The DMV

   I just returned from the DMV.
   The DMV is the department of motor vehicles, or as I call it, the Mexico Africa China Philippines Persia Non-White 9th Circle of Hell Building.
   The "complaint department" of the DMV is a cell, with bars comprising one of the walls, and which is commonly called "The County Jail."In other words, unlike Nordstroms, when you complain they dont cheerfully refund your money. They put you in jail.
 
   The personnel at the DMV have been dredged from clinically depressed wards of Creedmore Sanitarium For the Insane. Drunks dead in the last bench of the dirtiest bus on the dirtiest bus route in Detroit are more alive and easier to get along with than the employees at the DMV in Pasadena.
 
   The lines of "customers" extends for 500 feet ending outside the building on the sidewalk and down to the corner of Rosemead and Colorado. Out of what appeared to be 500 people trying to work their way into a building the size of a Dennys, one of them was white.
   Me.
   The rest of them are from the far corners of the earth, except for the Mexicans, who are there from Way Too Fucking Close To Suit Me.

   There are 50 "serving" windows, 49 of which are closed. Everyone in line - which would be everyone not working there - notices this; you can tell by the way they sometimes look up from their cell phones to scrutinize the empty windows and sort of attempt to change their expression from one of frustration and anger and exasperation into one of even more frustration and anger and exasperation, but their face muscles won't go to that new level of tenseness because they are already exceeding their skeletal and structural safety limits for frustration and anger and exasperation.
 
   The interior of the 9th circle of Hell is 1-20th the size it needs to be. Not only that, it is just this side of squalid in appearance and upkeep. The gas chambers of Treblinka were more decoratively pleasant in appearance, and the people operating them more cheerful. In fact the people being gassed were probably less rattled than the people attempting to get permission to use the government roads without going to prison for using them without permission. You will notice McDonalds does not operate this way. If you dont like the lines at McDonalds you just leave the line at McDonalds and eat somewhere else. You are not forbidden to eat. McDonalds does not threaten you with imprisonment if you eat somewhere else. You just go eat somewhere else. Because there is somewhere else.
   However there is no substitute DMV. They have a lock on driving. If you dont go through their drive-thru you don't fucking drive. If you don't go through McDonalds drive-thru your life does not change one bit. Only your menu item changes. You still get to eat. Your stomach is not ripped from your backbone by some vindictive authoritarian ogre that says you have to eat at McDonalds and nowhere else. No. Your life continues-on pleasantly; you go to Burger King.
 
   At least, fair to say, outside, in that part of the long long line that exists out "on the earth out in the atmosphere and life of the planet itself" you are comfortable at least in your surroundings, which would be "normal life" which would be, you know, stores, pedestrians, traffic -  even though today, out there, in that part of the line, it is presently 90 degrees F.
   On a rainy day however it is very likely not so nice.
 
   Once inside, things are different. The world disappears and things compress and squeeze to a pressure approximating the surface of Saturn. There is no free commerce in here. There is only threats backed by a cop with a gun: you shop here or you don't drive.
 
