I hate Virginia state car inspection laws, mostly because I'm always on the outside looking in on that one. I've been riding my truck with a sticker that expired in October of last year for a while now, but I was underemployed for a long ass hour and a half there at the end of last year, plus we got a couple of snowstorms that put me off the road (since my simple-assed rear wheel drive 4-cylinder truck ain't worth a damn in bad conditions). A major issue for not having renewed my inspection is I hit a deer a while back which bent up my front end real smartly, blowing out driver's side headlight, driver's side fender, hood, front grille, and being I am a born broke ass, I just ordered Estonian replacement parts from inside the internet rather than get someone to do it for me, which I wouldn't have been able to afford no ways. My repair method involved sacrificing the windshield wiper fluid system completely, and smashing on metal parts with a small-sized sledgehammer until it was close enough to be close enough. I think the main problem with getting a new inspection is the fact my headlights are like a cross-eyed dude, with the driver's side one pointing way too high since it rests on a stabilizing bar that I smashed back into close enough shape, which I guess may not technically be close enough.
Anyways, I started working a real, steady job in January, and where it's situated at is right by a State Police cop shop, and I passed this same trooper a number of times one week. Finally one day, outside our complex, he was on motorcycle cop duty, and he pulled a quick U-turn to pull me over. Dude was completely chill though, approached the car asking if I knew why I was pulled over, which I got that question right, and we talked about what had actually been wrong with my car, why it wasn't inspected yet since I got it fixed up again, etc etc. He let me go, saying somebody will eventually give me a ticket, which is always the case isn't it?
Fast forward to last week, as I hit the dumpster in Lake Monticello, which had nothing I felt like trying to scavenge, and I'm coming home, and at this entrance to an undeveloped subdivision but with a nice paved road already, sits this state trooper I've dealt with before. In fact, years ago, he gave me a ticket for this very offense in a different car of mine, so it was the same thing just different. He was one of like five state troopers that lived nearby, but the only active one I still think is around. I know this because he lives in a shitty little house at a key intersection on my ride home from Scottsville, and I always see his troopermobile parked there. His ugly wife also had a kid last year because there were balloons on the mailbox. (His wife is not necessarily ugly; I am just being mean; though it would not surprise me at all if she was.) Anyways, the most important factor in my ongoing relationship with this guy is last summer, my wife had traded some herbalist witchcraft sessions with some nice local peoples for a chicken tractor, which was about 20 foot long or so, and rather than take apart to bring home and run the risk of never getting it back together again, I strapped it into my truck in a very odd and precarious looking manner, although it was strapped down solidly. You could hang from the back end and it wouldn't budge. But if you were to look at it, it looked like some hillbilly nonsense bullshit. In fact, the nice peoples we got it from, apparently as an explanation for such a ridiculous looking stunt, I said, "Country livin'," and it became a catch phrase. Yeah, I be simple like that man Van Zant spoke about.
Well, I am driving home, and hit the stop sign across from said state troop's home. He is in the front yard, in plain clothes, and another state trooper car is there with a fully dressed and perhaps on-duty state trooper in the backyard doing something or other. The state trooper I deal with, in plain clothes and thus off-duty, looks at me and my truck and the contraption barely inside it amazed. I mean he is like, "What the fuck?" so badly he is looking around in all directions to see if anybody else is seeing this. I find this amusing, so decide to wave to him as I drive past, because you just have to in that position, especially when the guy's given you tickets before. The immediate drawback to such an action is I had to drive faster on the way home with my precarious load because I was afraid the trooper was gonna get his on-duty buddy to chase after me when he came back around the house from wasting taxpayer's money. The long-term drawback was I knew that this dude, at some point, was gonna pass me on the back roads near my home and pull me over for whatever bullshit he could. (And what the fuck is up with so many cops living along my local back roads? Back roads are supposed to be a demilitarized zone for cops that you can drive drunk along and not worry about the all-seeing eyeball of the pyramid cyclops in its local form.) Well, that's exactly what happened that day last week.
Homeboy pulls me over, and comes to the window, no small talk, just straight up "I'm officer Blah Blah Fuckface of the Virginia State Police. I need to see your license and registration." He takes it, says my inspection is expired, and then immediately goes back to his car to fill out the ticket. No talk, no what's going on, nothing. Then brings me back my ticket, and I lay the whole unemployed just started working deal on him, and I can see he's like, "Hey, this is a real guy," for a minute, but then he goes, "Well, it looks like you're trying to get it taken care of... at least it sounds that way," as if there's always the chance I'm lying (which I guess, technically, I was, but still). That just made me hate this guy even more. So now I can pre-pay and be docked $85 or so, or go to court and hope they throw the shit out since it'll be straight by then (because I wait till I get a ticket in such situation), but then they passed a new law last year saying you have to pay court costs anyways, which are probably ridiculous, so I'm out either way.
It sucks in America that our well-behaved ignorant people end up being cops, so the front line on law enforcement are these majority white guys without a lot of deductive ability who are very straight-laced. So they automatically don't trust anyone they pull over because they suspect you are always up to something, thus they don't really serve and protect the citizens so much as the rulebooks, and they become blind to the actual people who are just lying smarmy assholes who can't be trusted. The laws, however, are straight up and well defined and won't turn on them. (This is not to suggest all cops are shitheads, because I know some good cops, and I'm sure they get promoted quickly because the cop universe is like, "Oh shit, we got a guy who can actually put two and two together without a calculator and a tutor here.")
And the whole fucking thing starts with the fact the state of Virginia feels the need to protect people from themselves by driving cars they shouldn't drive. In fact, the stupid shithead cop's reasoning for me to fix my shit is if I had an accident, the other person could sue me, saying my truck shouldn't have been on the road. And they convince lenient garages that used to hand out inspection stickers because it's a bullshit process they are forced to follow for a $10 waste of their business time that they can't be so lenient because if someone has a wreck, then their surviving family members could sue the garage. So basically we have this giant system based on instilling the fear in people that they might get sued, enforced by ignorant assholes, with the rules set down by lawyer who do all the frivolous litigating in the first place. And what it all boils down to, this nationwide bullshit, on a local level, is my piece of shit truck, although a solid vehicle yet rough-looking as hell, can't be driven by me without the stress of getting pulled over even though the truck is a perfectly fine marvel of modern mechanics, both manufactured and my own backyard improvisational skills. This should be a credit to the American spirit, but instead I'm a fucking outlaw. No wonder the 21st century will be the end of American dominance.
I love doing love second instead of hate. The internet is full of hate, and even when people love on something, they become so myopic in their love that they mock newer people for not loving it so deeply and academically or ridiculously or whatever, and thus it goes right back to hate. The internet is for haters. I think it’s because it’s electronic chatter shooting at your brain, the 0s and 1s all mixing together and it crosses our emotions up and we just lash out, except we’ve stifled our physically violent genes for decades now, so we lash out with our smarminess instead, and become fatter and pastier and more self-important than ever before, about even more obscure things. But don’t worry fatty, I love your self-important ass, with all my heart and soul. I am here for you, and in turn, your little anonymous clicks on my cybertracking devices boost my ego, because I know pasty fat assholes in such far-off places as Roanoke, Worcester, West Mifflin, Little Rock, and Reykjavik are out there with me.
