It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [74]
“So what do you think about that?” I questioned. “What do you think about someone who buys that many timers in fourteen days?”
“I think he abandoned his goat herd and went to a training camp where he was told he’s going to get seventy-two virgins if he blows himself up in front of a falafel stand,” Jamie said simply. “Even though I bet his goats were prettier than the virgins. What do I think he’s doing? He’s building bombs.”
I asked my friend Michell, who is a cop in Florida.
I only got to the part where I said he was living in Germany when she simply said, “Bombs.”
I asked my other friend Michelle, whose husband used to be a cop in Texas.
“He’s eating jalapeños on top of cream cheese right now,” she informed me. “But I’m pretty sure he just said ‘bombs.’ ”
So I called my sister to get her opinion, and she answered while she was on the elliptical at the gym, watching Tyra Banks on a wide screen.
“So what do you think?” I asked her.
“Why did you buy a stove and drag it fifty miles home if the timer didn’t work?” she replied between huffs. “You should have just gone to Sears.”
So with the general consensus being that I had stumbled upon a terrorist’s nest, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. I looked up the address of Homeland Security, but I wasn’t all that sure what I should do after that. Did I proceed? Did I just ignore it? Was I overreacting, or was I being naïve? Was I being Mrs. Kravitz? There was no middle ground here.
I decided the only way to know what was responsible was to make a list of pros and cons. So I did.
Pro: You could be foiling an international plot to kill innocent people. And those people might even be Americans.
Con: They’re kitchen timers. What if someone just got an impulse to buy every kitchen timer he could possibly get his hands on or decided he wanted to break a world record and was absolutely unskilled at anything else? Sometimes people need to feel special.
Pro: That’s ridiculous. Kitchen timers would be one of the last things anybody would collect. If you can blink your eyes, you can break a world record, with some self-determination and Rockstar energy drinks. Eat some beans and fart a thousand times. That’s a record.
Con: That’s precisely why kitchen timers are an excellent choice. They are unexpected. They are free-spirited and out of the ordinary. Just because they don’t fit into your box. Follow your bliss!
Pro: How would you feel if you ignored this and next week a bomb went off in Germany? He’s probably living in Hani Hanjour’s apartment!
Con: I would have no idea if it was KOOKAROO who used the kitchen timers to set off bombs. Everyone should be home-schooled!
Pro: You could help capture a dangerous person who is probably on welfare and using my tax money to buy RC Cola and Little Debbies. This terrorist needs to get up off his ass and get a job and stop tinkering with little timer parts! Be a productive member of society and pay taxes!
Con: You could be ruining a dork’s life. I wish I could breast-feed something.
Pro: If collecting kitchen timers was a life, then being renditioned would be an upgrade. I hate you, Con.
Con: I hated you first, Pro.
Pro: You live in a trailer and you start drinking too early in the morning. Why don’t you go write a letter to one of your convict boyfriends?
Con: How was your Tea Party rally? I see you have a nice little sign on the back of an old Papa John’s pizza box with the word “consitution” scrawled in black marker.
Clearly, Pro and Con were no help. I abandoned that effort after Con tried to hug Pro, saying that they needed to come together and that diversity was good, and Pro responded by flipping the pizza box over to the other side and scribbling “We Came Unarmed—This Time.”
I found myself wishing there was a smoking car parked at the curb or a guy looking suspicious when he asked for an extra side of tahini and a remote detonator. But all I had was a person who was buying a stupid amount of kitchen timers on an auction