It was close to midnight and I was pulling out of the rescue squad parking lot on my way home. It wasn't my regular duty night; I was just riding extra in hopes of getting a few more driving reports in the final stages of my progression to emergency driver. I'd had the occasion to drive a wee bit on the fast side earlier in the evening when several units were dispatched on a car accident with multiple head traumas. Away screams the heavy rescue truck, off goes the ambulance, and I'm driving the medic. But the airbrake won't disengage. I watch the other units go screaming off into the night as I futilely push the button to disengage the brake. On rare occasions this can happen to vehicles with air brakes; you have to rev up the motor to build up pressure before you can take the brake off. To my immense relief, the brake suddenly comes off, and I pull out with lights and siren going. The other units have a substantial head start on me.

Before I learned to drive the ambulance I'd never been at the wheel of a vehicle this massive. Early on I worried that I would be intimidated by the vehicle's bulk and become a tentative, slow driver. So I made a conscious effort to get comfortable and drive the ambulance at reasonably normal speeds. My efforts paid off, but I may have overcompensated slightly. After sitting in the copilot's seat on a call I drove, my night crew officer told me I did fine but "could lay off the adrenaline a little." It seems my tendency is now to drive a wee bit faster than is best for a new emergency driver. I've actually been working very hard to slow down on calls and drive with only a judicious measure of haste.

In this case, however, it seemed speed was appropriate. So (with the legally-required due regard for safety) I stepped on it. I felt a certain measure of pride when I saw the lights of the squad up ahead. Before we made it to the scene, I had caught up with the other units on the call.

But as I pulled out of the parking lot in my own car later that night (feeling ridiculously low to the ground in comparison with my perch in the ambulance) I was thinking about my long history of ruined and abandoned friendships. I have a hard time keeping them alive and viable over time, and occasionally I feel a certain regret for all the relationships lost along the way to now.

I turned out into the street and was momentarily distracted by the search for a decent radio station. I broke off our antenna a month or so ago -- the second I have dispatched in a singularly uncoordinated maneuver I can't bear to describe here -- and although it seldom makes any difference in downtown DC, the audio quality begins to degrade out in the burbs. Before long I'd abandoned hope of getting a consistent signal until at least Western Avenue. Those silent rides are killing me. With no music to distract I'm left to ponder things like why my friendships inevitably founder and disintegrate.

There must be some common factors to the declines. If I could identify them I could begin to counteract them. And then it came to me: I need to survey my former friends and gather more information on the topic. I'm sure I could put together a two-page questionnaire on the quality of my friendship, its strengths and irritations, as well as the various factors contributing to its eventual decline. I could easily track down a dozen or so onetime pals through the web... but would they understand the spirit of scientific inquiry in which I sent them the survey and provide me with candid responses?

On Saturday we walked around the neighborhood a bit, just enjoying the weather. It seemed like the first weekend day in weeks on which I wouldn't have to head off to the squad, and I hardly knew what to do with myself. From Q Street we could see a mass of people in Dupont Circle, many of them attired in bright yellow, like bicycle cops. "I'm guessing the good folks from Falun Gong," I said. We started joking about a recent series of full-page newspaper ads taken out in the Washington Post by Falun Gong followers, which attempted to discredit Chinese reports that the faithful were setting themselves on fire and engaging in other cultish insanity. The ads featured several photographs released in the Chinese media, along with text that attempted to draw attention to falsities in the photographs and media reports. Unfortunately, the intense and vociferous quality of the text did far more to paint the group itself as a lunatic fringe in my mind than the Chinese government had been able to accomplish.

"What is this shadow?" I chanted in drone staccato, mimicking the bizarre captions beneath the ad's photographs of a man in flames. "Where is man in the left side doing? What is the light source?" I'd been perfectly willing to believe that Falun Gong was a bunch of laid-back Buddhist Tai-Chi practitioners until I saw the otherworldly quality of their PR efforts. It had a certain single-minded quality, a complete immersion in its own lingo and inability to perceive how non-members would react to its version of reality, that really did suggest a cultlike herd mentality. If even a single person in their DC office had a lick of sense they would have killed that whole ad before it ever saw the light of day.

As we drew nearer, we could see snippets of text on the various signs held by the yellow-shirted people: "state-sponsored" and "intimidation" and finally "Falun." Despite our mockery of the group's lame-ass public education efforts, I don't doubt that they're being leaned on quite unpleasantly by their government. We sat for a while in the park watching the faithful distribute literature and hoist their banners high for passersby. My own progenitors the Quakers were certainly shat on for many a decade for being irritatingly vocal about the beliefs. I should have a painfully soft spot for Falun Gong.