Law Abiding Citizen

You know how, in TV crime dramas, the cops (FBI, CIA, whoever) always find some big, important clue by hacking into a suspect’s computer?  Ever wondered what incriminating details they’d find if they hacked yours? I did, and discovered writers may be more at risk than the average computer owner. As a result, I am making full, pre-emptive disclosure here, in this blog post, in the event the authorities ever feel the need to go through my computer.

I am not a panty thief.

While looking through one of those stranger-than-fiction websites for a plot device, I ran across a news story about 1,700 pairs of panties, mostly women’s, some brand new and some used, found strewn along a stretch of country road in Ohio. A hook like this cannot be wasted. The “panty” documents are just story ideas, not plans. 

I do not have anything against chickens.

If you pay close attention, you’ll see that all those bookmarked Youtube videos showing chickens being shot from a cannon are about aircraft engine testing. I saved them in the event I ever need to crash a plane in a novel using nothing but a seagull. Anyway, the chickens are already dead.

I don’t have anything against donkeys, either.

I was trying to find out if there’s any truth to the urban myth that more people are killed by donkeys than die in airplane accidents. Apparently, no one collects statistics on donkey related deaths.

I have never committed, and am not planning to commit, bigamy.

It was just research for the next novel. Same goes for the spreadsheet outlining the penalty differences for class C felonies in the states of Washington and Oregon and the folder containing pictures of big-breasted cartoon women.

Speaking of big-breasted cartoon women - I am not kinky.

I was trying to figure out what sort physical damage would result from a dozen lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails, an important plot point in a novel I read recently. It’s basically hamburger and I think the writer should have done more research, since there’s no way the victim could have stood up three hours later, let alone lead the crew in a mutiny.

I do not Worship the Devil.

It just so happens that most of the internet discussion on crones and psychic powers exists on Wiccan websites. All of which may (or may not) come in handy for the novel I’m writing now. Which reminds me, I have to look up famous arsonists.

So there it is. Full disclosure - except for the folder on fish tongue parasites. That research really is just for my own amusement. I got interested in Cymothoa Exigua when Michael, my fact-obsessed, library technician buddy, told me about them.  (Now there’s a guy who should never get caught on the wrong side of the law. Michael’s interests are both broad and odd.)

See? All fully explainable and totally harmless.

What mis-interpretable interests does your computer expose? If you’re a writer, or Michael, I’d advise you to check it out before embarking on a life of crime.

Masterclass: Procrastination

This will be a very short post. Here’s a little multiple choice test that explains why:

I spend so much time surfing the internet with my morning coffee I’m still in my pajamas at:

1.    7:00 AM

2.    9:00 AM

3.    12:00 PM

4.    Well, no point getting dressed now.

My highest score in Bejeweled is:

1.    0

2.    27,900

3.    211,031

4.    898,922 – but I know I can do better.

The last time I tidied the house was:

1.       Yesterday.

2.       A couple of days ago.

3.       Sometime last week.

4.       I’m pretty sure it was last month because I had houseguests.

I pay my bills:

1.    As soon as I get them.

2.    Once a week.

3.    On the last possible day.

4.    Why isn’t my phone working?

The brown things in the kitchen sink are:

1.       Potatoes I bought at the market today.

2.       Coffee grounds I spilled this morning.

3.       Last night’s tandoori chicken bones.

4.       Oh look! I’ve created life!

On the Predictive Value of Hotel Room Art

Here’s a little tale that illustrates why the pictures in your hotel room are worth looking at:

Friend Rita flew in from Portland last week for a visit. Although we rarely get to see each other nowadays, and hardly ever exchange emails, every time we meet up it’s as though we are continuing a discussion suspended only moments before. We plunged right back into the easy conversational flow of long time friends, speaking in half sentences, cracking one-word, inside jokes. (If you ever meet Rita and want to hear her laugh, just say oh-pie.) Her flight had arrived too late to embark on the two hour drive home, so we put up at a downtown hotel for the night. Over two crisply perfect martinis in the hotel bar, we made plans to do a bit of sight-seeing the next day before picking up her rental car.

In the morning, while waiting for my prink-time in the bathroom, I studied the pictures on the hotel room walls; black and white art photographs of famous Toronto architecture taken from unusual angles. Having lived and worked in Toronto for over twenty years, I was able to recognize all the photographs but one, a perspective shot of receding white arches towering over a familiar-looking building, all enclosed in a glass cube. 

It reminded me of a train station, although in which city, or even which country, I couldn’t say. I puzzled over the familiar-looking building until Rita came out of the bathroom, then turned my full attention to the much more important task of taming the stick-ups caused by a recent encounter with an overly enthusiastic hairstylist.

Rita and I are both knitters, although in fairness she is less rabid about the hobby than I am, so we made our first stop of the day at Romni Wools on Queen Street West, possibly the most famous yarn store in Canada. This was a mistake. The knitters code of ethics demands that upon entering a yarn store, every fuzzy ball in the store must be squeezed to test the hand.  Romni Wools is a vast, mind-bending cornucopia of floor-to ceiling-bins filled with yarns from around the world. And that’s just the ground floor.

After blissful hours of intensive squeezing, we staggered out of Romni, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes, and into a nearby coffee emporium, where we flopped down at a table to re-caffeinate and squeal excitedly over each other’s purchases. Sufficiently revived, we toddled a bit farther along the street to a French restaurant, where they had just received a delivery of aromatic Enokitake mushrooms, so naturally, we just had to have lunch there. Emerging from the restaurant, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes against distended tummies, we realized we’d used up our entire sight-seeing day squeezing yarn and it was now time to pick up the car.

