Doin' Crimes

I am a clown...and I collect moments

Thanks, to all of you that subscribed and thanks SO MUCH to all of you that became paying customers! I’m so stoked that anyone cares about this shit. I promise that it’s gonna get real good. Anyway, on with the show….

Welcome back to Bad Sandwich Chronicles Beyond Thunderdome. Before we get started on episode 2 (attack of the clones), I would like to conduct a little informal survey. How many of these should I be cranking out in a week? I subscribe to a couple of these things, and when too many show up too quickly, they just kinda fall by the wayside in my experience. In the old days of blogging, I did one every day, but that was back when people actually read long form shit, so I think that’s way, way too much right now, right?

That being said, we are all trapped in our houses right now, so maybe we need content more than ever. BUT THAT BEING SAID, everyone and their mom is producing some kinda content now. You can watch a dude from Arby’s working the fry basket in his kitchen at home on his livestream and you can watch any thousands of people playing their songs or pulling out their tits or dicks or whatever, so I don’t want to contribute to the sudden glut of half assed content out there (not that I have any problem with making jomade jalapeno poppers [eat arbys], playing music or pulling out your junk). I am just here to entertain. Let me know in the comments. I’m personally thinking that if I do at least one free one and one for paying subscribers each week, that’d be good? (Oh, and this one is free because it’s post number two and I’m not trying to shut anyone off too soon. But the exclusive content is on the horizon like a gang of rabid cannibal horsemen coming to steal your girl, find your trapdoor full of liquor and old people and turn you all into sexy piñatas). 

Anyway. On to the meat of this thing (as it were)….

Q:What’s the coolest crime? 

A:There are lots of schools of thought on this, and what’s really funny is that I typed this up right to that sentence: “What’s the coolest crime?” and stopped for a second to parent my kids as one does in these times of Cholera. In quarantine, I have to be not only a parent, but also a teacher and a microwave chef and a stern disciplinarian AND the guy who says “Good god. Go run around the block or something BUT don’t get near anyone because you’re little germ factories and nobody wants you around, including me right now.” So it’s a bit of a rugged pioneer existence, if you get my drift. Picture the greatest American hero of all time. Now give him more hardships. That’s essentially me. 

Anyhow, during one of these flare ups in “parenting” it became clear that my son uh….dun goofed, boy. He has been lying to me about how much homework he has and when pressed, he finally cracked and admitted he didn’t bring home his plague packet so he wouldn’t have to do all the work during the eternal quarantine.

And y’all, I was steamed. 

However, it was almost worth the whole thing to watch him buckle and crack like some kind of halfassed wiseguy in a crappy crime procedural on UPN or something. He clutched his face and banged on the table and pushed back his hair and turned red and got indignant and screamed and cried and muttered to himself and all sorts of extremely boilerplate busted criminal shit. At one point I said to him “dude, I know you think this performance is somehow gonna get you out of this, but this is like, textbook shit that people do when they’re busted and it’s really just embarrassing. Besides, I’ve seen all your emails and I know you have work you’ve been lying about.” 

He calmed down immediately after that. And he’s now sitting in my sightline trying desperately to look like he’s doing work, but I remember being a kid and getting busted and I know his pain. So lemme just say this: fucking around and not doing your homework: NOTthe coolest crime. 

There are crimes out there that no one would ever say are “cool,” like uh…transporting mattresses across state lines or mailing a scab or whatever, but almost all crime has been fetishized so much that there’s an aspect of almost every criminal pursuit that’s got an element of coolness to it. 

Let’s get into it then….(I didn’t want to make this another listicle type thing but here we are…two in a row, I guess).

Speeding: Speeding is bad because it’s putting innocent people in danger BUT speeding is definitely cool. There’s a reason that people speed and for most people speeding, it’s not because their wife is in the backseat about to deliver a baby. Speeding is like smoking: reckless and dumb and cool. Is it the coolest crime? No. But it’s cool enough that Ryan Gosling and a slightly cooler-than-ed-hardy jacket were able to turn the coolness of speeding into an entire movie. 

Jaywalking: Eh, kinda cool. It’s as cool as, say, shoplifting a thing of Bazooka Joes if you’re six. Fun fact: Jaywalking isn’t even really a crime in Chicago (where I live). But if you go to California and cross in a crosswalk against a light and a cop sees you, you’re busted, pal. Nah. I take it back. Jaywalking is uncool. Having to talk to cops about walking is the penance of the lame. 

Rape: Um. Not cool at all. Consensual fantasies and all that…not crime. The crime of rape, very uncool. No. Thumbs down. 

Fucking kids: Also bad. I mean, as far as “cool crimes” go, probably nothing as uncool as fucking kids. Here’s a rule of thumb: if your crime makes other criminals want to murder you, pretty fucking uncool crime, Jared of Subway. 

Mail Fraud:Not even totally sure what this is. I assume it involves the mail and dishonesty. My take is that mail fraud is probably a dorky crime. “Hey, what ya in for?” “Oh, I shot up a 7-11 when I saw this motherfucker Jim up in there with my bitch. How about you?” “Oh, mail fraud.” (long, protracted silence followed by brutal beating with bar of soap in pillowcase). See? Not that cool.

Nigerian Prince Scam:I’m a little split on this one because the absolute nutsack on you to still try to pull the old Nigerian Prince Scam in 2020 has gotta just be fucking immense. It’s the crime equivalent of trying to pull off “why did the chicken cross the road” as a new joke. That said, fleecing old people out of their Medicare checks is pretty lowly and doing it via the internet is incredibly cowardly. Bash some old lady with a crowbar by the ATM like a gentleman at the very least, right? Final assessment: uncool crime. 

