Category: Writing

Witness to Stupidity

Many moons ago I dated a D.C. cop, and he used to say that only the stupid criminals get caught. Today I saw proof of that with my own eyes.

While on a walk through one of the District’s wealthier and more quiet neighborhoods, I witnessed a thug getting ready to break into someone’s house. He had climbed up the front of the building—yes, the front, in broad daylight—but apparently he was too much of a klutz to manage it and was dangling by one hand from a second-story window ledge. Truth be told, I might not have noticed him had he not let out an aggravated cuss.

At first I thought it was an attempted robbery, but he didn’t have a sack or backpack slung over his shoulder to suggest that he was about to make off with someone’s hard-earned valuables. All he carried was a large butcher knife.

Oh, this isn’t good, I thought. Not good at all.

Then I saw the dog. This numbnut had brought his dog with him to keep watch while he broke in. It was a mean creature, snarling and crouching as though ready to leap forward and rip open the throat of the first person who chanced by, like me.

Fortunately I was across the street and downwind from this ridiculous crime in progress, and rather than get mauled and quite possibly eaten alive, I ducked behind a car and took a few photos. I couldn’t get the guy’s face, though. He hung facing the house, unable to pull himself up to the window but unwilling to let go of the ledge and drop to the porch.

Come on, look over your shoulder. Show me your face.

No luck. This guy was quite frankly an idiot and very obviously stuck, so I punched in 911. It took the police five minutes to arrive, and you’d think that by then the guy would have just let go and fled. Nope. Only the dog had that much sense, running off into some nearby woods when the black-and-white pulled up. The perp hung there until the police helped him down and arrested him.

Yep, only the dumb ones get caught. Here he is:

And now for today’s candy: KitKats! I love these things, maybe a little too much.

Except I probably wouldn’t love these next ones. Orange? Ye gods, I hope they aren’t pumpkin-flavored. That would be a sacrilege.

Glass

One of my all-time favorite candy bars is 3 Musketeers. So light. So soothing. So delicately sweet.

And in the picture above, so absolutely fake.

Did you know that the food shown in print ads is almost never real? Real food melts, wilts, congeals, solidifies, spreads out on the plate, and otherwise reacts with its environment and the hot lights of the studio, so it’s very difficult to photograph in an appealing way.

Nowadays they probably just use Photoshop or something, but decades ago they used sculptures that were anything but edible. My father was one of the original Mad Men and one day he brought home this hefty block of clear, wavy glass that had a little slot drilled into it. I remember him putting it on the coffee table, sliding a straw into the slot, and saying “There you go.”

The sculpture was for an ad for drinking water, and in photos it did look like someone could take a long, refreshing slurp through the straw. However, on the coffee table it looked like a giant, melting ice cube. Whenever people who had never been to the house before came to visit, they would stare at it like they weren’t sure what were seeing. Then they would reach down and touch it very gently and nimbly with just their fingertips. Upon realizing it was room-temperature, they’d slowly put their whole hand over it, and invariably they’d say, “Oh, my God, I thought that was REAL!”

Sometimes they’d even pick it up. By the time the 80s rolled around, dozens of people had held it up to the light, turned it this way and that, checked its weight like they would a melon’s. It was about three-and-a half, maybe four pounds—light enough hold in one hand, but heavy enough to do some damage if swung. My parents were always spritzing it with Windex and wiping it down because it would get covered in fingerprints.

And that, friends, is why I’m still out here, twenty years later, roaming free and unpunished while the one who did me dirty is in the ground and the one he did me dirty with—my bestie, she who swore up and down that she would always be there for me and have my back, the woman I trusted like a sister—is in the clink. All I had to do was show her that sparkling clean little sculpture. All I had to say was “Check this out! My parents left it to me. It’s glass!”

She never could resist touching what was mine.

About Edgar

This evening I had the pleasure of attending a lecture about Edgar Allan Poe by Amy Branam Armiento, Ph.D., professor of English at Frostburg State University and immediate past president of the Poe Studies Association. Titled “The Macabre Poe,” the lecture is part of the annual October run of spooky, horror, and dark talks hosted by Profs and Pints, which brings college faculty members into bars, cafés, company offices, and other off-campus venues to share their knowledge.

Dr. Armiento gave a great presentation and I picked up a few tidbits about the great Poe that I didn’t know before. For example, he had something of a contentious relationship with his foster father, John Allan, so if you have a signed collectible and Poe’s signature spells out “Allan,” there’s a very good chance the signature is not authentic. I couldn’t blame Poe if he was resentful. He was taken in by John and Frances Allan when he was three years old and they never officially adopted him. Harsh.

So much for naming my bookends Edgar and Allan. Out of respect they are now Edgar and Lenore. See also, I’ve always thought it would be fun and rather metal to have two Vasa parrots and name them Edgar and Allan.

A black Greater Vasa Parrot in a palm tree.
Greater Vasa Parrot. (Image: Wikipedia)

I doubt I’ll ever have Vasas though. If I ever spy a pair at Phoenix Landing, I’ll be there, but they’re hard to come by on the adoption circuit.

A woman in the audience tonight was involved in naming the current Baltimore NFL team, and thank goodness she’s a Poe fan. Otherwise, the Ravens might have been named the Blue Crabs or the Lighthouses. I’m sure both the team and whoever designed the Ravens logo appreciate that. Too bad this audience member wasn’t also involved in renaming the D.C. team, which used to be called the Redskins and now goes by the Commanders. My guess is no woman was involved in that nonsense, or at least no one who ever read or watched The Handmaid’s Tale and doesn’t hate women.

Joseph Fiennes as Commander Fred Waterford in The Handmaid's Tale.
Joseph Fiennes as Commander Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale. Now we know where JD Vance gets his make-up ideas.

I picked up a copy of More Than Love: The Enduring Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe, a collection of essays edited by Dr. Armiento. In the essays, writers, poets, actors, visual artists, musicians, tour guides, teachers, and others describe how Poe has influenced their careers. I can’t wait to read it–but first, I will have to dig into my Barnes & Noble’s collector’s edition, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe for a refresher on some of the tales Dr. Armiento discussed tonight.

A book titled "More Than Love: The Enduring Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe."

And now for today’s candy, Necco wafers. These hardened discs of sugar and flavoring could have been made yesterday and they would still taste like they came into the world the same day Poe did.