Life, Death, and Doughnuts

---

Two brothers attempt to outwit each other in a continued quest to take the other's donuts. Explore popular and recently added TV series available to stream now with Prime Video. Start your free trial. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Enjoy unlimited streaming on Prime Video.

There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Walters as Michael D. Seriously, maybe we should turn off the music and do something about it. He was a man… and everything that comes with that. I suppose that makes me a woman. We were ruthlessly typical which was why our reality was so distressing.

I was so excited. But there were the red flags: But how could I avoid it? I was in love, but I was also excruciatingly aware of what was on the verge of happening. I investigate a lot of death. I see the ending to every story and then I slowly rewind the video feed to track the mechanics involved. I watch, in reverse, every decision that led to the dead body on the floor. And perhaps the two most over-whelming commonalities are this:.

Most deaths I investigate are those of men. Well, because men make riskier decisions. Men tend to be more violent. Men are less likely to get regular health care. And more men have unbridled substance abuse issues than women. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, men are twice as likely to become drug addicts. Furthermore, 88, people die of alcohol-related causes annually, 62, of which are men… making it the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Do they just mean those deaths are the result of liver failure and other medical problems that result from drinking? Or do they also include the car accidents… and does it include the victims of drunk-drivers or just the drivers themselves? Does it include people who kill themselves as a result of their addiction? Does it include the murder victims of crazed alcoholics in the midst of a meltdown?

There was an error trying to load your rating for this title.

House fires in which the drunk person fell asleep with a lit cigarette in hand? If not, that number should be even higher. I can say firsthand that, of the non-natural deaths that I see… in other words, of the suicides, homicides and accidents… the staggering majority involve alcohol in some way or another. And most of them are men. The destructive force of alcohol and alcoholism cannot be measured. It was right there. And I knew the destination for the drunk train was inevitably grief and destruction.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1. Everyday, 3 women in the U. Now if you take a look at the school shootings in America since the year 18 years , and I mean shootings on school buses as well as grades K in both private and public schools, also including colleges and universities— the number of fatalities amounts to approximately One more time for the folks in back: Of those, almost all of them were murdered by their male partners- typically when the woman was in the process of leaving him. I can recite all the numbers you want, but nothing can really give you a hint of what that looks like:.

A floor smeared with blood, lots of it. Trails indicating where she ran and how he followed. Scattered belongings all over the floor: How dare she leave? If I told him to leave how angry would he get? What would he do? Could I defend myself if he got violent? I had to wait until it was safer. How do I deal with all the terrible stuff I see? How do I process the realities of how and why we die. Then how do I live and love in the face of that? How do I know what I know and then look beyond all the signs and signals that scream: I threw a weak answer at that kid that morning, but his question has stuck with me like a penny I picked up and left in my coat pocket months ago.

I pull it out and stare at it when the fingers of my thoughts brush against it during the day. I think the answer is simply that I am always living in the suspended moment of indecision. I exist in the impossible contradiction between everything that I hope for as it crashes into the impenetrable wall of everything that I know.

Or, at least it will be very soon… 5 hours and 45 minutes to be exact. All is not lost! Speaking of… I just spontaneously looked him up on Facebook. I have many happy childhood memories of elementary school classroom parties during which we forsook our afternoon academia in favor of eating VAST amounts of sugar and exchanging dopey little cards that featured our favorite cartoon characters. It became a problem later in life. It can be a lot of fun if you keep an open mind.

Like this year, for example…. I would like to bestow a special gift. One of my friends was recently dumped by her deplorably tactless boyfriend who flailingly bumbled off an excuse he probably found online. Meanwhile, the truth of the matter is almost certainly that he wanted to fuck other people. But for the fact that I was an intrinsic part of this scenario and my capacity to completely fuck up virtually any situation is unlimited.

So we were kissing, and I must have had some kind of odd expression on my face, because in the midst of our heated breathing and unbridled pawing, he breathlessly asked me,. So, as a medical examiner, I end up at a lot of really nasty scenes. And the nastiest are always the scenes when the person has been dead for a while and, for whatever reason, no one noticed… until they started to smell.