   The "customers" inside, on this alien platform of humanity seemingly flung into a different dimension of existence and reality and involving the heat and humidity of Sumatra during the Krakatoa eruption - and which "customers" I would remind you are forced to be there against their wills as with all things governmental - the "customers" of this nightmare have the bland, stupified look of Jews who think they are merely lining up for showers. 99% of these "customers" are illegal aliens who are displaying at least a mildly feral imitation of alertness. There is a law that claims that illegals cannot get licenses but I have a hunch that it is a law that, unlike the law that says you cannot drive without a license - is not ever even once enforced.
   The interior of this humanty-packed barracks from the japanese jungles of Guadalcanal houses an "employee" conclave that actually has some breathing room in it -  and also an absence of employable personnel -  that has as a barrier from the "public" - get this - a complex, winding, ever-direction-changing, extensive perimeter of bullet proof glass. Yes, that's right, the employees of the State are encased in an attack and assault-proof castle of Miracle Plastic than can terminate the flight of projectiles from pistol shots, rifle shots, Howitzer cannon-fire, 16-inch shells from the USS Forrestal, and photon torpedoes from the Romulans.
   Outside the perimeter of bullet-proof glass the non-employees - who are paying the salaries of the bullet-protected employees who have ordered them into the building under threat...these people are considered "the enemy." The ones who are complying with the threats are the enemy. The ones issuing the threats are the "decent folk." The "decent folk" need to be protected from "the enemy," which is the people who have been ordered by the decent folk to show up there or else be fined, imprisoned, isolated from being able to go from one place to another without using some form of transportation operated by the same ilk operating the DMV, which would be government "workers" or "people who jut don't give a fuck" in other words.
   Keep in mind that the bullet proof glass is not because the taxpayers are dangerous inherently. The bullet proof glass is there because the people working behind the bullet proof glass are pissing the other people off and they are becoming dangerous the longer they are in there
   Apparently at some point in the long worthless uninteresting history of the DMV, it became apparent to them that the people who are in the building but who are not employed there are the people who apparently are driven to murderous rage inside DMV offices for some reason: which offices they have to visit if they want to drive automobiles - which were created by entities in no way connected to government -  on roads -  built by entities in no way connected to government - until both automobiles and roads were put under total government control so that you would be driven to murdering DMV employees whose lives are devoted to FUCKING WITH YOU FOR NO REASON UNDER PAIN OF PRISON JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT TO DRIVE THE CAR YOU BOUGHT THAT WAS INVENTED AND USED AND BECAME SUCCESSFUL AS A PRODUCT LONG BEFORE THE DMV's EVER CAME BY FIAT OVERNIGHT INTO EXISTENCE!!! FUCK YOU, DMV!!!!.
   
   Naturally the people on the outside of the bulletproof glass are convinced that driving a car is a privilege granted to them by the people inside the bulletproof glass and not one granted by God and the pink slip and the natural terrain. Yes, they think it's the fat lazy sullen attitude-filled sub-amoeba dirt particle squalid ugly piles of idiotic unnotivated goo on the bulletproof side of the bulletproof glass who make driving possible: they are convinced the DMV created the automobile. And the employees of the DMV have no trouble at all believing this either; they are convinced they are the ones in better control of your driving life than you are, which, until enough people suddenly leave their comatose states of absolute confusion - they are in control of it and they will always be. At least until gas becomes illegal as being "too dangerous to own." Then there just won't be any driving at all, period. Except by government employees, who won't have to obey the No Gas Allowed laws. They probably won't even need to have driver's licenses either, since they will be the only ones driving and so licenses will not be necessary. They'll automatically know what to do. Because they are gods.


    I had an appointment and got there a half hour early to study the routine. In 25 minutes I had made no headway and there were of course no concierges or maitre d's or janitors or information officers or even bums to ask what to do, only hundreds of people with no expressions other than perhaps despair mixed with "will I be fired for leaving work to do this?"
   There was no shortage of Chinese-laudramat-type signs and posters, however, that had not been dusted or cleaned or washed or attended-to for a hundred thousand years. Asking one of
The Bewildered waiting in line was out of the question so reading the signs was the only option however they were all understandable only if you worked there and had asked a fellow employee what this or that ambiguity - which all the signs had - meant.
   You cannot run an operation just by placing signs all over the place and then insulting anyone who cannot figure out the signs. No business operates this way other than a few bulldyke-operated sandwich- and-coffee shops since bulldykes are convinced that all of humanity, except for themselves, deserves no courtesy, they just need to silently obey and to somehow know what to obey and for how long.
 
