Okay so what happens when you end up at a camp site in San Diego and you meet a family across the park from you and they say, “why don’t you come and stay with us in Phoenix Arizona and by the way my wife is in the Po-Po (American for police) and you can come ride shotgun with her on the night shift?” Of course you say , “hell yes!”

And apart form the slight moments where I wondered if I am going to have one of those “it puts the lotion on its skin” moments it has been incredible.

Last night I was the Cagney to Glendale’s Lacey and I WAS the law……

So in brief: 3 shootings, one beating, one hostage situation, one knife attack, one arson attack resulting in one death and one injury, 1 stolen car, 5 drink drivers, a drug bust, one woman jumped from a 2 storey building and a 12 year old runaway. Apparently it was a quiet night.

Things I wanted to do: shoot a gun (didn’t), call someone Punk (didn’t), tell young kids to pull up their pants and tuck their underpants in (didn’t), play with the handcuffs (didn’t) and Yell out to drug dealers “we are the princesses of Darkness and we own the night” (didn’t).

Things I did do that I probably shouldn’t have: filmed heaps of stuff, spoke to dispatch and said “Roscoe Pico train here, that’s a big 10-4 daddy-o”, went inside a meth house and discovered they cut meth with rosary beads…..something I found mildly disturbing even as an atheist (note to self: never try meth), nearly vomited in/on a crime scene that stank of cat pee and human poo, hoped something bad would happen just so I could watch it “go down”, peed in the prison toilet, drove really fast with the siren on making siren noises of my own in between quoting lines from a Few Good Men which I know has NOTHING to do with policing but it sounded good: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth”, ate donuts with other cops and sat around with cops making jokes about dumb criminals.

Seriously, Glendale is a very scary place. We went into these apartment blocks that, instead of calling them by their legal name of Twilight condos, I would have used the term Suicide Towers and it was dismal right down to Chihuahua man who kicked his dogs in the hope we felt sorry for them and took them away from him, his partner who only had one tooth and it looked like an oversized cartoon tooth from a baby ogre…. to the 12 year old boy who had run away because he just wanted to grow up and be a gangbanger which in itself is a contradiction because if any of these kids make it to adulthood then it will be a miracle.

After attending a “shots fired” where hundreds of kids dressed like hookers and pimps ran from the scene and scattered like scared rabbits spitting and cussing at the car as we drove by….we then went to trailer park town which I have only ever seen on My Name is Earl and that park looked like the Hilton compared to this place. Here even the cats have attitude.

Stopped off at a halfway house and had a mildly disturbing and yet refreshingly intellectual conversation with an articulate homeless man called Kevin who said it was one thing to be a “have not” but it is important to do it with dignity (not sure I’ve mastered that one) and went on to answer a DV (code for Domestic Violence dispute) at a block of apartments that actually had a fresh coat of paint and a fountain (faaaancy). I made mention of this being quite upmarket with the fountain and all and Officer Johnson brought me back to reality with a resounding thud. “Yeah, nice fountain, body found in it last week.” Right then..where to next? Satan’s underbelly?

Another note to self: I thought I had fallen on hard times. I was mistaken.

Anyway it was amazing and I have found a little spark all fired up inside of me just for stepping outside my comfort zone and doing something that really shakes me up and makes me think. First of all it is noble to be brave like these incredible officers and I completely admire them and the work they do and what they hope to achieve by doing what they do. Hats off to you all!

Secondly we are blessed with opportunities and the ability to see them because some people don’t even have the luxury of that and while I can still dream and see a light ahead of me I am wealthy beyond imagining. To be born into helplessness and hopelessness must be a solitary confinement of the mind that would be almost impossible to escape from. To see children wandering the streets at midnight while their mothers score drugs and their fathers are in prison really makes you question human frailty and the spirit it takes to climb out of the gutter or the ghetto and make something of yourself. I want to wish all of these kids richness in spirit but I know sadly for the most part that wish will remain unfulfilled. I am sad for the young people and angry at the adults. I will drive away from this town and there is very little I can do for them at the moment but if I ever get a chance to do something of worth for these people and others like them then I most certainly will.

Thirdly, I realised it is time to do something I have longed to do my whole life: write crime thrillers. It is time for me to go to Quantico, go meet cops, go and do whatever research I want/need to do and write the books I have always longed to write well before those other books happened. It is truly time to follow my heart – exactly what I am doing staying at a complete stranger’s place in the middle of Phoenix Arizona. Another piece of the Mojo puzzle just clicked into place.

Tomorrow Kai is going hunting with the local men and then we are off on the next part of our trip - no plans other than to head in a certain direction and see what happens. In the meantime please vote for me and send a message around the world for others to do the same. Oprah would be a blast but today that job does not define me or my ambitions. I am falling into bed exhausted having done an all nighter then come home to be mom all day…and this time last night I was shining lights into local parks looking for a runaway kid just one year older than my own son who was safely tucked away in a beautiful house with his teddy bear under his arm.

I am truly deeply grateful tonight for all that we have. Dignity, safety, friendship, spirit, hope and happiness.
I am rich.

Please vote:
http://myown.oprah.com/audition/index.html?request=video_details&response_id=12976&promo_id=1