Unfortunately, Rita had left the address of the car rental place in her backpack, which was in the luggage room of the hotel. I knew the only two car rental places downtown were on Bay Street, so we headed in that direction. Rita thought the street number was 161. I thought that was the address of our hotel and asked her if the car could have been rented from Eaton Centre. She said it sounded familiar, so we tried there first. No luck. We decided to call the help number on Rita’s AVIS card. She punched her way through an epic phone menu, listened intently for  a couple of minutes, then pressed the repeat button and handed me the phone, which I promptly dropped. I managed to pick it up in time to hear “BCE Place, Bay and Front Streets, Unit 10”.

Finding Bay and Front Streets was easy; we just allowed ourselves to be swept along in the tide of office workers scurrying toward Union Station to catch the GO train home. BCE Place remained elusive. We found a skyscraper labeled Brookfield Place at 161 Bay Street, but no BCE Place. I began asking passersby. No one had ever heard of BCE Place. Finally we found a security guard on the steps of Union Station who pointed toward Brookfield Place, so we went back and asked people coming out of the building if they knew where to find the AVIS rental office in BCE Place. They all shrugged denial. With no other clues to follow, we decided to at least look inside the building before trudging back to the hotel to get Rita’s backpack…

… and there they were; soaring white pillars arching over a 19^th century bank building enclosed in a glass cube. Warm certainty settled over me like a lace-weight merino shawl. Despite the wrong name, this had to be the right place. A friendly newsstand vendor confirmed it, adding that the building had been renamed from BCE Place to Brookfield Place ten years previously.

So this is why you should always pay attention to the pictures in your hotel room, because you never know when you’ll need a sign.

Throwing Stones

I’m in a good mood as I make my way up the hill to visit a friend. The weather is transitioning to autumn; cool nights, misty mornings and bright, warm afternoons like this one. Against a brilliant blue sky, the leaves of the ancient maples lining the street rustle cheerfully in a light breeze. Fat squirrels bound across the front lawns of once grand Victorian houses, carrying last minute additions to the stockpiles that will get them through winter. I pass a nodding acquaintance from the library. We nod, giving each other smiles just wide enough to acknowledge familiarity, but not so wide we’d have to stop and chat. Even my knees are in a good mood, protesting the extra effort of the climb with mild twinges instead of the agonized yowling that usually accompanies a steep incline.

I crest the hill and round the corner onto the street where my friend lives. Yellow tape cordons off a stretch of sidewalk. On one end, the tapes are tied to the porch railings of a shabby rooming house. On the other end, they are wrapped around the bumpers of an old bus that has been converted into a police mobile command post. I hear the crackle of two-way radios as I walk around the bus and up the front walk of the restored Victorian house where my friend sits on the miniscule balcony of her second story apartment.

“What happened here?” I call up.

She tosses the answer down to me along with the key to the front door. “Murder.”

In her tiny perfect kitchen, she makes me a spectacular cup of coffee – fresh ground beans, steeped in a French press – then we sit out on the balcony for a smoke while she tells me about the murder.

There have been problems with the next-door neighbors this summer, all-night parties that regularly spilled stoned guests out onto the street where they shouted incoherently at each other. Two days previously, at the height of a particularly boisterous party, my friend heard her neighbor shout out a death threat. Shortly after that, a young man lay bleeding to death in the middle of the road, stabbed, possibly, by the woman who uttered the threat.

My friend wonders what would have happened if she had called the police. She threatened to do so earlier as the noise levels rose, but they turned down the music so she never followed through. If she had, she might have saved that young man’s life. I listen to her guilt and remember how, a long time ago, I felt the same way.

During a brief downturn in my life following the end of my first marriage, I lived in a dilapidated apartment building next door to a motorcycle gang house. It wasn’t unusual to arrive home from work and find myself unable to get to the door of the building because police swat teams were arresting my neighbors for possession of illegal firearms or busting up one of the broken-bottle rumbles that took place in the parking lot outside my living room window.

One morning, in the middle of winter, a friend who’d been visiting me went out to the bus stop and found a young woman wearing motorcycle leathers lying on the ground. Her arms were wrapped around her belly. She retched and vomited continuously. She had a split lip and a swollen bruise covered half her face. Despite the sub-zero temperature and her lack of warm clothing, she was drenched in sweat and reeked of alcohol.

I went inside, called 911 and took a blanket back out to the bus stop. We sat with her until the ambulance came while I kept a fearful eye on the front door of the gang house, worried her biker boyfriend might decide to have another go at her. She ignored us, panting and moaning in the intervals between vomiting up pale yellow bile. As the paramedics were lifting her onto the stretcher, I decided to stay with her.

In the hospital, after telling the admitting nurse everything I could, which wasn’t much, I sat alone in the waiting room listening to the young woman scream. The doctor came out and told me the she was aborting a fetus, probably killed by a blow to her stomach during the beating. She screamed because she was too intoxicated to be given pain medication.

When it was over, I went in to see her. She was still drunk enough to have problems focusing her eyes. I asked her for the name of someone I could contact, hoping to find relatives or friends. She shrieked at me to go away, to leave her alone. I returned to the hospital waiting room for a while, then realized there was nothing more to be done and went home. I felt guilty about abandoning her until I called the hospital to check on her later that day. They told me she had somehow managed to dress herself and walk out without anyone noticing.

When things like this happen now, I no longer feel guilt.  

Imagine life as a river and events as stones. Choices we make for ourselves have the most impact, like boulders tossed into the water, creating great splashing waves of consequences and redirecting the flow of life. The casual actions/inactions of others are like pebbles landing in the backwash of the waves, tiny perturbations whose ripples ultimately have little, if any, effect.

And this is how it should be. It’s okay to toss a pebble or two in someone else’s river, when the need arises, when we believe we are doing the right thing. But it’s best to reserve the big stones, the stones of commitment, responsibility and regret, for our own rivers.