My wife knocked me awake around 11:30 last night, wearing a worried frown and fleeing the room. Of all the pleasant ways to be awakened, this is pretty damned low on the list. The living room walls were pulsing with red and blue light as I stumbled into the front of the house in my bathrobe. Looking out, I counted nine police cars gathered on my street corner, including a canine unit.

The ruckus? Some guy stole an SUV from a house down the street. It must not have been his lucky night, because within seconds, he picked up a tail of police who chased him as far as our corner. Apparently, he jumped from the still-rolling vehicle and took off on foot. The pilotless car kept moving, its open door flailing along the side of my truck and leaving a nice long white streak before it hopped the curb and crashed to a halt mid-span on my neighbor’s new fence. No kidding, this fence was like two weeks old.

I stood there with my feet freezing on the wet asphalt and stared at the wreckage, thinking about the wake of destruction that follows some people. Here the rest of us are, doing our best to color inside the lines. We go about our daily business and try to minimize the damage we do to others when BAM, some jackass drives into our fence. Maybe the fence is a childhood scarred by an alcoholic parent, or a career ended by a drunk driver. Hell, maybe some dork cut in line in front of us at Starbucks. Regardless, we played by the rules and lost anyway because of the overlap between our lives and that of someone hell-bent on causing misery.

It wasn’t just a general feeling of victimhood dashing through my mind as I stood there. Oh no. I was working on how to use it, how it might work into my current novel. Because that’s what we writers do, right? We get these creepy grins at the most inappropriate times. Everyone else thinks we’ve got a spring loose, but we’re practically cackling, “Yes! I can use this in chapter eight!”

The police dog did his bit, and before long the perp was resting comfortably in the back of a squad car. This morning the fence is a mess, and my truck has looked better, but I’m a happy guy. Somewhere in the middle of my novel, some hapless homeowner is about to get a bit of bad news…

UPDATE: Half the fun of this story is seeing the Google ads in the right column tailor themselves to fit the words. Check any other entry on this blog, then this one. You’ll get a chuckle.