Here’s the problem with thinking you have a cognitive edge on the rest of your neighbors.

You don’t. I knew when I got out here, this place was going to be overrun with 300,000 erstwhile Rain Man stunt doubles, all muttering about owls and stuff. And I was right.

I may as well talk about this. I went to the river’s edge where the old cement bases for the Shasta Dam Conveyor belt once stood. Of course, some guy has to be there drinking a 40 oz. in a bag. I thought he heard me walk up.

I said “Excuse me,” because, you know, I needed to get around him.

He jumps up, swinging because I apparently scared him. Yep. He was plastered. And too drunk to be really dangerous, which is apparently theme near my house these days.

I calmed him down and looked where I needed to. 

Ten minutes later, he’s stumbling around like he just came out of anesthesia–and–get this–HE’S TURNING OVER THE GARBAGE CANS LOOKING FOR THE LOOT.

If my theoretical assumptions can’t even outmaneuver the loaded? I give up.

What’s even funnier are the other people with the “hey, I’m just wandering around incognito. I frequently look under benches and power boxes with my hands in my pockets. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”

Sherlock Holmes once said “man as an individual is an insolvable puzzle. But in aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”

And man–is THIS ever true.

So far the only thing I will admit to failing at is the expediency at which I expected some glassy-eyed upright to come lurching out of the woods with an embossed envelope in their hands.