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white privilege near Ramapo
Thursday, September 1 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I put in a nearly-full day in my remote workplace, stopping occasionally to socialize with Gretchen and Andrea. At some point this afternoon, Gretchen gave Andrea a tour of the upstairs, including the laboratory. I haven't ever seen anyone so overwhelmed by the laboratory's fine-grained visual spectacle. Later I joked to Gretchen that what she had done was something of what Larry Wilmore would refer to as a "black react." Then I thought about it further and realized the two people whose had reacted the most intensely on seeing the laboratory for the first time had both been of mostly-African origin.
In the mid-afternoon, shortly before a phone call I knew I would be having with a co-worker, I drank a cup of kratom tea (containing, as always, a tablespoon of finely-ground leaves from the kratom tree). I recently learned that as soon as the end of September, kratom would be joining marijuana and LSD as a Schedule 1 drug, that is, the worst of the worst with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." From personal experience, I can say that kratom is not a reliably-pleasant drug and I've never felt any craving for it. Though occasionally it's been helpful at providing mental focus or enough empathy to overcome my normally-misanthropic set-point, I often experience pangs of nausea and dysphoria in the late stages of a kratom high. For these reasons, I won't miss it much when it's gone. Of course, I object on principle to the government telling us how we may alter our minds. While society has come a long way from where it was in, say, the tasteless, repressive, vaguely-fascist armpit of the 1980s, the fact that drugs are still being classified as Schedule 1 shows that we're not yet in a post-drug-war utopia.
Today's dose of kratom gradually kicked in while I replaced a rotten ten-foot plank on the laboratory deck. The plank had been made of pressure-treated wood, though evidently the application of preservative in that particular plank had been insufficient, and rot had managed to attack and degrade it over its twelve years of being exposed to the elements. None of the other planks on the deck had been affected by rot, though a little of the rot had spread into the underlying two by six joist beneath where the rot in the plank had been the worst. This suggested that the rot itself was a strain that had evolved some tolerance for the preservative. To keep that rot from spreading, I dug it out of the joist as best I could and then poured a toxic brew of wood-reservative into the resulting void. Finally, before installing the new plank, I covered all of the exposed top surface of the joist with roofing tar.
As I was finishing that up, I got that call I was expecting, and by then the kratom had me in a generous mindset. For some reason, sometimes people in the departments that interact with IT feel apologetic for asking us to do things for them, failing (it seems) to realize that we have to do something with our workdays. And the truth of the matter is that I rather enjoy working on the tools that I build for this young woman's department.
Towards the end of the workday, I got bogged down in a swamp of baroque poorly-documented code designed to build a SQL statement for a search. By then, Gretchen was ansy to begin our planned roadtrip to her parents' house in Silver Spring. I loaded what I needed onto my laptop and packed some clothes in a cloth grocery bag while Gretchen (who had done her packing earlier) loaded podcasts onto a microSD card. We told the dogs that they "get to come" and they dutifully piled into the backseat of the Subaru (which we would be taking for reasons that will eventually be clear) and hugged Andrea goodbye. She'd be housesitting in our absence.
Our drive southbound seemed to be proceeding uneventfully when, just north of the Ramapo travel plaza, a police car came up behind Gretchen and turned on its flashers. We pulled over and so did the police car. Had we been black, we would've been terrified. But we're middle-aged white people, so we were merely annoyed. What the fuck could be wrong? Gretchen hadn't been speeding.
The cop gradually made his way to our car, shining his flashlight intrusively as he approached, eventually arriving on my (the passenger) side. He asked where we were going, and Gretchen explained that we were headed to her parents' house in Maryland for the weekend. "You packed pretty light for that," the cop observed, immediately dispelling any goodwill we had for him. He soon explained that he'd seen Gretchen handling her cellphone and that was the reason we'd been pulled over. Evidently the law is that a driver must never touch his or her cellphone while driving. Normally this would be a hard thing for a cop to witness, but at night it might be possible given the intense light a smartphone screen produces. The cop took our insurance, registration, and Gretchen's license info and went back to his car. That process always takes an unexpectedly long time, in this case giving Gretchen an me plenty of time to arrive at a consensus that this particular cop was a dick. What business was it of his how much we'd packed for a weekend visit to Gretchen's parents? Eventually the cop returned to our car and gave Gretchen a ticket for her cellphone offense. She said something mildly combative about it, and then I piled on by saying it was "fucking ridiculous." "Excuse me?" the cop said, an additional layer of menace appearing in his voice. "Nothing," I said. "Excuse me?" he said again. It sounded like he wanted to dance in the way that cops get to, particularly when they pull over African Americans. I haven't been talked to that way by an authority figure since high school gym class. But Gretchen defused it by saying I'd been talking to her. Afte the cop was gone, she said, "You absolutely can't talk to a cop that way." I could see her point, but, as I explained later, I'd felt empowered by her presence. I would've never spoken that way had it just been me pulled over on the lonely shoulder of an interstate highway.
We drove into Ramapo so I could urinate. Interestingly, most of the other travelers there looked to be ultra-orthodox Jews.
I continued the driving southward from Ramapo. Somewhere in the heart of New Jersey, Gretchen suggested that we stay in a motel for the night and resume our driving in the morning, a roadtrip interruption that is never a bad idea. After doing some research on her smartphone, Gretchen directed me to the Red Rood Inn in Bellmawr. She'd read that Red Roof Inn is pet-friendly, though there was a possible issue with the fact that we had two dogs instead of one. But when Gretchen walked into the Red Roof lobby to inquire, the person at the desk said that dogs had somehow been forbidden from hotels in all of Bellmawr; this meant going to the Econo Lodge next door would be similarly-fruitless. We were directed to the next township over; supposedly we'd have more luck at the Days Inn in Runnermede. But when we got there, Gretchen was told that they too didn't accept dogs. At that point we gave up completely, not bothering to check what the situation was at the fancy La Quinta next door. We were only a couple hours from our destination at this point, so driving there seemed like the most realistic course of action.
We arrived at Gretchen's parents' house a little after 1:30am.
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