Hello folks. I’m back. I must apologize profusely for the abject neglect of my blog these last six or seven months and ask your forgiveness. As events were, I experienced a schizophrenic episode and was temporarily disabled. My doctor instructed me to cease my usual endeavors and prescribed a period of rest and relaxation until I recovered. I have just now begun picking up again my usual commitments and obligations and have only recently returned to work. Going forward, my attention to my blog will again be more regular.
In today’s post I pick up where I left off in my tale of Langley, B.C.: Policemen Aren’t Your Friends. To recap the tale so far, I, being homeless and living on the street at the time, was set upon by Constable Shithead in Langley, B.C. late one night after I exited a bar at closing time. The ever charming Constable Shithead laid a beating on me at the side of the street, loaded me into his cruiser, and carted my sorry carcass about 15 kms out of town where he hauled me out of the cruiser and abandoned me at the side of the road with the instruction to not return too Langley. Outraged and full of righteousness, and with a sizeable chip on my shoulder, I made my way on foot back to the city to seek retribution for my mistreatment. The opening of this, the sixth part of the ongoing saga, sees me waiting in the lobby of the Langley Police Station waiting to speak to a supervisor too inform him of my mistreatment and enlist him in doling out the punishment that Constable Shithead so sorely deserved.
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It was early. I was the only person in the Langley police department lobby. I stood transfixed in the lobby along the far wall from the door that ran perpendicular to the counter on the right. I stood scanning a historical article hanging on the wall chronicling the supposed greatness of a past police Chief in an effort to distract myself as I waited impatiently for the return of the officer to whom I reported my experience of Constable Shithead. With visions of court proceedings, monetary awards, and job suspensions running through my head, I had been waiting at least 30 minutes, but it felt like forever. While I anticipated that justice would be done, my mood soured the longer I waited. I estimated that in the time I had waited one could plant and harvest a crop of lettuce, or so it seemed.
As an aside, I point out here that, as man of conscience, I don’t eat lettuce as a matter of principle because I am morally against cruelty to vegetables. And what cruelty might that be you ask? Well, it’s this way: People abandon lettuce rooted to the ground in an open field under the searing sun without the basic necessities of water and shade for days on end, like a dog tied to a stake in the back yard. And like a staked dog, they then neglect the vegetable by leaving it there in the fields for months with almost no human contact, even though everyone knows lettuce is a social vegetable that requires large and ongoing quantities of human companionship to thrive. Truly, lettuce desires to be man’s best friend; but, where it is the sole desire of the lettuce to love its master, this neglect in providing the necessities, and this withholding of companionship, these are acts of cruelty to this the vulnerable lettuce.
Then, after suffering such despicable neglect for a whole summer, in a brutal act of barbarism, people slaughter the poor lettuce by violently severing the head from the body of its roots and cram its butchered remains into boxes with the carcasses of other lettuces to ship to grocers across the nation. At their destination, the remains of the lettuce heads are shamelessly put on open display, like trophies, not unlike the stuffed deer head on Grandpa’s wall above the hearth in his cabin, though more numerous and edible. From there they are purchased and taken home to the buyer’s domicile where the buyer commits unspeakable indignities on the remains of the lettuce by tearing it up into pieces and eating it like some craven maniac. If someone tore up into pieces the head of a bloody decapitated human cadaver and ate it there would be hell to pay! So too I say for the poor lettuce! When you cut a lettuce does it not bleed? The cruelty and violence of the process is barbaric. If for no other reason than of simple human compassion, I refuse to support such inhumane treatment of this humble vegetable, and, therefore, I refuse to eat it.
I do however eat apples. Eating apples is good. When I was a kid I once met Johnny Appleseed as he playfully leapt across the land here and there planting apple seeds. Hell of a guy. I liked his hat.
I got about halfway through the article on the wall when I perceived movement on the periphery of my sight. I looked towards the counter on my right and out from behind it emerged the officer upon whom I had been waiting. The supervisor was not in attendance. He made it directly in front of me and stood impassively in silence looking at me.
Believing the matter to be working out in my favour, but confused by the absence of the supervisor, I asked curtly out of irritation from waiting, “Well. What news?”
“You need to make a formal statement,” he replied simply.
