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!

Mornings Happen

Recently I had what I would call a Fran Lebowitz Moment. I was minding my own business, getting by, when it suddenly dawned on me how certain other people are nuts.

I suddenly feel an obligation from out of nowhere to become more specific. I will yield to this sense of obligation: morning people. Morning people are nuts. This we knew already. But now I realize precisely how they are nuts. Such a realization is valuable to me. Among other things, it helps make life more interesting for me. At least, more interesting than being dead would be.

Morning people are nuts because they have an insatiable need for useless experiences and information. To a sane person, for example, dawn is a time of day to sleep through. But to a morning person dawn is a time for wondrous observations, insights and discoveries: "Look, wow, its another sunrise!" "Hey everybody! It's morning!" "The Earth is turning to face the sun again!" "Look, the sky is becoming light -- just like it did the last trillion times this happened!"

I didn't arrive at this realization all at once. It began one day when I was forced to be up at the ungodly hour of 9 in the ungodly AM. Maybe I had to go to some stupid ungodly committee meeting that morning. So that the morning wouldn't be a total waste, I turned on the radio and happened to catch a local call-in show, one obviously geared to the morning people audience, on big trees.

When I say it was obviously geared to morning people, I mean it is obvious to me now. Now I see the signs. Suppose sane people had been the audience. Then the program might have told us something useful concerning big trees, such as that you can get in out of the rain by means of them. But no, this program was not about conveying useful information. This program was about big trees. That there ARE big trees. I mean, that some trees are little, and that other trees are bigger. That some trees are biggest.

The show consisted of the local radio guy, I'll call him Steve, interviewing a Big Tree Expert, I'll call him Raoul (I forgot to take down their names, so sue me, I'm too sane.) Steve would say things like, "So I guess you've found some really big trees, haven't you, Raoul?" And then Raoul would say things like, "Once I was in British Columbia, near Vancouver, and I saw a really big one, Steve." And then people would call in, I swear they were all morning people, and they would say things like, "I saw a big tree once, you know the one I mean? It was in California." And Raoul would answer with, "Maybe you're talking about the big one I know of there. It's really big." And the listener would say, "Yeah, that's the one, it was big all right. Awesome!"

Since hearing that program I have been alert to that sort of phenomena. I have noticed that such things occur to the greatest extent in the mornings and that morning people are usually involved. For example, it was morning people who first announced at the end of February that it had been a year since last year's Mardi Gras celebration. In effect, they were telling us all that calendars could be relied upon to that degree, a fact that was probably familiar to the ancients even prior to the invention of Tuesdays.

In the last few days since the vernal equinox, morning people have blitzed the media with the Earth-shaking news that baseball will continue this year. That's right everybody, hop out of bed, you will want to be wide awake for this -- last year's season did not end baseball! They've decided to have another go at it! Isn't that just incredible?! And look! The days are getting longer!

Knowing what I now know, I can identify morning people at all hours of the day. Let's say it's 5 PM and the person I'm talking to suddenly gushes all over me about the fact that it's the 21st Century now. That would be a morning person.

Knowing that could be useful. I could recommend that person to take my place on some ungodly Real Change committee, for instance. My new motto: "Throw the morning people to the morning lions!" (Does not necessarily supercede pre-existing mottos.)