Monday, January 21, 2019

The Police "King of Pain"

As a forty-something adult with no criminal history (minus that time when I was 12 and shot off bottle rockets in a park near my home), I still feel a guilty sensation whenever a police car drives past me. My first instinct is: they're looking for me! I'm not sure who or what to blame for my always-guilty-for-no-reason conscience. An equally guilty feeling overcomes me whenever I exit a department store for fear I'll set off the ever-embarrassing "you stole something" alarm. For the latter, I seem to always be that guy who finds that one clerk who forgot to remove the security tag from my newly-purchased slacks. As for the former, this may or may not stem from Halloween 1991. As that night of trick-or-treating began, I literally walked across the street from my house to my friend Matt's house when a police car stopped me. He offered this threatening warning: my description matched that of a neighborhood bully who was stealing candy from other children. The description apparently was: a boy wearing a black coat. GUILTY! After explaining to the officer that I literally just walked about 50 feet from my house and, for that reason alone, I didn't do it. He warned me that he'd be out all evening to keep an eye on things (i.e. "me").