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!

Search Me

Lately, Dylan's been saying, "The sun is beginning to shine on me... but it's not like the sun... that used to be..." Well, there, that's right. For one thing, the Union Gospel Mission is in the way.

The good news is I'm newly housed. The bad news is that that's the backside (not round enough) of the Mission out my window. Or, if I really crane my neck, I can gaze upon the building that was tallest west of the Mississippi back when Smith-Corona meant something besides "what, you don't use computers?" Back when cotton was King and papyrus ruled Middle-Earth.

So one minute you're poor and homeless, next minute you're just as poor as ever, but you're peeling it out for rent in the Old Quarter, the Altstadt. You're living in the perpetual Pioneer Day Festival. Because you desperately need a change in your life and even this is an improvement. Even if it means starving. That much less money per month for food.

As I write this at a Mac in Word 6.0, my words are automatically saved by a stupid - idiotic - moronic- imbecilic - brainless machine every five minutes. Odd, because it takes five minutes to write five words. So - what's the rush?

Are you hearing the poetry? Do I sound ungrateful? Lean in closer...

Opus Take a Number, and Sit Down and Wait!

or, No, Not You! The Poem.

Want to know what's great?

Being homeless a while!

Then you get a section eight!*

It makes you smile...

There's nothing better!

Oh, yeah... it takes a year -

You pray for good weather,

Drink lots of beer...

and stay out of sight,

cause cops got the power

to harass you all night

at any hour

because you exist.

It's the LAW!

[*: Section 8 = Government subsidised housing.]

Let me now prosaically explain all that for the poetically impaired. Yes, you can get subsidized housing, but, depending on your circumstances, you may have to wait anywhere from six months to eighteen for it. Meanwhile you can have no housing at all to speak of, or you will lose your eligibilty. And during the time that you have no housing to speak of, the police will take exception to every breath you take.

Speaking of police harassment: - so I was going out the Speakeasy Cafe the other day, after checking my e-mail (you know how I have to check my e-mail everyday, because I get so much...) Well - I decided to take the back (alley) exit, in order to evade my many beloved but occasionally inconvenient fans. That was my first mistake.

My second mistake was looking homeless. Until recently I have cultivated the look of a graduate student. But I just couldn't pass up the offer of a free army-brown jacket with detachable lining. It isn't really an army jacket but at ten feet you'd think it was, so now I look like a Vietnam period Vet, and those Vets are all homeless, right?

My third mistake was suddenly realising that there was a splinter in my shoe. Right out the door, still in the alley. I should not have done that. That realisation in itself may have been an actual illegal criminal act. I took off my shoe as a result of that realisation, fished out the splinter and tossed it aside.

Suddenly, I was surrounded by two bicycling police-women (I am not making any of this up) asking me questions like "Did you just find a rock in your shoe?" and "Yeah, right, are you sure it wasn't a needle?" and "You know, we find that a lot of drug addicts keep their fixings in their shoes and take them out in alleys. You weren't doing that, were you?" - said one of them, facetiously.

"No" I said.

"Is that so?" they said, not believing me.

Like it mattered whether they believed me or not. I had committed no crime. I had not even been seen doing anything suspicious. Taking something out of one's shoe isn't, in reality, a suspicious act, unless the one doing the suspecting is an SPD officer who doesn't know anymore what's suspicious and what isn't.

Normally the police would not explain their own bizarre behavior. But these women must have been new. After they finished searching me, and after finding no drug paraphenalia on me (because I don't do drugs) they acted embarrassed and apologetic. One of them said "you know, we have to do this, because the businesses around here have been complaining so much, you know..."

I said nothing. I looked at her badge and knew from past experience not to respond. A response gets you a kick in the ribs, and you're black and blue for weeks. (Are you reading this, Norm Stamper? Let me know. Please. I get very little feedback. Thanks.)

She read my silence as disapproval. I said "I don't care what the businesses complain about, I don't do drugs, so why do I have to be detained and searched?"

She then asked me if I was homeless, and when I admitted that I was, she said, "well, see?

that's the problem, isn't it?"

Right.

You, who are reading this - you are next.