Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Yesterday we drove out to the Monterey Aquarium (you know, the one that's in Star Trek IV and was all over Popular Mechanics when they built their massive tanks). The drive was really beautiful and the aquarium was very well done. Nefarious had a great time running around looking at everything also. The more time I spend here the more I wrack my brain trying to figure out a way to legalize it. I have come up with a few things that could work but I'll need your help (more later)…

Seriously, I love living in Mexico, but there's more to my life than just me. My needs are pretty simple. As long as I'm left alone and have a high speed internet connection, as long as there's stars over my head and water nearby I'm pretty content. But I know that Rachel needs more, and I know that Nefarious would do well with more… So I have to figure that out somehow. Anyway…

On the way back from the aquarium I was following Jen home. She drives a Range Rover and I was in some rental minivan and there's quite a performance difference so I had to have it floored pretty much the whole time to keep up. That said, it's not as if we were speeding or driving recklessly, so I was pretty surprised when I saw police cherries light up behind me in the slow lane. I pulled over with no idea why.

The officer came up to the window and said, “you were following that car pretty close.”

“I know, I'm from Canada and I'm staying with them, so I was following them home.”

He asks me, “do you know what the three-second rule is?”

(For those of you who don't, it means that the time it takes you to get to where the car in front of you is should take three seconds or more, in order to ensure you have enough time to brake if they do.)

“Well, we have a two-second rule in Canada, is it the same as that?”

(Oh crap, I probably shouldn't have said that!)

“Yes, but you were following a half second behind that BMW…”

Um… OK, it was a Range Rover, but anyway…

To my surprise, instead of issuing a ticket or lecturing me, he just says, “now you'd better hurry to catch up to your friends!” and sends me on my way. “But don't speed,” he adds as he walks back to his police car. I guess cops are pretty nice in Monterey. I like my encounters with the police. Here's a few others that I've posted here:

• Getting nailed doing 200 in Rachel's Porsche
• Pulled over by small town cops in my racing Porsche
• Bribing the police in Mexico
• Outrunning the police by using a truck convoy as cover
• Audi TT vs. Audi TT racing
• Lame low-speed chase in the Vette

I have a whole bunch of other encounters that I couldn't find in my IAM archives that I'll write about when I get a chance… My monster truck has been in a few funny crashes (I ran over an old dude in a white Lincoln Town Car once), and I guess because it was my particularly reckless period, I got nailed for passing a guy in a ditch at 200 in my TT once, and then for racing through oncoming traffic past a police car. Someone remind me again how I'm not dead or in prison yet?

I'm here. I think I'm going on a walk in the forest today. Michael is cooking a giant feast. I have a lot of work to try and slip in and will try and get an update posted as soon as I can. My computer has just rebooted for no reason. I am worried about that…

Update: The reboot problem was fixed by a driver update on my wireless system.

First, if somehow you haven't seen the “George Bush doesn't care about black people“ clip, follow the link to download it. I was thinking about that statement and I think Kanye mostly missed the point when he blurted it out (although good for him for having the courage to not just read the cue cards like a good little performer). I actually think George Bush is one of the less racist people in right-wing politics… however, he is a classist, and it's classism that's the real problem in America.

Sure, there's a right-wing power structure that enacts policies that fan the flames of racism — but it's there only to distract from the real societal imbalance (the fact that money pools in very small pockets of the population, and stays there). When people misdiagnose America's problem as racism, any attempted cures are fighting the wrong battle… So if anyone tells you America is a racist culture, explain to them that racism is just a distraction from classism.

The concentrated assets (and power) that result from American classism have left the American people with an oligarchy and only the facade of democracy, full civil rights only for the top 1%, and a middle class that's rapidly decaying into the legions of impoverished lower classes. In addition to the direct injustice classism brings inside America, it's also classism that's going to cause America's downfall as those increasingly concentrated pools of assets become extranational and lose any patriotic duty they had to their homeland or its people. As America falls they loot it for what they can and move on to repeat the cycle on the next frontier.

Blah, blah, blah, eat the rich, blah blah blah.