01/08/2005 - 6:51 a.m. | important info re: my subsequent dismemberment

Not that I am alarmist or anything, but if you should suddenly find me missing or, you know, hacked to pieces, let me help you out with the investigation post mortem. It was that fucking hobo Jerome (a.k.a. "Old Man"), the one Smacko is friends with.

So, I was sweating in bed as usual, as a result of the space heater and/or nightmares, when Kyle and Shelly come bursting in. "We're going to fucking die," they say. I paraphrase. I gurgle something. They were woken by someone pounding on the door a short while earlier and eventually rose to answer it. Kyle peeked out the window and somehow decided that the Danny Glover-esque figure (and the smaller shadow behind him) were no doubt Jevon and Yousaf. So, he opens the door and - whoops! - it's a fucking homeless person! "My name is Jerome-" "OLD MAN?!" Kyle interrupts. "Yeah, man - that's me!" He goes on to say that he's been going around shoveling sidewalks for people and asks if he could provide us with his services. I can only assume he has been systematically (drunkenly) been doing this to every house in Champaign-Urbana, stopping at ours currently because, of course, all our lights were on. The logic of Kyle's tale goes a little askew here, starting with Kyle saying that, no, we would not like your crazy hobo services and somehow ending with Jerome saying, "OK, I'll be back at around 9 to pick up my money!" Then began the shoveling, which kept Kyle and Shelly awake until the came up to see me.

We started discussing a viable course of action. My first thought was saying to them, "It's OK, kids. Crawl into bed with Dad. I've got a sword and a gun," but that's a little weird. None of us really wanted to pay him, of course, because that would put the mark of the beast on us forevermore from his kind, but Kyle had an additional fear that he had neglected to mention. When he was talking to Jerome, he had the door barely ajar, just enough for his head to fit through, but there was a point where Old Man took a lingering (longing?) look into our house at our stuff. Obviously, if we did not pay this man, he would come into our house, murder us all, and take our stuff. "So call the police then," I said. No good. Even if the police were able to catch him and toss him in the slammer, he'd be out in no time at all, now with revenge on his mind. And, of course, they were both leaving right at the time he was supposed to get back, so it was all up to me to deal with this vagrant. There was a lot of circular discussion (with the occasional interruption from Kyle along the lines of, "He's gonna hack us to bits!"), and I'm not entirely sure of the solution we came to, but I do believe it might have been taping an envelope with "Old Man" scrawled on it to the window, five bucks contained within. That's certainly the most amusing way. Well. Short of killing him ourselves.

Hm.