Bad Sun Risin'

Not a good day yesterday. Let's set aside my personal issues with the media and baseball world for a minute and get back into reality. I got up early, 5:17 AM, and was out running by 5:31. My driveway was clear. My lawn was clear. Our new fence, which is to surround the perimeter of our home, has been partially erected. At least the front is done and part of the right side (the right side if you're facing the house from the front). We have a gate in front of the driveway that I jumped over rather than opened electronically. I don't know the combination yet and probably won't for another year or two. (Guess who could never get into his locker at school.) I started my run by passing our two garbage cans, set out neatly for garbage pickup.

It was a good run. My right wrist is no longer wrapped from my fall, and the pain has mostly subsided. I didn't have to pre-medicate myself with Advil before the run. The up and down shaking of my arms was painful in the wrist for about 3 weeks. Four or five Advil taken 30 minutes before a run would help the wrist. Probably did damage to my heart. I'll let you know when I'm seventy (or "sempty" as Grandpappy Scott used to say).**

I ran for about 45 minutes. Doing about a 7 1/2 minute mile, that means I ran about, uh... You know. You do the math. Fact is, I ran far and hard and wasn't struck once by any flying newspapers from the army of paperboys driving around town in their 1996 Caravans, Mega 97 blasting from their open windows like gunfire. When I was a paperboy, I rode a bike. And wore headphones. And listened to tapes of the Rolling Stones. Plus, I was not 35 years old. Where have all the 11 year olds gone? Here's why immigration is such a huge issue in the upcoming election. The Hispanic population has taken all of the good paperboy jobs from the domestic 11 year olds. Now these boys are stuck at home every morning, unemployed, sleeping and thinking about potential plotlines for Halo IV.

I'm cynical today; a little surly. That's because I finished the run, like I always do, with a walk of about half a mile. Made it onto my street, the sky becoming colored with the sun due to rise shortly. And I looked ahead and saw something on my driveway that wasn't there before. I stopped walking. Instead, I started to run again, got to my driveway and almost puked. The stench was incredible. Somehow, within the previous 45 minutes, somebody, or somebodies, had taken what looked like every garbage can in the state of New Jersey and emptied it onto the front of my driveway. I could tell because cluttered in front of my new fence, just slightly away from the torn up garbage bags and loose food scraps, wet paper towels, moldy cans, and influenza-carrying used tissues, were about 35 empty garbage cans.

Needless to say, I hopped the fence, ran inside and called the police.

This was all on a day when Alyssa and Grace had to get to school by 7 AM for their early-morning extra curricular stuff. The car couldn't get out because of the trash, so I got out a snow shovel and carved out a path for Vanessa's Hummer. She drove away, her tires covered in banana peels and gum.

The police were mad at me.

Policewoman: Mr. Scott, why did you move the evidence?
Me: So my kids could go to school.
Policewoman: You compromised a crime scene.
Me: Do you think the bad people who did this deed left a clue amongst the rubble of suburban life that is now trapped between the grooves of my wife's car?
Policewoman: You joke, yet keep in mind who's going to have to clean all this up when we're done.
Me: Who?
Policewoman: You.

They were done after an hour or so. By then, half the community had come to pick up their garbage cans. I wasn't sure how so many people could look at a large, gray cylindrical instrument of waste collection which looked just like the other 33 large, gray cylindrical instruments of waste collection, and know which one(s) were theirs. People must have a spiritual connection to their garbage cans, I guess.

Our newly installed video cameras didn't catch the perpetrator(s) of this crime. They'd just been installed last week and weren't pointed in the right directions. I think they will be now, after we sue the company for negligence. I mean, how hard is it to point security cameras at a home's point of entry?

By midday, the debris was basically gone. The cleanup crew missed a few scraps which had become embedded between tiny cracks in the driveway, but otherwise the place looked as good as it did before this fourth act of vandalism on our home.

I called the police around 4:00. No witnesses. No leads.

Somebody out there doesn't like me.

** Just kidding. There's no "Grandpappy Scott." My father, "Red" Scott, had his family deported to Scotland many years before English was the official language of the United States.