $172 ticket… for stringing a hammock between a couple of trees?

I think there are very few guys my age, particularly in the city of Madison, that haven’t toyed with the notion of becoming a cop at some point in their lives. Let’s face it — it looks pretty glamorous on TV, you carry a loaded firearm and you get trained on the proper techniques to disobey traffic laws.

But for me, and I’m sure many others, one of the aspects of the job that scares me away from it is the powerful influence police have over the lives of the city’s citizenry. For instance, I’m prone to having what some would term “bad hair days,” and what I like to call “days I’d like to bite the head off anyone who gives me a damn excuse.” But for a police officer with a case of the Mondays, the degree to which they’re able to take out their frustrations on innocent bystanders is magnified tenfold.

Case in point, one Branton Kunz. He’s a 25-year-old resident of State Street in Madison, working as a supervisor at a respected downtown hotel, and according to the Madison Police Department, he committed a heinous crime Saturday night. He tried to relax in public.

Specifically, Branton is accused of stringing a hammock between two trees outside his apartment on State Street. He explains that he got the hammock while he was in South America recently, but doesn’t have anywhere to hang it in his apartment, and after a long day of, first, work and, later, the Mifflin Street block party, he was aching to get it out.  

Within a half hour, Jane Law rolled up in her squad.

“An officer came out and she asked me if I had a permit,” Branton explains. ”I said, ‘No, I wasn’t aware that I needed a permit to lay in a hammock.’”

Now, before I continue the story, I must banish the notion of editorial neutrality from any reader’s mind. It’s true — I’m quite partial to hammocks myself, and have been known to string them up in odd but satisfying places. Perhaps more importantly, Branton is a friend of mine. I can personally vouch for the fact that Branton has a clean record, a very laid back demeanor (a hammock, man) and, while he has a wry sense of humor, he’s completely lacking any sort of “attitude problem” prone to rubbing law enforcement the wrong way. 

When these events transpired, I was in fact upstairs in his apartment napping after a day of absorbing sun and beer at the Mifflin Street Block Party. But until he came upstairs with a $172 citation in tow, I was not involved.

The ticket he was issued was for an alleged violation of city ordinance 10.25(1), a prohibition on placing “articles” on the sidewalk or terrace. What qualifies? “Any cask, box, crate, wood, stone, plank, boards, goods…, wares, merchandise, ashes, bottles, cans or other substances or materials.”

“The ordinance seems to clearly be talking about storefronts and them kind of colonizing the area in front of their business,” observes Branton, who admittedly is “no big-city lawyer.”

Neither is police Sgt. Rachael Peterson, who’s worked the State Street beat for 15 years and wrote Branton his ticket Saturday night. She clearly put some thought into the matter at the time.

“There are several other citations that could have been issued,” she told me this afternoon, ”such as hanging things in public trees. Basically everything that (Branton) was doing was not okay.”

Peterson says she even warned Branton he could be cited for disorderly conduct, due to the attention she accuses him of drawing to himself.

“I think a reasonable person would assume that would be unusual and not okay to be tying up a rope to city trees on State Street,” Peterson said. “Call me crazy, but I guess to me that a reasonable person would think that’s a little odd, which is why several people were stopping and taking pictures of him.”

So what would a “reasonable person” in a position of authority do in response to an alleged violation of an obscure city ordinance by an affable working man on an unofficial city holiday? What would a “reasonable person” dole out as a penalty for getting comfortable and having a few laughs? 

“(At that point) I expected I would get a warning because I wasn’t causing any harm,” Branton says. ”I was cooperating.”

Peterson even admitted to me that Branton was exemplary in his willingness to cooperate with the police “investigation.” He answered all her questions, didn’t lip off, provided identification when asked and was more than willing to take the offending hammock back upstairs to his apartment. So is there just a “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to alleged sidewalk obstructions?

Nope. There was just an officer burned out after a long day corralling drunks at the Mifflin Street Block Party, and someone that inexplicably became the focal point of her frustration long enough to catch hell for it.

“We do (issue warnings),” Peterson told me, ”but unfortunately due to the nature of Mifflin, people receive warnings all day long, and so I think people were done getting warnings for the day. It’s at every officer’s discretion (that warnings are issued), but there’s no statement that says we have to give somebody a warning.”

Peterson even admitted to me that in cases involving the homeless, who often find themselves in violation of city ordinance 10.25(1), police are wont to issue several warnings before writing a ticket. So, like any “reasonable person,” Branton plans to fight his ticket in court — and not just for the sake of his checkbook or his record, but for hammockers the world over who are tired of being kept down, literally and figuratively.

“Of all places, this is Madison,” he says. ”You would expect to see something like that on State Street.”

That’s it, I’m putting my foot down. I’ve had it with the teen-vampire craze, particularly the Twilight novels and movies. I propose an immediate Madison police policy of threatening any eyeliner-sporting pale-skinned guy with a wooden stake to the heart.

Think my reaction’s a little extreme? I bet you the jogger in this Madison police report would agree with me:

You read it here first — either some member of the lunatic fringe is convinced he’s a character in one of these crappy vampire stories that are suddenly everywhere, or the daywalkers are really among us. Either way, sound public policy dictates that we hunt down anyone who looks suspiciously emo, whose skin is just a bit too pale or whose clothing is too strategically disheveled, and we stake ‘em.

As for this poor jogger’s mystery assailant, I’ve rounded up the usual suspects and put together this lineup. Male? White? Twenty-something? Slender? Spiky brown hair? Gray T-shirt? Propensity to hiss? I think we have our suspect.

Stake 'em. All of 'em.