Fellow trainee David is a very cool guy. So laconic he speaks with a non-Southern drawl, he walks with a tremendous limp: his knee has lost most of its cartilage from a motorcycle racing accident. I had to go to the bank today during lunch and told him so, which led to a discussion on banks that revealed we customed the same bank. He very nicely agreed to drive me, which was nice because we had an interesting conversation and I did not have to risk running out of gas before I got cash to a gas station on my lunch hour.
His car is a white Grand Marquis. Having been in a couple car accidents (and having twice gone through a windshield), he prefers large cars. So, it was a bit like driving with Dad, except that Dad does not drive like a race car driver. I found it very unusual to be hanging on to the hand straps in a big, paternal car like that. We traded crash stories along the way. One of those times he went through the windshield, a Jeep slammed to a halt in front of his friend's pickup truck. Arm hanging out the passenger window, he bounced off the windshield (putting a hole in it), broke the backglass with his head when another car hit them from behind, then went through the windshield again when the front took another hit, ending up draped all over the Jeep's roll bars.
He has almost no facial scars, for all these accidents; probably the kind of guy who prefers full-face helmets. Obviously, he is my new role model.
David had his own business in St. Joseph, Michigan until Whirlpool let him go. We had a fascinating conversation about that, revealing that any cash transfer of more than $4,999.99 requires days to process. Also, even cashier's checks are subject to holds from certain banks. It must make business tremendously hard for small retailers.
Of course, the necessity of arming yourself to make a deposit at the bank in Benton Harbor/St. Joe probably didn't help. The riots there a couple years ago were sparked when a kid was killed by a policeman's accidental weapon discharge. (True? False? More on that later.) Another kid died while eluding police on a motorcycle. This led to the rule that motorcycle riders would not be chased through St. Joe. This led, in turn, to motorcyclists using St. Joe's Main Street to shake off police at 150 m.p.h.
Well. Bad laws are known as such when they reward criminal acts. Rumor has it that Murfreesboro sheriffs, even Tennessee state police, are corrupt. Confiscating marijuana to sell it in county jail, running over a wife's lover and planting drugs on him, various acts. The Tennessean paper ran a story on state police background checks: an allegedly tremendous number had various convictions for violent crime. One had been allegedly convicted of sex with a fourteen year-old girl. (No word if he was thirty-five or eighteen at the time.) On the other hand, with the law outlawing human judgment, anyone who wishes to use his or her judgment is an outlaw, and it's the criminals complaining loudest about those awful police. So file these under "possible BS people once told me".
I am again ducking the question of why I moved. I am just not up to it today, nor has part of that issue been laid to rest, which makes it impossible to write about unless I give myself hours in this blog to dissect my emotions and then bleed them until no color, no life is in them. I keep this blog to avoid having to maintain a mental mailing list, but it also serves a useful purpose: by grouping everyone I know, I just imagine speaking any given sentence in front of them all. It has a wonderfully concentrating effect on my mind and removes the impossible task of rereading every letter to see who should read that particular letter. Anything better said in private is said, later, in private email. This puts me in complete opposition to the general birth cycle of blogs where kids (and dumb adults):
- start a blog,
- invite a select circle,
- insult and denigrate anyone outside of that circle,
- get at loggerheads with a circle member,
- get exposed by disgruntled ex-intimate,
- close the blog.
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