It’s Not Breaking in if You Leave the Door Unlocked

Thank you to those of you who keep telling me I need to post, it’s really nice that you care/are interested/notice.

Why does my subconscious think this animal wants to eat me?

I don’t sleep well.  If I’m not dreaming about ferocious, giant white ferrets and blowing up a bridge with a fully occupied school bus on (recurring, always in the same dream, and not awesome), Charley snores like the poster boy for sleep apnea and the tiniest sound wakes me up as if someone is laying on our doorbell at 2 o’clock in the morning.

That is actually what happened last night though, the doorbell rang right at 2 am.  I thought maybe Charley’s dog was just breathing too loudly for me to sleep through again, but then someone started pounding on the front door.  Charley, who I promptly poked until he glared a sleepy eyeball at me, didn’t believe me (to his credit, I’ve needlessly shaken him awake several times in the middle of the night so that he can confirm, yet again, that the house continues to be burglar-free) but the pounding continued so the man of the house trotted off to the door, and I followed at a safe distance clutching my taser, preparing to find the paintballs if this was an ill-timed game of doorbell ditching.  (Not that we have ever shot paintballs at mischievous neighborhood kids in the middle of the night, recently.)

As the police carry tasers that are more powerful than my own, I put mine away when we realized that’s who was at the door.  The conversation went like this:

The PoPo:  “Do you guys know the kid across the street?”

Charley:  “Yes…”

The Fuzz: “Do you leave your car doors unlocked?”

Charley: “Sometimes…”

Big John: “Do you have a Nextel phone?”

Charley: “Yes…”

The Heat: “Does it look like this?”

Charley: [sigh] “Yes.”

I’m out of police nicknames and frankly, I find the Urban Dictionary’s list of suggestions unsuitable (also, it appears that there are a lot of angry policeman writing definitions on Urban Dictionary these days), so I will sum up by saying that Charley received his (apparently) unscathed wallet from the car and locked it, and then declined to press charges against neighbor-kid.  We returned to bed where he immediately resumed snoring and I laid awake for several hours.

This morning, I walked over to compare notes with a couple of neighbors.  One neighbor indicates that neighbor-kid got in a fist fight in order to return some items that “someone else” stole out of her car a couple of weeks ago.  Another neighbor says neighbor-kid bums cigarettes off of him sometimes, but he seems like such a sweet kid.  We all agree, it’s sad and he’s a nice kid, and I said I would just talk to him next time I saw him, and then neighbor-kid comes out of the front door of his house.

If he was insincere (I don’t think he was) he put on a good show.  He came right over to me and apologized repeatedly, and cited his misguided pharmaceutical experiments.  He didn’t deny anything, and our conversation almost immediately turned into an After School Special/DARE pep rally.  (Incidentally, I had a DARE cop tell me I was on track to be a victim of gang-rape after I was caught sneaking into the Teacher’s Lounge to use the coke machine when I was in 8^th grade, I should probably write a post about that guy.)  I finally just told him, the phone is just stuff, but he has a whole, long, potentially happy life ahead of him.  I told him that Charley and I care about him, and if he ever wants to come over and talk, we’d be around.  I hope that being nice was the right thing to do.  Either way, he gave me a hug after I told him to go home, drink water, and sleep all day; now I smell like smoke, and stuff…