The Liberation of Things/Aurora/Sun Feb 11/2 am: After staring at the corpse on the bed with the needle in her arm, Officer T. Weibke made an inventory of the hotel room. He wrote: "There was a small bottle of VCR head-cleaner sitting on the night stand next to the box containing steel wool. [The dead drug addict's] purse was sitting on a chair next to the night stand. Her wallet was sitting on top of the purse and there was $5 sitting in plain view of the wallet. There were several small trash bags containing empty beer bottles and an empty wine bottle. There were three or four used needles inside one of the empty beer bottles. Four unopened Budweiser beers sat in a box on the floor, and a full bottle of Boone's Farm wine sat on the dresser." The point of this report? Only in death do objects (beer bottles, wine bottles, needles, wallets) come alive with such fire! Indeed we may argue that life, human life, smothers objects out of existence, while our deaths liberate them--give them an opportunity to burn brightly.

The Objects of a Future Crime/University District/Tues Feb 13/3:11 pm: While the city slept, alert Officer Newbert was driving around the dark city streets making sure everything was in order. Suddenly, he noticed something was not in order. A black Buick with a Washington license plate made a turn without using a turn signal. Officer Newbert ignited his sirens and "contacted the vehicle operator who provided his name." Officer Newbert entered the name into the cop computer, and immediately it revealed that the man owed several debts to society. The driver was arrested, and while he waited in the back seat of the cop car, Officer Newbert searched the Buick for anything that would be of interest to the eyes of the law.

First, he found a large black bag that contained two knit masks, two screwdrivers, one hammer, two pairs of gloves, one flashlight, and a bulletproof vest. Then he found another plastic bag that contained 10 flex-cuffs, a propane torch kit, a black raincoat, and a nylon case containing a fully loaded 12-gauge shotgun with seven rounds of ammunition. The shotgun had a folding stock and extended magazine tube. The eyes of the law also found 80 rounds of ammunition, a dental-floss container, and a note pad with scribbled information on weapons. But this was not the end of the discoveries. Officer Newbert popped open the trunk, looked inside, and found two wooden baseball bats. Somewhat unhinged by this last discovery, Officer Newbert turned to the handcuffed suspect and asked him what the hell he was going to do with all this serious stuff. Realizing that only truth could improve his situation, the would-be robber said, "I was going to Capitol Hill, to commit robbery and assault on a person." Later, as dawn approached our still sleeping city, the suspect confessed to the law the full details of his planned crime. When finished, and all truth was exposed to the light, he was booked and thrown into the cold, dark belly of the American correctional system.

In the World with a Deadly Blue Box/Any Police Station in Seattle/Tues Feb 13/4:17 pm: At exactly this hour, a Seattle Police Department dispatcher received a bomb threat call from a possible (or impossible) young black male who stated that there was a bomb in a big blue box outside of the police station. "I want you to know," he explained, "you are about to die, and everyone around you." The impossible (or possible) black male then hung up the phone. The police were now confronted with a big problem: Not only was a bomb about to explode, but the caller had neglected to say which police station it was going to destroy. Immediately, all precincts performed a sweep around their station houses, and all came up with nothing, absolutely nothing.