   There was one person in what may or may not have been the Appointments Only line.
   I got into that one five minutes before my appointment. The Persian Muslim, sorcerer, baby-eater, building- exploder jihadist who was working that section of bullet proof glass and not yet been called into service by his particular imam called me up and I went there and he just looked at me. "Why are you here."
   "To have my license renewed."
   "Where is the form you received."
   This is when I said "Oh, shit," aloud and slumped over and put my elbows on the counter and put the front of my head into both my palms.
   After a moment of disgust mixed with pity the Persian IED installer said "Relax. Fill this out. Come back when you're done."
   Dazed, and for the time being detesting myself for once with the same degree of fury that I detest everyone else, I staggered over to a filthy shelf and called Cecily. "Get the form off the refrigerator and read to me exactly what is on there when I ask you."
   The whole place could hear me, at least during those moments when the ten million babies were not screaming. Meanwhile I was being felt-up by thousands of passing Mexicans and Flippers - Philippinoes - because their tribal squalid existences are made meaningful by flesh to flesh contact with other humans because the idea of personal space is not only unfamiliar to these prehistoric primates it is considered evil: a sign of something being seriously and dangerously wrong with you. Saying excuse me for sticking your frottage-crazed dick up someone's ass would be as weird to these Incan grub-eating, Ming Dynasty rickets-carriers and tattooed street-gang enforcers as would be for them them to read Newton's Mathematica in the original Latin and understand it and then extrapolate new theories from it. Them not rubbing against you would be that bizarre for them.
 
   After ten minutes of sweat-inducing filling out of the new form while wondering if now that i was past my appointment time would I have to go home and start over, I went back to the window and the Persian clearly remembered who I was since i said "Oh, shit" clear enough and loud enough to have been arrested for public vulgarity in a government building and I think he was, frankly, impressed. I think he was saying to himself "This guy 'gets it.' He knows we hold all the cards and that he holds none and that this is just one big joke on the taxpayers, but he's not going to make a fuss: he's going to say 'Oh shit' and quietly go back to square one because he knows we have him cold 'cause he fucked up and he knows it."
   This is what he was thinking. This is why he was showing mercy.
    He took my sheet and stapled a number on it and said "Wait in the room over there - (nodding toward some Greyhound Bus Station-like pesthole yonder, outside the bulletproof glass, with rows of chairs inhabited by the sullen, the forlorn, the confused, the dense, the repellant, the indifferent and the damned) - till your number is called then go to the window that is called."
   Suddenly alert since I was back in the system after my astoundingly stupid omission and breaking of protocol and feeling as though I had defied all odds by not having been sent home to start another round of appointment making which would have left me without a drivers license for weeks since it was expiring in three days - feeling like I was back in the game I at once went into hypervigilant mode. I had dodged a big bullet which I had basically shot at myself and I was grateful for this new lease on life in this Land of the Dead.
 
   The first thing I learned was that the robot voice from the ceiling calling the numbers could not be heard in the din of the Hell that was the DMV. I might as well have been in Calcutta during a monsoon. Most of the people present probably actually were from there. I was the only America Caucasian that I saw in a building packed with more humanity, if that's what it was, than a cattle car packed with range steers. It was nothing at all like the experience of being in Nordstroms or Bloomingdales in Las Vegas. It was more like being in Charon's boat filled with Mestizos during an entire becalmed month on the Sargasso Sea on Venus in the summer during a typhoid epidemic in a slum hospital in the Burmese section of Venus in 1860. If you can at all imagine that.
 
   I took a seat and stared at the floor concentrating my attention on the ceiling voice. Within ten minutes my number was called.
   "F: ...Zeerow:  ... five:  ... one:  ....please:  ...go:  ....to:  ....window:  .....8."
 