And once you smell it, you smell it for hours , sometimes DAYS. Never was this more in evidence to me than recently when I was on a date. Afterwards he leaned in for a kiss and I almost re-introduced him to my dinner. I shrank away from him as though he had dung beetles crawling out of his mouth. We get bad breath because of the microscopic bits of food in our teeth. Anyway, when this dude tried to kiss me, a knee-jerk, visceral chain-reaction occurred. I squirmed away from him as my face wrinkled in disgust, Involuntarily, a whimper of revulsion wormed its way out of my mouth and I pushed Dude away with unmistakable finality.

I groped about for an explanation, even as I pulled him back to me for a hug in an attempt to deflect the awkwardness of my repugnance. Later that night, I sent him a lengthy text message and apology, exhaustively explaining the biological mechanics of what had happened. And, believe it or not, he was actually cool with it.

I mean what kind of person would be cool with that?

Posts navigation

I could blame these personality glitches on my profession. His name was Tom. It was my freshman year of high school and he sat next to me in history. I was always in a huff. It was kind of my default setting as a teenager. I used my huffs to poorly hide the fact that I was painfully insecure and being pissed off all the time felt slightly more powerful that just being pathetic. A blush crept its crimson fingers across his face as he looked down. A pregnant pause followed. I picked up the kiss and … a trilling purr of delight rumbled somewhere deep in my belly.

I looked at him, looked at the kiss, looked back at him… and… and…. I asked him, matter-of-factly. The semester ended and he went on to date a cheerleader… meanwhile I retreated into the waiting, morose arms of the theater department. You will continue to kick all kinds of ass and he will almost certainly contract an STD.

So, I suppose what I mean to say is that, not every incident turns into an existential crisis for yours truly. So, taking a break from my incredibly strange dating life, here are a couple of more-benign tales:. Murder is a big crowd-pleaser. It seems that for any tale to be considered interesting, someone has to be dead, someone else must have murdered them… and someone has to be naked.

Such plots are the stuff that tend to drive story-lines right into the awards season. So-and-so was brutally killed and Thus-and-such processed their grief by going on a rampage… or revolting against an unjust government… or by writing a symphony… or by meeting someone else and falling in love against all their instincts… or by taking a spaceship to join a new human colony on Mars… and so on and so on.

I usually come on shift right after Henry. He glanced up as I approached and sighed. Law enforcement is always on the lookout for something to solve; a homicide, a robbery, a crossword puzzle…. Henry launched into his tale of an older woman who had been found deceased in her bed by her roommate. Clearly, they decided, someone else had done this. She had obviously been sexually assaulted and then murdered… or murdered and then sexually assaulted… or maybe she had died DURING the sexual assault. Why else would she be partially naked? I first learned this concept as a paramedic student after spending a day pronouncing a wide array of naked people, all of whom were positioned in such a way that the first thing that we saw when we walked in the room was their dead… naked… butt.

My paramedic field instructor put it best as he was explaining this phenomenon to me during a break in our day:. First they blamed the roommate, then they decided the family must be in on it. Maybe she had been drugged. Was it possible it was an assault gone wrong? Could she have been smothered with a pillow during the attack? That must be why there were no marks on her! Henry did his best to reel them in. The police remained unconvinced and called out the detectives who jumped on the homicide bandwagon like they were writing a script for a summer blockbuster.

Henry quietly called the body-removal team and released the decedent to a funeral home. He excused himself from the scene as the detectives were beginning to question the roommate. The story of a death is supposed to write itself on the empty pages of my perception and all I do is watch and record. Life fucking sucks… deeply and frequently. That said, I find it incredibly difficult to have sympathy for the dead when I have to deal with the aftermath of their demise… particularly when that aftermath includes a shattered family that will spend the rest of their lives trying to shed the spirit-crushing weight of this event.

Suffice to say, the last thing this guy did before deciding to off himself, was assault his wife as she was trying to leave him. Seriously, I was pricklier than a porcupine in a mosh-pit as I excused myself from her company and went into the family home to assess the physical state of said alcoholic.