“And that took over half an hour to decide?” I asked.
“Be that as it may,” he said.
“Fine,” I replied in a huff. “But I’ll have my statement taken by the supervisor. Take me to him now,” I demanded suffering the illusion that I was in control of the situation and calling the shots.
“The supervisor is not in.” he replied.
“So, you lied when you said he was in!” I said with emphasis thinking I had caught him playing games.
“I said no such thing. You assumed, wrongly I might add, that I left to get him,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“Then where have you been for over 30 minutes?” I asked in reproach.
“Let’s just say that I was looking for the form needed to take your statement,” he responded wryly.
I paused momentarily to look him in the eye and consider his wry look. It was becoming apparent that he was not going to give me what I wanted the way that I wanted it no matter how strongly I willed it. My illusion of being in control began too crumble and with it I panicked. A feeling of powerlessness tugged at my consciousness.
“Fine!” I said expressing the anger that rose in my throat and masked the fear at its root. ”Take my bloody statement then!”
“I am afraid I can not do that,” he said visibly unaffected by my anger and choice of words.
“And why the hell not!” I said in a rising belligerence while wondering what the game was at which he was playing.
“We do not have the form needed to take your statement. We are out of them,” he said with what I imagined was a malignant glint in his eyes.
He was playing me. He knew it and I knew it. I imagined he knew I knew it. Hell, I actively suspected he knew that I knew he knew that I knew. My sense of powerlessness increased. I doubled down on the belligerence to compensate. “I don’t give a shit about any form. Get a piece of blank paper and write it down for Christ’s sake!”
“I can not do that. There is procedure to follow,” he explained
“Fuck procedure!” I fumed.
“Come back in a week. We should have the form then.”
“I’m not going any fucking place until you take my God damned statement!” I shouted arching my back and stiffening my body.
“There is nothing I can do for you.”
I finally succumbed to my powerlessness and screamed in futility, “There isn’t any shortage of forms! You are a liar! You’re just putting me off to protect Constable Shithead! You’re just hoping I’ll leave and forget about it and not come back! You aren’t any better than he is. You police are a fucking bunch of bastards!”
Bringing the exchange to an abrupt end he said with finality, “Not another word. It is time for you to go. You can either turn and march out of here on your own or I will assist you out. Which is it to be?” His otherwise impassive face momentarily flashed a look of menace showing emotion for the first time in the conversation.
I paused long enough to take notice that he had about six inches and 80 pounds on me. Push come to shove I imagined I was headed for another beating by persisting any longer. I still had enough of my wits about me that wasn’t lost to impotent rage to recognize that the greater dignity was to be had by leaving under my own steam compared to being hauled out kicking and screaming. Substituting my rage for any hope of a satisfying outcome with this fellow I managed one last show of resistance. I looked him in the eye and hissed half under my breath between clenched teeth, but loud enough for him to hear, “You haven’t heard the last of this!” I turned on my heels and stormed out the door fuming.
When I got outside the sky was dark and ominous and threatening. Flashes of angry lightening sliced violently down through the hot, oppressive air from rain laden clouds ready to burst forth with a bilious torrent. There was a clap of thunder that threatened to break the heads of the oppressed.
A great philosopher, and I do not recall which one, once said that a society can be judged by the way it treats its least citizen. Esteeming myself to be the least citizen that deserved better, I came to judge Langley as an epic fail. Yet, naively, I thought the next move was mine to make in my own time, like, maybe a week, as suggested to me by the officer in the detachment. I did not suspect at the time that the police had a move or two of their own they were about to make. In light of what was to happen next, all I had managed to do with my brazen and careless little confrontation in the detachment was to kick the bee hive. Now I was going to have to deal with a swarm of organized and angry bees. And there is nothing worse than a swarm of angry bees, except perhaps, two swarms of angry bees, such as it is.
Ignorant of the future, and unappreciative of my vulnerability as one lone traveler in a strange and hostile land where I was grossly outnumbered and outmatched, all that I could see that was left for me to do at that moment was to let my rage burn out, calm down, and head for bed to let the matter rest to another day. And so that is what I did. Before I lay down to sleep, I said a hasty heart felt prayer for the well being of all the lettuce in the land. When I finally slept, my dreams were plagued with troubling visions.