   Window 8 was not in the section of the building where they have you wait. Naturally. Window 8 was in another section of the building which required a hurried navigation of the bulletproof corridors and condensed human flesh, all of whose owners were in a state of paralyzed frustration and brewing fury.
   40 years in grocery and restaurant retail have given me a mastery over The Masses. I weaved and darted my way through their immobile and zombie-like obstacles of listless bodies like they were not there, searching, darting, charging, changing direction to find window 8 before the human stalagmite working window 8 pressed the button to call the next number to window 8. You were given, as I had noticed, two announcement and then the next number would be called.
   Far down the long row of sullen, dreary, vacant faces I saw window 8.
   I ran and inserted myself between two bodies who did not know I was even there bursting between them and went up to the window.
   An overly-large negro woman with wrist-braces on both arms as a display-piece prior to her going on permanent disability for carpal-tunnel sat on the other side of the bulletproof glass and took my papers and asked for 32 dollars and had me read an eye chart. Since i could not hear her through the din and the 2-inch-thick plastic laminate designed to stop machinegun fire I read the wrong chart. She looked at me like I was from Mars. I have Negro Rapport, fortunately, especially with fat female bureaucratic ones. I looked at her and winced, Scrooge McDuck-like, at her - "You did say chart B, right?" She moved her head from side to side -  like they do -  a few times and said blandly, "No.... I said chart A." I said "So, I don't get to choose the chart?" She said, "Uh-uh. I choose de chawt." I said, "I see. Ok, let me try A."
   I read the A chart.
   She said "Da uvvah eye now, if it be awrite wif you?"
   I said, "Not a problem."
   I read the chart with the other eye. She said, "Ok, you alright. Once you loin I does the choozin'."
   I said, "Yeah, I think I get the idea now. You pick the chart, I read the chart."
   "Das rite. You gut it now."
   Louweezy handed me the required go-to-the-next-venue materials and uttered, more or less interested, "Go down day and take yo' test."

   "Down day" was at the far end of the long long line of people who deigned to forgo making an appointment and were in the Long Line of Endless Doom To Avoid Prison. Where the line veered-off at a right angle and proceeded out the door and into the town of Pasadena itself, since the interior of the DMV was designed to only hold the employees of the DMV in spacious accommodations within the medieval barrier and moatless castle walls of bullet proofing, where it veered-off I decided was not the direction for me to go, and i looked the other direction.
   In this direction, outside the castle of bulletproof glass but still inside the building, there was only room for rats to scurry under and along the feet of the hundreds of people standing motionless above them, and all were in physical contact with - essentially - everyone else in line via a chain of constant contact of one with the one next to, behind, in front of and in some cases -  if someone fell down from weakness or heatstroke, for example -  underneath you.
   However there seemed to be a vacant mini corridor with a few people in it. I headed toward that.
 
  The DMV is designed to make you erroneously skip steps and stages so that you will be forced to come back again at a later date, you having screwed-up in your chain of needful events to faithfully fulfill. In other words, it was only my innate hyper-vigillance that kept me from going past the photo ape. Since he was crouched down out of sight at the time, probably swilling gin, and since passing through the alarm-like structure was essential to getting into the next line of doom, I stopped to examine my new contrained surroundings and decided I had better not proceed past this point otherwise I would have waited in the next useless line for nothing and would be sent back to here. This cunning behavior paid off as the delirious non-entity of a human slowly ascended into view from beneath the bullet-proof barrier enclosing him and the camera. "Glub blub grrgle gaffl gaffl" he said. So I looked toward the camera. After he fucked up the first attempt there was a small flash of anemic light and he handed me a piece of paper with his artistic rendering of me in Karsh-like magnificence and Hurrell-like splendor. Ok, it looked more like a psycho had gotten ahold of some Crayolas but if it was enough to give a cop a boner when he gazed at it it was enough to make the grade.
    I was then directed to move on.
   "Moving on" in this case meant moving two feet and being forced to turn right because of the wall.            
 
