HORmobiles, shoe bombs and cell phones

This morning, I looked out the window and saw a little, blue hatchback wedged perfectly into the mouth of our crumbling cement driveway. The parking job wasn’t the work of an ordinary drunk either. And, this wasn’t an, “Aw, fuck it, they can still get around me” job, where you have to go a foot or two into someone’s driveway. This was a professional bad parking job. “This,” I knew immediately, “was personal.”

Whoever parked this car bypassed two blocks of perfectly good parking spots to parallel park directly in front of the six-foot opening that offers the only exit from the beautiful, metal fence that surrounds and protects our home. With the introduction of this cork of a blue hatchback, we were essentially trapped.

My own damned fence was being used against me, and there was no way I could get to work.

Yes, in theory, we could have gotten out, had our lives depended on it. We could have slid over the hood like the Dukes of Hazard and headed out on foot, or we could have rammed the fuck out of it with the truck. Both ideas appealed to the my sense of heritage as Kentuckian of rural lineage, but I held tightly to my college degree and my fear of conflict and asked my wife to call the police.

Linette went out and looked at the car, trying to find clues as to its origins, while I ate peanut butter toast and angrily put on my shoes. She wrote down the model of the car and the license number and came back in to call the cops so that they could arrange to have it towed. I asked if there were any clues and she said it had a few dents and some big scratches in it. There was nothing else unusual about it.

Wanting to see for myself, I went out with the dog and began to poke around. The dents seemed to be old, there was rust filling in the cracks that outlined the damage, but the scratches were new. There were still paint flakes curled up around the edges of the scratches and they weren’t at all rusted or weathered in any way. Someone had keyed this thing up good.

The entire passenger side of the car was emblazoned with a few superimposed, elongated ‘x’s that extended well beyond just the passenger side door panel.

As I was standing there, admiring the damage, a police cruiser pulled up and a cop got out to talk to me. We talked over the car for a minute and then I decided to make my move and shimmy my fat ass around, between the rear bumper and our fence post. With a sigh and jolt, I met him in the middle of the street.

“Wait a second, what’s this I see on the driver side window,” I thought as a took a few steps forward, toward the cop. There was a yellow post-it note stuck right in the middle of the window. The police officer saw what I was looking at and he began toward it at the same time.

You didn’t need a world-famous homicide detective with OCD to see that it was an important clue. It was right there, with the word “HOR” in the top left corner.

“Who did you fuck last night HOR” The words “you” and “fuck” were underlined.

I mentioned to the officer that the guy probably meant “WHORE,” when he wrote “HOR.” I think for a second there I felt proud of myself, like he might nod at me and say, “You know what, Kid, I think you’re right about that.” Instead he just looked at me like I was a stupid jerk-off. And that, coincidentally, was when he stopped talking to me.

I thought about asking if I could borrow the note long enough to go in and scan it, but I didn’t even try. I just concentrated on it and committed all that I could to memory. After that first sentence, there was a little more. I believe it said something like, “I will spend the rest of my life fucking with your shit. I will fuck your shit up.”

Then, it was signed, “your ex-boyfriend Charlie.”

Given all the evidence, my assumption is that this is in no way tied to the urine-streaked butt funnel of the previous week or the Ritalin recently found in among the tomato plants. This was a new crime.

I also don’t think it had anything to do with us.

I do think that it was parked here, at the mouth of our driveway, intentionally though, so that it would be towed, but I don’t think it had anything to do with us. I certainly hope the guy who put it there doesn’t think that I was “fucking” his HOR.

So, my guess is that she didn’t come home from the dance club down the street last night and that he went out looking for her car. He found it, he scratched it up (there were also big ‘x’s carved into the driver side), he rolled it into position in front of my house and then he left the note. (So, she apparently wasn’t the only one busy scratching and thrusting last night.)

I was thinking that it would be kind of funny if she had gotten mugged last night or something else had happened to keep her in the hospital overnight, or perhaps she had gotten a job during the night shift at a local factory in order to save up the money to buy her boyfriend, Charlie, something nice for his birthday. I’d love to see her face as she walks, exhausted, down the street to find her car this way. If Charlie were me, I know that’s exactly the way it would have played out.

I didn’t have a chance to snoop too much because of the cop. He stood there with the car until the tow truck came. But, I did notice a copy of the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in the backseat.

The car got towed.
I went to work.
The end.

Bomb Shoed Moron

I just read an interesting piece in MIT Technology Review about airport security screening. (I know this may be odd, following the last piece as it does, but this is how my mind works.) The author suggests in the article that Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber, most likely saved a number of lives by jumping the gun and boarding that international flight with his shoe bomb. The author reasons that as Reid was not in any way capable of producing such a device on his own, it must have been made by other al Queda operatives. He also argues, and I think successfully, that al Queda wouldn’t produce just one shoe bomb. They would rather, he states, go for the big news story. The plan, he reasons, was more likely for ten or more Richard Reids to blow up ten or more planes in the space of one hour’s time. He thinks that the al Queda infrastructure was dealt such a blow in the aftermath of 9/11, however, that underlings, such as Reid, were left without direction. This lead to a situation where Reid decided to go off on his own without the order to do so. That could have preempted a larger successful attack by making airports aware of the shoe bomb threat. As they now look at shoes, it’s less likely that such a plan would work. At any rate, I thought that was worth sharing.

On My Own, With My Cell Phone

Linette called and left a message for me today at work. She asked me to meet her, Laura, Arun and some other folks at the Del Rio tonight at 7:30. She then went on to remind me that the Del Rio has a rule against cell phones. She told me to be sure to turn mine off so that it didn’t ring. I’m not a huge defender of the rights of cell phone users to use cell phones in public, but I decide to pass on principle. Actually, I’d like to go in and set it off just to see what happens. Do you think a slow-witted in-bred Amish bouncer comes flying through the doors at the first strains of the “The Entertainer,” hell-bent on kicking some “high-tech ass”?