Sometimes You Gotta Wonder

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but it is definitely worth sharing. There is a “gentleman” in town who has been busted for drunk driving several times. He lost his license and is no longer able to drive cars and trucks. He figured out that you don’t need a license to drive a MediChair. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with them a MediChair is a small, battery powered four wheeled scooter about the size of a shopping cart. They are generally used by the elderly and people with mobility problems. As I mentioned earlier this man uses it even though he is healthy because you don’t need a drivers license to operate it. He has driven it drunk several times and he has received a couple of warnings. Well several weeks ago this person who must have mush for brains got good and ripped and he called up the police station and said “I’m doing it again, what are you gonna do about it?”. He then got on the MediChair and he drove it around town waiting to get caught by a cop. He did and he got charged with operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. He was convicted.

A couple of other notes: He has ::shudder:: reproduced. The kid lives with the mother. She has the annoying habit of driving down sidewalks at high speed on her bicycle towing her very yappy dog on a leash. She also imbibes and since she lacks alternate transportation she drives her bike to the liquor store to buy beer and return her bottles. So picture a woman riding down the sidewalk on a bike with a dog being towed along while the bike driver is carrying a 12 bottle case of beer.

Momma is also a piece of work. She also has a fondness for the grape and she also has a MediChair. In February she got hit on her chair because she darted in front of a truck who was driving straight into the rising sun. He didn’t get charged because he did no wrong, and the cops didn’t charge her because it would have been adding insult to injury.

I find the whole thing sad, but also funny. The person I pity is the child. What kind of future is he going to have when all his role models are so severely f****d up.

Keith

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I used to work at a convinence store/gas station. We had a fellow who stopped in every day (frequently several times a day) to get his booze and smokes. His license had been suspended after countless times being caught DUI. So, he drove a riding mower instead.

Now this store was in God’s Country, out in the middle of BFE. He would hop on the mower, and drive MILES down a country highway to come into town. Rain, hail, flooding . . . nothing stopped him.

I asked him about it one day, and he cut lose with a long, obcsenity-laden rant on unfair drunk-driving laws and people who couldn’t “mind their own buisness” and let a man “who drinks a little now and then” drive a car in peace. His last experiance behind the wheel involved a bottle of vodka that he couldn’t wait to get home to drink. He crashed his car into a tree, flipped it, crawled out of the car (bringing the bottle out with him. “Didn’t spill a drop,” he bragged to his cronies.) A passing State Patrol car found the wreckage, and found the man staggering up the road, bottle clutched in his hand, headed toward a friend’s house who owned a tow truck.

The man was livid. He hadn’t hurt anyone, he said, so how dare they take away his license? Why not wait till you gte home to drink? I asked, and he looked at me like I was an idiot. The Statie stopped in the store frequently as well, and I mentioned the mower to him. He sighed, said that they were aware of it, and what was he supposed to do? Confinscate the mower? He paid the tickets every time he was caught.

Someone must have gotten through to him, because he stopped riding the mower. Instead, he would walk down to his brother’s house and borrow a horse. He would take his nephew along with him to hold onto the horse in the side lot while he went into the store. I spoke with the brother, and asked him if he had any misgivings. He said that the horse was smarter than his brother, and knew how to stay out of the way of oncoming traffic, and that the horse knew its way back in case his brother was too drunk to find his way home. He also thought the presence of his son might keep his brother in line.

After falling off of the horse a few times, the man gave up on this means of transportation, and now relies on friends to either drive him to the store, or to pick up the necessary items.

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Sounds like the citizens of any of a number of small towns I have lived in. It’s a sad, sad world we live in when you can take away someone’s license to drive, even take away their Medichair, but their kids are subjected to any number of abuses before the law will intervene.

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Update: i saw him driving his Medichair today, Yup he still has it. His son now has one -he’s about 13 years old. They were weaving in and out of traffic with no regard for life and limb. Sigh
Keith