Friday, January 21, 2005

Whose peers you talkin' about, Willis?

Over at my daughter's blog, she rants about jury duty. I've been called for jury duty three times, and was selected once.

The two times I was not selected, I suspect it was because I was the only person in the courtroom who had bathed that day. Oh, and possibly my statement that "people who drive drunk are no different than people who bring a loaded gun into a crowded McDonald's and wave it around." Added to the fact that I had a high school diploma and knew better than to say 'I seen him' . . . . .

The attorneys were more offended than the suspects. I know why, too.

The third time, I was selected. I think they were desperate to get a full jury before the Second Coming. They were almost ready to go out into the streets and waylay passers-by, but then they realized that the last prospective jurer had not shown up, so they telephoned him at his job down at the Pizza Hut and made him come down to the courthouse, asked him if he, personally, drank a lot, and when he said 'yes,' they had their man.

The trial had to do with a drunken road-murder. I call it 'murder' because that was what it was.

Two guys were so stinkin' drunk, they were driving their truck down the wrong lane of a narrow two-lane highway. They met a van head-on, and murdered the driver, the father of a family.

The trial was not to determine that a terrible wrong had been committed; it was to determine which of the two drunks was the driver. You see, their truck was pretty much held together by duct tape and bondo and a lot of rusty lace. The impact disintegrated it, and both drunks were thrown across the road. Neither could remember who was driving at the time.

The drunks' lawyer had made all kinds of diagrams of the accident scene. Diagrams of the interior of the truck. Diagrams of where the two drunks landed after the crash. Lots of arrows and signs and information about logistics of a thrown object going X miles per hour. . . . I looked at the diagrams but none of them really proved anything to me. I was more interested in the pictures of the two drunks as they were being loaded into the ambulance.

I voted for the guy with the steering-wheel-shaped bruise on his stomach.

The other drunk just had massive head wounds from going through the empty window-frame and filleting himself on the hood ornament.

Please don't assume that I am against drinking. I'm not. But when someone drinks and then gets behind the wheel, I consider them a potential killer, and a danger to society, and a blithering idiot.

I'm not going anywhere else tonight. I wish we had some vodka. Oh, and I made enough cookies last night for ALL of you. Come on over. Bring vodka.

Belle loves shoes. She loves to buy shoes for herself, and lately she's been buying them for me. She's a goooood daughter. I've told her that all her life, and I hope she believes it. She's an awesome daughter. She really is. Plus, she's hilarious. And very, very intelligent. Even when she forgets to wear a coat on a day like today, and phones me from the Union where she's arguing with an ATM machine and shivering, and telling me all about how she had to scrape the ice off her windshield with an empty plastic pop bottle because she had no window scraper. That's my girl.

She did say it was easier after she took the cap off the bottle.

The bookstore had a huge table full of bargain books; but as I looked through them it soon became obvious why these books were not sold at full-price earlier.

How awful, when even the bargain table and a red sticker can't get someone to read your book. My heart hurts for these authors, who worked so hard and had such high hopes, and now their book is stacked ceiling-high on the $1.99 table at Barnes and Noble, and the stack gets no shorter with the passing days.

Why do I read such intense meaning into everything? I even cry at movies I've seen two dozen times already. I mean, I KNOW it's going to be all right; why do I still cry?

We got behind a bubble-head old-chick-dye-job-bad perm- driver in a goldish-brown geezer-Cad on the way home tonight. She was going, oh, maybe 25 in a 60 zone. I called her names from behind the anonymity of closed doors and windows. Creative, interesting, descriptive names. I was an English major.

Isn't that mean? I think it's fueled by fear. I want you all to promise me that if I EVER fit that description, you will poison my Margarita and bury me in the back yard.

Sometimes, I want to run away and never look back. Fortunately, most times I know just how lucky I am, and I want to nestle in and never go out. The average helps make me interesting.

Jury duty. I used to think that "a jury of one's peers" was an awesome thing indeed. Now, it just scares me. "Peers?" The peers of a drunk? The peers of a murderer? Illiterate "peers?" Peers on the same social scale would think driving drunk a natural and cool thing! I'm confused. I need some vodka to go with these cookies.

Also, the cat's breath is really grossing me out tonight. He must have brought down and devoured a squirrel or something while we were gone. I'm putting him out. It's worse than a baked-bean fart.