HUMAN GENIUS ON DISPLAY IN BLOOMINGTON
Did I dream this or what?
No, no, it must have happened. I’ve got coffee splotches all down my T-shirt to prove it.
The morning news announcer (not, sadly, Annie Corrigan whose wake-up voice I miss terribly) reported on an arrest for an incident in a Bloomington day day center yesterday.
Now let’s see, where is that story? I pore through the WFIU and H-T websites. Nothing. Maybe I did dream it. But why did I blow a huge gulp of morning java out my snoot?
Anyway, here’s what I remember. A man was caught on security video camera roaming through the day care center in the middle of the night.
Okay, a break in, right? But you gotta ask, what’s in a day care center that a savvy crook would want to steal?
I don’t figure they keep loads of cash at the place. Nor would there be supplies of good drugs like, oh, I don’t know, hydrocodone. Good, that is, for guys who make their daily bread breaking into places in the middle of the night.
No, not drugs
So what did the man want in the day care center?
Let’s go to the tape. He was walking around the place, the announcer informed me, in a child’s pink swimsuit.
It was at that nanosecond that the coffee was expelled through my nasal passages.
Like I say, it couldn’t have been a dream — I’ve got the T-shirt splotches to prove it.
Of all the areas of human endeavor, there is none which engenders creativity like sex. Not particle physics. Not microbiology. Not applied chemistry. Not even war.
Military Creativity
Nope. None of them produce innovators the way the sexual urge does. My long-ago roommate Ray Pride, the Chicago photographer and film critic, explained to me way back in the early days of the commercial interwebs why the net would spread like wildfire. Any technology, he said, that facilitates masturbation will be enormously successful.
Fair enough. How else to explain the fact that a significant number of the Earth’s people know who Paris Hilton is?
Admit it — You Know Who This Person Is
Our sad friend caught traipsing through the day care center didn’t even need high technology to aid him in his presumptive self-gratification.
All he needed was a teensy-weensy bathing suit.
Dang! I just blew another coffee gulp out my nose! Hold on a sec while I clean off my computer screen. There.
Imagine how strong the urge must have been for the man to risk his freedom, his reputation, and, quite possibly, even his health and life to commit the crime of breaking and entering solely so he could, well, get off!
Many of you might conclude the man is a loon. I won’t argue with you. On the other hand, he’s got the capacity for genius. All great artists, it is said, possess the seeds of insanity.
Mad Genius
Our swimsuit-clad traipser had to plan this caper with all the due diligence of a general plotting an invasion. He had to identify his target, determine how to get in, and do it all secretly so the enemy — the cops or some nosy neighbors — wouldn’t espy him en route.
As in any military operation, his was fraught with risk. But his urge for kink overwhelmed whatever diffidence he may have had. Like Ike on D-Day, he said, Let’s go!
When confronted with the video tape, the alleged traipser spilled his guts, according to the WFIU report. Yeah, that’s me, he told the cops. He did deny, though, that he stole (borrowed?) the swimsuit. It was his own. Nice of him.
Now, no matter how this case is ever adjudicated, this man will forever be known as the guy who broke into a day care center in the middle of the night to wear a child’s swimsuit.
Hell, he could win the Nobel Prize in Medicine one day and the incident will appear in paragraph two of New York Times story about it.
This man who had the cagliones to do what he did now might not be able to show his face in the Kroger for the rest of his life.
All for a for a few minutes of self-gratification.
And the most publicized act of his life thus far has caused at least one observer to blow coffee out his nose twice in a morning.
The poor sap.
This is the only story I’ll tackle today. What could top this?