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     ## ##  ###    I S S U E   # 0 7 4        0 6 - 1 0 - 0 0   ###  ####   
    ###  # ###                                                   #######    
    ####  ###  "The Greatest Moment of My Life Has Come and Gone"  ###       
     #######                      by Jason                            
      ####                                                                  

        I fear I may have made a grave mistake today.  I think that as a
 result of temporary inspiration I have made the rest of my life meaningless.
 I have this creeping, horrible dread that every accomplishment, every
 challenge overcome, every idiot humiliated will pale in comparison to what I
 have wrought today.  I have peaked.  I have performed the greatest single
 work I will ever conceive.  At the tender barely-old age of 26, I know that
 I have already passed the greatest moment of my life.

        Some time ago, my brother introduced me to the effort of the
 Minneapolis/St. Paul police departments to curb prostitution by publicly
 announcing all arrests for both prostitutes and johns.  Since then, the site
 (http://www.stpaul.gov/depts/police/prostitution.html) has become a weekly
 stop of mine.  I go there to chortle at the brain dead yokel johns who get
 caught, to be horrified by the drugged-out 30 year-old ho's who look 60, and
 to be disgusted by the chicks they couldn't PAY me enough to do.  This week
 was a first, though, since there was a 19 year-old chick who actually looked
 kind of cute, and I commiserated.  So anyway, I've been visiting the site
 religiously and have even taken to sharing it with my coworkers.  One chick
 in particular, we'll call her "Ms. S", seemed to take particular mirth in
 such off-beat things.

        Now the plot thickens.  One of my other coworkers, a guy we'll call
 "Mr. S" (no relation to Ms. S) had to take pictures of an event and burned
 through the remaining film by taking pictures of us.  Naturally, he manages
 to take a horrendous photograph of Ms. S.  Now Ms. S is actually pretty hot,
 you know, if you're into that whole chick thing (which I am!  Woo-hoo!).
 Caught half-blinking, she looked drugged and a haggard.  She tried to
 confiscate the photographs, but we convinced her to return them, swearing
 that we wouldn't do anything bad with them.

        I don't mean to be evil.  I fully intended not to do anything with
 the pictures, but sometimes I get swept up in events beyond my control.
 It's as if the cosmos itself WILLS me to do something bad.  I am only one
 solitary man, so what can I do against all of the forces aligned against my
 weak and unsecured promise?

        If you haven't picked up on it by now, the devious plan that crawled
 out of the depths of my mind and scarred away my sense of decency centered
 around placing Ms. S's face on the Prostitute list.  With the full support
 and encouragement of Mr. S, I set about my task.  It wasn't easy either.
 Copying the HTML was easy, but I had to wheedle a third coworker into
 scanning the photograph into her Macintosh.  From there, I had to turn it
 into something compatible with both the PC and the Internet.  After a non-
 continuous hour of cursing Microsoft for burdening us with a program as
 singularly worthless as "Imaging" and Netscape for not understanding Bitmaps
 or Tiffs, I finally downloaded a conversion program.  After a little more
 fiddling, I nestled the photograph of Ms. S in the middle of all of the
 other pictures.

        As further proof that the universe was on my side, no sooner had I
 finished than she came strolling into our department.  I innocently
 suggested that we reprise our weekly viewing of the ho's in Minnesota.  We
 casually comment on the degenerates when suddenly, two-thirds down the page,
 she sees her own photo among the rogue's gallery of hookers and johns.  Ah,
 no words can describe the profound spiritual ecstasy I felt when she made an
 inhumanly long gasp and almost collapsed on the ground in shock.  Shock
 eventually gave way to laughter and much less violence than I feared.
 Afterwards, we showed it to virtually everybody else in the office and much
 fun was had by all, but I knew it was over.  The glow of my greatest gag
 ever was fading.

        Even now, the warmth in my soul is fading as the greatest single
 moment in my life passes farther into history.  Sadly, Ms. S forced me to
 delete my page so now there is no monument to that blessed second when
 realization collided with her fragile psyche like a bowling ball on a Pop
 Tart.  In the years that come, our memories will fade as alcohol and age
 take their toll on our brains, and in time, the three of us that witnessed
 that event will become history ourselves.  Even now, I'm plagued with the
 question: What now?  Will I ever again come up with a gag so stunningly
 clever?  Will I ever commit a crime against sanity that won't live in the
 shadow of this incident?  Will anything I ever do have any meaning?

        Ah, I guess you had to be there. 

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 # (c)2000 aNAda e'zine                              aNAda074 .*.  by Jason #
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