Danger!

Man! These blog things can be kinda dangerous.

I ate at a Mexican restaurant tonight and had two bathtubs of unsweetened iced tea. You have to specify unsweetened iced tea in the South. Sweet tea is par usual. Anyway, I drank my weight in iced tea at about 8:30 pm and now I'm awake. AWAKE.

I already went for a walk. I walked around the block trying to look into the windows of all my neighbors. Just from the street, mind you. It's not illegal if it's from the street.

I wasn't trying to do no peeping. I was spying. I got a ticket recently for making too much noise. No warning. Nothing. Cop just walks up and hands me a fucking ticket. $211.

Sure I was making noise, but how are you supposed to know that you're bothering someone if you have no warning? Sure, sure, a reasonable person might have assumed the noise was great enough to disturb a neighbor, but who on this earth ever said I was reasonable?! No one ever did.

So I was spying, trying to suss out the MthrFcker who called the cops on me.

The other day I went down to the court and took a gander at the noise ordinance. Two things jumped out at me: The words "Health and Safety" and "Inside" as in INSIDE the domicile, as in a person's health and safety must be threatened from within their home or it doesn't count.

This is where the Baptists come in. When I went to the pretrial thing to plead INNOCENT and schedule a trial, the judge looked at the ticket and said, "Mr. Rushing. It says here the officers issued this citation at two A. M. in the morning." He paused and looked at me. He kept looking at me. I realized that he was hoping the fact of the hour would sink in. He was trying to bore it into me. He was hoping for me to realize that Jesus would not have been out at 2:00 on a Saturday night because, technically, that's Sunday and Jesus is hung up on technicalities.

I live in Oxford, MS. This is the town in which it is illegal to sell cold beer at a gas station or grocery store. Did you get that? They can sell you beer, just not on Sunday, and never can they sell it to you cold. Ahem, ahem... THE LAW REQUIRES THAT IF YOU ARE GOING TO SELL BEER TO A PERSON, PRESUMABLY AN ADULT WITH ADULT CAPACITIES, YOU ARE NOT TO SELL IT TO THEM COLD.

When I first moved here, I walked around Walmart for an hour looking for the cold beer. I saw stacks of beer, warm, all over the place, I just couldn't find the coolers with the cold beer. So I left and went to a gas station, and again, I looked and looked and could not find the cold beer. So I asked and the lady behind the counter said in her Southern emphysema voice, "You're not from around here are you?"

Oxford is also the place where bars can be open until 1 am on Thursday and Friday, but not Saturday because that's technically Sunday, EXCEPT ON A GAME DAY. Jesus apparently likes Ole Miss football and reserves the witching hour of the Sabbath on home game days to have a little snort of the hooch.

Anyway, the reason I illustrate these bizarrities is to show that this place has no business charging me $211 for being a little noisy one night. This place is out of wack and needs readjustment. The Feds did it once, years ago and left a couple bodies behind. If it we'ren't for the Feds black people would still not be allowed to attend Ole Miss. Wack I tell you.

So, how in the shit am I going to threaten someone's health and safety inside their home with what is essencially a boombox? My tax dollars are being used to torture and kill people. Now I must suffer the indignity of a redneck cop smugly handing me a ticket that says I am making too much noise? I am poor. Like most poor people I live very close to other poor people. EXCEPT, right down at the end of my street, just within earshot of the interested, there are people who are not poor, who are Southern Baptists, one of which is himself a redneck cop. Inside those houses there is no way I was threatening anyone's health and safety with my boombox, but if a door were cracked and a pinched and bitter face were to hear the sinners regailing themselves with a celebration of music and sex and alcohol and DRUGS with Blacks and Mexicans and single women who should know better, then wouldn't it be a favor to those sinner's souls and to the baby Jesus to call the police and tell them just a little lie, that you were in your bed and stood it as long as you could, but finally you just had to get up and call because you didn't know what to do, instead of the truth which was that your acid reflux was kicking in and, as you usually do, you got out of bed to find some antacids which, strangely, took the form of two pieces of leftover fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, chocolate cake and (well why not) three bowls of icecream, and that's when you saw the headlights going toward where those sinners live, so you poked out your head and worried for the health and safety of my soul. God Bless You.