[fiction] Damaged Goods

Part 1:   Snow

"I see her face all the time," said Jason.  "I can't forget it."  The pensive look on his face was priceless.  He looked like the quintessential pro-army, politically correct soldier sitting there on the bar stool:   broad shoulders slumped but only a little, large forearms on the bar, and a crew cut.  He was every right-wing parents' wet dream.

"So, like, even on the toilet?"  The question was serious, and it game from a man, perhaps we should say man-boy, who looked quite the opposite.  He loomed on the bar stool like a vulture, his muscled yet wiry body twisted as if it was designed by God to be impossible to straighten.  His skin was racially ambiguous: dark, but not very dark.  Possibly just permanently tanned.  Atop his head rested a silly hat in the shape of a white monkey, and it had two pompoms hanging down next to the man-boy's cheeks.  But if you knew him, it was the eyes that gave it away.

"No, of course n--huh.  That's weird."  Jason thought for a moment.  "No, never.  I wonder why."

"So, and this is just an option here, but option 1:  remain on a toilet for the rest of your life.  Unless I've jinxed it though.  The next time you're dropping a live one you'll probably think of her again.

Jason face-palmed.  "You are not helping."

"I'm probably the last person you should talk to about this."

"You're the only person I can talk to.  All of my friends are shitheads, military assholes like me, or just naive dumbfucks.  You're the only one who's morally ambiguous."

"So you ...ah."  Snow leaned in and touches Jason's shoulder.  "It's not your fault," he said, voice thick with melodrama.

Jason shoved him.  For a second something hostile flashed in his eyes.  Then he stared at the bar again.  "Is there anything that will make me forget her?"

"Oh you mean like, substance wise?"

"Yes."

"Of course."

"What, uh...what would you recommend."

Snow waved to the bartender.  "Jameson, for this guy.  Lots of ice; he's a giant pussy."

Jason looked as his new drink.  "I don't mean alcohol."

"Bottoms up!" Snow said, and reached over to click his fruity drink against Jason's glass.

Jason took a careful sip.

"Seriously...there are a lot of substances you might use to forget what you did, and alcohol is just as effective as they are."

"You mean, they aren't effective at all," said Jason.

"Well yeah if you want to be a downer about everything."

"Snow I only shot a single person while I was over there.  That person was an unarmed woman."

"That is bad," stated Snow with the enthusiasm of a fifth grader answering a question in class.

"I could have helped more people simply by not enlisting."

"Well, that's not necessarily true.  Obviously there would have been a different guy in your unit, and he might have shot two women."

Jason glared at him.

"I'm fucking serious dude," said Snow.  "The world isn't full of angels.  Sometimes you can help people simply by doing less harm than the other guy."

"I guess..."  Jason looked around the room.  "There are some cute girls in the corner."  His voice betrayed the awkwardness of the change in subject.

Snow looked.  "Ooooohhh yeah Daddy could hit that."

"Which one?"

"Huh?"

"Which one could 'Daddy' hit?" asked Jason.

"Oh, well I mean if I had to pick just one...the blonde one."

"They're both blonde."

"The blonder one."

Jason squinted at the girls, trying to figure out what Snow meant.  By this time the girls had realized they were being stared at.  One of them smiled back.

"You want to take one home?  I'll be your wingman," said Jason.

"Meh," Snow whined.  "Not tonight.   I mean I'd love to, but my place is a mess, the jacuzzi is broken, my hands are still fucked up from the Harley incident, I have no wine whatsoever, no candles...no oil...no whipped cream."

Jason stared blankly.

"And all of my vibrators are in Florida," said Snow.

Jason choked on his whiskey.  "Holy shit dude," he coughed, "I meant take her home, as in just make out on the couch a little."

Snow blinked.  "Oh people still do that?"

"Ok, just..."  Jason waved his hand around his head a little.  "Back to my thing."

"Yes, back to your murdering spree."

"I only killed one person."

"So not much of a spree then."

"Of course not!  Do you think you're being helpful right now?" asked Jason.

Snow shrugged.  He looked up at the ceiling, eyes darting back and forth, as if he was choosing between two options.

"Here's another way to look at it.  You know who Jenny McCarthy is?"

"The red scare?"

"Oh fuck no, wrong witch hunt.  No dude Jenny here has caused the deaths of thousands of people.  She didn't kill them herself, but she found paper in England or somewhere that claimed vaccines caused autism. The guy who wrote the paper lost his license for fabricating the data, and every study since then has failed to show a link, but..."

