pulled over to give a homeless guy some cash on the side of the road today and he pointed to my bigfoot air freshener and asked if i believed in ‘that guy’ and no, i don’t, i have the air freshener because my last car before this one (the pt cruiser) belonged to a woman named tracy who loved bigfoot and had a whole collection of bigfoot stuff including the air freshener and she died of cancer which is why her husband was selling me her car and i figured, hey, might as well keep the air freshener in her honor. and then when i had to junk the last car i couldnt bring myself to get rid of it. so now it’s just hanging off my rear view mirror again. which is probably a worse reason to have an air freshener than believing in bigfoot.

Despite today being an indoor work day, I was asked to head into the gardens and take measurements of graveyard pins.

Some important context:

1) "indoor work day" means that instead of my grounds crew uniform I was wearing a black dress that wouldn't look out of place in a Ghibli film.

2) graveyard pins like to sink under the surface of the ground with time. If you're lucky, you can whack the spot where they should be with a shovel and find it in seconds. If you're smart, you go get a metal detector.

3) after twenty minutes of attacking the ground by hand, I will admit I was too stubborn to get the metal detector.

Which is why some poor woman slowly drove up to me and very tentatively asked, "do you... Uh... work here?"

"Yeah. Do you need help finding something?"

And she gave a nice long up-and-down look to the person of indeterminate gender dressed like a witch frantically digging right by a gravestone.

"...No, actually. I was just checking."

Floofability score: sheep

I have a hard time talking about American law enforcement, because I have ptsd (like a therapist told me this and everything) from my own experiences with cops and because it's so balls quaking insane.

Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.

There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.

A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.

If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.

You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.

These aren't like crazy things that I'm just making up, these aren't some weird twisted way I'm looking at something, these are all very real things that we all just.. ignore? Police abolitionists and the media bring these things up all the time, and the overwhelming response to it is: so what? Don't break the law and it won't matter. Blue lives matter. More police funding. Cops should have tanks. It's insane. And I always feel like im just rambling and sound insane when I say this kind of stuff because if you wrote a book and had the dystopian government doing the stuff that the police in this country do every single day, those same people who "back the blue" would line up to say stuff like "*Books government* wouldnt have a chance before us real americans stopped them" on twitter and not even get a hint of the irony.

this election season, remember that anyone telling you that lucy van pelt is going to yank the ball away from charlie brown at the last second is a russian bot trying to undermine democracy, as russian bots are wont to do

this kid is 14 oh my god is no one teaching children to protect themselves online anymore…

• if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost
• take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle
• fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism
• now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning