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I merge my sky blue Ford Windstar into the declension of the off ramp at the Buckner exit from Interstate 71 North and I am accosted by a blinding spotlight aimed precisely into my face. Straddling the stabbing spear of light, which literally impedes my ability to safely drive, are the iconic red and blue roof lights of two county police cars. A triumvirate of officers and their respective squad cars have cordoned the bottom end of the off-ramp which T-bones into Highway 393 leading north to Buckner and south to Centerfield. The exit is roughly twenty miles east of Louisville and leads into some of Louisville’s bedroom communities in Oldham County which shares its long western border with Jefferson County.

Initially, I adopt the notion that there is an accident at the intersection of the off-ramp and the two lane highway. After all, it is 12:00 A.M. on a Friday night along a road undoubtedly susceptible to reckless speeders. Just as likely, someone could have become careless at the bottom of the off-ramp and over shot the stop sign, projecting them into cross traffic at exactly the wrong moment.

The speculation was necessarily short lived as it took, despite my impaired vision, but a dozen seconds to progress to the line of what I can now clearly identify as the aforementioned triumvirate; the spot light which was washing out the center of my field of vision was mounted at the joint of the hood and the cab of the car in the middle. The other two cars, with their bi-colored roof lights spinning, were impeding the two flumed leads pointing drivers north and south, accordingly. As I was being hailed to stop by the uplifted palm of a tall thin 40-something officer stepping away from the front bumper of the middle car, I knew there was no reckless speeder and no accident caused by an incautious misplaced conclude beyond the advisable line of advancement.

Instead, as I was taking my brother to his home in Oldham County from his work in downtown Louisville, I was caught in a road block where people abiding all applicable and relevant laws were being subjected to, by definition, a police space. That is, I was being subjected to rigid and repressive control by state sanctioned authority without cause.

I stopped my Windstar and let down the window. The officer approaching me then shined his flashlight into my face and wanted to know where I had been and where I was going. Although it would have not only been perfectly righteous and justified but also very satisfying to say, ‘None of your goddamned business,’ I told him the fact of my destination. “I unbiased picked my brother up from his job downtown and I’m taking him home about a mile from here.”

Suddenly this officer was shining his light into my brother’s face, the leg space of the van and the befriend of the van. I had a titanic plastic insulated cup with a slotted lid sitting on the cantilever of the ashtray (which never gets used as such). As he was spying into the back of the van with his flashlight, he feigned to casually ask about the cup he had spotted and looked away from, “What’s in the cup? ”

Undoubtedly, this massive lidded plastic cup with the handle at an angle of likely access to my right hand at midnight on a Friday must have some kind of alcohol in it. Undoubtedly, they had entrapped a hapless fish in the clumsy trawl of their oppressive net. Undoubtedly, I was giving them a line about taking my brother home from work at 12 A.M. on a Friday night.

“Sweet tea with ice,” I answered.

The spot of his flashlight returned to bite into my vision just as his 500 Watt hood-mounted spotlight had done on my descent down the off-ramp. The tone of his next question inspired an implication that he doubted my answer while it simultaneously (and assuredly) brought to light the trusty circumstance of why I was caught in a little microcosmic police state where Kentucky State Highway 393 converged with Exit 18 of Interstate 71 North.

“You had anything to drink tonight? ” He dipped his head to stare into the landing point of his flashlight’s beam. He wanted a good look at my unnaturally and rudely illuminated face and the eyes I involuntarily squinted due to this beam of light punching me in the nose. He was looking for deception.

“I haven’t had anything to drink in seven and a half years.”

Should he have wanted an exact date of my last episode of alcohol ingestion, I could have provided it: February 9^th, 2002. I could have told him the price, type, and the size of the bottle it came in: Jim Beam, 80 proof bourbon, a 1 liter bottle. I could have told him where I bought it: Main Liquor, 10624 Manslick Road, Fairdale, KY.

The first time I ever had a specific interaction with the law was when I was 12 years old. This thick oversized Louisville police officer who had hair as black as the ocean floor knocked on the door of our rented house on Tiverton Way out in the east end of town. He wanted to know if my brother and I had stolen a neighbor’s raft from their above ground pool? We had not.

The second time I interacted with the law, I was 16 years old. Two weeks after I had earned my driver’s license, I got a speeding ticket. It was inadvertent. That is, I was driving my father’s pickup truck for the first time and I was unaware of how much faster it went than my mother’s car when you gave it the same amount of gas. Which isn’t to say that the speedometer was malfunctioning; it worked fine. I unbiased wasn’t paying any attention to it and, as I said, I was inadvertently going 11 miles per hour over the bustle limit. I was 16. There was nothing to be had out of the dwelling except the speeding ticket and the interaction with the cop who treated me as if I had punched his wife. He seemed to take my honest mistake personally and I was rather dumbfounded over the incident.

The next time I was involved with the law, I was 20 years old. It was during the summer. I was returned home to Louisville from Bowling Green Kentucky where I attended college at W.K.U. Development near my parent’s house had changed the roads I once knew and I ended up turning down a dead-end slow on a Saturday night. For some reason, this qualified me as a brand to be pulled over by the L.P.D. Whether they had a moral to or not, as driving down a dead-end road is not illegal, they went rifling through my car. They opened the glove box and found two quarter bags of marijuana.

I had purchased the bags earlier in the evening and they were, as yet, untouched. That is to say, they weighed 7 grams apiece. That’s 2 bags x 7 grams = 14 grams of marijuana. Yet, when I laid eyes on the police report during my court date, the record indicated the evidence had (mysteriously) shrunk to “10 grams of marijuana”.

My next involvement with the keepers of law and order happened in my home away from home in Bowling Green Kentucky. I was 22 years frail. It was a Friday night and some friends were hosting a keg party. Sometime after midnight, a couple of Bowling Green’s men in blue walked into the party and ordered everyone to leave. About two minutes later, these same officers stopped a friend and me in a field and demanded our I.D.s.

That is to say, these officers ordered me outside and then stopped me within sight of the house I had been inside of to cite me for public intoxication. (I can barely contain my anger when I consider it.) When the one questioning me returned my I.D., I lit out across a field spanning the distance beside our informal gathering. I don’t know why I ran other than the fact that I had just been, in the literal sense of the word, forced by these officers to break a law that they were then going to cite me for breaking. I evaded them for 26 minutes before I was caught.

When they asked me why I ran, I answered with a statement of fact and my acquire question; “You kicked me outside and then stopped me for being intoxicated in public! Is that what you call a fundraiser? ” My question was met with a cocky inculpable glimpse of confident impunity. The look, for all intents and purposes, said, “That’s beside the point since you’re the one in handcuffs about to spend the weekend in jail.”

Indeed, I did spend the weekend in jail and 30 subsequent days were spent on home incarceration for running from two police officers who ordered me to wreck a law they then cited me for breaking.

The next time I danced with the law, it was perfectly legitimate. I was living abet in Louisville. I had been drinking at a bar and I was driving home. I wasn’t swerving or driving erratic. The cause was that I had failed to use my blinker at a turn from Bardstown Road to Eastern Parkway in Louisville’s cultural hub known as The Highlands. I ended up with my first (and only) DUI.

But I want to mention a bit of the minutes during my time on the side of Eastern Parkway. The officer issued a series of field sobriety tests which I passed with flying colors. The most notable success being the task he charged me with of standing on one foot and counting backwards from 30 to 1. I pulled that off without even swaying in the wind, so to speak. Neither did I stumble over the countdown.

So, when he then issued the breathalyzer, I couldn’t help but ask, “If you were going to give me this anyway, why bother with all the monkey tricks? I mean, I passed them. So if passing them doesn’t mean anything what’s the point? “

And there was that look. That recognize of hyper-confidence. That look of, “Your logic means nothing here. You are wrong and I am true. So much so, that I don’t even have to appear to have heard what you are saying.”

Regardless, I surmised that the monkey tricks were to humiliate me on the side of the road where all manners of cars were driving by and dwellers in the nearby homes had an amusing live performance to lay witness to. If I am ghastly in my supposition, the blame for my deceptive words lays with the man who did not feel compelled to give reason.

The most significant fallout of my DUI was to motivate me to stay home and drink. For better or for worse in the interim, I cannot say. But, in the long bustle and after a great amount of personal pain, the effect was salubrious.

However, before I note the impetus for that eventual healing, in the interest of chronology I need to form mention of another interaction with the law. Despite what might be (an understandable) presumption on the part of the reader at this point, this instance has me as the victim and not the perp.

I was living on a six acre property in the middle of a 6000 acre state park. I owned a Jeep CJ-7 that was repeatedly having engine trouble. It had been breaking down on a rather regular schedule and it became impractical to sustain it as my primary transportation. So I parked it on the edge of my property, cancelled the insurance and I bought a dependable Nissan pickup truck.

On a Sunday afternoon during the spring of ‘97, I drove onto the one lane dead end road which led to my driveway. When I came over the crest of a slight rise in the road and my vision broke through the indigenous trees crowding all that had been built into those hills, my Jeep was gone.

I slowed in my approach to the mysteriously bare space and stopped when it was at hand. It seems amusing upon recollection, but I rolled down my driver’s side window. I wanted to look unencumbered upon the elliptical spot I had razed of weeds, suckers, bracken, and all manner of flora so that I might have a parking space for my Jeep until the time I could afford to have it fixed (to, most likely, sell). Yet, with my truck’s window rolled down, the region was no less empty of my silver CJ-7.

I progressed the 100 yards to my driveway and had a feeble thought that I might find my Jeep had been moved, by some motivated entity, next to my house. It had not.

After obligatory but fruitless calls to those few places where the Jeep may have been towed by the city or county (for what reason, I couldn’t say), I allowed for the rather depressing and surprisingly creepy truth to exert itself. My Jeep had been stolen.

I called the county police. Two officers arrived at my property a few hours later. They expressed a bemused, if sympathetic, fascination at the occurrence as they casually took a police report. I understood their bemusement and I didn’t take it offensively. It was rather odd that a Jeep that didn’t run, at rest in plain sight on private property that literally touched a public residential road, would disappear in the space of 8 hours.

Not long after the officers left my house, I walked south along Snawder Lane and knocked at one of my neighbors. I told them about the incident and was in the process of inquiring about whether or not they had seen anything. Their 12 year old son overheard me talking and I didn’t even fetch to ask. He came to the door and told me that he saw two men loading my Jeep onto a tow truck a little before noon that very morning.

I learned that the tow truck was green and of the rollback variety; the type that lifts vehicles completely onto a flat bed for transport. The men were both Caucasian. One was an “old man with gray hair and a beard” and the other was “younger with blondish brown hair.” The neighbor’s boy said he was walking down Snawder Lane to Top Hill Road to go visit a friend who lived around the corner. He saw them loading the Jeep and he stood and watched them for a few seconds. He assumed I was having it towed to a garage and gave it puny thought.

I returned to my house and called the Jefferson County Police Department with this information. I was told that the person assigned to my case would call me within 24 hours. Before that return call, which came the following day, the boy who had witnessed the theft was knocking on my door. He was inflamed to whine that he knew who had stolen my Jeep.

After a brief discussion, I walked down and spoke, once again, with his father. What I learned collectively from my neighbors was this:

1) A man who used to live on Snawder Lane owned an auto junkyard on the Outer Loop.

2) He used to have many inactive cars on his multiple-acre property at the end of Snawder Lane and he would shuffle them around with a green rollback tow truck.

3) He was seen once driving down Snawder Lane, which is a dead-end road, the very Sunday morning of and prior to the theft of my Jeep.

4) He was seen a second time driving down Snawder Lane that very same Sunday afternoon and subsequent to the theft of my Jeep.

These points in summation? A man with access to a green rollback tow truck and workers at an auto junk yard was seen twice on a Sunday on a dead end road where he used to live and those appearances just happened to straddle the disappearance of a Jeep which was seen being hoisted onto the back of a green rollback tow truck by two men. I only pointedly set that Snawder Lane is a dead-end road to undermine any thought that this man may have been passing through along this road on route to some further destination. As well, I point out this was a Sunday because, should he be coming up to see if he had a stack of mail that had arrived since he had moved, he certainly would not have had to check twice on a day when no mail is delivered. I believe he came up once to see that I wasn’t home. Then he went and told his men to get a Jeep CJ-7 on Snawder Lane. Then he returned to confirm that the Jeep was gone.

In short, before I received the return call from the lieutenant at the Fairdale branch of the county police department who was (allegedly) investigating the theft, I had figured out who took my Jeep. I relayed all of what I noted above when that call came the following day.

I waited a week and had not heard word one from the officer. I called him and was told, in so many words, “We’re working on it.” Another week passed and, as before, I had to take the initiative to call this lieutenant at the Fairdale branch of the J.C.P.D. This time, he sounded not only annoyed but he spoke bluntly and rudely, “That guy’s never been in effort for anything but a marijuana charge. He’s never been involved in an investigation for stealing cars so I’ve got no cause to even talk to him!”

It doesn’t take a master logician to realize that, by that standard, nobody would ever be investigated for anything because a “first time” would never be established!

Nonetheless, my Jeep was a total loss. It was uninsured because, barring a tornado, there was no reason to think it was vulnerable to any damage as it sat sluggish on my property for the long months until it would be made road apt (or sold).

Four and a half years later, my alcoholism reached the event horizon and circumstances demanded that I either change my life or, one way or the other, it would be changed for me. I awoke on February 10, 2002 with a great deal of hurt running through nearly the entirety of my body. I frail to be a long distance runner in high school and I had rush Louisville’s Mini-Marathon on three occasions. My body felt, from my shoulders to my feet, as my legs traditional to feel the day after trekking the 13.1 miles of this road race with all the speed I could manage.

I lay there in my bed, my beloved dog beside me on the covers, staring up at the stucco ceiling. I did not have to move to aggravate the hurt. It simply throbbed of its own volition without an agent to stir its sensitivities. The mere act of breathing empowered it. Like my alcoholism, it was a parasite thriving on life itself. The hours passed and the dendritic lines of the ceiling were all that I looked to but for when I would glance to my dog, laying on his side with his paws kicked out and tangled among themselves as if the touch of one to the other gave him a comfort. His big white eyes and brown pupils looked to me, curious and expectant.

On days off from work, as was then upon us, we would most often go hiking into the colossal humped backs of the hills we called home or down into the seams of the crevasses between them. I had a stainless steel flask with a leather sheath for just such occasions. I would fill the flask from a liter bottle of Jim Beam, load some music into my CD player, and choose the headphones into place. It was this step in the ritual, the pocketing of the CD player into my green nylon fanny pack, when my dog, Dusk, would be in the know and start his fill ritual of a guttural growl, frenetic jabs towards the door with his long lupine nose (in case I had forgotten where the door was) and airborne half-circular leaps in execution of some beautiful canine contra dance.

That time of my life was the rue which thickened my soul. The acreage of the expansive nature preserve, with its 100 foot Hickories, Maples, Oaks, and Sycamores in a peaceful fight for domination of the great rain of light and the great light of rain was like some atavistic consciousness come daily upon the currents of the wind to whisper in my ear about the proud history of mankind extracting himself from the midden of muck and mud while, even still, relishing its remnants beneath the rasp of our nails, between our boney toes, in the paste of our marrow, and in those recesses of our mind which aught not be tamed. That we should come from such places back when the recipe for our blood was still being tinkered and then turn and name them “wilderness” as if they were an otherness from ourselves seems tragic and sad; an impetus for a great societal rumination.

But February 10, 2002, there was no perusal of the hillside runs of imbricated slats of shale; no surveying of the great dry creek bed slabs of fossil-infested sedimentary rock; no reconnoitering of the edge of southerly farmers’ fields where I would go at times to sit upon the park’s public cliff in charming proximity to grazing cattle just the other side of the five rungs of barbed wire strung across out-of-plumb posts of cedar.

Because February 10, 2002 was a day of healing. A day for me to lay there and question, through the apropos harm radiating through my body, what I expected of my future. Indeed, I needed to question if I wanted a future?

At about 5 o’clock that day I struggled from bed. Dusk had figured out that something was severely amiss by then. He knew that I was, for lack of a more comprehensive term, sick and he merely kept a thoughtful distance; not crowding me with insinuations that we aught to go hiking and not abandoning me to isolation and aloneness.

My tiresome trip out of bed was purposeful and the purpose took me to the garbage can in my kitchen. There I extracted 6 empty 1 liter Jim Beam bottles accumulated over the preceding 5 days. It is a trick of the alcoholic physiology that it can adjust and expand according to the demands asked of it; like a balloon being filled with air. But, like the balloon, at some point it must pop from too much infiltration of the good stuff. Too distinguished inebriation from the longtime friend turned longtime enemy.

I hobbled to the stereo, turned on the radio, and returned to bed. I lay there, essentially, for a day and a half. During those hours, between extended moments of depressive and exhausted sleep, I spoke to myself down in the deep whorls of my constitution, (down where, in truth, language itself becomes trite) and in that aphonic and muted conversation, I will now transliterate into language what was said to whoever or whatever might have been listening:

“Let me emerge from the inflicted horror simmering under every square inch of my body’s flesh and I will never drink again.”

So that is how I know that the last day I ever had a drink of alcohol was February 9^th, 2002.

My mother, god bless her equanimity and esteem, had been enabling me. Whenever I needed to borrow money, she was generous. But when my addiction was gone, so to went that imperative to approach her on those frequent days of the passing months when I was 10 dollars short of a 15 dollar price tag for a liter of bourbon to take home and drink in the company of my dog, the music playing late me, as I wrote my poems, my prose, my plays; these reflections on life.

From the day of that decision, my life improved immensely. I no longer had to isolate myself in my home, 20 miles from my friends, out of fear of drinking and driving. My writing, which was already formidable, became more so. I no longer felt as if I had some numinous tumor, attached to my viscera and hidden away in the flaps of my sweatshirt, that I had to keep secret lest those unsympathetic to my deleterious fate should point in fun and mockery. I no longer felt tethered to some vicious familiar who dragged me about at his inimical whimsy. I no longer felt as if my primary being had been usurped by the Doppelgänger and made secondary to his scandalous and ghostly intentions.

Before I depart forward into the bulk of my closing, this seems a good transitioning point to bellow directly. So, I will declare out of generosity of spirit and the intention of my ends, that as I move forward, should any reader of this piece come to detect an acerbic and righteous anger seething in my subsequent words, trust your perception; it does you well. Should you pull back in consternation over some of my possibly boorish sentiments, bear with me. When I am finished with all that I have to say, you may resolve to fully disagree with me. But, until that moment, you do us both an injustice in drawing premature judgments.

That said, let us carry on into the drama of my denouement…

In the year that followed my crash from alcohol dependency, for two practical reasons, I began growing my contain marijuana. Those reasons were:

1) I didn’t like spending my money on it.

2) I didn’t like buying, what was quite often, pressed and seedy crude grade product smuggled in from Mexico.

3) Perhaps most significantly, I did not like all of the damned gas and time I had to waste before finally locating a bag of pot to select.

Those are my reasons and, as with my pot smoking itself (though I rarely partake anymore), I freely and without contrition admit to them as such.

The first plants I grew with less than auspicious results. The reasons were rather easy to extract from the experience, and perhaps the most well-known was not something which could be remedied. That is, I was growing in my yard and over a tumble of the hill’s higher ground and the line was in tree-spawned shade during much of the daylight hours. Nonetheless, I harvested enough pot to last me about five weeks.

As with everything a person undertakes, once the time of the neophyte has been purged, a comfort overtakes the trepidation and doubts. So, my second experience appeared to be more promising.

I had bought a halogen light and had it hanging in the upstairs of my house inside of what was a small area enclosed by office cubicle panels; I’m sure the whole developed world must be familiar these ubiquitous items. At the time, the work I did allowed me access to these materials and the ones I was utilizing were four 48″ panels pulled out of a batch that were destined for a land fill.

Essentially, I had 16 square feet closed off with these five foot gigantic panels and a halogen light hanging in the center. To the side of that, I had two cardboard boxes turned upside down with 4 36″ fluorescent bulbs held aloft by some thin rope. It took me about a weekend to compose the set up.

What I did my second time around was to start my seeds in the boxes under the fluorescent bulbs. Then I would transfer them to bigger planters and move them under the halogen light. Eventually, some of them would die, half would turn out to be males (which are basically trash for the compost), some of them would be runts, and some of them would be malformed. When I was down to the sixteen healthiest females (sixteen 5 gallon buckets was what would fit inside the cubicle panels), I would move them out in the yard for the unparalleled energy of the sun’s frothing light. My aim was to grow, each summer of a given year, enough smoke to last me until the following October harvest.

For all intents and purposes, this was a foray into botany and I found that I quite enjoyed the experience. For lack of a more dignified and admirable accolade, I’ll say that it was fun. And, though fun may lack substantiation to the more serious of minds among us, I will offer this quote from the unimitable Oscar Wilde: “Life is too essential to take seriously.”

As well, I was no longer drinking myself to death on a daily basis during my free hours and things like getting my hands dirty in the soil, transferring rooted plants, watering and caring for that which is growing, and, in the end, eliminating the need to drive all over town to buy low grade weed smuggled across a border a thousand miles away was quite wholesome by comparison.

So, my system had advance to a smooth pass and, distinct life issues aside (which will be forcefully addressed soon enough), I had made a coup of sorts over the course of a year. My writing was becoming multitudinous in its strengths and recognizable skills. The decrepit house where I was living, through the labor of my own hands, was becoming more livable. I was drifting farther and farther from those destructive shoals in the shallow waters of my years of addiction to alcohol and I was 16 months out into open waters on the low seas of the rest of my life.

Then, in October of 2003, some of my marijuana plants began to proceed while I was at work. (This would have been my first real harvest after the incipient experimentation of the previous year.) They were easy enough to be had as they were free standing in 5 gallon buckets. I assumed it was some neighborhood kids and I thought that, once they had a couple, they would be done with their theft. After the fourth one disappeared, I erected a 50 foot dog run between two trees right along the ridge one had to trespass to catch to the low point where the plants were settled. While I was at work, Dusk, my beloved dog (who also happened to be a 90 pound wolfish mutt with 4 one-inch long canines between his upper and lower sets of teeth), was tethered to the dog bustle.

About a week later, in the first week of October, my friend Zach was out at the house. We were in the yard, looking over the ridge line at the plants. As I stated, the cleared area where the house stood, the driveway ran and the plants were settled encroached right into the edge of the old trees of the forest. As we stood there chatting, the distinctive, abrasive, and stuttered sound of helicopter blades sounded off over head. There was no mistaking that it had advanced directly to the canopy line of the trees whose trunks rose from the declension of the hillside but 20 feet away. Had, perhaps, a half dozen trees been absent from where they put down roots so long ago, I imagine that the pilot and I could have locked eyes. As it stood, neither had we seen the helicopter nor had the pilot seen us.

It might have taken about 3 minutes for us to transport 12 five gallon buckets into the back door of my house about 30 feet away. When the last plant was sitting in the mud room, over a heart shaking my chest like a zigzag axle shakes a speeding car, I had time to realize that the helicopter had never returned. Like a hawk grabbing a midair prey from its migratory flight, it had come once (to the brink of discovery) and was gone.

Then there was this gargantuan Meathead walking through my yard. He was looking all about as if he were pondering buying the place and I heard Dusk out there barking. I went outside and called Dusk to me. He heeled and as I stood there holding my dog by his collar, I looked up at the Meathead. Meathead was dressed in street clothes but he had a bulky radio on his hip.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you’re on private property,” I said.

“Well, we got a call about some danger up here. So we had to come. You haven’t seen anybody around here or anything? “

“You mean, like strangers? “

“Yeah.”

“Just you.”

He proceeded to ask me about how long I had lived in the house and how much property there was. And he kept feigning to be there for some vague reason about which he never was clear. At one point, he took offense at my dog barking at him.

“Well, if you weren’t here, he wouldn’t be barking at you. I’m certain of that. But let me establish him inside.”

I returned and after a few minutes of pointless conversation, he identified himself as a county police officer. Then he wanted to know if there was anybody else in the house. I told him that Zach was in there and he told me to bring him outside. I strolled over to the steps, ascended to the back door, stuck my head inside and told Zach to come outside.

Meathead then radioed someone and said, “You all can come on.”

Suddenly there were three Junior Meatheads on my property. Meathead wanted to go into my house and I kept telling him that he couldn’t. He wanted to know why he couldn’t go into my house and I told him, “Because there’s gay porn all over the place and I don’t want you to see it.” (This was a half lie, but more on that later.)

Meathead said (and here I stress that I am quoting him directly), “Come on Dave, I don’t care about any of that stuff.”

He thought then to ask me if I had anything illegal in my pockets. I told him that I had a dugout pipe full of pot in my good pocket. He had me empty my pockets and place the contents on the roof of my truck. Unscrewing the conical tip of the pipe, he looked at the weed in its hull and reclosed it.

“What’s this guy got to do with anything going on here? ” he asked with a kick of his apt thumb towards Zach.

“Nothing. He’s unbiased a coworker.”

“Get out of here,” he told my friend. Zach opened the door to his blue Volvo and, as he was about to get into the driver’s seat, Meathead called to him, “Hey!”

Zach looked up and Meathead threw him the pot filled pipe. Then my coworker, with the pot that had just been distributed to him by this police officer raiding my house on account of some pot, drove off.

Meathead squared his shoulders to me, pulled his chest out of his back pocket, puffed up like a blowfish on defense and offered me an ultimatum. They would be going in my house, one map or the other. If he had to get a subpoena to do it then he was going to take me downtown directly after they went in the house and did what they had to do. If I gave them permission to go inside, I could sleep in my acquire bed that night.

The writing was on the wall. All I had to do was read it or scuttle my feet in diffidence and be a stubborn jackass and, eventually, ruin up in the impersonal, utilitarian, steely and crowded 66˚ holding cell down at 6^th and Jefferson.

I went in first and put Dusk in the bathroom. Then Meathead and the three Juniors came in.

To sit here and detail the minutia of the following hour of that day is, quite frankly, equal parts enraging and depressing and I don’t believe I have the strength to do so. Therefore I will extract the points relevant to the final brunt of my declaration.

1) At one point, Meathead, having come across a naked picture of one of my ex-girlfriends, sat in my chair and ogled it with wide eyes as he asked me all about her. I must remind people, this is the guy that spoke with such dismissive and aloof aplomb 30 minutes earlier about how he “[didn't] care about any of that stuff.” But there he was, acting as if we were old friends chatting about some whore I’d had an impersonal encounter with as opposed to a picture of an ex-girlfriend which he was privy to set his eyes upon solely and exclusively because he was going through every inch of my personal property under the authority of his badge.

2) At one point, Meathead began to rifle through my desk drawers and was told by one of the Juniors, “Leave that alone, I’ve already been through all of that.” But he didn’t cease his exploration of my desk which he continued diligently for ten minutes. I have assumed that this was due to the fact that he had just been getting his puerile jollies from a naked record of one of my ex-girlfriends and he was looking for more pictures of a similar nature.

3) At one point, as Meathead spoke with a childlike frisson about raiding my property and he was derisively chiding me about how small my plants were (an vital point I will recount later), he mentioned how he had gotten a call tipping him off to the plants from someone who said, “He’s got ‘em up ‘er just over the hill.” (Perhaps, for some strange reason, this call came from the person who could no longer steal my plants? ) Nonetheless, he said that he had been standing on the other side of the privacy fence I had put up with my own two hands and that ran along the road front. And he had already seen the plants before I took them inside. To this point, I immediately and brusquely asked, “Then what did you need the helicopter for? ” He grinned, as if we were chumming around, and said, “I just wanted to see how you would react.” In short, it was a goddamned game to him and one in which he could needlessly employ a frigging helicopter in order to indulge in a moment of panicked action on the piece of some stranger. So then I asked, “You mean you had me outside with all of those plants out in the originate. And then you provoked me fair to have a little show and then you let me go inside my house. Isn’t that, I don’t know, stupid and dangerous in your line of work.” Then I got that look which comes without an answer. That glimpse from plot help in Bowling Green that says ‘You are subordinate to me and you don’t matter. I have all the power and you have none. I can do whatever I please with you.’ And it is no wonder, I guess, that with such inculpability intact that one would take no care to not bluster forward and create a fool out of oneself.

4) At one point, as I sat in an old armchair in the living room, and one of the three Juniors was going through my kitchen as Meathead sat in a chair across from me. I objective started shaking my head and I gave him this ironic smile and he knew what that peer was about. There is a moment in perhaps the greatest new ever written by a Kentuckian, All The King’s Men, when Willie Stark finds out from Jack Burden that he has lost the support of a long time political backer, Think Stanton, and Willie wants to go over to the Judge’s. Jack tells him that the betrayal has been done and will be in the papers the following day and talking to the Judge won’t change his endorsement for one of Willie’s opponents. Willie Stark says, “I know that. I just want look at him.” That’s the kind of look I gave Meathead as he sat there with his cat-got-the-canary grin on his face and, as I shook my head, I said, “This is bullshit. I nearly drank myself to death and you people come in here and raid my house over some pot.” To this, Meathead seemed to answer by rote and with a tone which, curiously enough, attempted to deflect all personal culpability from the fact that it was indeed him and his three runt Juniors in my house going through all of my personal belongings. He said, “Change the law Dave.” It is interesting to note that there was no actual offense beneath the crime, i.e. a victimization, that he could proclaim to be exposing and setting right. He was simply deferring to the breaking of the law itself as the crime. Even in a mind so vapid as his, this deficiency of a realized connection to the greater scheme of his function in the social mechanism within which he acts is one that is surprising and yet very significant to the point I will hone to a fine finish before I leave off from this lengthy declaration.

Before they left, they had discovered the office cubicle panels upstairs and the halogen light and all the diminutive seedlings that were an inch tall. As well, they had discovered all of my bisexual porn and stashes of swinger magazines. These latter items were all left sitting out in prominent display upon my dressers, desktop, and the seats of my chairs. I have no doubt that this was deliberate and done specifically to humiliate me. As if to say, in the infamous words of Pontius Pilate, “Ecce homo!”

But I can’t tell you how impervious my constitution is to such prejudices. Such fatuous pettiness never has and never will embarrass me on my hold behalf. What it does is, after the hatred and the arouse are moved aside, it embarrasses me on behalf of those hollowed out shells of wasted flesh who, in biological criteria alone, share species classification with myself, my friends, and my family.

They had taken the halogen bulb and dumped all of my seedlings into a single dirt pile in the upstairs of my house for me to clean up. They had uprooted my 4 foot tall plants (which had garnished me a ribbing for their diminutive size), bagged them, put them in the rear position of the SUV and then sat for some time in my driveway in that SUV. I assume they were writing up the report.

About a month after the raid on my house, a couple who lived down the street from my house was talking to me in the street about half way between our respective properties. They said that they had read in “one of those free newspapers” they picked up at a small diner on Dixie Highway that the officers had found all of this porn and magazines with “men in dresses” in my house during the raid.

I was dumbfounded. I stood there in the street, my arms folded in the form of a bowtie over my chest, shaking my head in profound disbelief. As naturally verbose and articulate as I am, I was literally at a loss for words. I believe, after opening and closing my mouth a few times like some bug-eyed fish during feeding time, I said, “Wow.” Then I turned and walked away to my house.

I made it down to the Justice Center records room soon thereafter and acquired a copy of the police recount. There was no mention of any of what my neighbors spoke about. Which is to say, Meathead and his Juniors took it upon themselves to go out of their way and personally disclose this information to some reporter. As well, I will never forget that there is some reporter at great in Louisville Kentucky who would think it somehow relevant to anything at all in the world to disclose that information that was not a matter of public record and about someone who they failed to contact with regards to said information.

What the police report did produce note of were the marijuana plants and the light. To my further dismay, the report claimed confiscation of plastic baggies and scales and the discovery of two “grow rooms”. The baggies, indeed, were most likely taken from my kitchen. I had not noticed they were missing. But I have to throw my hands up and ask who, in all of America, does not have baggies in their kitchen? The scales were an out and out fabrication of evidence. The “grow rooms” were four office cubicle panels and two cardboard boxes.

When it came time for me to hire a lawyer, we were discussing my defense. He concluded that he would talk with the prosecutor and work out a deal. I spoke with him about the fact that there were no scales found at my house. He dismissed the point casually. I brought it up again at a later meeting and he spoke bluntly and with an authoritative prescience, “If they say they found scales they can come up with scales. It’s beside the point.”

As well, when I addressed the noted number of my having 64 plants as rather deceptive on anecdote of 52 of them were an inch tall, half of those were male, and a handful of the females would have died or been deformed, he grew frustrated. Basically he said that if I wanted to go to trial, the minute I started talking about females and males and about how many would be deformed the jury is going to get lost or they’re going to choose that I know an awful lot about the process. After that, I didn’t even bother bringing up the fact, as was eminent by Meathead himself, that my “fleshy grown” plants were dwarfs by every standard of typical commercial marijuana growers.

So it was that, as it was a game to Meathead, so too was it a game with my lawyer. Never mind if the officers presented the situation as other than it was. Never mind if 52 one-inch tall plants and 12 four- foot gargantuan plants which might produce 12 ounces of marijuana becomes “64 plants” which, when presented simply as a number on a page, are the perfect equivalence of 64 twelve-foot tall plants which might produce 64 pounds or more of marijuana. Never mind if baggies in my kitchen which I used for their intended purpose are illustrious as if they were drug dealing paraphernalia. Never mind the malfeasance of an officer of the law who fabricates evidence to substantiate all of the other deceptive fudging of facts which, when totaled, all point to this man being a drug dealing grower.

What was not noted or questioned or apparently of significance, since a negative can easily be relegated to a nothingness, was the glaring fact that they found absolutely no cash. Is not cash the tell-tale sign of the drug dealer? Are stacks of cash not noted in every goddamned news story one ever reads about the bust of some drug dealing operation? And are there not usually some guns laying around? And nobody cared to note that my house also showed no signs of ill begotten wealth. I say this with all affection for the residence, as it changed my life immensely and permanently, but it was a dump. And there is a very grand reason that I can say that plainly and with such a statement holding so miniature meaning to the estimation of my years in the forest: I have never made one decision in my life with an eye towards the accumulation of money and some people living in dumps have ten times the quality of character as some people living in regal luxury. Though I proceed with expansive trepidation and cautious scrutiny before doing so, here I will yield to the recorded sentiment of another. “I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.” Should anyone deem this is merely one poor man’s rationalization within the echo chamber of another poor man’s words, that quote comes from Andrew Carnegie who, when he said it, was the richest man in the world.

When I moved from that house, three of my six neighbors expressed how sorry they were to see me, the drug dealing mastermind and destroyer of wholesome livelihood, go. (The other three I hardly ever spoke to in the years that I lived on that dead end street in the middle of the 6000 acre state park.) When I was convicted of that felony and received 5 years probation, none of my friends disowned me. None in my family were “ashamed” of me. The world did not become safer. Society did not become more productive. My employer did not care. I did not become reformed and rehabilitated as there was no self-destructive path beneath my feet from which I needed to avert. (There had been that malevolent path beneath my feet a couple of years earlier and it was paved with a mosaic formed from shards of shattered bottles of obedient obsolete Jimmy Beam.)

What did change, and is of noteworthiness, is that I lost my voting privilege. A privilege which I had exercised in every election I was eligible to vote in since I had turned 18 years customary. As well, for a time, I was made by the courts to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. (I literally laughed as I scribed that last sentence but I mean no disrespect for the unfortunate people who are shackled to that addiction. I sincerely bid you my believe fateful strength. I no longer need it.)

Here now, we are at the threshold of the backdoor of this dully extensive explication into the farce of law and justice in Louisville Kentucky and the breakdown of moral authority in America. When we have passed from this backdoor, a dense and expansive burden will be lifted from my existential cognition because I will know that I have sent out a truth to the world at gargantuan and the world will then own the burden but the truth will remain my own (as truths are necessarily the possessions of individuals).

During those months subsequent to the raid upon my house, one could be forgiven if an assumption was made that my mind was subdued under the fright of my situation. A skeptic may doubt me if I say otherwise. A cynic may refuse to listen. But those that occupy with me will understand, if they have the capacity to do so, that both the skeptic and the cynic and, indeed, every individual who populates the earth and who ever drew breath have been dismissed, not from my heart (for I have love for a astronomical number of people), but from my mind.

Much of my life, as with much of most lives I assume, has been guided by the sentiments of those who came before; the paradigm was established like tire tracks cut in stone. I have shown my dutiful obeisance and followed those conscripted paths in places which only I can visit. I go there when I close my eyes. But this confluence of what has already been and what has honest near into being is coalesced by a terrible myth of benevolent indentureship. One believes these paths lead to where they will because others have wanted to go there and one would be well to follow.

Those months subsequent to the raid upon my house were consumed by what has nothing whatsoever to do with a bunch of hypocritical automated meatheads, some laws established with a nod towards the greed of a few individuals and the empowerment of otherwise impotent men, and the sanctimony of a profligate society. The year surrounding those months saw the incipience of a long unyielding and adamant reflection into the projection of my own life’s path.

I was in a near debilitating longing for someone that I had let go from my life with no more effort than it takes to spit after clearing your throat. It would take me several years of that incessant reflection to realize that my entire life was but one long repeating failure of intimacy strung together in the interims by one night stands with anybody who might join me.

One spring afternoon in 2005, as I was driving through some neighborhood streets to a friend’s house, I was considering an odd inconsistency with regards to my self discipline. I was thinking of how, all of my life since I was fourteen, I diligently wrote because I had decided in 8^th grade to be a writer. I was thinking of how instantaneously I had quit smoking cigarettes, literally in an instant, wait on in 1997. I was thinking of how instantaneously I had quit drinking alcohol when I decided it should be done. And I was considering how I had failed on 4 occasions, over a period of 9 years, to cease my association with all of this porn and the strangers I’d meet for sex through these most impersonal methods.

So I began to trace that part of myself back to see if perhaps the answer might be got at at the mouth of the original inroad to it all. I went wait on across all of my failed relationships, none of which lasted longer than 23 months, and I got all the way back to my first girlfriend when I was 15. But that wasn’t far enough. It started before that. I had to keep going back passed my 14^th year. Passed my 13^th year. Passed my 12^th year. At my 11^th year, I was able to stop my mind’s long trek.

It was my 11^th year when a man whose lawn I had mowed for 10 dollars introduced me to porn as we sat on his bed. He showed me how to masturbate him while we sat there watching XXX videos. I suppose my mind, which was most fascinated at that time by light sabers and the hard chocolate shells on McDonald’s ice cream cones, honest sucked it all in like a sponge steeped in a bath of acid.

So that was when it all began; what I was trying to pinpoint. That is why this thing which I had squared my shoulders to was getting the better of me. It had gotten a one year head start on even the beginnings of my possess pubescent sexuality which began when I was 13. And it all became clear to me why I had this broad dysfunction and why my estimation of intimacy was warped. And why being close to a stranger had always seemed a viable equivalency to being close to a lover. And why I had let this one person go whose name I’ve sworn to never advise again because, at this point, it’s not really about missing her. It’s about missing a piece of myself I never got to know. The part that would have come into its own naturally, by way of two innocent people in a mutual discovery.

And after coming to that realization, the bulk of self-knowledge continued to grow and deepen in its implications so that I was periodically overwhelmed by and succumbed to the comprehensive understanding of it but I was appreciative for a mind which desired to know and that had the capability to delve on.

Eventually (two years later, to be exact), my reconnaissance of the parameters and the personal psychological terrain within those boundaries became so extensive that I broke from the trodden paths under foot and breached the world at hand and the hard fact of the crime itself. So came an certain and natural question; was this man, who must have been in about 50 twenty-five years earlier, still alive?

I looked his listing up in the phone book and there he was at the same address where I used to mow the lawn when I was 11 years old. This knowledge settled in over a period of a few months. I did not reflect upon it so considerable as I simply allowed it to be.

Then came a day when I no longer allowed it to simply be but it seemed suddenly relevant to all of my future. I suspect I knew the time was coming and that I was only doing as I often did with regards to my understanding of things. I was letting it come on slow so that, when it would be exerted, I knew it fully.

On April 26 of 2007, I called the Crimes Against Children Unit of the Metropolitan Louisville Police Department to represent this man who had sexually molested me when I was 11years old. I was directed via an automated menu to an answering machine and I left a message with my name, phone number, and reason for calling. Two weeks passed and I had yet to receive a return call. So on March 9 of 2007, I called the C.A.C.U. again. This time an actual person answered the phone. I told her that I had called two weeks prior to report a child molester and that I had not received a return call. She yelled at me “We get 2000 calls a month!” To say that I was dumbfounded by her reaction and tone is putting it mildly. II felt as if I was in some alternate reality. (Perhaps I should have said, “This guy sexually molested me when I was 11 years old but wait, that’s not the worst of it, he grows pot!”) After snapping at me as if I’d stolen her parking space, she then asked if I wanted to speak to someone “again” (although I had not actually spoken to anybody the first time I called). I said that I did. So I was transferred but, as unbelievable as it sounds, I was not transferred to a person, as I was led to believe. I was transferred to yet another answering machine. I again left my name, number, and reason for calling.

