Yesterday the clerks of the fourth judicial court of Montana embodied Franz Kafka’s peculiar vision of bureaucratic hell when they informed me that printing forms is practicing law, and they don’t do that.
Do MUNICIPAL court clerks print forms? Yes, they do, but that doesn’t matter. Consistency, or even common sense, does NOT apply to bureaucrats, so one key to NOT losing your shit is adjusting your expectations.
It took me ALL DAY and THREE visits to the Courthouse to file a motion to get more time for the CIVIL part of the legal hell I’ve been in for over a year. Did I know filing an appeal gave me 20 days to file a legal brief? No, I did not know that. Unlike the politically-connected woman who weaponized a protective order against me, I never attended law school, so I’m at a BIG disadvantage here.
When you examine the duties and skills clerks of limited jurisdictions are supposed to have, the hilarity of what I experienced yesterday only increases. Here’s what the clerks are SUPPOSED to be able to do (emphasis mine):
Efficient? That’s REALLY FUNNY.
The second clerk I interacted with yesterday was nice enough to show me a little shelf on the second floor of the courthouse where some legal documents exist in printed form for pro se idiots like me, but the specific forms I needed were NOT available. Yeah, EFFICIENT!
Judicial bureaucrats aren’t the only kind of bureaucrat that make this modern era so maddeningly stupid, there’s also the propagators of parks who spend dumb money on dumb things with dumb results. Let’s take a quick look at two examples of EXTREME STUPID.
The first example of extreme stupid is the indefinite closure of the West Broadway Island, a piece of geography I’ve been intimately involved in dealing with, both as the former Homeless Outreach Coordinator of the Poverello Center, then as a concerned citizen. Here’s the latest on the problem CREATED by Parks and Rec when they spent almost a MILLION dollars building that REALLY stupid bridge to no where. From the first link:
West Broadway Island is undeveloped land nestled in the heart of downtown Missoula that’s been inaccessible to the public since early September, a closure poised to continue into 2025.
“We elected to close the island and really just give the land time to heal, right?” said Missoula Parks and Recreation conservation lands program manager Jeff Gicklhorn. “So, keeping people off of it and let vegetation in particular recover after those impacts that we were seeing.”
Throughout the summer people were staying on the island and damaging vegetation, leaving holes and the potential for riverbank destabilization, said Gicklhorn.
City staff did an initial cleanup of trash in the area before doing further work, Gicklhorn said.
While Parks and Rec did their cleaning this summer, the homeless sex swing I cleaned up occurred in spring, around the same time that guy got ARRESTED for picking up trash along West Broadway.
Remember that, Missoula?
I certainly remember, since putting the homeless sex toys on display and declaring our community RETARDED earned me my SECOND criminal charge for violating a protective order last spring, a charge I’ll be on trial for tomorrow, unless the busy courts boot my trial to early next year, like I suspect will happen.
The second example of extreme stupid is all the money being spent for the Caras Park area of the Clark Fork, including this new access loop:
I thought this image lacked something, so I had ChatGPT create a more plausible one.
Yeah, that looks a little more accurate, don’t you think?
If you appreciate what a motivated citizen journalist can do with a zero-fuck approach to exposing local corruption and cognitive impairments, please consider donating to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF). Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!
