I fear I may have made a grave mistake today. I think that as a result of temporary inspiration I have made the rest of my life meaningless. I have this creeping, horrible dread that every accomplishment, every challenge overcome, every idiot humiliated will pale in comparison to what I have wrought today. I have peaked. I have performed the greatest single work I will ever conceive. At the tender barely-old age of 26, I know that I have already past the greatest moment of my life.
Some time ago, my brother introduced me to the effort of the Minneapolis/St. Paul police departments to curb prostitution by publicly announcing all arrests for both prostitutes and johns. Since then, the site (http://www.stpaul.gov/depts/police/prostitution.html) has become a weekly stop of mine. I go there to chortle at the brain dead yokel johns who get caught, to be horrified by the drugged-out 30 year-old ho's who look 60, and to be disgusted by the chicks they couldn't PAY me enough to do. This week was a first, though, since there was a 19 year-old chick who actually looked kind of cute, and I commiserated. So anyway, I've been visiting the site religiously and have even taken to sharing it with my coworkers. One chick in particular, we'll call her "Ms. S", seemed to take particular mirth in such off-beat things.
Now the plot thickens. One of my other coworkers, a guy we'll call "Mr. S" (no relation to Ms. S) had to take pictures of an event and burned through the remaining film by taking pictures of us. Naturally, he manages to take a horrendous photograph of Ms. S. Now Ms. S is actually pretty hot, you know, if you're into that whole chick thing (which I am! Woo-hoo!). Caught half-blinking, she looked drugged and a haggard. She tried to confiscate the photographs, but we convinced her to return them, swearing that we wouldn't do anything bad with them.
I don't mean to be evil. I fully intended not to do anything with the pictures, but sometimes I get swept up in events beyond my control. It's as if the cosmos itself WILLS me to do something bad. I am only one solitary man, so what can I do against all of the forces aligned against my weak and unsecured promise?
If you haven't picked up on it by now, the devious plan that crawled out of the depths of my mind and scared away my sense of decency centered around placing Ms. S's face on the Prostitute list. With the full support and encouragement of Mr. S, I set about my task. It wasn't easy either. Copying the HTML was easy, but I had to wheedle a third coworker into scanning the photograph into her Macintosh. From there, I had to turn it into something compatible with both the PC and the Internet. After a non-continuous hour of cursing Microsoft for burdening us with a program as singularly worthless as "Imaging" and Netscape for not understanding Bitmaps or Tiffs, I finally downloaded a conversion program. After a little more fiddling, I nestled the photograph of Ms. S in the middle of all of the other pictures.
As further proof that the universe was on my side, no sooner had I finished than she came strolling into our department. I innocently suggested that we reprise our weekly viewing of the ho's in Minnesota. We casually comment on the degenerates when suddenly, two-thirds down the page, she sees her own photo among the rogue's gallery of hookers and johns. Ah, no words can describe the profound spiritual ecstasy I felt when she made an inhumanly long gasp and almost collapsed on the ground in shock. Shock eventually gave way to laughter and much less violence than I feared. Afterwards, we showed it to virtually everybody else in the office and much fun was had by all, but I knew it was over. The glow of my greatest gag ever was fading.
Even now, the warmth in my soul is fading as the greatest single moment in my life passes farther into history. Sadly, Ms. S forced me to delete my page so now there is no monument to that blessed second when realization collided with her fragile psyche like a bowling ball on a Pop Tart. In the years that come, our memories will fade as alcohol and age take their toll on our brains, and in time, the three of us that witnessed that event will become history ourselves. Even now, I'm plagued with the question: What now? Will I ever again come up with a gag so stunningly clever? Will I ever commit a crime against sanity that won't live in the shadow of this incident? Will anything I ever do have any meaning?
Ah, I guess you had to be there.