It was a mess. Dude had opted to off himself with a high-caliber fire-arm and hollow-tip ammo right through his thick skull. The floor of the bathroom was a veritable swamp of blood and brain matter. It was late and I was tired. I fucking human, man! What the hell do you want from me? Because I definitely got my just desserts on that one. I wedged myself into the bathroom, tiptoeing around the vast puddle of bodily fluids and angling myself over the decedent like I was playing a macabre game of Twister.

Why , you may ask. Why bother looking at all that stuff if there was a big-ass hole in his head and so much blood that you could hydro-plane a HUMVEE? Sure the guy may have a bullet in his head… but he may also have a bullet in his chest. Then you, too can become a cranky, judgmental, disillusioned government employee who wrestles with soggy dead-bodies over the holidays. Anyway, once I was finished with his front, I had to roll the guy over to take a look at his back. No small feat since he outweighed me almost two-to-one and we were stuffed into the cramped bathroom so tightly I could practically taste the liquor he had been drinking, pre-mortem.

The police were of limited help, seeing as how the two I had with me were looking a little nauseated and both were large enough that had they attempted to join me in the bathroom, one of us would have had to literally stand on the corpse, and another would be relegated to standing in the blood-puddle. The fact is, the guy was heavy, stiff and slippery… a trifecta of inconvenience.

And I was bent over him in an attempt to lower my center of gravity to ease the movement. Gathering the gist of what had just happened, they awkwardly stood there, trying to think of something to say… finally blurting out:. I guess it was a team effort… which was fine, because it gave me a chance to have a little talk with my assailant. It has that greeting-card, anecdotal type of sentiment that pastors like to employ when they want to dandle your heart on their knee like a dim-witted toddler.

He must have made an impression because I still remember. It goes like this:. A father and son had a falling out over something. How many ways are there for a family to fracture? I remember that much. Phone numbers change, people move… and then move again… keep moving. The silvery-thin threads that connect them, disintegrate. Each of them has, in turn, come to understand that the reasons for their rift are utterly unimportant. Their aggravations and arguments are inconsequential when compared with the enormity of losing each other forever.

The pressure is on. I think the worst calls of my career have always happened on holidays, not necessarily because the calls themselves were so different or traumatic, but rather because during the calls, you realize that THIS holiday will forever be ruined for THIS family because it will always be tainted by THIS death. The hardest part was the teen-aged son, though. At one point he pulled me aside and asked if it was possible that someone else may have shot his father.

I asked him why he would suspect such a thing and he told me that he saw small holes in the closed garage door when he found his dad. Could those holes be bullet holes? Is it possible that someone was firing a gun elsewhere and the bullets ripped through the garage door and killed his father? I had to tell him that, no… those holes in the garage door were NOT stray bullet holes. Subsequently, their remedy was to fumigate the residence with tear-gas in an attempt to smoke the guy out.

They must have fired at least 6 canisters into the 2-bedroom home… all completely useless because everyone in the residence was dead except for the dog- who was found hiding under the bed. And even though the cops opened all the windows for ventilation after they gained access to the house, it was still impossible to walk into that place without having your eyes water-up, your nose start leaking like a sieve and your throat lock up tighter than an angry fist.

Yet more than gruesome calls and overly-enthusiastic SWAT tactics, what we deal with on holidays are unresolved issues. She showed up at the scene of a fatal motor-vehicle accident that my co-worker, Henry, was fielding. But more about that later…. The calls commenced like a flash flood.

At first there was nothing- just your normal, everyday benign business at the office one day. And the next day our phone was squawking like an angry crow… announcing an onslaught of voicemails, because Beatrice had found us. Now, doing the math on that concept really quick: Our county is scrambling towards a population of , souls.

Assume that roughly half of those souls are men. Then take into account the fact that women live longer than men and as a rule, men are statistically more at risk for heart disease, alcoholism, auto-accidents and so on and so on. This means that most of the calls our office gets are to report the deaths of men… Well, nowadays, the rest of the calls our office gets are from Beatrice, wondering if any of those dead men are her son. If that medical examiner is busy… you know… doing their JOB. They may not call Beatrice back for a few hours. Consequently, her repeat calls come faster and faster, always with a building sense of irritation and urgency.