"Accusations are page A;  rebuttals are page B."

"Exactly.  This bitch spawned the modern, american anti-vaccination movement.  We lost herd immunity to diseases that have been gone for 100 years.  Children died.  Babies died."

"Jesus," said Jason.

"So you think about all of the little babies who came into a doctors office with their entire life ahead of them--babies too young to be vaccinated yet--and they get whooping cough from Johnny over their who could have been vaccinated but has a bunch of dumb fucks for parents.  And multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand."

"Yeah but she didn't shoot those kids," said Jason.

"Who gives a fuck?  They're still dead.  Have you ever watched a baby die on a respirator?"  Asked Snow.

Jason looked a Snow, searching his face.  Snow's ambivalence was legendary, like some kind of twisted super power.  Misdirection, half-sarcasm and full out lies were his bread and butter.  But the words 'baby die on a respirator' had come out of his mouth with an earnestness Jason had never heard before.

"No," said Jason.

"It's not much better than watching a bitch bleed out," said Snow.  The callous words sounded fake.

"Come on Snow.  Give me something.  I can't block this out.  I don't want to go crazy, be one of those guys-"

"You will block it out, and it will mean you're crazy.  Still might be better than this.  Or not.  I can tell you, if you want to get over it, you gotta ride it out, and it will be awful.  Or, you can bury it so deep you will never remember."

"Does that work?"

"Worked for me.  I have no memories of 2005 or 2006.  None."

"At all?  Where were you?"

"I don't know."

"Where were you planning to be, I mean you remember where you were in 2004, right?"

"I don't like to think about it."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to know.  Becoming a nutcase in order to block out a memory doesn't do much good if you go back and try to remember what happened."

"Was is something you did?"

Snow Monkey shrugged.

"What if someone--someone from 2005--comes after you."

"We're all from 2005.  Except for--"

"You know what I mean."

"I'm more dangerous than I look."

"Snow, no offense, but I could take y-aaaaah!"  Jason's bar stool slid out from underneath him, and he hit the floor hard.  Snow's right foot inconspicuously came to rest on the rungs of his own stool.

Snow got up and dropped a fifty on the bar for what could have been no more than $20 of drinks.  He stood over Jason and said, "I'll leave you to your demons.  Oh, and you know we're not friends, right?  I mean I can definitely do favored acquaintance, but friend is too much."  He might have looked intimidating if not for the swaying pom-poms of his hat.

"Go to hell, Snow," said Jason.

Snow smiled, winked, and left.

Probable Cause

 Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no
 statement to the police under any circumstances.

--Justice Robert Jackson

I'm not sure what other people call them.  I call them guides:  people willing to drive faster than you, perhaps because they accept more risk, or they are locals and have more situational awareness.  Naturally I have no issues swallowing my pride and moving out of the way so they can take the lead and I can trail a half mile back, hoping that any law enforcement officers will pick on the first guy.  All of this is occurring at exactly the speed limit, of course.

Anyway today, I discovered a flaw in this system, when the guide is willing to go...significantly faster than you were expecting.  So much faster that catching up to them requires speeds you might not risk even with a guide in front (again, this is happening at or below the speed limits).  So just imagine what could happen were you to try and catch up to a guide, but you are too far behind to realize they have slowed down just behind a police car.

In other news, I got my second ticket today.  He accused me of going 93 mph.  However, the ticket is not the interesting part.  The interesting part is what happened between the time I was pulled over and the time I was handed the ticket.

When I pulled over, I decided not to be a dick with the 1" window thing, because, since the cop was moving, I figured he didn't have evidence and it was worth playing nice.  Unfortunately, when he asked where I was going, and I said "East" and glared at him, he told me to get out of my car and come sit in his car.  The cop talked about how a lot of drugs are coming out of Washington now, and...I have Washington plates!  He continued pressing me for more information.  I told him that I wasn't going to answer any of his questions, and I didn't consent to any searches or seizures.  Just like the internet videos said to.

Unfortunately, real life is very different from theoretical courtrooms.  The officer spent roughly forever summoning a second officer and a K-9 unit.  Now, I've never had drugs in or near my car, but for some reason when the drug sniffing dog ran straight up to my car and indicated, I wasn't surprised.  I couldn't see what the K-9 officer was doing;  I don't know if he gave the dog a hand signal to indicate or not.  So then they took all my shit out of my car and started going through it.

So, for those of you who care, this is where the whole "rights" thing breaks down:  drug sniffing dogs apparently alert at anything, and that's all they need for Probable Cause.  They are like 4 legged, barking Probable Cause factories.

