Crime of the Century

My car is pretty distinctive. It’s a late-1980s, white stripe–tired, Elderly Gentleman Land Yacht. In sky blue.

This instant recognizability makes me feel extra bad about doing stupid things in traffic, because I know I can’t hide. If I cut somebody off on the way to work, then every day on the commute he can see me driving a wide-turn-radius blue sign that says “Remember me? The jerk?”

Of course, dumb driving moves make me feel horrible anyway because there’s almost no way to apologize afterward. Shouting out the window tends to get misinterpreted, oddly enough, and the rest of the world still hasn’t mastered reading my thoughts. I just need a bumper sticker that says “I’m so sorry” and a neon sign to switch on in my rear window.

(SPECIAL NOTE: The aforementioned situations are, naturally, completely hypothetical. I have of course never committed and would never entertain the notion of any irresponsible activity that could jeopardize my own safety or that of others while operating a motor vehicle. Hi, Dad!)

Being really eye-catching also means that my car and I should probably stop hanging around security-patrolled abandoned buildings.

Let me back up for a second and point out, in case you were unaware, that derelict shopping malls are extremely cool. I am not the only one who feels this way, as evidenced by a large and moderately disturbing web community and the delicious term “Dead Mall,” which is coincidentally also the name of my emo poetry collective.

Old things are pretty nifty in general, for that matter. I agree with hipsters on this point, as difficult as it is to admit. Actually, I might be swayed by aspects of hipsterdom were it not for my natural mantle of crippling self-consciousness. For example, I don’t believe that all ironic fashions are necessarily stupid or unappealing—

—it’s just that I know that they are decidedly stupid on me.

My enthusiasm for decaying structures is similarly hobbled by unrelenting fear, this time of trespassing arrests and/or hobo molestation, so personally exploring boarded-up retail carcasses is not in the cards. Thank goodness there’s the internet.

On the other hand, we’ve got a mall in Albuquerque that has been mostly dead for years, and it’s attached to a feral cat wonderland of a long-abandoned hotel. You can drive right up to the perimeter fence and stare at all the places where copper wiring used to be, and it’s beautifully landscaped in broken glass and 1960s parking lot fixtures. 

Recently, though, they actually moved a bulldozer into the site to clear the way for new construction. The last time I needed some kitchen gadgets from one of the three stores still operating out of the mall husk, I suddenly realized that all the fabulous creepiness could disappear at any time and be replaced with something unromantically safe and operational. 

Seizing what could be my last chance, I drove a really slow arc around the hotel and took some nausea-inducing jittery video. After that I pulled into the front parking lot for a few still photos of the desolation. 

Then a mall cop in a golf cart whirred up to tell me not to take pictures. 

I spooked like a first-grader in trouble for talking in the library and slunk home as shamefaced as possible. 

But then I realized that all of my pictures were really cool…

Two weeks later I went by the mall again to see if the bulldozer had moved, and OH WOW THEY PULLED THE OUTSIDE WALLS DOWN AND NOW YOU CAN SEE INSIDE THIS IS THE NEATEST THING EVER! I was busy gawking at the peeled-open hotel when I drove right past the same golf cart guard, who wrote down my license plate number as I made my getaway at a parking lot–mandated 15 mph.

I felt like such a wild hooligan that it made me cackle all the way home.

I haven’t monitored the demolition situation in weeks, and again I’m nervous that all of the enticing decay is about to be replaced with something dull like progress. Also, I’d like to give the security guard another opportunity to get nervous about my intentions. Presumably he has no idea that I am too skittish even to get out of my car, and I really hope that he’s imagining my vast potential for breaking, entering, and wreaking havoc. Part of me is way too excited about the possibility of being suspected by law enforcement. It’s probably the same part that wants to wear tiny hats.

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. We need a lot more holidays that allow people to dress in costume and eat an entire bag of Reese’s cups. Seriously, just think about how much better Valentine’s Day would be if you could buy yourself a box of chocolates while being an imperial stormtrooper.

I squandered a few Halloweens in my childhood by wearing the same fairy princess dress for multiple years in a row, thus forever missing my chance to be baby Yoda. Since then, I’ve learned to show greater respect for the idols of my formative years.

[Important Update: It has come to my attention that some people think the creature pictured above is Cookie Monster. If you missed this important part of Sesame Street, I feel really bad for you.]

In addition to dressing up and sugar, I also love being good at things, which is why I rarely go dancing. However, one of the community centers in town has swing dancing every Tuesday night, and my roommate convinces me to come roughly once per year for the Halloween costume contest. A little coordination-based loss of dignity is a fair price to pay for dancing with the Dread Pirate Roberts and Dr. Horrible.