To date, that was 2 years 4 months and 2 days ago. I never did hear back from the Crimes Against Children Unit of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department. After all, they get 2000 calls a month! The turn around for the time it took for those law-breaking hypocritical bigoted officers to obtain the call about my marijuana plants and to raid my house, replete with a superfluous helicopter just to “see how [I'd] react”, was 7 days at the most.

I’m not even going to do myself the disservice of feigning naiveté as to why such a disparity exists in these two experiences.

Raiding someone’s home for “drugs” is exciting and sexy and flashy. Terrorized and otherwise useless dolts get to exert their adolescent brio all over again. They get to flash a badge and substantiate their ersatz braggadocio because they have a site sanctioned authority. They get to submit people under their questionably opposable thumbs. They obtain to rifle through every inch of privacy of completely harmless and integral persons. They procure to peruse private pictures of naked women who wouldn’t so much as glance down wind at their fat fetid animated carcass. They accept to shut their goddamned mouths and defer to the silence of the slow wind in the mountainous ullage over their diminutive brains when they blurt out obvious stupidities and get upped by the better before them. And, most importantly and potently, the public at large gets to seize into some chronic disillusionment that an order they can never really grasp, but certainly must have, has been maintained. The concrete levy holding attend the flood of chaos has been reinforced with another rod of ½ inch rebar. Then, when it is all said and done, they can take private information that had nothing to do with the mission of their invasion and, like the giddy puerile school children they never stopped being, they can disclose this information to some hack reporter devoid of any integrity at all but for what lets him button his shirt in the morning.

On the other hand, protecting children is ho-hum and tedious. It’s not sexy. Indeed, it is even dismal and depressing to know that out there in the world we adore to pretend is being held in this tenable and civilized state of order, there are kids slipping through the cracks and into the subterraneous vile. And, when it’s all said and done, there is a caring intact in the keystone and essence of protecting children. Yaaaaawn.

Caring for children cannot be traced, in its heart of hearts, back to a monetary interest of people all to willing to acquire a status quo which enables their agencies (D.E.A.), their sprawling conglomerations (the prison industrial complex) and their private companies (alcohol, pharmaceutical, and lawyer services) to continue to enrich themselves. And should some man who was nearly killed by alcohol have his life needlessly upended over marijuana while his calls about a pedophile go unanswered so that the enrichment of some worthless, amoral, and sebaceous succubi can continue on uninterrupted, then I am clear that is of no more concern than a footnote to a footnote in the index of a dusty modern that will never be opened.

“Our problems are manmade, therefore they can be solved by man.” John F. Kennedy said once in a speech. Of course, there is an assumption with that ouroboros-like statement that man cares to solve his problems as opposed to jockeying for personal wealth while problems be damned.

I have come out the side walls of that long tunnel of man’s deception about progress to the greater good. I no longer believe anything floating in the collective consciousness of American wholesomeness and dreamy kindness. Kitsch has replaced the charm. I no longer run with the insinuation that law is based on justice and that order is maintained at large by men and woman empowered by the benevolent state.

Where it counts the most and is most significant to my existence in this tactile world of a knowable reality, I am into an unchartered realm. That is in the triptych world of my mind and my heart and my soul and the collective realm is such that nothing which I have not witnessed first hand will be taken even for face value.

Liars run great of what abounds in America. Indeed, I have witnessed the start of a war based upon deliberately fabricated lies. I have witnessed persons of absolutely no myth rise to prominence on the backs of pure lies. I am currently witnessing some clandestine entity forcefully promote flat out lies to scare vulnerable people simply to prevent others from receiving adequate health care. I have witnessed lies after lies after lies propagated in the name of some vague God who simultaneously moves his flock to caresses guns, cheer for wars, spew paroxysmic hatred at peaceful citizens, molest children with a clerical hand, and attempt to coerce some monogamous tyranny upon a changing country their extinct and shrimp minds just can’t fathom without some inherent and debilitating panic seizing them because, in perfect consistency to what surrounds them, they’ve been riding upon the crest of their own lies their entire pitiful lives. And, perhaps most alarming and egregious, I see people lie and lie and lie out of either sheer unfathomable stupidity or, most likely and yet again, out of gluttonous abysmal greed about the slow shuttling of our great and blessed planet into an unlivable hell.

From all of these worthless cretins that I have conjured from their intrusion into my life to estimate them upon this page, I separate myself. They are of something else. They are of the planet that is slowly being brought to a boil. They are of the bulging pockets. They are of the ineptitude. They are of the hypocrisy. They are of the bigotry. They are of the sophomoric sensationalism. They are of the cold unfeeling acrimonious vacuum where once a heart may have pumped. They are selfish and narcissistic and vain and they are so goddamned self-consciously proud that they could trip and fall on their smug fat faces and swear it was the earth that shifted in its cosmic orbit and came up and punched them out of spite.

Once, it might have meant nothing to me to say so. It may have been enough to know all of this. But last Friday as I was doing my brother a favor and taking him home from his work, I was stopped by an officer of the law, blinded by his lights, rudely interrogated and sent on my blueprint with no offer of apology for his completely unjust intrusion into my life and his waste of my time. This, on account of a substance which nearly killed me years ago and for which I see television commercials that peddle it with ultra-hip and hyper-beautiful people enacting some goofy frilly fictive world that does not exist. A substance which kills thousands of people every year but which I had the good sense to abandon. But, even so, there it was exerting itself into my private life by draw of an authority I cannot remark.For that offense, there is what I’ve written here: My own authority which also cannot not be denied.