This past week started with my wife driving herself to the emergency room from what started as a routine doctor’s visit. She’d been ill for a week, and seemed to be getting worse over the weekend. She suspected an infection, probably a urinary tract infection, but it wasn’t responding to the normal treatments. So she went to go see her doctor.

For whatever reason the doctor decided it might actually be a heart attack. I’m certainly no doctor, and my wife told me later that some of the symptoms she was showing could be construed as a heart attack (rapid heart rate, weakness, sweats) as well as her dehydration she also seemed to be suffering from. So she drove herself to the ORMC emergency room while techs checked her out (blood, an IV to work on the dehydration, another ECG). It was while she was checking in she called me while I was at work. That’s when I closed up and bugged out.

When I got there we were met by a mutual friend. I left after about a half hour to grab a bagel for a late lunch. On the way back I was asked by a someone I’d not met before what that camera was I was carrying and it if was mine. I was already annoyed that this was an unnecessary visit, so I told the person it was, and this was the second time I’d walked in with it. I then turned and left.

While sitting in the room with my wife and our friend one of Orlando’s Finest came in an read me the riot act about having a camera in the ER. Something about HIPPA (which I knew about) and if I took any photos they deemed improper that they would make me erase them. I bit my lip (literally) and let idiot law enforcement do his thing. When he was done blustering he turned and left. I stayed about a half hour longer, and then left to go home and look after the animals as well as get the house straightened for my wife. She finally drove herself home about 5pm.

The next day was the first Tuesday in November, Election Day. We’d both filled out our mail-in ballots but hadn’t mailed them in, with the idea we’d drop them off that morning at our polling place. Unfortunately for us the rules had been changed such that we couldn’t have done that. Since Judy was still ill, I took both sealed ballots with the idea I’d drop them off. Instead, I had to drive away from our polling place and drop them off in downtown Orlando at the Supervisor of Elections on 119 W. Kaley. I dropped them off on the way into work. For all the good our votes did in the long run.

All these little events, my wife’s ER visit, the cop’s belligerence, and the arbitrary change of the voting rules, have all contributed to my growing unease with society in general.

When I was a kid in Atlanta I grew up with a much healthier attitude towards the police. They were seen as a vital part of the community and to be trusted. But over the decades, especially after 9/11, I’ve come to view the police as increasingly adversarial, to be avoided if at all possible. They have grown increasingly more armed and more powerful as a consequence, with overly broad discretion when to use it. That’s supported on the legal side by district attorneys who push the law way outside and beyond any reasonable boundaries. An excellent example of governmental legal overreach is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 being applied to a box of fish (literally) that was dumped by a fisherman, and whom the federal government wants to prosecute under Sarbanes-Oxley because the fisherman, who poured undersized red snapper back into the ocean, supposedly destroyed a “tangible object”, in this case the fish, that was used in a federal investigation. I personally think it’s pure unadulterated bullshit because Sarbanes-Oxley was originally meant to keep another Enron from occurring again. Instead the feds have twisted this law into something the original drafters of the law never intended. And that’s just one example.

Today my attitude towards the law as practiced in this country is to avoid at all cost, and ot offer neither aid or comfort to them. They are the enemy, as much as any external enemy such as Russia, China, Iran, or ISIL.

And then what my wife went through (what we both went through) so that some very expensive medical tests could be conducted “just to be sure.” I’m beginning to believe that our aging flesh is being used as a “monetization” opportunity by Big Medical/Big Pharma.

And if you think that all these changes to the voting laws are to make sure our voting is more “secure,” think again. No one has offered any evidence in this state of any voting fraud that the changes are supposed to “correct.” Instead, it’s meant to make it as hard as possible for anyone to exercise the right to vote.