I’ve been appalled by my inability to handle the changes taking place in our household right now. I’ve always felt I had a firm sense of self and purpose, but it seems a minor road block has popped up, and I’ve come unglued and descended into an existential glut. I haven’t been working on the things I should be working on, and I’m completely distracted.

Anyhow, here’s a picture. I’m back to taking pictures as a way to focus myself.

While reading an article in Salon about the FBI’s plan to “profile” Muslims, I was intrigued by this paragraph:

The fiasco of the prosecution of the Detroit Four should also have been instructive. These four Arab men apparently had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, having moved into an apartment in southwest Detroit recently vacated by a man suspected of al-Qaida ties. The prosecution alleged that innocent vacation videotapes of places such as Disneyland found in the apartment were part of a terror plot, and that vague doodles in a notebook depicted targets abroad such as a Jordanian hospital and Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey.

It’s interesting how innocent objects, videos, words can become questionable, or take on a sinister meaning depending on who’s inspecting them, and what that person’s looking for. It made me think of a run-in I had with the cops ten years ago, on Thanksgiving Day. It’s not as serious as the experience of the men from the Salon article, but it has its own little lesson on preconceived notions. I was with my then-boyfriend. He was the reason for the run-in, but not because he had done anything wrong. We had been to his parents’ house, my mom’s house, and my dad’s house in celebration of the holiday. We were on our way back to my mom’s house when we decided to stop at United Dairy Farmers (UDF) to get some ice cream. It was around 9:30pm. We walked in, put in our order. I remember laughing at the generous amount of ice cream the clerk gave us. When we left, we noticed a van parked next to my little Toyota. One of the men in the van was staring intently at my boyfriend…so much so that when we were seated in the car, my boyfriend made a comment along the lines of “what is his problem?” We laughed it off, pulled out and drove off in the direction of my mom’s house. Just as we were about to turn onto my mom’s street, a police car pulled up behind us and the red and blue lights started flashing. I pulled over. I didn’t know why he was stopping us. Maybe I was speeding? I didn’t think so, but I hadn’t been paying close attention either. Two officers walked up to the car, one on each side, and asked both of us to step out of the vehicle. This request seemed unusual, but we had nothing to hide, therefore we had nothing to worry about (oh, the naïveté).

A couple of cops took my boyfriend a few yards away to talk to him. I noticed the van that had been parked next to us at the UDF was here with the police; it turned out they were police too. Another officer asked if he could search my vehicle. “Go ahead,” I told him, again, fearing nothing because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I spoke to the cop standing next to me. I can’t remember if I initiated the conversation, or if she asked me whether I knew why we were pulled over. When I said I was clueless as to why we were stopped, she said we had been reported to the police while at the UDF because my boyfriend perfectly fit the description of someone who had robbed a gas station earlier in the day. Workers in the area had been told to be on the lookout for a white male wearing a black, leather jacket with fringe. Yes, you read that right: a black, leather jacket with fringe. My boyfriend wore just such a jacket. I hated that fuckin’ thing. I always thought it was gaudy. I attributed his love for flashy clothes to his being a musician and showman. He could certainly dress to bring attention to himself, and he succeeded in this case—that UDF clerk probably hit the under-the-counter panic button as soon as he saw the black fringe swaying with each step my boyfriend took. I mean, how often is one told to keep an eye out for someone wearing a black, leather jacket with fringe? The whole situation was ridiculous. No wonder the clerk was so generous with his ice cream. He probably thought we were going to rob him, and wanted to keep us preoccupied with the good stuff.

When the officer told me this, it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. I knew the accusation was absurd, and we had plenty of people to support our alibis, so I relaxed a little. I heard one of the officers brow-beating my boyfriend into having his picture taken with a Polaroid (“Listen, you match the robber’s description from the black leather jacket, to the curly hair, to the baby blue eyes. You can either have your picture taken here and be on your way, or we’ll take you down to the station and do it there”).

After rooting around in my car, one of the officers declared it to be free and clear of any questionable materials. Of course it is, I wanted to say. I was losing my patience. However, while standing next to my car, waiting for my boyfriend to be released, something occurred to me. Only three or four days earlier I had cleaned my car, and thrown out a lot of accumulated trash. Two items I removed during my cleaning frenzy: a black ski mask and a baseball bat. The ski mask was used when we went sled-riding. The baseball bat…well, I’m not sure why I had one in my car. But it wasn’t for robbing banks–that much I know. I can only imagine how complicated the situation would have become had the police searched my car and found those two items in the backseat. Not because there was anything inherently wrong with either of the items, but because the officer was searching the car with the idea that one of us had robbed a gas station earlier.

I’m at work reading research articles on invasive species in South Florida. I am perplexed by the persistent use of “impact” as a (transitive) verb in the research documents I’ve read and edited. I’ve changed it during some of my editing opportunities, only to have it reinserted by my boss, so it must be lingo he prefers. Maybe it’s a science thing. Anyway, I’m reading about Green Iguanas in Florida, and the Green Iguana population boom that occurred in one state park after a number of raccoons were removed. This line made me giggle: The 2001-2002 Raccoon removal program evicted 263 animals.

The raccoons were evicted. I have a mental image of a raccoon leaving the park with his hobo bag dangling from a stick propped against his shoulder. I hear my little hobo raccoon saying in Cartman’s voice, “Screw you guys, I’m outta here.” Of course, evicted sounds better than euthanized, which is what actually happened.

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On another note, is it me or is it him? How do I tell? Maybe it’s never me and it’s always him (them)? I’m talking about the author of a book I’m reading. With all the talk about buyouts going on, I’ve been feeling low, and decided to focus some energy on learning about Ezra Pound. Now, I would consider myself a generous, patient reader. If something is not clear to me, I’ll keep reading with the assumption that as I progress, the pieces will fall into place. Well, this biography is testing my patience. Not the content so much as the writing style. I don’t have the book in front of me, so I can’t give an example of the work, but it strikes me as trying too hard to be clever. You see, I just want to learn about Ezra Pound and enjoy the process of learning about Ezra Pound. I leave it to the biographer to choose how he/she presents Pound’s story, and I’m willing to do my part and be an active reader. However, this bio has me asking “is it all going to be written like this?” and I find myself thumbing through the book to preview other sections. Eventually, I put the biography down and moved on to a book by Dinty Moore. Perhaps I’m not in the right state of mind to appreciate a book like the bio on Pound (ie: a patient state of mind). Then I wonder whether I worked hard enough to “get it.” (Hence the “is it me or is it him?” question).