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not even Mad Dog drinking gutterpunks
Wednesday, September 22 2010
Gretchen took the dogs to Onteora for a walk today and somehow managed to get lost, taking a trail around the north end of the lake and ending up in the lunar landscape of quarries and landfills to the southeast (see the Google ærial view). She found her way some buildings and then a long driveway that led ultimate out to Route 28, where she came upon a scene wherein an officer of the law was writing a ticket for a recently-speeding motorist. Unlike some in our society, Gretchen comes from a tradition that believes it is normal for an ordinary citizen in need to ask for help from an available police officer when in a bad situation. She'd been lost for hours in the woods and thought her situation qualified as bad. She explained her situation and the police officer if perhaps he could give her a ride to the Onteora parking lot. "What, your dogs don't have leashes? Ever heard of leash laws?" he sneered. Evidently this particular police officer was not out to dispell any stereotypes about people with power and control issues gravitating towards law enforcement, prison guard work, and (failing those) mall security. But Gretchen couldn't say anything; perhaps this was an issue he could write her ticket about. So she bit her lip for the short ride back to Onteora, where she and the dogs leapt out of the police cruiser. Sally made the mistake of walking in front of the police car, and the sadistic officer took the opportunity to gun his engine and then slam on his brakes. Gretchen stood there with mouth agape, but again she couldn't really say anything because of the power differential being exploited by the main in uniform. "That's why you need to keep your dogs on leashes" the officer said, and then sped off. Incidents such as these, experienced even by people who are not gutterpunks drinking Mad Dog along the railroad tracks, are what keep the population just a little bit hesitant about putting their complete trust in law enforcement. Once the officer was gone, Gretchen hung out for a few minutes talking to some stoners who had come to Onteora to boldly drink beer in the middle of a workday afternoon. They could all agree that this cop, and perhaps most cops, are complete assholes (though few make enough money to qualify as douchebags).
Gretchen would be teaching an evening class down at the prison, so I took a semi-recreational dose of pseudoephedrine with the hope of channeling some of the resulting energy into the one-product e-commerce site I have been working on. Instead, though, most of my energy went into elaborating the story lines of my various Facebook puppets. I'm being reminded of what a good muse Sara P. can be. It was, after all, partly from bouncing ideas off of her (and her written contributions) that the Big Fun Glossary came into being.
At some point, though, I took a break and turned on the ginormous teevee in the teevee room. It came on with a scene of Tom Cruise being lowered by cable into some sort of pristine high-security office, where he would go on to download data onto an optical media disc (how 1990s!). The movie was Mission: Impossible, and once it became dialog-and-explosion-heavy, I switched to an pre-recorded episode of Intervention.
Before dark, I'd channeled some of that pseudoephedrine energy into collecting a big stainless steel bowl of tomatoes. When Gretchen returned home, we chopped them up and put them in the oven to roast for an hour at 420 degrees. We also cut up some winter squash from the CSA. Inside it was like pumpkin, so we had to gut it and separate out the seeds, which we toasted independently. In the end, though, the roasted flesh of the squash proved cloyingly sweet and I really only enjoyed the roasted seeds, which I ate with large amounts of salt.
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