Special Interest

Bad Bunny Moments in Dakota
By Doc Logger

Dear Editorbeing,

This article is submitted by Charles Herriot who got extraordinarily lucky with the tranquilizer gun and chained Doc Logger to the keyboard long enough to crank out this epistle.

Roll da flic, Frank

Dear Reverend Visage,

I had to get home from San Francisco and there was no way in hell I was gonna fly. It's not the terrorists I'm worried about, it's the fear that in mid-air, somewhere over Chadron, Nebraska, the airline that I've selected will go bankrupt. How does that work? I mean, do they just shut off the engine and tell everyone that the trip is over? And the plastic smiling stewardess with Missouri drawl says what? "Ya'll mind your step now. It's a 39,000 foot drop there darlin'." So I picked up SERIOUS wheels, what with the turbo-charger, the nitro-methanol injector, and the entire Dadawa CD collection. It was a pretty uneventful trip until I landed in Dakota.

I learned a number of things last night as I drove through the badlands of Dakota. (One of things I learned was how to spell "Dakota" which is probably a good thing. I had a sense that another misspelled "Dakota" would cause Julia to run screaming for a quote from a dictionary.) One of the things I learned last night is that you can't be too careful when you drive with a tubful of freshly cut carrots nestled into crushed ice. With 6,500 gigawatt coffee in your veins, you pretty much have to replace beta-carotene at enormous rates because dilated pupils cause a certain amount of sensory overload on the optic nerves. I discovered that crime is everywhere and that evil bands of jackrabbits roamed the badlands, waiting patiently for someone to drive by with a tubfull of carrots. The rabbits denied that they were rabbits of course, and came disguised as Dakota Highway Patrol police but I could sense from their twitching noses that were really rabbits. As soon as they shone their flashlights into the car, you could see their eyes widen in amazement at the mothering HUGE tub of carrots sitting in the passenger seat. (It was all perfectly legal, the tub of carrots was wearing a seatbelt.)

The cop-heart isn't genetically capable of stopping a car at 2am in the morning which is loaded to the gunnels with carrots. There are places out beyond the weird curve that their cop-heart minds can't fathom. This is a mercy, because after casually mentioning that I'd been clocked at 174 mph, they plum forgot all about giving me a ticket as we stood in the ghostly moonlight and discussed the carrot comprehension problem that they were having. "Are those real carrots?" asked one of the patrolmen.

"Sure. Try one. I don't look like the kind of person who'd be driving with synthetic carrots do I?" The officer munched on the tasty goodness of a carrot and opined that it certainly was one damned fine carrot - the real McCoy - Mother Nature's proudest tuber.

"I don't guess you can grow carrots around these parts," I allowed while pointing to the arid moonscape punctuated by Janthina scrub and pin-cushion cactus. Anyway, we stood there, out in the moonlight, and discussed carrots pretty much for 20 solid minutes, and even the other officer let slip his rabbit disguise and partook of a few. As we said our goodnights and I gently ran up through all six gears to get back up to light-speed, I shouted "Hey rabbits. Don't mess with me. I'm armed with carrots and I know how to use them." I have a sense that there are still two patrolmen out there in the Dakota sagebrush arguing with each other about whether they had just stopped a guy for speeding and ended up having a whole conversation about carrots. I've been keeping score. So far, I've been pulled over 13 times and haven't actually been given a ticket for speeding yet. I've got 4 WARNINGS, 3 cute little booklets about state traffic laws, and.. check this out - a gift certificate for 6 free donuts to compensate me for the inconvenience of having been stopped.

Visage, I haven't even gotten to the Chautauqua part of this message and already I can sense that your mind is having a few bad bunny moments. Take deep breaths. Think about going on a date with Madeline Albright. There, is your mind not sharply in focus? I just knew it would be. As the nightly news is filled with the usual lies from the military about their "precision" bombing and the effectiveness of their campaign in Afghanistan and I try to withhold my despair while poor George Dubya cures the economic woes by adjuring us to "go shopping." It is not that the world got any different on September 11th, it's just that the horror finally came home. The same military, the same politicians, and the same sanctimonious country stood idly by while a million Rwandans were slaughtered and they did nothing. Evil, apparently, does not exist unless it visits the World Trade Center or The Pentagon. As an observer from the frozen tundra to the north, I am largely cynical about the flag-waving rhetoric that seems to surround the latest US adventure. If it had been spawned by a call to decency as opposed to revenge it might have been easier to swallow.

After a year of fruitlessly bombing the desert, the only legacy we will keep is a new and ugly approach to liberty in the US, and particularly in Canada where politicians are quick to intrude in the lives of their subjects. Warrantless searches, detention without trial, and a government whom most of us wouldn't trust further than we could throw them - these are the charming intrusions that our leaders have lined up in the name of protecting us from ourselves.

I'd write more, Visage, but your secretary seems to be having some sort of crisis. She's waving a "Hubert Humphrey For President" placard at me. This is all very strange considering that it has only been a few minutes since I unleashed the rabid lemmings. As the good and decent people that we are, I think we should send her to work in a coven of sociologists.

Regards
Doc Logger
Furlang Island,
South Pacific