   There before me were two more lines, with enough space between the two to allow a broom or a rake to pass through the middle if held perfectly straight up and down. One line was for the people who had passed the written test. The other line was for the people waiting to take the written test. And there was no way to tell which line was which. Asking the people in line was a preposterous idea, none of them spoke English and the ones that did have some familiarity with it had no familiarity with intelligence. So why ask them.
   After standing in the wrong line I took a gander at what the people in each line had in their hands. The people in the line I was in had tests in their hands. The people in the other line had no tests in their hands.
   I decided I was in the wrong line since I had no test in my hands. So I left the line I had been standing in for half an hour and went to the back of the other line and started over. In due time - if I passed the test - I could once again stand in the line with the people who had tests in their hands.
   I decided, after crossing over to the other line and waiting for the people going up and down and trying to inch past each other between the two lines, since there was no space between the two lines and yet there was a ton of human traffic passing each other, people who were in neither line and yet needed to get to a destination somewhere in the vicinity of the two lines that did not require standing in line, which would be wandering around lost, which did not require standing in line, you could wander around lost pretty much on a path or trail of your own choosing...I decided, after crossing over to the back of the other line, that the reason why there were so many different lines was for the purpose of making you have to remain in the DMV office for far longer than was necessary. I also decided the ultimate purpose of the many lines for you to systematically wait-in was to keep you there past the time needed to get the job done in one day so that you would have to come back and likely risk driving without a license so that you would be kept off the road so that the highway department would not have to keep up with the ever increasing load of road repair.
   On paper this probably looks pretty good to the DMV and since they have nothing to lose if it's a bad plan or if it's a good one, why not just run with it for now. That's their thinking on it. It's not as though it will help make things better or help make things worse, they don't care, you have to be there, whether they make an effort or whether they give a fucking shit or not. You have to be there. Or you will go to jail or be housebound. This is governmen'ts idea of "freedom of choice." "Get a license or stay at home. Or ride government transporation! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!"
   The creature that was handing out the tests was a drooling pain in the ass dreary caucasian granma that grandchildren everywhere would have loved to have killed and fed to sharks, she was that unlikeable. She was also correcting the tests. So that means you had to wait for her unmotivated hulk of swollen ankles and wrists to reduce the line you were in while she at the same time corrected the tests of the people who were in line number 2 - which she was also in control of - so that meant she was operating two lines simultaneously at very slow speed.
   She gave me a test paper and told me to take the test.
 
   Taking the test was the most leisurely and relaxing part of the whole DMV experience. You were alone, you were not in line, you didn't have to try and find your way, you didn't have to talk to any of the staff, you just had to read the test and calmly answer the questions. There was no time limit. You could take all day if you wanted. You could relax. Even though everything hinged on you passing the test, even though the test was logically the most stressful portion of the experience, in reality it was not that way. Everything leading up to the test was more stressful and infuriating and frustrating than the test itself.
   Once you were done you had to start being pissed off all over again, Relaxation Time was over.
   For the second time you had to get in line to work your way to the diabetic timebomb shrouded in elastic bindings so that blood didnt burst from the pores of her extremities.
   She slapped the test onto the appropriate proof-sheet and checked off two items and then said "Pffff."
I had heard her say "Pfff" enough times while waiting in both of her lines to know that pfff translated from DMV subterranean dweller into English as "pass."
   "TakethistolineB," she drooled while choking on her swollen Down Syndrome tongue.
   I got for the second time into Line B only this time with a corrected test in my hand and the woman there gave me a temporary license and called the next person up.
   I was done. It ended a lot more abruptly than it began, when it began a month prior, having gotten the announcement in the mail "Renew your license or stop driving or drive without a license and go to prison or take public transportation HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
   Suddenly, while I was still inside the building, I was free. Free until the next government order came to me via the government postal service. I meandered not fast, not slow, through the waiting hordes of people who did not want to go to prison, past the miles and miles of bullet-proofing, past the chipped ancient paint, past the swelteringly oppressive glut of shitty signs and posters and warnings and WW2 Russian-like ancient squalid disrepair and exited out into Pasadena where the line vanished down into the horizon and up the distant San Gabriel Mountains miles and miles to the north.
   I could drive. I was allowed.
   I can't wait until bicyclists have to go through this. Then skateboarders. Then baby carriages. Then pedestrians. Then I will laugh at it all. But not in the good way. In the crazy insane way. Then I will kill.