Am I Blog Enough For You?

Strange things are afoot. D. heard a caller to AM radio (unassailable source of news and opinion because why would someone call in and get past the call screener if he or she didn’t have extra special information?) predict a major earthquake in the Bay Area by the end of the month. We are closely watching our cats and children for any signs of unusual behavior.

We spend a lot of time driving between our two houses, moving objects from Pacifica to Palo Alto. I have a new appreciation for Newton’s law about objects at rest tending to stay that way. After a while, tend is too mild a word for it.

So anyway, we drive both cars separately to one of another house, and usually we listen to AM radio. Why AM radio?, one might ask. Well, I’ve already heard Feel Like Making Love by Bad Company and Bad To The Bone by George Thorogood enough times and all my CDs are packed in a box somewhere and Fresh Air is going to suck until we pull out of Iraq and most NPR shows sedate me too much to lift heavy things and it’s frankly un-American to listen to KPFA after a U.S. spacecraft flies through a comets tail and a U.S. space probe lands on Mars. So that leaves us with AM radio.

So last night I heard a caller to The Clark Howard Show talk about how he emptied his safe deposit box into a briefcase, locked it in his trunk, met a friend for lunch, and came back to his car to find the window smashed and the briefcase gone. I took this as a sign from Divine Ceasar because we would done the same exact thing, only now we know to go right to the new safe deposit box and not stop for lunch along the way.

Crimewise, it is a pretty good idea to hang out outside of a bank and wait for people to leave with cash. Small business people do this all the time. Clark Howard said that the passports that the guy had in his safe deposit box are extremely valuable to thieves.

Also a good crime idea is to wait for businesses to deposit their cash at the end of the day. D. told me that when she was 17 she worked as a manager at a movie theater and she used to deposit about $10,000 cash by herself at a bank on the side of a mall on weekend nights. Considering that all the teenagers who ever worked there probably knew about these deposits, it’s amazing that no one was robbed. On some nights the movie theater would make much more than $10,000, so I’m guessing that the owner spread out the deposits throughout the night to make sure that no more than $10,000 could get stolen at a time.

Speaking of crime, I picked up a New York Times today at Starbucks. One of the front page stories was a story about how disruptive students in Toledo are being sent to juvenile hall so that they don’t disrupt the other students with all of their disruptive disruptiveness. I followed the jumper inside the paper and was surprised to find a picture of a judge that I once came face to face with as a result of some stupid shit I did as a teenager. The NYT web site didn’t have this picture posted, so I had to go to the Lucas County web site to get a picture. This picture is much more majestical than the one in the times anyway:

Fig 1. A judge’s good side, apparently.

I’ll never forget what he told me when I sat across the table from him: “There are leaders, and there are followers. Son, you are a follower.” Every so often since then I will have a mild anxiety attack and get all paranoid that maybe I’m a follower and not a leader. This pretty much ruined getting high for me.

Of course, the paradox here is that if I somehow magically work and work at becoming a leader, then I’m really still a follower because his statement is what spurred me on. He doomed me to always be a follower. If someone doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, wouldn’t that person be neither a leader nor a follower? Maybe that is the way out of the paradox.

Then he sentenced me to this weird program where every week for a few hours I had to sit in a room with about fifteen other young offenders (YO’s) and a guy that in retrospect reminds me of the doctor on The Simpsons. All of us YOs were encouraged to share our feelings about stuff like dating and the future. At one point we YOs went around the room and said what we wanted to do for a living. I went first and said veterinarian. I was really surprised when all the other YOs wanted a job that didn’t require a high school — never mind college — degree. Even at 14 I had enough class awareness to figure out that I better quit dicking around and start taking things seriously.

And since a follower like me can never be too careful who he hangs out with, I got all new friends.

I seriously considered writing the judge guy a letter after I saw his picture. It would be something along the lines of “Hey! Saw you in The Times today. Thanks for putting an end to my life of crime. If you need any software or mp3s just let me know! Yours, Todd”

Speaking of class snobbishness just the other day I was telling D. about this time that my parents went out of town, so I had some classmates from high school over. I went to a private high school, so most of them were from wealthy homes and once the party was underway — note, this was not a drinking party — they started goofing on my house and my parents’s cars and the food we had in the cupboards. It was really horrible, compounded by the fact that I was stoned.

I had always thought that we lived pretty well, but then I started getting suspicious of everything I had. Fortunately most of the classmates that came over that night were pretty popular, so I didn’t have to deal with them much after that night. If I could remember where I packed my yearbooks, I would look up their names and list them.

This happened a few months before I saw my judge friend above, so I guess he helped save me from taking a wrong turn in my life. I started doing well in school again. I made new friends. But most importantly for my future, I learned some valuable lessons in class awareness. And just look at me now, 22 years later! I own two houses in the Bay Area. Ha ha!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2004 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.