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A down-on-his-luck sailor spent too much money on a decrepit old 58 foot trawler. With a huge old wooden hull, it looked like
it would need somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand dollars in repairs and maintenance every 12 months just to keep it from
getting worse, which was way more than the old sailor had. The boat had gotten blown ashore during a storm and got beached.
I suggested to the owner that perhaps God didn’t want him to own a boat? “It’s not God that I’m fighting with, it’s Satan!” he
told me. I pointed out that it appeared that the rising tide and the wind were clearly responsible for grounding his old boat. “No,
that’s Satan’s agents that did that to me!” was his response. Uh…..okaaaaaayyyyy. Good luck with your boating adventures.

The PPD patrol officers had a special little quick-reference booklet that listed most of the traffic laws; it got updated by our
municipal court annually and it contained literally hundreds of traffic and criminal offenses. When I had citizens riding with
me I’d show them the book to watch their reactions when they saw just how many laws there were that could be broken. There
were also some pretty obscure ones in there, like “driving over a fire hose” and “advertising unlawful speed attained” and
“snowmobile DUI” and “theft of cable tv services” and “depositing of unwholesome substance” and “spectator at animal fight”
and “driving while embracing” which is what it’s called when two adults in the front seat decide to..you know…uh…

Motor vehicle collision on the highway: three cars had crashed into each other, making a mess of the road. I arrive with the aid
crews and some dude runs up to me waving his arms, yelling to me that I just “drove through the debris field” which in his
opinion was a cardinal sin. I found out later he had been a paramedic in some other jurisdiction, but got fired. Mostly likely
because he was an ass. I say that because he then told me where to move my patrol vehicle to; he didn’t like where I had parked
it. I pointed out to him that HIS parking job was the main problem; stopped on the wrong side of the road by the crashed cars
it was causing a significant amount of confusion and complicating the whole mess. After a brief yelling match I won and I made
him leave. Although he yelled back over his shoulder that I was doing everything wrong and people should listen to him more.