johnbyronkuhner.com

purchase Lyrica canada There are a great number of things I love about the Catskills – a friend was just enthusing to me that she could see the constellation Delphinus from my cabin, and I know that you cannot see Delphinus from everywhere in this wasteful age.  I love listening to the animals at night and the storms in the mountains.  I love the thin line between my psyche and nature here.  But there is one thing which is terrible, absolutely terrible about living here, and that is the extraordinary, unavoidable police presence.  They are everywhere.  I see a policeman almost every day that I get in my car.  I live in between two NYC reservoirs – patrolled heavily – and there is a NYC DEP police station one town over; there is a prison in Napanoch and another in Woodbourne; and there are two state police headquarters on route 209.  And all these police, of course, have absolutely nothing to do.  I have already written about my double jeopardy incident, getting arrested twice and tried twice for trespassing – and defending myself and getting acquitted – and there have been other incidents which for various reasons it has been wise not to write about.  The general trend remains the same: I cause no harm, but nevertheless I draw police like you know what attracts flies.  It’s always nervewracking because my paperwork is never in order.  Just recently I had lost my driver’s license for about a week.  It turned up under a copy of Pliny’s Natural History – thank God I simply had to read his thoughts on walnut trees or it could have stayed under there for hundreds of years and no one would have found it.

buy Pregabalin mexico The latest fun incident was today.  I was driving on 209, and two people flashed their lights at me.  My truck is always having problems and I had forgotten to reload my spare tire into the bed of my pickup, so I presumed I had a flat.  I pulled over, but my truck was fine.  As I was kicking my tires, who pulls up but a cop.  He asked what the matter was.  I told him.  He then looked at me and said, “Sir, what’s that in the passenger seat of your vehicle?”  I looked at the passenger seat.  There was a mound of sunflowers – Helianthus “Lemon Queen” – which my boss had asked me to remove from her garden because they were invading her vegetable beds.  “That plant material.  What is that?”

“It’s sunflowers,” I said.  The cop put his flashing lights on and pulled his vehicle around behind mine.  He got out of the car.  I grabbed a stem and showed it to him.  “You don’t believe me?  They’re sunflowers!”

“Approach the vehicle.”

“You really don’t believe me?  I’m a landscaper.”

“Approach the vehicle, sir.”

I walked over to the door and showed him the pile of plants.

“You can tell by the leaf it’s a Helianthus.”

“All of them?”  And he poked at them with his billy club.  He grunted in disappointment and then gave the rest of the vehicle a quick look.  I was, as so often, only half angry – I was also bemused by the utter stupidity of the incident, and the culture as a whole.  Everything now counts as probable cause for a search.  “Your honor, he was bringing home sunflowers.  I thought this warranted a search.”  One of the funny aspects of this is that two people have separately asked me to grow marijuana for them, because I have been successful at growing things.  Not only do I not smoke the stuff – and I like to be sharp, I don’t really like even the idea of being stoned – but I know I would never, ever touch it because the police always find me.  I got a speeding ticket for driving 71 in a 65 zone.

Here’s an idea for balancing budgets: we need to lay these cops off.  Or tell them to grab a broom and start cleaning streets.  Their idle hands – not to mention idle pistols, idle billy clubs, and idle coercive authority – really are the devil’s workshop.  That Wisconsin governor who wanted to strip unions of the collective bargaining power with the state, of course exempted his private army, the police force.  They are sometimes given credit because they bring in revenue for the state.  I’m sure they do – for certain in my life, I have had about ten times more to fear from police than from thieves.  As Tom Paine said, the purpose of despotic government is plunder, or as they call it in civilized countries, revenue.  Things like waiting at the bottom of hills in Central Park to ticket cyclists for speeding on Sundays is just theft and fraud.  “Remove justice,” said Augustine, “and what are kingdoms but large-scale robbery?”

As I drove off I realized what the people were flashing their lights for: they were telling me there was a cop nearby.