First on the short run list was going to the DMV to pay my license tags, which expire in three days.

It wasn’t too surprising to learn that the clerks were huddled inside, but we the unwashed public wouldn’t be allowed in without an appointment. I called the appointment number. It said there were three hundred callers in front of me. I stayed on the line.

But I didn’t waste the hold time. I went to fill the water jugs.

A minute after I pulled up to the machines, some other guy did too. We did our things. Finally his lonely extrovert ways got the better of him. He … admired my jugs. Where’d I get ’em? How much?

In fairness they are quite curvy and attractive. In case you are similarly smitten, the answers are that you get them at what we used to call the health food store, and it runs about twenty each for my sleek three-gallon model. Of course I have a matched pair. And that’s pretty reasonable considering what jugs normally cost. In these dark and sober days.

But my admirer was only getting warmed up. Soon he was preaching up a storm. It started with the evil unmarked FEMA cops bagging people off the street in Portland, and I was very much with him that far.

It didn’t take long to devolve into to weather control and the space program though–that’s how come he lived out in Sun Valley without public utilities–and by then I was looking for the exit.

As I was running he asked for my name and I told him. He said his was Justice.

I thought: Yeah maybe. I thought: Can I be Liberty?

Back in the car the DMV number was still ringing.

When I got back in the car with the coffee and the One Vanilla card at the minimart where there are always twice as many cars parked as there are people inside, what’s up with that, it was still ringing.

When I drove through for one jalapeno burger and one guacamole burger, it was still ringing.

But as I finished off my side of waffle fries, parked along the side road where the NPR station comes in clear, next to a temporary river caused by yet another broken water line, a little Julie finally answered.

I asked for an appointment. She said I couldn’t get one, for paying off tags or for anything else that I could do online.

I said so Julie. How do I pay cash online?

She said I couldn’t.

I said I knew. So this wasn’t a transaction I could do online after all, so how about an appointment?

She explained in a patient tone modulated for the Justices of this world that it wasn’t happening, Jack.

I did not preach, about how fucked up that is for people without cards. Which might include me, for all she knows. The fucking clerks are in there getting paid. Their bosses are keeping my fully masked ass out for absurd and ultimately classist reasons. Somebody somewhere is going to end up busted for expired tags by slackjawed cops at the other end of a broken system.

It won’t be me though.

I just paused fiercely, said Alright Then, and hung up.

Something something shithole countries. When I was ten or twenty or thirty, I never dreamed this world.

You don’t have to go out on any Justice limbs to be appalled, or concerned.

The Revolution starts now.