Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

My Life Of Crime
In Which Our Hero Fights the Law, and the Law Wins

On the day after Thanksgiving, I woke up and decided to begin my life of crime. Motivated by misanthropy, steeped in hatred for my fellow human beings, I decided to devote my soul to Evil and my every waking moment to the doing of Wrong. Such a course is not to be charted randomly. My first task was to immerse myself fully in the mindset of rebellion and lawlessness.

I sat in my living room and focused my mind on the most evil, disturbing images I could conjure. Lawyers kicking puppies. Florida voters. Jehovah's Witnesses. Roscoe the Clown, who did the children's entertainment at my company picnic a couple of years back. Telemarketers at their desks. Rosie O'Donnell. Obese men mowing their lawns and tanning their back hair. (Wait, that's the same thing twice.) The Reverend Al Sharpton. The Reverend Al Sharpton kicking puppies. The Reverend Al Sharpton kicking puppies while mowing his lawn with his shirt off.

Still, disturbing as all of that was, it was not evil enough. I spent an hour staring at the television with the channel tuned to a station "blacked out"' by the FCC. I squinted as best I could to see the forbidden pixels, to allow the photons of the illegal syndicated programming to wash over my retinas, despite my government's best attempts to protect me from myself. This, while feeling very evil, still was not enough.

I searched the apartment for those tags that say "Do not remove this tag." I checked the sofa, the bed, the pillows. I couldn't find any. I went into the kitchen hoping to find and take vitamins that were past their expiration date, but all our Centrum was fresh and our Vitamin C current. I ate an entire box of Rice Krispies Treats. Feeling sick rather than evil, I decided to leave.

I sat behind the wheel of my Pontiac, which, while quite evil, was still not evil enough by itself. I idled the motor for three hours, hoping to destroy the environment. I sat in the parking lot honking the horn as if to summon someone from inside my building.

I was failing in my bid to embrace the Darkness. I tried tuning my car radio to the local Urban Beat station, turning it up as loud as it would go. Without a real low-riding "boom car," though, I couldn't muster enough beat to bother myself, let alone anyone in the vicinity. So I threw the Pontiac in drive and took to the highways, determined to commit crimes against society.

I drove for four blocks on only two wheels. I chased seagulls. I frightened old men and small children, sneering from my open window and spitting on the sidewalk. I drove to the Southern Tier college of Alfred University, drove through the Quad, got out of my car, kicked the life-sized bronze statue of Alfred the Great, and tore up the lawn as I left the property. I drove back home and traveled the whole way on sidewalks and through cow pastures.

I searched the city for a bus full of nuns so that I could sideswipe it, but had to settle for tailgating a sedan festooned with "student driver" labels. I set fire to my Firestone tires and drove smoking and flaming like Stephen King's Christine through the worst sections of town, just waiting for my wheels to explode. I drove through the drive-through windows of every fast food restaurant I could find, refusing to order anything and shouting Zen koans at the cashiers. I drove to the Mayor's house and stuffed his mailbox with my three-week's accumulation of six hundred "Heartland" mail-order catalogs.

On the way home I got pulled over and ticketed for speeding and passing in a no-passing zone. And I felt really evil.