This post is going to be long. Consider how brief and to-the-point my comments usually are… You have been warned.

Tuesday, about 8:30am:
I’m running behind getting my shit together to leave for work in the morning. This is more commonly the case than not ever since the advent of Beatrix. (Can I get a witness from the 4me family?) I’m walking the dogs around the yard, urgently asking them to Just Pee, Already (don’t laugh: I’ve actually managed to teach Jacques the command word “crap”, and it works). Once they’ve done their thing, I’m headed back to the back door when two guys in jeans and t-shirts get out of a nice pickup they’ve parked on the wrong side of the road and walk towards me. “Hi. Is this your house? Do you have a second?”

“I have about two,” I respond, thinking they’re going to tell me how I’m a heathen sinner and ply me with pamphlets or something. But then they’re not dressed well enough for that, so I’m confused. And in a hurry. “We’re police officers, and we want to talk to you about the apartment complex over there.” The short one shows me an ID card and nods in the direction of the apartments across the street. You’d think they were running an illicit doughnut shop in there given the number of cop cars we’ve seen in the last three years since we moved in. “We’d like to do some surveillance on one of the apartments and we’d like to use your house. Would that be okay with you?”

We discuss the particulars for a minute or so before I say “Sounds okay by me, let’s just go inside and check with my wife and see if she has any objections.” We head into the house where E is on the phone. While we wait for her to finish, only a matter of about two minutes, a Ford Explorer-looking SUV thing (they all look alike to me) pulls into my driveway, which is just outside the back door and the kitchen where we’re all standing. The two cops look very interested. I suggest it’s probably just turning around in the driveway, and sure enough, the truck starts to pull back out again.

[screech! crunch!] Loud noises that you’re not supposed to hear during normal driving conditions are heard from just outside the door. We open the door to check things out and see that the truck has run over my bike, which I’d locked to the handrail outside the door, bending the back wheel into an interesting but non-circular shape. The truck keeps on backing out as if nothing’s happened. The cops push out the door past me yelling “Hey. Hey! HEY! Stop!” The truck stops, and the cops (who still haven’t identified themselves to the driver) say Look what you did to my bike and Give me your driver’s license. The girl says “This is my mom’s truck - my license is in the other car.” So cop number two gets on the phone while cop number one shows her his ID card and gets serious. Turns out she’s 16 (so should be in school), has a passenger (who it turns out the cops already know from prior experience), is driving someone else’s car without a license. And she trashed my bicycle. Things just got interesting. I ask “Do you guys just want to handle it from here?” “Yeah, we’ll take care of it.” The last thing I hear as I head back inside is, “Okay, now you’re fuckin’ with me. Out of the truck.” I look out the window once I’m in and see cop number 1 standing in the road shaking his necklace badge in the girl’s face. I get out the cellphone to call work and say I’m gonna be a little late today.

I wander outside after a while to see if they still want to talk about the surveillance thing and cop number 1 says they’ll just come back tomorrow if that’s okay - things are too complicated and weird right now. Meanwhile, the passenger is trying to talk to me from a short ways off, trying to buy the bike off me - “Dude - how much you want for the bike? Come ON. How much?” I thought but didn’t say, “Dude, the chick you’re with is playing hookie from school, driving a car she can’t prove is owned by anyone in her family, and driving without a license. This whole thing is no longer about the bike.” I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that I’d been talking to E only the day before about trashing the thing and buying a new one. This bike has been sitting out all winter locked to that rail and rusting since I planning on getting rid of it anyway. It was a graduation present - a high school graduation present - and I figure I’m due a new set of wheels seeing as I’m now 35. So anyway, off to work.

Wednesday, 8:00am
The cops come back and we all agree that yesterday was just too weird to be real and we should forget about it and move on. We head up to the top floor (3rd story), which has a fine view of the apartment complex, and talk about surveillance. I mention that it’s already proven to be a fine vantage point to watch a big bust go down, since you can see the cops hiding around the backs of the buildings and still get a clear view of the half-naked guy getting hauled out the front window. Turns out they just want to set up a camera for a couple of days and watch people coming and going from a dealer’s apartment. We set up a time for them to come back that evening and get set up.

When they return, there’s an extra guy and a very spiffy camera setup that they install in one of our windows. The zoom lens can read the lettering on a 30-day-I-just-bought-this-car tag on the far side of the apartment lot, so things are looking good. They set the laptop to record and leave.

