Freedom
Autonomy is possibly the most important thing to me. I want to be able to do what I want, when I want it. This is why I hated being a kid. I couldn’t wait to be an adult so I could call the shots as to how I spent my time. I don’t like anything that infringes on my free time or prevents me from roaming about freely as I wish.
This is why the prospect of losing my driver’s license for 60 days is like a bad nightmare I can’t wake up from. It’s much better than the one year license suspension I was expecting to result from my second DUI, but I’m still going to be a prisoner in my own home for some time in the near future, and I’m not looking forward to it. I have to pay my debt to society somehow though, and this is better than the alternative punishments the judge presented. In Nebraska they still want to throw people in jail for 5–60 days over marijuana residue. That state still has a long way to come with regards to marijuana legislation, but I digress.
The most devastating loss will be my inability to make my morning Dunkin’ run. I’m there every weekday around 5:20 AM, getting the large iced hazelnut coffee I’ve enjoyed since living in Boston. It’s probably extremely sad that my first thought is the devastation losing my license will bring to my indulgences. I believe I may still be able to provide transportation to my mother, so I may not be entirely jailed during the revocation period.
I live in a very non-walkable city, which definitely doesn’t help matters — my boyfriend’s house is a 7-minute drive away, but it’s an hour to walk. Ouch. Definitely not doing that everyday. And I don’t foresee myself being able to afford Lyft everyday to see him, so unless his truck magically gets fixed, we may have to go without seeing each other as regularly as we have gotten used to. Bike might be the best option, actually — 16 minutes according to the map, but that’s probably based on if you’re an athlete bicyclist. I get winded after about 10 minutes of riding, so 16 minutes sounds like a decent enough challenge to me.
I will find some way to use the 60 days constructively. I will wake up at the same time I usually do for my Dunkin’ run and get into a walking habit in order to satisfy my roaming urges. When I was searching the neighborhood for Minnie and TT I realized just how pleasant our neighborhood is, and how I should walk around more often. I don’t get to listen to music inside the house, so without my car, walking around with headphones is just about the only way I’ll get my daily dose of music in. Music at loud volumes is my version of therapy, so I hope not being able to blast my music while driving isn’t a devastating loss.
While I wasn’t guilty for the crime at hand — I was manic at the time of the DUI charge and they mistook symptoms of psychosis for symptoms of intoxication — I have certainly committed the crime in my life, and probably deserve some kind of punishment for once upon a time being the kind of person who would hit a bowl while driving. I am no longer that person, but I was pretty reckless in a past life. I only drove drunk once, and I got caught (and let go, by some fucking miracle). That’s far more dangerous and I felt horribly guilty about even doing it once. It feels hypocritical of me to now have two DUIs when I used to be the type of person to thoroughly judge people who got DUIs as the scum of the earth.
My sister was an early bloomer — she got her DUI at the tender age of 20. She lost her license for a year because she was underage. Mine came later, at the ages of 29 and 30. I think for a long time I never viewed marijuana as particularly impairing because it is objectively easier to drive high than drunk, but that’s just something stoners tell themselves to justify bad behavior. I apparently had to get two DUIs to learn that DUIs mean legal substances, too. Prescription and OTC medications, even. In Nebraska, I had cold medication in my system and the county attorney asserted that that could have been impairing.
I know why cops so aggressively prosecute DUI cases. It’s a matter of public safety. The less drunk/high drivers there are on the road, the better off everyone will be. I was just one of the unfortunate ones to end up with a charge because I had (legal) drugs in my system. There need to be better ways of detecting “impairment” than the current methods of field sobriety tests and blood tests that detect drugs last used days or weeks prior, depending on the drug’s half-life. Marijuana in particular stays in your system for up to a month, so even if you’re a casual smoker, you could end up with a DUI even though you weren’t high, just because a blood test says it was in your system.
Currently, there is no “cutoff” for marijuana levels in the bloodstream to indicate impairment. I’ve heard of some scientists at UC Berkeley working on the science behind this to make improvements, but I imagine better testing is still many years off from being in common use by police forces. I am hopeful that there is a better way to determine who has recently used marijuana and driven vs. who used yesterday and is sober enough now to drive. Both get charged with DUIs in our current justice system, especially if the police don’t like the way you performed on the field sobriety tests. And believe me, those are difficult to pass sober. I’ve never had good balance and the test is basically just you standing on one leg the whole time. Of course I’m going to stumble. Doesn’t prove intoxication.
Oh well. I’ve come to peace with it. I fought this hard with an attorney and feel like a 60-day license revocation is about the best possible outcome I could have managed. I will have to make the 1500-mile trip back to Nebraska for sentencing, so that should be fun. Drop about a grand on that trip; maybe look at it as a mini-vacation.
After all is said and done there, if I never see Nebraska again it will be too soon. They call it “The Good Life” there. Ha. Hahahahahaha. Ha. No.
