Usually, I leave my apartment at 8:15 AM to walk to Broad St. station from my apartment, which is probably about 1/2 mile away (once I took the bus that leaves from the front door, but I had to leave 15 minutes earlier and got to work 10 minutes late).  Friday morning, however, I had to be at work at 7 AM rather than the usual 9:30, so I began my trek at 5:45 AM that morning.  The Sun had risen by that point but the streets were empty--not a car or pedestrian to be found.  I was watching an episode of "Dream On" on my Ipod as I walked the streets that I do every morning.  It had rained heavily the night before and large droplets of water were falling off the leaves above and splashing down onto the screen.  I decided that I didn't want to risk damaging the electronics, so I paused the show and put the device into my pants pocket, but left the earphones in place as a fashion statement. 
 
As I turned the corner from 7th Avenue onto Martin Luther King Blvd. (Chris Rock: "You know what's sad? Martin Luther King stood for non violence. And I don't care where you are in America, if you're on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there's some violence going down.")  my pocket began vibrating.  The work assignments from Milan that I was coming in early to handle were already trickling in.  As I looked down reading my mail and with my ears blocked off, a car headed in the opposite direction pulled across the street against oncoming traffic (or would be oncoming traffic if anyone else had actually been driving that morning).  I thought nothing of it.  When a kid hopped out of the passenger side of the car my assumption was he was being dropped off at the house that I was now passing.  Even for the split second between when I saw the gun in his left hand and he spoke to me, I didn't think anything of it. 
 
"Gimme your Ipod and phone", he said in a calm tone.  Is he talking to me?  Must be because now he was standing directly in front of me.  I glanced down at the semi-automatic he was holding casually at his side.  It was then that I realized what was going on.  I handed him my Ipod when the driver shouted out to his friend: "Get his wallet too."
 
"Give me your wallet too", the gunman dumbly repeated.  I reached into my pocket and took out my wallet.  It was full of things like my driver's license, debit cards, health insurance card, work ID--things that the mugger had no use for and would just cause me a major inconvenience to have to replace.  "How about just the cash?" I suggested. 
 
Pause.
 
"Yeah, alright".  At this point I determined that I was going to be fine.  This hood was all together too polite to shoot me.  He was allowing me to dictate the terms of the robbery.  He never lifted the gun, yelled or otherwise made a spectacle that most would do to try to intimidate a victim into submission for fear of their life.  He didn't even know to ask for my wallet without being told.  This guy was an amateur.  In the moment that I made that assessment, I then contemplated if the gun was even real, but wasn't ready to bet on it.  Feeling no threat to my life, I neglected to take an action that may have if I did.  No sense making a non-life threatening situation into one for the cost of a dying Ipod, a blackberry, and less than $40 in cash.  I handed him the money and put my wallet back in my pocket.
 
"Phone too."
 
Phone?  What phone?  Oh, he means the blackberry.  I don't have a calling plan for it, only data, so I don't think of it that way.  And it didn't belong to me.  It was work issued.  He could have it. 
 
He took what I gave him and walked back to the other side of the vehicle where his accomplice was still waiting.  I walked about 20 feet when it crossed my mind that I would not like to be shot in the back.  I turned to see if I should be running.  He was back in the car.  Well, lookee here, a license plate. SKC 29C, light blue, what make and model is that?  Shit, I don't know anything about cars. 
 
I walked about 20 more feet and now felt really safe, but they were still sitting there.  Now I had time to really double check.  SKC 29C right?  Yup.  SKC 29C, SKC 29C, SKC 29C...
 
They drove off and I went up the steps of the first house.  It had a Fraternal Order of Police sticker on the front door, surely it would be a friendly place to wake up even at this ridiculous time in the morning.  I rang the doorbell 3 times before the owner grumpily shouted that he was coming.  He opened the door and I gave him the sitch.  His wife shouted from the back of the house, "Who is it?" 
 
"Some white man", he gruffly replied.  I laughed at the comedy playing before me.  I called 911 and gave them all the info, plate numbers, description of the perps, surely the robbers would get pulled over before they even made it home with my goods.  The operator told me to wait there until the police arrived.  What seemed like 15 minutes went by before a police car pulled up, but a few houses down from where I was waiting.  I walked over to them.
 
"Are you here about the armed robbery?"
 
"There was an armed robbery?", Newark's finest replied.  My hopes that the police were actually doing something competent were dashed.  I told them the story and how I had called 911 already, and they told me I'd have to come into the station to fill out a report.  I was enjoying being chauffeured in the back of the police car, when I realized that people were expecting me to be arriving at work, at about...now.  And my only means of contacting them with my whereabouts was just taken from me.  When I got there I asked to use the phone.  My boss wasn't in yet either, I got the voicemail.  "Uh, you're not going to believe this, I know this is a really big emergency, but I'm going to be late.  I'm calling from the police station..."
 
When I finally got in, I checked my email.  About 2 minutes after I got held up, an email was sent from Milan that I didn't have to come in early after all.  You couldn't have sent that email 10 minutes earlier?  Fucker.

When I got home last night, it was a typical calm summer night; balmy but otherwise ordinary.  But something extra-ordinary happened on the short journey between the lobby and my third floor apartment...
 
When I arrived at my door I heard a loud roaring sound bellowing from within.  For a second, I thought that my living room was on fire, yet there was no smoke or heat emanating from the source of noise.  I turned the key to my lock, oxymoronically prepared for a surprise.  Yet the door would not open.  The horrible groaning and the refusal of the door to give way led me to consider that perhaps a powerful poltergeist had evicted me.  I remembered that in an attempt to come home to a cool room, I had left my “windows”¹ open.  In the one minute while I was on the elevator, a downburst had occurred outside and created a vacuum within so powerful that I couldn't push the door against it.  The age-old dilemma of Man vs. Nature had reared its familiar face--and it was a brutal countenance.  However, Mike Holden himself is in fact the most powerful force of the Universe (it was a photo finish with nuclear bonding).  I rotated the knob and threw my shoulder into the door the way I'd seen police break them down in so many movies before.  When the door gave way and the pressure released, I entered to find...almost nothing wrong.  A light bulb blew out when I flicked the switch and the rest of them put on an impromptu light show with their slowly pulsating dimming and brightening, but other than that and a piece paper on the floor, my apartment had slipped through the fingers of the Hand of God.
 
It was only a few minutes after I got home that the full brunt of the onslaught came.  The blitzkrieg left as quickly as it appeared, but not without leaving a total wave of destruction in its path.  The sidewalks leading to the train station that I walk each morning were littered with thick tree limbs that had been ripped from their torsos in the storm's furious rage.  One mighty soldier in my parking lot was completely felled, crushing the souls (and everything else) of a few cars underneath.  When I finally arrived at the station, I was greeted with an announcement that the engines were running up to 1 - 2 hours behind due to the previous evening's inclimate weather.  Wouldn't you know it, today was the day I left my phone and blackberry at home, leaving me with no way to inform employer of my impending tardiness.  After an hour and a half waiting in the warm concrete train station, with nary a train passing by to provide cool relief, I decided to go home and call it a sick day.
 
Have fun at work today, suckers.  I'll try not to get a sunburn.

 

Footnote:

1.  My apartment has floor to ceiling windows, so they don't actually open, presumably so people don't regularly jump out of them.  For fresh air, they've provided large vents underneath the actual glass.