We may be explaining to a young mother how her baby died. We may be discussing details of a homicide with a detective. We may be in the fucking bathroom. And when we finally DO call her back, Beatrice suddenly becomes evasive and vague… demanding information, but refusing to give any in return. And this is where it gets weird.

This is where she typically hangs up. Or the story starts changing. Another time she told me he was homeless and could be anywhere. At first Henry dismissed her until she got close enough for him to hear her voice. Only then did he realize that Beatrice had taken her crusade to the streets. In our little office pow-wow, we decided something needed to be done… but no one was sure what COULD be done. She seemed to exhibit signs of dementia, yet she was aware enough to withhold information. My father died a few years back. My brother has his wife and kids.

This is where I would start getting scared. Listen, do me a favor. This holiday season, do something for me… as I sit in the office fielding phone calls from Beatrice and a host of other broken, remorseful people. It also describes most of my experiences as a human, but I always had kind of a twisted sense of humor. Anyway, I was sitting at my desk, having finally cleared from two separate death scenes that had both been particularly tedious. I was just sitting down to the tidal wave of resulting paperwork when my pager went off.

I called the number and found myself on the phone with state police dispatch. I glanced at my pager, I HAD gotten a page two hours earlier, but when I called the number, it had gone straight to voicemail. Which, I suppose, now they were. I explained this problem to dispatch trying to keep my irritation under control. It is a faux pas of epic proportion to miss a scene call, and the sinking feeling I experience when I find out that this has happened roughly resembles the legendary, black-out drop on the Space Mountain roller coaster at Disney World.

Write-ups and warnings abound… and rightly so. The dispatcher stuttered and fumbled, then transferred me to her supervisor. I explained the situation over again and the supervisor put me on hold for a few minutes before coming back on the line and telling me that the motor vehicle accident on highway 30 was in such a remote area that there was no cell phone coverage. I re-packed my freshly un-packed scene-bag and mounted up for a drive into the remote foothills of my county… for a head-on semi-truck-vs-panel-truck motor vehicle accident that was two hours old and getting older.

I was preparing the little come-to-Jesus talk I was going to have with this noob state trooper when I got there: However, when I got to the scene…. Trooper Nicholson and I rescued a dog together who had been locked in a garage alone for a month after his owner died in the house. It was a miracle the dog was still alive and both Nicholson and I had almost burst into tears when the beautiful Rottweiler had huddled his gaunt frame up to us, grateful for his first contact with other living beings in 33 days.

And I did ask dispatch to call you back. I wonder what happened. Trooper Nicholson stared at me in disbelief. I squirmed under his gaze like a freshly salted slug… shrugging and chuckling awkwardly… because it was funny.. There was the burned up semi-truck on the shoulder, as I mentioned before. Reportedly THAT driver had been airlifted to the downtown hospital and was doing just swimmingly.

My date was with the panel truck that sat in the center of the two-lane highway, split open like a busted melon. The debris field was… substantial, easily covering nearly one hundred yards of pavement before me: It all speckled the asphalt like a Jackson Pollack painting. In the middle of it all, there was a yellow tarp. Nicholson explained as I gingerly tip-toed through the hodgepodge: The truck was going about The semi was coming down the hill in the opposite lane, going maybe 60? There was carnage scattered around in the mess.

Chunks of flesh were sprinkled here and there amongst the wreckage.

There was so much… meat on the highway it boggled the mind. It looked as if the guy had exploded. There was a pile of muscle to my right, another scrap of sinew to my left. And over there was… a… plastic bag, split open… with a few hunks of carrion spilling out the side? Upon impact, dozens of boxes of raw chicken and pork had burst out the yawning tear in the truck. The boxes had detonated when they hit the ground and literally bestrew the debris field with… well… debris.

