state of iowa vs. me - part one

This day has been a rotting halibut on my calendar. It has alarmed and depressed me for weeks but here it is and I enter the traffic violation east courtroom where I will need to answer to a school bus driver who says I passed him while his lights were flashing. I am clutching a carbon copy form the officers gave me a month ago when they were kind enough to visit my home and inform me of this invitation and it says 8:30 will my be my appointment time. I have arrived ten minutes early and I could have been earlier but I didn't want to appear too eager. Imagine my surprise when I find fourteen people waiting before me  and why I assumed I would have my own private appointment time shows my extreme ignorance in the ways of Lady Justice and her schedules.

The court clerk informs us that we will be seen in the order we checked in so I attempt to get comfortable on the hard wooden lawbreaker chair. I cast sideways looks at the other party-goers and I appear to be the only person outside the court clerk who is not wearing jeans, sweats or Green Bay Packer pajama bottoms. One disheveled young man has been told to remove his baseball cap and that was a mistake as he is sporting one hell of a case of greasy bedhead locks thereby increasing his guilty index by several points.

The clerk asks me how I will plead and I say not guilty and then I realize every citizen in this courtroom is also claiming to be not guilty. All of us are pure as driven snow responsible drivers and the victims of overly zealous police officers and lying GI Joe school bus drivers.  It just makes me wanna cry as I nod sympathetically to the woman sitting next to me. Her kohl-rimmed eyes, triple-pierced lips and belly rolls extending over ripped jeans scream that she's just another innocent tread-upon victim of the fascist state of Iowa.

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And I notice that all these other innocents have something that I do not. Paperwork. Realms and realms of computer sheets with diagrams of little cars and school buses in various positions on little streets. Piles of paper with arrows and circles drawn all over the place and highlighted sentences with exclamation marks. All I have is the before-mentioned pink carbon copy barely readable as all carbon copies are. I will definitely need to get myself some serious bad ass paperwork.