Attack of the midnight creepers

Sunday night Rah and I had a surprise visit from a group of teenagers (I think) who wanted to help us decorate our yard in toilet paper. Since they wanted it to be a surprise to us they did it sometime between 3 and 5 in the morning so that when Rah woke up at 7 am and looked out the window her startled reaction woke me up into a frenzied state of activity. Upon seeing the toilet paper wonderland that was my front yard my first reaction was "those &$%#*&#@ kids" then I thought that this was a pretty good TP job. I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures and then set about the task of cleaning up after this late night prank. Since our house is on a corner lot we have a large front yard and because of the 8 or more trees in our front yard this ended up being a difficult cleanup job. It essentially took me from 7am to 10am when I had to stop and take Rah to the airport. All in all I think they used 20-30 rolls of TP which ended up overflowing two large garbage bags and gave me a major knot in my back as I picked it all off the ground and reached up to get it from trees and then extended even further to get it out of the highest points with a long stick.

During that 3 hours of cleaning I got to meet a lot of neighbors who all had very interesting things to say. One man who was driving by when I first started cleaning stopped and said "that is the best TP job I have ever seen", I simply smiled and returned to cleaning. Later an older man who was walking his dog said with a mild Chinese accent "Was there a party here last night?" and my response was "If there was, we weren't invited" which caused us to laugh. I liked my interaction with him and was in a relatively good mood for about 15 minutes or so. Then there were the countless people passing by who said the painfully obvious "wow, looks like you got TPed" or "Why would anyone do that?". Cleaning up after a prank is bad enough but because of the spectacle it draws the stupidest comments from people. Either that or it just draws stupid people who choose to comment.

Between the visits from people walking by I had a long time to think about the act of TPing. A number of times I imagine myself waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking out the front door and grabbing one of the kids and kicking the living daylights out of him. Each time this thought entered my mind I would remind myself that this is a pretty harmless prank and they were thoughtful enough to use heavy duty toilet paper that stays in once piece when you pull it from trees. At one point I came up with this grand socio-political stance that TPing is a way for teenagers, who are constantly told what to do by older people, to reverse the power structure and force adults into action. This suddenly turned into half baked dream of writing a book on this subject and touring the country giving paid speeches at major universities as my book climbed the best seller list. Once that thought evaporated I again turned my attention to the fact that I was picking up TP from my front yard while the punk kids who did this were probably comfortably sleeping and would have a proud day of recounting how they punked the people who live at the top of the hill on Beverly drive.

My best friend who is a cop tells me that even if the police catch kids TPing a house they don't arrest them. All that happens is the kids parents get called and they can't be forced to clean up the mess they made. Can you believe it?

Here is a link to the pictures in case you want to see the carnage http://picasaweb.google.com/pedram/HouseGetsAVisitFromTPers