Yes­ter­day I took my step­son DJ to a deten­tion cen­ter a few hours away from here. He needs to serve 2 days in jail as part of sen­tence for get­ting caught with mar­i­juana down in that county in Decem­ber. Yes, that DJ, the main char­ac­ter in so many of my posts. He prob­a­bly should have been charged with more, accord­ing to his accounts, but once again was left off the hook by some well mean­ing judge. It was inter­est­ing watch­ing some­one being booked. This was new to me, DJ being and old hand at it. He knew what they would ask before they did ask. Knew what he had to turn over. Knew what he had to pay for his stay. I could tell it was all a joke to him. Except that his hands were shak­ing. And I knew his stom­ach was queasy as he refused lunch. Not so old hat, huh DJ? We did some talk­ing on the way down there. Mostly this and that. I tend to ser­mo­nize when I have a cap­tive audi­ence but had decided ahead of time to not do that this time. He told me about some instances just recently when he was “up to no good”. I didn’t ask and he didn’t elab­o­rate. Watch­ing DJ being booked was hard for me and I think he knew that. I think he was glad it wasn’t his mom or dad. And no mat­ter what his bravado, being locked up still both­ers him. I thought a lot about him dri­ving home. The win­dows down. 68 degrees out. Stop­ping to get cof­fee. The free­dom to come and go. No locked doors. The one thing I did say to DJ was I hoped this was his last time being locked up, but that he was the only one who could guar­an­tee that. He said he wished that wasn’t how it was because he knew what he had to do to stay out of jail and he is not will­ing, at this time, to stop those behav­iors. No, the hard­est part was not see­ing DJ locked up. The hard­est part was dri­ving away, know­ing he had used the night before, and by his own words, will keep on doing so. It sim­ply breaks my heart.