We were surrounded by errant breast fillets and stray tenderloins… It had all tumbled and scuffed along the ground, getting covered in dirt and leaves, until each species of gore was virtually indistinguishable from the other. The only thing that could be definitively identified as belonging to our driver, was the severed arm underneath the tarp. I took a couple deep breaths and stepped over a tangle of snarled noodles that were hemorrhaging out of a box nearby as I moved to survey the truck driver still in the cab.

The guy had died on impact… thankfully. He never felt a thing. He had lost a leg as well, it was tangled in the seat mechanism beneath him. And he lay sideways across the seat… eyes closed… almost peaceful. It was tragic, deeply tragic. He was young… tattooed… bearded.

He looked like so many of my friends…. I looked up the road to make out the skid marks that would communicate the lines of travel that the semi had made as he swerved, hoping to avoid the truck. Up the road I saw the police tape stretched across the road and a legion of curious drivers, all, trapped by the accident, stuck waiting for us to move it out of their path. Necks were craned and eyes were alert. All of them were angling to catch a glimpse of the deceased driver as he lay, barely shielded by the crooked-hanging passenger-side door.

One of the department of transportation guys nearby began ambling up the hill towards the onlookers.

I could see him hollering at the people and their lukewarm response to his commands. I became even more incensed and began stomping my way up the hill, intent on delivering a scalding diatribe as soon as I reached them… a diatribe that included the phrase: It appeared they caught sight of me bearing down on them because the whole sordid lot scrambled back to their cars as though they were being set upon by a swarm of killer bees.

Turning back to the accident, I noted another state trooper nearby. Our eyes met and his mouth twisted in a barely contained smile. We had to call the fire department back to the scene to get the driver out. It was a long process. I ended up helping and received a massive splash of blood on my leg that soaked through and wet my skin. Attempts to get an address for his Next of Kin was impossible.

He had just started working for the truck company and his supervisor barely knew him… when asked if there was emergency contact listed on his hiring paperwork, he told us the office was closed until Monday… then shrugged with indifference. As I was finally leaving, with the truck driver on his way to the morgue and his cell-phone tucked into my pocket in the hopes I might manage to find his family, one of the DOT guys stopped me. The truck had apparently been making a delivery to an Asian restaurant, because hundreds of fortune cookies lay at my feet… some crushed, some intact.

I shrugged, picked up a fortune cookie, cracked it open and glanced at the words from the hereafter. I hugged Nicholson goodbye and reminded him to invite me to his retirement party… seeing as how he was a newbie and all. Climbing into my county truck, I headed back into civilization, hoping to finally start my paperwork and maybe go home to eat.

Finally, desperate to notify someone before midnight, I called the most frequently dialed number in his phone and ended up speaking to his fiancee. It was a horrific notification. When I told her, she screamed, choked, cried. My roommates in the living-room stared wide-eyed through the kitchen door, clearly able to hear the wrenching sounds of her devastation. I had three more calls that night. Instead, I staggered back into my office and finally began hacking away at the jungle of documentation that has been amassing for the last 48 hours.

At one point I logged into Facebook and happily saw that my boyfriend of three months was online. Launching into a story about how busy he had been. He told me he thought he was getting sick and logged out. We cancelled plans to go out of town on an overnight trip upstate. I was exhausted and his sickness had taken pretty serious hold. I offered to make him soup and show him movies if he came over.

But then a few days stretched into a week. A sentence here and there, a greeting, a video of some cats. Then one day went by… then two… with no contact whatsoever. I asked him if everything was okay, was there anything I needed to know. No, he said, he was just tired and sick. He loved me, he missed me, everything was fine. Then five days went by. The unease was starting to gnaw at me. The two of us had been inseparable right up until that night of that awful shift.

• The Great Ramirez (Tales of the Star Force Book 5)
• Der Königsweg zu Gesundheit und hohem Alter: Plädoyer für ein besseres Leben (German Edition)
• Organic Synthesis in Water
• Boxen: Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia
• US Army, Technical Manual, TM 5-1080-250-12&P, ULTRALIGHTWEIGHT CAMOUFLAGE NET SYSTEM (ULCANS) WOODL
• Theresa A Twitter: Fairytales and Finance In France (Story Courts Book 1)
• Solar Cooking