And this is where I broke my own personal rules, because they obviously found a lockbox containing some rather important personal documents, and I, picturing those documents catching fire as they cut the box open, elected to tell them where they could find the key.

As I watched them I tried to steel myself for whatever could happen.  Sure, I was technically innocent since I did not (and have never) possess any drugs.  However, as John T. Williams can tell you, bullets still kill you if you're innocent.  And though being shot in the back was [hopefully] not likely, there was nothing I could do to stop them from planting drugs in the car in order to save themselves from embarrassment, and I'm pretty sure we were within 100 miles of the border so they probably could have anally raped me.

However, none of that happened.   They didn't even take my car apart or rip up the upholstery like they did to that black guy from colorado.  The K-9 officer tried to give me a good cop talk about how the other cop was a nice guy and this all could have gone differently.  He also decided to explain that--surprise--these dogs generate a lot of false positives.  I directly insinuated that the false positives called into question the validity of the probable cause generated by those dogs, and he became visibly annoyed.  There was also a lot of talk about all these drugs coming out of washington, and how they didn't profile me based on my washington plate, or based on the fact that I invoked my 4th and 5th amendment rights...it was some kind of other set of things that gave the first cop reasonable suspicion to order a drug sniffing dog.

I think I learned a lot from this incident.  No, I did not learn some gay lesson about being more cooperative with cops.  Fuck those cunts.  I will seek to establish a more nuanced method of asserting my rights.  Honestly, every time I read another news article about some guy getting pulled over and having his car ripped open or whatever, I keep thinking "if only I had been there, I would have not said anything except for 'I dont consent to any searches or seizures' and I would have won the encounter!"  It turns out, I was wrong about that, because I finally had my shot at it and I fared not much better than the colorado guy.  So I feel like I can relax while reading those articles, instead of trying to be an armchair lawyer to a news story.


Obviously I spent the rest of the night thinking about this incident.  So far my best ideas are:

1) get a solid block of steel (or titanium?  tungsten??) and put a fake lock hole into it, so the next time this happens, they will have a hell of a time attempting to cut it open.

2) Sue them for an illegal search.  I'm not actually certain that is a real thing.  I do know that illegal searches aid the defense in court and can cause all evidence gained by and after the illegal search to be thrown out.  However, that doesn't mean the police have civil liability if they perform one.  Still, you could probably sue them for profiling.  I suppose it won't hurt to ask a lawyer about it.

The downside of suing them, though, is this:  the only reason I am not dead, or in jail, is because at least two of those cops were honest.  They didn't handcuff me and choke me, or shoot me in the back, or plant weed in the car and pretend to find it.  They apparently honestly thought a drug runner would carry drugs in a fucking Subaru WRX with a Washington plate and drive 93 miles an hour (their words; not mine).  That notion is actually so ridiculous I almost laughed in the cops face when I realized he thought I was carrying drugs (if I ever decide to be a drug smuggler, I am going to use drones).  Anyway.  The point is I am alive and safe because of honest cops, and if I sue the department in an effort to stop them from profiling Washington drivers, I am concerned that I would be harming the wrong people.  Then again, thinking "I'm not going to answer your questions" gives you Reasonable Suspicion is pretty shitty.

So...in conclusion, fuck cops.

A quarter mile at a time

Its 4:30 am local time and I made it to Sheridan, Wyoming.  Not bad for my first full day of driving.  However I spent 17 hours on the road, and especially after yesterdays moving fiasco, my bad and legs are killing me.  I think I even got tennis elbow from just holding onto the wheel for so many hours straight.  Still, I kind of want to see how fast I can cross the U.S.

Taking a small 10 minute nap, even if you can't fall asleep for most of it, can actually really help with staying awake on the road.

Got my first speeding ticket of the trip in Montana.  The speed limit is 75 but they still make a big deal about going 90.  What's the point, then?

Unfortunately they won.  I obeyed the speed limit (my version of obeying, which is speed limit + 10, in order to exceed the limit by at least 5 after accounting for a speedometer that reads high) until I left the state, since I don't want to get more than one ticket per state--makes it harder to fight them.

I want to investigate mounting an infrared camera on my car.

Coming Home

Its 1:06 seattle time and I am enjoying my last "dicks" burger before I hop in my car and head east.

Moving out was a disaster.  I could write pages upon pages on the misadventure but I only have one hand to type bc I am eating.

So...anyway.