In Which We Run Out of Our Sense of Humor

For 17 years now, I've been being generally good humored, I think, about the vagaries of the border people and their agricultural prohibitions. I memorize the rules they give to me, I am tediously meticulous about telling them what food products I am transporting into the U.S. from Tsawwassen's markets. In fact, the guards usually stop listening while I am reciting my list: ten Canadian apples in season, six bananas, six pounds of peaches, 436 blueberries (no, that last one is a joke).

And for 17 years, long before 9/11, I've been bringing in Canadian apples and pears in season, which is to say in the fall, without any questions being asked. Today, however, some otherwise bored dude who asked me "Where are you going?" (note that he has on his computer monitor the information that I live in P.R., but he hasn't bothered to look), wanted proof that my six apples and my four pears were grown in Canada. And what he wanted was stickers. I pointed out that at this time of the year, they would only come from the U.S. or Canada, because Ukraine isn't trying to break into the northern American apple market and Mexico isn't growing them. (I didn't actually say that about Ukraine, but I did about Mexico.). He graciously granted my point, but insisted tht they could have come from anywhere, and only a sticker would show otherwise.

Only a sticker would show that I had not injected the apple with nanobot terrorists, I suppose.

Now if I buy the apples and pears at Thrifty or Safeway, they will have stickers, but if I go to the Farm Market, where the fruits are fresher and from local sources, they will not have stickers. The solution to this problem, obviously, is to save my fruit stickers, carry them with me at all times, and apply as necessary.

I do grow weary of people pretending that their pronouncements/solutions are based on anything other than a pretense at rationality. The Age of Reason. Wish I'd been there for it.