Murder:Bad. Murder is pretty much always bad. I GUESS there’s a Hollywood take that says that sometimes exploding someone’s face with a hollowtip is for the good of society but there’s also a Hollywood take that says that sometimes yellow VW bugs turn into giant robots that just wanna hang out and listen to Wiz Khalifa, so I’m not really putting too much credence in their murder take. Murder is uncool. If I was at a party and a guy was like “yeah, Steve here murdered a dude,” I’d probably leave. Murder is uncool. 

Home Invasion/Burglary:Aaaaaah. This suuuuuuucks. AND, if it is paired with rape or murder it’s definitely reallyuncool. BUT in its purest form, there is a germ of coolness in it….sneaking around, scoping a place, having a plan and then coming away with a bunch of imitation Faberge eggs and cubic zirconia sconces or something…I get it, I GUESS. But the thing is, home invasion wrecks people’s lives and their mental state and that’s super duper uncool. I had a friend who had her spot broken into and the people who did it stole her weed, smoked a joint on her couch and then took a shit in her toilet and didn’t flush it. The cops, upon arriving on the scene, told her that was really common. There’s nothing cool about a crime where the calling card is taking a shit. Home invasion is not cool at all. 

Mugging:Mugging sucks. It’s a bully thing. Mugging with no assault is bad enough, but if you harm someone while you’re trying to get their brooch or whatever, nah man, fuck you completely. This is a wack ass lame crime down there with knocking a kid’s cafeteria tray out of their hand before they can sit down. However….

Pickpocketing:Definitely at least kinda cool. It’s got a bit of an art/magician component to it that can’t be overstated. To get up in someone’s piece and swipe their watch or their clutch out of their handbag or cut their wallet out of their tight ass pants…that’s a real skill. The thing that keeps this from being the coolest crime is that you’re fucking with individuals. That part is really really lame. I don’t have enough ‘ars gratia artis’ in me to get over realizing that that dude that juked into me on the train is now looking at the pictures of my kids that were in my wallet and spending my few dollars at Wendy’s. So, pickpocketing gets an “elements of coolness” but mixed with a serious “yo, seriously?” that makes it definitely not the coolest crime. 

Vagrancy:A crime perpetrated more by a broken system that works against, rather than for the people. Every vagrant is a brutal strike against our failed governmental apparatus. In that way, vagrancy is cool as shit. However, let’s be real. Man, I don’t at all believe that you just need $12.72 to get back to Arlington Heights. That said, vagrancy is an important crime to recognize that’s perpetrated by an unjust system, so it’s not cool at all, but I’m still gonna give it kinda cool just for freakin out the squares.

Um….what’s up next? How about insider trading:Ya know, there’s a big part of me that wants to go lazy on this shit and say ‘this shit’s dope. Martha Stewart went to fucking JAIL for this shit and earned the respect of Snoop in the process’ but the truth is that, like all white collar crime, this shit is a crime of privilege that disproportionately affects us all in a way we don’t even see or notice until our stomachs are rumbling in the night months later. The perpetrators that DO end up getting punished are given lax sentences and there’s literally no incentive for any CEO criminal to stop just fleecing the shit out of the rest of us. So, white collar crime gets the buzzer from me, dawg. Very uncool. There’s nothing cool about being Robin Hood with your underpants on backwards. Sorry, Martha.

Graffiti:Now we’re getting somewhere. Illegal ART!?!?!?!? There is nothing cooler. Holy fucking shit. The idea of scaling a wall in a ski mask and cutting through a fence and jumping a gap that goes 30 feet down in order to make art that can be seen? Fuck off. That’s the coolest crime. I mean, is it not? It’s crime for art’s sake for fucks sake! Scelus gratia artis, even. Graffiti: way up there. 

Crazy caper: You’ve all read about this bank robbery that was so amazing that it made the dudes who did it national heroes in Argentina, right? Holy shit. This is so cool, it’s insane. These motherfuckers took out LOANS to finance their crime, and they planned it so well that the movies and books (multiple in both cases) had to ADD drama because they did it so perfectly. The mastermind, Fernando Araujo, talks about the heist AS a work of art, and he ain’t wrong. Read the article if you don’t believe me. I’ll wait. 

Okay, right? That’s cool fucking crime. The part I DON’T like is that by hitting the deposit boxes he’s fucking with real people but you HAVE to imagine that at a wealthy bank, they have insurance and everyone got covered, at least that’s what I’m gonna believe. 

The only thing cooler is stealing famous art or crown jewels….okay, stealing famous art is super cool, but it DOES take said piece of art out of the realm of being seen by the potential slapdick viewer like myself, but stealing crown jewels? Sheeeeeit. Fuck them jewels, man. If you can dance through lasers in a catsuit and come away with the headdress of some complete sociopath executioner inbred queen cousin that literally no one who’s not a complete dildo gives a shit about, good for you. That, my friends, is the coolest crime.

Yeah. That’s the coolest crime: stealing crown jewels, caper style. Go ahead and tell me what’s cooler. I look forward to the comments. Also, don’t forget to tell me what you think of my proposed schedule of at least one free/one paid a week. I don’t want to overwhelm any of y’all, but I want you to get your money’s worth. 

Thanks for coming back, my lovely dogs of war. It’s good to be back on my bullshit.

xoxoxo