Surrounded!

I damn near pissed myself, I must admit. Those of you who know me well are fully aware that law enforcement and I have never really seen eye to eye. Mostly little things (like my inability to obey the speed limit or to wear a seat belt), but there were a couple of significant issues 15 years ago. Suffice it to say that I went on a Tour de Stupidé between 1996-1997 and got myself into loads of trouble.

Also, did I mention I hate cops? And not necessarily for any of the above reasons, either. I hate them because they’re always up your ass when you don’t need them and never around when you do*. Because of that, I rank them right up there with the salespeople who work at Best Buy. You KNOW what I’m talking about, don’t even try to deny it.

But I digress…

The cops on THIS day and in THIS particular state have never done anything to me but issue aforementioned speeding tickets. So I shouldn’t really say I hate ALL cops. I will say that they make me nervous, though, in that knee-jerk “I’m not doing anything wrong, so go away NOW!” kind of way. The fact that they were sitting there made me laugh… at first. I made plenty of “go eat your donuts somewhere else” and “your tax dollars hard at work” jokes, because they seemed to be doing absolutely nothing but chatting each other up at a good ole cop convention.

But after they sat there for an hour or two, I started wondering what in the fuck they were REALLY doing here. When you see cops milling about on television, it’s usually because they’re waiting for a warrant to be issued. (Yes, yes, I need to quit watching CSI and Law & Order, I know.) I started flipping through my mental Rolodex of all things I have done wrong in my life that I have not rectified yet and could give them probable cause to get a warrant issued^™.

But I had nothing. I’m a boring work-at-home mom now. The worst thing I do these days is answer the door without a bra on. And the girls are not exactly 18-year-old perky anymore, so it probably IS against the law somewhere (if only for the Fashion Police, who I also thumb my nose at). Probably not warrant-worthy.

So what the HELL?! I started feeling paranoia set in. I knew I hadn’t done anything, but when you distrust law enforcement like I do, you know from first-hand experience that sometimes the truth isn’t always the highest thing on their list of priorities. Maybe one of my former enemies decided to start trouble and tell authorities I had a meth lab or something**.

So I called Brian to share in my delusional paranoia. He laughed it off at first, but crazy is contagious. Heh. No, he was worried for a different reason. He wanted me to get out of the house and go somewhere with Jack in case there was a psycho on the loose. I figured if there were a psycho on the loose, they’d be crouched down with their guns drawn, running through the streets and making military hand signals. (I REALLY need to lay off the tv, don’t I?) But in the end, my uneasiness got the better of me so I did just that.

(By the way, you have no idea how relieved I was when they didn’t surround me screaming to get out of the car with my hands in the air. It was the same ridiculous relief you feel when you’ve had to pee for 6 hours and your bladder can’t handle one more drop and if you so much as clear your throat, you’re going to have an accident and leak a little. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

Turns out, Brian wasn’t too far from the truth! A burglar broke into a house a couple doors down from me and the owner actually came home and interrupted him! The guy was trying to sneak out the back door and run off, the homeowner called the police, and the cops came to surround our subdivision. They caught the guy, so I guess I shouldn’t have been making fun of them milling about and doing nothing.

Talk about a dumb area to break into. This isn’t a gated community or anything, but ironically, it IS loaded up with cops. (Which would explain why there were so many here yesterday.) A cop lives right across the street from me, a state trooper lives 10 or so doors down on the same side of the street, AND there’s another state trooper who lives one street over and a few doors down. Those are just the ones I know about. Idiot should have scoped out the area a bit more. Heh.

I’m so, so thankful it wasn’t my house. Not because I care about the stuff, but because I would have been right here with Jack at the time, and I think the guy had a gun. They said it was “aggravated burglary”, so he definitely had some sort of weapon! I don’t even want to think about that. That’s a little terrifying, honestly.

Brian is calling today to re-activate our home security system. We turned the dumb thing off several years ago because the cats kept setting the alarms off when we weren’t home, but they need to decrease the sensitivity and turn it back on, and I’m going to leave it on when I’m home now, too.  Annoying. I can’t believe a tiny town like this had a burglar. If I’m going to start dealing with crime, I’d rather be back in a bigger city again. Pffffft.