Don’t Rain on My Pleasure

Last week a California court, in the course of seeing to it that a cocaine possessor wouldn’t get off on a technicality, came up with what struck me as a very useful new legal theory.

The arresting officer had searched the man against his wishes after finding him urinating in a Berkeley parking lot. Of course, a police officer can’t search you against your will anytime he or she wants. He or she has to catch you committing a crime, or have a reasonable suspicion that you have just committed a crime, or some such thing. I don’t know the exact legal language of the rule, but one of the words “crime” or “illegal” is in there.

So it looked like Mister Crack Pants might beat the charge, since for some reason not explained in the news story where I found this, there’s no law on the books to explicitly make peeing in Berkeley parking lots illegal.

Now, before you all rush to Berkeley to enjoy the heady freedom to pee virtually anywhere in that urban paradise, I should warn you that the appeals court’s clever thinking has corrected the situation. They determined it has been illegal all along to pee in Berkeley parking lots, in spite of the inconvenient absence of legislation to that effect, on the grounds that it “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of both life and property.” Shazzam! So the arresting officer had the right to search, so the cocaine can have been admitted into evidence, so the conviction stands, so let the sentencing proceed!

This is good news. All any of you need do to break the law now is interfere with my comfortable enjoyment of life. If you have any questions, that’s “my” as in me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning.

It’s not just finding urine in my parking stall that hinders my absolutely precious enjoyment of every moment of my precious life and my precious pleasure in parking my motor vehicles, but there are certain definite other things I don’t like either, that are now -- post factamente, no contradicteme -- as illegal as peeing in a Berkeley parking lot. Make my day, or you’re under arrest.

Take public morning activities, for example.

I’m not going to say all morning people should be lined up against the wall and shot. For any of us to say that would only be to stoop to their level. All I’m going to say is that for people to drive around and talk and whistle while they work before noon interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of my life and that of other decent people and therefore such people as do those things are guilty of misdemeanors and they must turn themselves in to the police at once. The actual penalty for their behavior will be worked out later, when some more judges have worked out what the law has always been all along. Such work will wait until afternoon.

Recently I have been noticing some delays as I ride busses about downtown. Metro Transit has openly admitted that, subsequent to the tunnel closure, bus travel times across downtown have increased by an average of 2 and one half minutes. That is 2 and one half minutes twice each day subtracted from my comfortable enjoyment of my life by the criminal bus company. Again, I don’t say heads should roll, permanently, but only that they should roll for at least five minutes daily, or as much as jurists may later deem fair.

Thanks to this precedent having been set, It is now and always has been against the law to be Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or my former next door neighbor Steve G., or anyone else who hacks me, Dr. Wes Browning, off. Because when I get hacked off I’m not comfortably enjoying my life.

Thank you California’s Court of the Appeal for the Second District! Now we won’t ever need stupid legislators again. One law fits all!