Simply because it is delivered quite literally onto my fingertips on weekday mornings, I have gotten into the habit of somewhat reading / somewhat skimming the headlines of a quaint little newsy number called The Virginian Pilot. It’s such a special little paper. I’ve just deleted two lines of description with regard to the usual selection of soggy fare that this all-you-can-eat buffet of self-fellating mediocrity serves up each and every. It was an increasingly ugly tangent full of Anger and Loathing and, well, it’s an already grey and spitty Monday morning (wherein our heroine finds her head pregnant with headache and self-reflective ennui) and the last thing I can use is more bile.  So, NAY, you will hear nary a hate-rant from me on the cunty writing of one Kerry Dougherty, the utter embodiment of provincial Virginia Beach lady-dickdom. Instead: Today’s front-page story is crowned with the headline “Weed-Sniffing Behind The Wheel: Smelling Funny, Critics Say.” This shit is priceless. Ok, so, guy gets pulled over- not for speeding, weaving, or disregarding a traffic sign/light, but for “suspicious driving” (translation: being a black man driving an old run-down car after midnight) and his car is searched without his permission. After lengthy searching, the officer finds an old baggie with dry, crispy marijuana detritus in it and arrests the driver for misdemeanor possession. The driver cannot afford an attorney and has a public defender assigned to him. Awesomely, his public defender is not of the spirit-broken, dead-eyed variety, his is a fire-eyed, altruistic man who is young enough to believe in justice and the potential for one person to make a difference. I picture him all Gyllenhaal (Or Gosling. Or young McConaghy.*) and Peace Corps-y. He rocks a Banana Republic ready-to-wear suit by day, nerd-glasses and worn-in flannel by night. He surfs, drives a hybrid, and composts. His hair was long in college, but he cut it in law school thinking that his professors would take him more seriously. He regrets it every day. He regrets it because fuck preconceptions, fuck conformity, fuck judgment, and fuck the establishment. Obama 2012. What? Sorry…where was I? Right- the driver gets a good public defender. The case goes before a judge and the PD goes after the police officer for unlawful stop and unlawful search. Here comes the comedy….deep breath. The officer testifies, with a straight face, that he pulled the driver over because he detected the smell of marijuana behind the wheel. The wheel of his cruiser, that is. He went on to spin lie say that he “drives his patrol car with the vents on, pulling air from the outside in, directly into my [sic] face.”  …     …     …   Like, he said that. For real. In court. The “smell of marijuana” caused him to pull the driver over (although the reason for the stop was not provided to the driver at the time) and provided probable cause to search the drivers vehicle without permission. Aside from the ludicrous nature of this assertion, bear in mind that the marijuana that was found was old and dried out…fossilized dust left at the bottom of a bag. Clearly this officer pulled the guy over for no reason (boredom? general doughbaggery? racial profiling?) and searched his car until he found something he could arrest him for. And then he came up with this truly astoundingly moronic defense of his behavior. It was probably not the first time. He could probably have whipped up anything, any ridiculous fucking story, that Jesus whispered in his ear that homedude had pot in his car, not enough to even smoke, mind you, but pot (at least scientifically) nonetheless, and the court would’ve swallowed it. BUT NOT THIS DAY. The PD made him repeat himself. And then again. And then he said that the people of Chesapeake were going to be so pleased to hear that their tax dollors would no longer be needed to pay for the training and care of drug-sniffing police dogs. He praised the officer’s “supernatural” sense of smell, calling it a remarkable gift, and then asked a series of incidental questions all prefaced with “Now, as a drug-sniffing officer…“ He summed up with “I’m proud to say that I consider myself to be a man with a healthy imagination, but never has my imagination been as stretched as it has been today. I suppose, in a way, that I should thank you. However, I’m not going to. I’m not going to because, while I do enjoy a good story, this particular one laughs in the face of the rights of my client, which were denied, by you, during this incident on the date in question.” The PD was lightly chastised by the judge who said that sarcasm wasn’t productive and wouldn’t help his client, prompting (to my annoyance) the PD to apologize.** The charges were dismissed, but, fucking naturally, the cop wasn’t reprimanded by the court and, sadly but understandably, the driver did not pursue any legal measures against the cop. This story seems less funny after this typing it out. I giggled audibly into my tea this morning over the cop’s stop/search explanation and the PD’s reaction, but relaying the story here has put more emphasis on the verdict. It could have been much worse, but the victory is feeble at best and the driver never should have been in court in the first place. At least I can derive some joy from the knowledge that there is a PD out there fighting for the masses. Until his balls of righteous fury are ground into a pulply mess by the broken machine that is the American legal system, of course.

*My inner equal rights activist just toooootally called out my inner [apparently white-centric] casting director. The PD could absolutely be played by a fuckable black actor in my inner porn-y reenactment! My activist sneers. “The color wheel keeps turning, Palin” she barks at my casting director while nonchalantly rubbing fair-trade macadamia oil into a dreadlock. Asian?! Aboriginal?! A Pacific Islander?! But his last name is Anglo as fuck!!! My activist rolls her eyes and condescends to soften her tone when she replies “Yes, sweetling….white men have been fucking color for eternity. Read a goddamned book.” Soooo I tried to think of sexy youngish black/mixed/half-Samoan/half-Latino/Octoroon, etc. actors. And all I couldn’t think of any. AM I A WHITE SUPREMACIST?!!

**I compiled the PD’s questions/statements to the cop and court both from the VA Pilot  article and the court transcripts which I nerdishly looked up because the article implied that his questioning was “colorful.” That shit paid off. “Now, as a drug-sniffing officer, have often employed your open vent technique in the course of pursuing drug offenders?”

And so, I have bought a house. A wee mid-century bungalow nestled between the very beautiful quasi-rural countryside of coastal Virginia and the surprisingly quaint remnants of what was once Princess Anne county. It has been a Holy Fuck kind of month- on more levels than I am able to process at this moment. Apparently, despite chronic independence and an apathetic uterus, biology demands I nest and nurture. The line between thrilling and terrifying has become very blurred and I find myself indefinitely stationed in the no man’s land between the two.

Love is enough: though the world be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the skies be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter:
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.

Blaah, blah, Bieber, all the hype is bull. Yessir, yessir, three louis-vuitton-bags-that-your-stylist-said-are-rad full. Fuckery, trickery, gawk, the Kardashians kan kiss my kock. I don’t mean a blowie- wait, maybe from Khloe…actually, I think that might rock. Little Miss Zooey, hair long and flowy, you’re eyes are so giant and blue. Elijah, wee mister, and hobbit-y hipster (perhaps your butch sister?), says he’s more precious than you.