Thursday

grumble

Yesterday, awesome. Today, piece of shit.

Whether I am describing myself or the world as it relates to me matters little.

Yesterday my wife took me to dinner and bought me a present for my impending birthday, which we will spend apart due to school and work obligations. Dinner was excellent and so forth; it made me forget the bad news given me by the dentist that morning completely. Even with the dental news, really a great day.

Today, I went to school, ruined a perfectly good oiling job because I wasn't paying attention (what is it when that happens? how can a guy fine tune his attention span?) which will take an entire afternoon to fix, partly because I'll have to change out the fluids in the cleaning machine because the rest of my class are lazy to do it. Oh sure, when the solutions are changed and nice and clean, there's a line out the door to clean watches, but try and get them to actually do it. So that sucks.

To deal with my frustration, I ran home, snatched the fishing stuff that was my gift from my wife, and hastened to the lake to cast my troubles away.

Tobacco is an insidious substance. It takes the place of other things that I've long forgotten about, and I still notice when an action I take would be one of those covered by the restorative properties of sweet, sweet nicotine. No, I didn't break down and buy any god-awful cigarettes. It might have behoved me to stop at the gas station, but I didn't. Fishing was to be one of the things that, like sleep, mends the ravelled sleeve of care. The order of the afternoon was clearly to look at water for a while.

Inner peace had yet to arrive when after three casts, I decided to change lures. Upon doing so, I looked over my shoulder and who should be there but a representative of Minnesota's version of the SS, the fucking DNR. Yeah, the first time I have ever seen one of these people and it's today, when I have put off buying a license. Can a guy get a freebie on a crummy day like today?

Of course not.

At this point my frown compounded, and I had to deal with a short guy on a power trip. I'll explain.

Phouketong Le, or something very similar to this, was the officer sent to me by Fortuna's wheel, and he proceeded to usher me to the parking lot, where he asked me to place my stuff in the back of a truck that could have towed the lake, had it been frozen solid, to a new location.

When he said to go ahead and put the stuff in the back of his truck I made sure to ask him if by doing so I was entering in to some slippery limbo, where because I had put it there at his casual request, it now belongs to him, along the lines of some slightly extra-legal entrapment. He answered in the negative, but not content to leave it at that, he swaggered in the way only four foot tall Hmong men can, and as close, punctuationwise, as possible, the following issued forth: "Am I going to confiscate your stuff?No. Do I have the authority to confiscate it?Absolutely."

He just haaaad to make sure that got slipped in there.

Then, for a second round of rhetorical infuration, he said "I'm not the new kid on the block." He obviously had every intention at this point, of continuing his shpeel, but I interrupted, "Nor did I imply that you were."

He didn't care for this, but for the most part ignored it, and continued to rant on about how long he had been with the department, even though it said it right there on his name tag, "[on board or whatever] Since 2000".

Yeah, you're really in charge, very authoritative, and did I mention how official and in charge you look in that exceedingly authoritative uniform, mister, sorry, OFFICER Phuket Le? Impressive!

So it was a shitty, expensive day.

And I recommend the lobster ravioli at Palomino with the Kenwood sauvignon blanc.

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