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I visited my doctor last week, a pleasant chap called Dr. Foord, about a minor matter that I won’t bore you with.

It was a lovely spring morning, in globally-warmed late-January, so I decided to walk the two-thirds of a mile.

On my return walk, as I my flitted between random thoughts, I sensed a car slowing beside me and, still walking, turned my head. It was a police car and the passenger lowered his window, “excuse me sir.”

I stopped walking.

“Could you give me directions to the police station?”

“You have to be fucking kidding?” I said.

He looked over to his partner, who had a road map open on his lap, the sort of road map that tells you the approximate location of a town, as long as it is a big town, and turned back to me, “we aren’t from this area.”

“No shit. But you do have a police radio. And presumably cellphones. And perhaps, having embarked on this journey, you might have thought to call ahead and ask. Or did you just think you could drive into town and the police station it would be lit up like a Vegas casino? And if you, highly trained defenders of the law, can’t find it, what chance do we, the terrified populace, have, constantly in fear of hoodlums, brigands, hucksters, shysters, rapists and murderers. I put it to you office that you could not find your ass with both hands.”

I said all of this in my head, of course, and with my eyes, and silent though the communication was, it was perfectly understood.

“I have a good mind to get out of the car,” replied the cop, “club you to the ground with a baton, kick the crap out of you, then urinate on your prostate form.”

He said this with his eyes, of course, but it was perfectly understood.

Our respective positions thus established, I gave detailed directions to the police station and continued on my merry way.