Awkward.....

Tonight I found myself in the extremely uncomfortable position of having multiple handshakes and a long policy discussion with an elected official I had obliquely referred to in print as "Sheriff Cunni..." Well, enough of that. We are all about healing and progress now.

You will be pleased to know that the entire weight of your Monterey County bureaucracy has done a U-turn and they all now value "Community Input".

Even more awkwardly......my Store will be the meeting place of the new Community Action Network or whatever. I am a possible board member of the Sheriff's committee.

I was having trouble processing this information, based on the private warning from a few deputy sheriffs that I was now on a hit list. The Sheriff's Department would do anything to take down me and/or The Store.....

OK.......This is weird.

Then I noticed that the Sheriff was continually referring to me as "Jeff". He thanks me for offering my Store as a meeting place......

I asked about the whole deputy sheriffs getting lost on their way to the Incident Command Post.....every day for three weeks. And the whole confusing "Nason Road" with "Nason Ranch" thing....

Everybody said it was all about budget and cutbacks. OK, fine.

But, when my random collection of jailbird minors assembles to go off to work a catering party......I send them the GPS coordinates.....the GoogleEarth foto of the terrain......and the GoogleStreets foto of the house. Only idiots without computers or good cell phones get lost.

And my guys don't carry guns.

Well, most of them.

Oh, and if they do carry guns.....they don't forget them on the toilet in the Cachagua Store and drive away.

Anyway......I look forward to a positive coming together of the whatever whatever, and the final ceasing of bureacratic shit falling from the heavens on the citizens of Cachagua and the stalwart volunteers of Cachagua Fire.

Hey, Mike......don't think you can dump off us into some bureacratic lagoon. Or next time, we will give your deputy's Glock to the kids in the Camp....or my Irish friend Kevin. And Sage and the brothers will not pull out any of the many silly county vehicles that get stuck on roads that the locals you despise told you not to drive down in the first place.

And the next time your lost units arrive looking for a major command post featured on multiple internet sites sites which are being minutely monitored inj 3D by each and every one of the citizens whose feelings, rights and liberties you are trampling into the dust by each and every ignorant, unformed decision you make........they will be on their way to Big Sur, or Parkfield. Or Prunedale.

I don't think that Sheriff C....I mean Sheriff K....realizes that his personal and administrative fuckups are so many and so legion that he could become a national laughingstock.

Unfortunately, us Cachagua folk.....being subject to so many of our own foibles and frustrations and failings....are more forgiving than any Franciscan monk.

I just hope we don't let go of this guy's short hairs......until he actually kicks in and recognizes that no one.....federal, state or county....should do anything in our valley without first consulting Cachagua Fire. Oh....and the local citizenry.

Where there is life...there is hope. After all.

Meanwhile.....I am not sure how comforted I am that Sheriff K...throughout our entire conversation...thought my name was "Jeff".

At first I was pleased. The Sheriff does not realize that I am the other Mike....who labeled Officer Cocksucker, and called him his ownself Sheriff Oral Pleasing.

There is a local Jeff....a couple, in fact.

One of them does the best breakfast between Los Angeles and Seattle.....but he is at Mid-Valley.

The other one is a problem guy.....who beats his son with pistols and runs through the police lines pursued by helicopters with SWAT teams aboard.

The Sheriff thinks that I am "Jeff".

Great.