What the Fuck Happened?

What the Fuck Happened?

The ride was fucking brutal.

BRUTAL.

Look, it wasn't even that long of a ride. Three hundred miles or so? But that was across southeastern New Mexico, and goddamnit, it was long and hard. And yeah, I know that's not normally a bad thing, except when you're riding across the goddamned desert.

We came to El Paso for the weekend. It was a last-second trip, but you know what? I like El Paso, and we had business here, so why the fuck not?

I tried to make the trip as short as possible by pinning the throttle and traveling at, um... triple digits.

I mean the speed limit.

But if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you probably know that I like to fiddle-fuck around at gas stops. I like to have a snack. Have a drink. Dump cold water all over my fucking head and shirt. Fill my helmet with cold water to cool it down. Write a letter to my third cousin Eric... by hand. Finish my fucking cross-stitch. Basically, I stay off the fucking motorcycle for as long as humanly possible.

So any gains made by my somewhat liberal interpretation of the speed-limit “laws” quickly fucking dissipate when I stop to fill the tank. We didn't roll into El Paso until about 8:30.

I don't drink anymore, but Dawna does. And holy fucking hell, Texas. For a state that likes to wrap itself in liberty and generally thinks government should stay the fuck out of our houses, you people sure don't mind some weird fucking regulations around the sale of alcohol.

Because liquor stores close at 9 p.m.

And they're closed on Sunday.

So we arrived just late enough that Dawna couldn't buy liquor to take home. She could still go sit in a fucking bar and drink until one or two in the morning, depending on the establishment, but buy a bottle from a liquor store, take it somewhere private, and consume it there?

Sorry. The government has determined that the clock says no. 

So we settled for beer.

Again, no biggie for me. I don't fucking drink anymore. But I actually believe in liberty and keeping the government out of our lives except where absolutely necessary, and this is fucking unnecessary.

The sale of alcohol is still just a fucking sale. There are already laws saying kids can't fucking drink. There are already laws against public intoxication under circumstances where someone may endanger themselves or another person. There are already laws against driving while intoxicated. So fucking hell, how many layers of laws do we need for this shit? 

This is one of the things that drives me fucking insane about government. Life getting uncomfortable? Regulate it. Somebody doing something you don't like? Regulate it. Feeling unsafe? Regulate it. Somebody, somewhere, might conceivably make a shitty decision?

For fuck's sake, we'd better pass another law.

And somewhere during this particular train of thought, my brain apparently decided we weren't talking about Texas liquor stores anymore.

Because then I started thinking about cars.

Specifically, all the fucking technology we're increasingly putting into cars in the name of protecting us from ourselves. Congress has already directed NHTSA to develop a federal safety standard that would require new passenger vehicles to include advanced drunk and impaired-driving prevention technology. NHTSA has been researching what that technology could actually look like and how such a standard could work. 

And I fucking hate the underlying philosophy.

Fuck you. Fuck them.

I should be able to drive fucking tired.

Period.

If I have a three-year-old dying in my backseat because he sleepwalked in the middle of the fucking night and fell down the stairs, I'm not waiting for the police and a fucking ambulance if I believe I can get him to help faster myself. I'm fucking going.

And I assure you, good sirs and madams, that I am not asking a fucking computer for permission first.

If I actually hurt somebody because I drove impaired, distracted, exhausted, drunk, or otherwise incapable of safely operating the vehicle, then we already have laws addressing the consequences of that behavior. Enforce them.

But I don't want my fucking car making moral decisions for me.

That's the line I keep coming back to.

Technology should serve the person operating the machine. If technological advances create features drivers actually want, then people will fucking buy them. Manufacturers will compete to make them better. Eventually the useful shit becomes commonplace because people decided it was useful.

We don't need government mandating every fucking feature because somebody in Washington has decided we're incapable of assessing risk for ourselves.

And that's where this becomes the same fucking argument I've apparently been having over and over lately.

Liberty isn't always safe.

Liberty isn't always efficient.

Liberty doesn't guarantee that people will make good decisions.

In fact, liberty pretty much guarantees that occasionally somebody is going to make a spectacularly fucking stupid decision.

That's part of being free.

The alternative is constructing a society in which government continuously tries to anticipate every possible stupid thing a human being might do and then builds another law, another regulation, another sensor, another algorithm, another fucking guardrail around it.

Fuck all of that.

It's wrong.

It's not fucking right.

It's fucking absurd.

Interesting that what started as a reflection on a brutal motorcycle ride across southeastern New Mexico with the woman I love somehow became a rant about Texas liquor laws, government regulation, vehicle technology, and the philosophical boundaries of individual liberty.

In the words of that one guy in Step Brothers: What the fuck happened?