Tea Time Is Any Time

I thought the knock on the front door might be from a neighbor, so I answered it. Still, I looked out the little window first. Some kid was already starting to leave the porch. I opened the door anyway because I wanted to know what he was up to. The kid greeted me by my first name and confirmed that I was registered to vote.

He had a petition signature clipboard and asked for my signature on the Richmond mayor salary initiative. The initiative turned out to be real but his patter was wrong. I asked him who was sponsoring the petition; he said, "Some political group." "Which one?" I asked back. "I don't know," he said, "it's somewhere on the back of the page. Here, look for it."

He handed me his clipboard. As I flipped through the different petitions, he crept up closer, peering around me into the house. "That's a nice X you have," he said. "Uh," I replied, still flipping through the pages on the clipboard. The petitions looked real enough, but I couldn't find one about the topic he had mentioned.

Now he was physically close to me, right on the door step. The clipboard was between us, but his head was peeking around it and he was staring straight into my eyes - at a close distance, but as if he didn't expect me to notice. Flipping through the petitions on the clipboard, I had to decide what to do.

It was a real weirdo move, no doubt about it. Physically I figured I could take him. I would have the surprise factor working for me in addition to my weight, training and whatever deep reservoir of recklessness that might kick in.

I looked into his crazy eyes, handed the clipboard back to him and moved a half-step forward. He was slick. He said, "Sorry, did I freak you out? I didn't mean to," or something BS like that. Of course he meant to freak me out, and if I had been freaked out he would have tried to move in on me. You don't act like he did unless your're a fucking psycho searching out weaknesses in people and looking for a victim.

However, I moved in on him a half step and he backed up a half step, so I just continued to close in. He seemed to like it subtle, so I gave it to him subtle. "Yeah, you did freak me out." I said, taking another half-step forward as he retreated a half-step. "You don't really want to do that kind of thing" I said, moving in another half step, "because you could get yourself really hurt doing that."

At that point, he was definitely at a less threatening distance and also just chirping instead of replying to my comments. Still, before he turned and ran off the steps, he asked me once more to sign whatever petition he had on his clipboard. Psychopath,

It seemed silly, but it also made me worry about other people, so I did report it to Richmond police. Whoever hires the people who solicit petition signatures for the Richmond Mayor's salary reduction initiative might want to clean house, too. And if Junior comes back to my house, the kettle is always ready and I have lots of kinds of tea.