IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY DAY...

...tales from the wacky world of Oregon law enforcement...

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I guess I must be a jailbird-in-waiting. I was stopped this week for the first time since January of this year. And the more paranoid side of me thinks they're trying to get me, for something, anything. After all, I'm such a danger to everyone and everything. It had been raining all day. It was about 3pm and I was headed into town. I spied a cop car on the shoulder of the opposite side of the road, all staked out to catch people doing 36 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone. Whew, I thought, I made it past the cop car, now I'm home free! Then the cop car left its shoulder-of-the-road position and got into my lane. Looking at my rearview mirror, I saw the cop car in my lane, and the more paranoid side of me was thinking, This can't be good! And it wasn't. I got pulled over. Sheesh. Not Again.

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A lady cop walked up to my car, and to be honest, I had no idea why I was pulled over. She told me my car windows were tinted too darkly. WHAT??????? I told her I've never changed my windows' darkness; it was this way when I bought the car almost NINE YEARS AGO. Well, since she had me pulled over (a pulled-over person has absolutely no rights until the Cop Lets Him Go, by the way), of course she took my driver's license and registration back to her car to radio in all my pertinent data. I swear, sometimes I feel that Cops Make Up Stuff, just to pull ya over and find out more about ya. Well, she couldn't bust me for anything. Then, and this was just AMAZING: She had a little gray business-card with big thick numbers on them. And, she placed that card on the inside of my drivers' side window. If the numbers can be seen thru tinted windows, then the tint is street-legal. And my windows were legal. The photo above was taken thru my tinted driver's window on a similarly rainy day. This is one of my car's windows that the officer initially, but mistakenly, thought was too dark. You be the judge.

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I asked her if she had made a mistake by pulling me over for basically NOTHING. She didn't wanna go that far, saying, how do I know you're not a deadbeat with 27 sub-machine guns in your back seat? I have, except for a BB rifle, never fired a gun IN MY LIFE. I asked her a bunch more questions about the law, and I could tell she wanted to get back in her nice, safe, dry, untinted-windows Cop Car, but I was trying to get into the mindset behind all these laws. As the traffic stop came to a close, the lady cop cut me loose and I once again got to breathe in the atmosphere of Sweet Freedom. She got back in her car and took off. I proceeded forward in my Car With The Newly-Determined-To-Be-Legally-Tinted Windows. I saw her driving towards the police station, and guess what: She tailgated an SUV for three blocks in order to get there.

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So anyway, I won. It was a rainy day, and I made her spend 15 minutes standing outside in the pouring rain, while I asked about her all the cop tactics that the paranoid side of me believes the cops try on everyone, to get them to admit something, to try and turn the detainee's words around to suit their own highly interrogative point of view. Have you ever seen one of those "shoot the ducks" games at the carnival? Instead of ducks, there should be little cut-out Cars which are then shot down by the cops, because that's how I believe law enforcement agencies deal with the public. The very public who is PAYING THEIR SALARIES. Hmph! Motorists, All motorists, are indeed Sitting Ducks for Law Enforcement.

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THE EYES HAVE IT: Okay, I told you that story so I could tell you about this one: The traffic stop referred to above made me late for my latest Eyeglasses appointment. I have been saving up this year so I Could Get Glasses. But, basically, the new glasses I'd just bought WERE ALL WRONG for me. Headaches, dizziness, and eye strain. So, I rescheduled, for ANOTHER eye exam, the one I was made late for by the aforementioned Cop Incident. For the second time, the eye doctor ran me through an infinite number of lens combinations until we found something that worked. But...my eyes are so different (basically one eye is great and the other one is, well, not great, not good, even). that the eye doctor told me all the changes I needed could not be performed with one set of lenses. Huh? What? She said that because my eyes differ so much, that one pair of all-around glasses absolutely could not be made. What the FORK???

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The best that can be done, is for me to use the glasses I have now for distance only (and they're great for distance viewing), but for reading or close-up work, I need another pair that focuses up close. In short, with the adjustments needed for my eyes, it's impossible to make one pair of bifocals to handle all my vision-related needs. What I'm getting, then, is a $400 dollar pair of READING GLASSES. Whoopee. I'd like to know if anybody else out there has even heard of this! Maybe it has something to do with the fact I want glass lenses. Plastic is a denser material in which modifications can be made with less material, and long ago I had plastic-lens bifocals made. But they were plastic lenses, rendered useless by my cleaning them on my shirt. Can you say "scratches"? I knew ya could. Finally, I must ask: Is it just me, or does the world Really Not Make Much Sense These Days?

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This, then, is my New Tactic for keeping things fresh in this blogsite. I just sit back and wait for stuff to happen to me, so I can take the entire world to task for not letting me have my way all the time. WHY NOT???? It's my blog, after all. This is Where I Rule. Or, at least one side of me tries to rule the other side of me. Can you say "Schizoid"? I knew ya could.