This year I couldn’t settle on an appropriate nerd culture role model, so I wore this:

I received a couple of compliments and only one “You look like you’re twelve,” but I just joined the contest for the fun of it. My outfit could never compete on the level of the guy who built a Transformer suit out of spare car parts.

But to my intense surprise, when they started announcing the winners, I had come in first!

In the children’s category.

Specificity was clearly not this contest’s top priority, though. Other winners, as announced from the stage, included:

“The robot”

stars.ign.com

“The Fantastiks”

amazon.com

…and finally, “The Star Trek dude.”

knowyourmeme.com

I asked Jean-Luc how he felt about being demoted from Captain to “dude.” Apparently it’s a little like dressing as food and being mistaken for a middle-schooler.

Picard did dance with me, though. My level of excitement was probably sufficient to put me on some kind of watch list for deranged stalkers of fictional characters. I elected not to mention my own tenure on the Enterprise.

Woof

I took French in high school and again in college. This decision showed great foresight and career-mindedness for a person living in New Mexico, where nearly 30% of the population speaks Spanish at home. That’s just how prepared I am.

Speaking of foresight, I forgot about the language requirement in my high school until my junior year, which made me the only upperclassman in a French I course with a bunch of 14-year-olds. If you’re thinking that being older made me cool in any way, please take a look at the rest of my blog.

Still, I was holding on to my dignity pretty well until Rico came through the door one morning and announced, “I hear you used to bark at people.”

The trouble with truth is that it’s difficult to refute convincingly, particularly if the witnesses survive.

The witness in this instance was a girl from my middle school who I didn’t previously realize had something against me. She had clearly been squealing, but I couldn’t picture how the topic had come up.

I should point out that it was perfectly reasonable to bark at the people in question because they already thought I was possessed. They never mentioned how they got the idea, but it might have been the amount of time I spent talking to a stump in the cafeteria courtyard. Or the day I wore plastic grocery bags in my hair. Or maybe my homemade respirator mask with built-in windshield from the year they re-roofed the school.

It wasn’t the invisible birds I used to chase; that definitely came after they had started throwing M&Ms at me.

I kind of liked attention.

(Aside: Believe it or not, I maintained an entire friendship through all three years of middle school.)

Here’s the thing, though: I definitely still bark on occasion. I also lick dessert plates, pretend that I’m invisible, and slide down carpeted stairs on my butt. Dorky stuff is fun. Just don’t let 14-year-olds catch you.

(P.S. You want to go for a full-bodied woof, like a German Shepherd or Rottweiler. Any animal that bounces when it barks doesn’t count.)

The Ghost Club

In second grade, I joined the Ghost Club started by two cooler girls from my class. We all watched Ghostwriter and read Goosebumps, so we were confident that we were the kind of savvy kids with whom all ghosts would prefer to work.

The three of us met at lunch and recess to compare paranormal encounters and think up ways to contact the spirit world.

The club disbanded in about two weeks. Sherry broke her leg and Jennifer broke her arm, which clearly indicated that we were getting too close to the ghosts and making them angry. The girls told me that we would have to stop meeting for my safety, and obviously the club could not go on without my wise input.

The next year, my friend Natasha and I formed the Chasing Those Floating Things You See In The Corner Of Your Eye Sometimes Club. Both of us kept all our limbs intact, but for some reason we were not invited to join any more recess clubs.

Sadly, Sherry and Jennifer both moved away before the student body’s most impressive brush with the unexplained.

My elementary school sat between two residential streets and a city park, so about twenty backyards housed small collections of escaped kickballs. We all avoided the dark green house at the very back of the school, though, because that’s where Captain Hook lived. Apparently his midlife crisis included a career change from chasing Peter Pan to terrorizing suburban school children.

No one ever saw Captain Hook, which was good because he hated kids and would kill you with his hook if you even looked at him. Once Natasha and I got really brave and snuck up to touch Captain Hook’s fence before shrieking in terror and running for our lives, but it was a very close call and for the rest of the day we just knew that he had seen us and would come hook our guts out during art.

Even though the Captain never showed himself, we had proof that he was really there because of the messages he sent. The school’s gigantic riding lawnmower spat up clods of grass with perfectly round holes in them, and these were clearly a secret code that our sinister neighbor had punched in with his hook.

My classmate Jan was the only person who could decode Hook’s messages. After she revealed this talent, the rest of us would bring her grass clods and she would examine them solemnly. Finally, she would whisper the horrible warnings she had read:

Now that I think of it, Jan would have been an asset to the Ghost Club.