I should have known better than to go into a store with its burglar alarm blaring, but it was definitely a coffee morning and we were out in the WC, so it was a necessary purchase.  Aside from the alarm nearly shaking my fillings out, there wasn't much of an incident in the store, but once I walked outside and continued down the parking lot, I came face to face with a county sheriff who said "take your hands out of your pockets."

Now since I've never been stopped by a cop like this, and being that it is a coffee morning and my mind was as foggy as the morning air, and since my hands were not in my pockets I was notably confused.  "Excuse me?" I said.  "Take your hands out of your pockets!"  He got out of the car menacingly, using his door as a barrier.  Again since my hands were not in my pockets I just dropped the sack with the coffee in it and just left my hands at my sides.

"What's going on inside," he said.

"The alarm was going off.  I think the manager was shutting it off."  Which was the case, as the manager was up at the front fiddling with it (apparently to no avail.)

"Did you notice anything suspicious?"  Not really knowing what to do with my hands, I fumbled with my earphone cord, but decided that might look too suspicious. 

"The alarm was going off when I went in."

The cop then talked on his walkie-talkie.  As I stood there, kind of like a deer in headlights, a black guy walked by on the sidewalk a few yards away.  He gave me a knowing glance and I wondered how many times he had been stopped like this in his life.  No doubt quite often just for being black.

"So do you live around here," the cop said still holding his walkie-talkie to his ear.

"I teach over at the Community College."

"Oh. When's your first class? "

"9:00. I've got plenty of time."  I mean the guy was just doing his job, and I don't particularly blame him for being suspicious of someone coming out of a building with the alarm blaring.  It is times like this, of course, that one considers the idea of order vs. social chaos and it seems reasonable to be stopped.  I had much the same attitude when I was selected for random security screening flying out of Austin.

"Sorry about this."

They have a job to do, and it is good they are doing it, even though it might inconvenience me, or my name gets on some list because they detected some strange residue on my back pack, or some cop thinks I'm out and about robbing the local neighborhood Walgreens.  Perhaps it is my month for random run-ins with the law. I suppose it had to happen some time. I could have gotten pissy, but what's the point of that? He would always be right and had a gun.

The cop's radio squawked.  "Thank you sir," he said hopping in his car and sped down the parking lot.  I grabbed my sack containing the coffee and a water filter and didn't look back as I headed off into the fog.

Four things used to happen around my birthday:

1) The Super Bowl

2) Good old SLC inversion

3) Presidential Inaugurations

4) Martin Luther King Day

5) Sundance Film Festival

A) Now one of these things doesn't occur around my birthday anymore, and I'll leave you to guess which one. Most of them weren't even close and weren't all that interesting to watch save a couple.

B) Another of these things took a long hard fight to be made official and not only in backward states like Utah.

C) The other still occurs with perhaps more intensity than when I was a child, but nothing can beat the whopper we had in 1983 when we had nearly 90 days of it and my mother commented that we she felt like a mole.

D) Another one, well it keeps on happening every four years, and I suppose one can thank either the system, American democratic values, or maybe just pure dumb luck for it. Having lived through two of Reagan's, I don't even bat an eye at this one.

E) A friend of mine once let Kevin Smith use his cell phone. He talked about it for months. I think he still has it enshrined somewhere.

Match the letter to the number as a comment for your special birthing-day surprise.

Well my hands have been far from idle. The beginning of the semester has been a torquer, a term that I seem to babble out once in a while. It is kind of fun to go a week and then have a day off, especially after the long vacation. It is enough to make one feel like the idle rich. In my case, it is more like the idle lower middle class.

"Idle." That's a fine word. Cars idle and are just fine--seemingly poised for action. People idle and they are lazy. Setting the "lazy" on a car would be fun, I should think.