Friday
E is taking exams all day (comprehensives to finish her master’s) so I’m taking the day off to watch Beatrix. The cops are coming at some point today to fetch the camera gear so they can set it up somewhere else for the weekend. When I get a chance, I check my email, and find a couple of real gems in my Inbox. They’re short (shorter than my stories), so I’ll just put them here in their entirety, with identifying features redacted:

From: […]@aol.com
Subject: S[…] and E[…] Bober want to hear from you
  Hey…I happened to be home just now when it popped into my head for the 100th time to google your name and see where you’d landed after disappearing without a word from CNN. Boom…here you are! Still at Az. State U.?
  We were devoted viewers and felt ripped off by CNN. I found your website - Aaron and E[…] Brown - but when I tried to click on to your material (I’m pretty klutzy with the computer), I apparantly got your e mail address instead…so I don’t know if there is still a website or not. I’ll try to go back and see where I went wrong as soon as I finish this.
  I like the idea of an intelligent interview program that you would host. I don’t see or hear much that qualifies as intelligent probing for honest material. Our general population seems to incline to histrionics, softball freebies, of talking point newspeak, so maybe intelligent material would not sell. Still, inquiring minds would tune in, even if we’re a minority. We would make your show a priority.
Okay…let me know if you’re active and I’ll sign up.

From: […]@aol.com
Subject: S[…] bober, again
  Ha! I finally got it right. Got into your photo gallery…the violinleaf is excellent! I’m imressed…strong image. I’ll get more into your site as time allows. And what is your speaking calendar? Any Denver area dates?
  I’m a communicator, corresponder, writer, therapist, and constant mountaineer. My serious amateur photography aims for the ephemeral and the expository in the high country of the Colorado Rockies…some would say flavored with occasional mysticality. My professional web site is at s[…]@aol.com. I’m always interested in dialog. … regards…s[…]

First of all, the guy’s an AOL user. Secondly, he thinks his email address is where his “professional web site” is. (I found his real web address - email me for it if you’re curious.) Now, I’ve had people before remark upon the similarity between my name and the name of the guy who used to work for CNN. I even remember the day he was promoted to a more prominent job (not yet Anchor Man) at ABC News when I was in college. The paper had a blurb about him, and someone cut it out and pinned it to my door at 110 Stephenson. So that’s not new. What is new is someone reading my personal web page and actually thinking they’ve found the The Other Aaron Brown. You know, the one who’s likely to be a turd, but who may or may not be “one bad dude in a slobber” - my absolute favorite from that list.

So anyway, back to Mr. Bober. I’ve debated about what to write back to him and I’m tempted to write nothing at all, thinking that such would be the reaction of The Other Aaron Brown if he’d gotten these random email messages from some mystic photographer in the Denver area. I’m also thinking that this strategy is, aside from engaging in outright deception, the one most likely to produce another entertaining email message in my Inbox. Mostly, from what I’ve read of this guy, I’m just not really interested in having any kind of ongoing conversation with him.

Sunday, 9:00pm
I need to pack up a breast pump and get it ready to mail. Any one of you who are not married, or even married but don’t have kids, especially the guys, I’ll give you a hundred dollars in cold cash if you can honestly say you’ve imagined yourself ever ever saying that. Nonetheless, as of about an hour and a half ago this evening, it was true for me. The damn things are expensive, so my cousin had kindly loaned us hers so E could use it when Beatrix was born. It hasn’t been used lately, and my cousin just gave birth to her second child, so we need to send it back. I’m collecting all the pieces and parts (follow the link - you’ll see) and this involves me turning on a rarely-used light at the back of our bedroom and pulling out the power brick from the outlet in a corner of the room where we haven’t gone since it was plugged in about seven months ago. I’m reaching for the brick and stop suddenly when I realize it has stuff on top of it… and the stuff is moving. I’ve found an ant colony. In my bedroom. The ants, perhaps trying to escape all the rainstorms we’ve had lately, have moved twenty feet up the wall of the house, found a way in through the power outlet hole, and have set up camp right there. The top face of the power brick is covered in little white ant eggs, looking like a dusting of tiny rice grains, and the eggs are surrounded by a ring of guardian ants. I lean in for a close look in a panic that I’ve found a termite nest, but they’re just ants. There are hundreds more coating the power outlet cover, and I’ve now solved the mystery of the two or three ants I found in the bathroom earlier that day. It was a scouting mission. It’s lucky we never take food up to the bedroom to eat.

The ant nest leaves me with a bit of a paradox - the vacuum is the easiest way to get rid of the ones I can see, and I’d rather vacuum dead ones than live ones, but spraying them would a) glue them to the wall, making them harder to vacuum; b) leave crap on my cousin’s power brick that I’d have to clean off later; and c) I’d be spraying a live power outlet in my bedroom. So I’m putting this off til tomorrow morning when I can deal with the issue in the daylight. [sarcasm:] I can hardly wait to see how many more ants and eggs are hiding inside the outlet box behind the cover plate. (sigh)

So that was my week.