First of all, I want to thank all of you for your amazing support of Strangerville, the podcast Jolyn and I kicked off last week. Within the first few days thousands of you downloaded and shared our first episode and we were so blown away by this response. We have much more content coming your way, so please stay tuned. And please subscribe to us on the iTunes if you haven't already. I think you can do that by clicking here. Or just search for Strangerville.

Seriously. Go do it right now. I'll wait. I promise. I won't say another word until you come back from doing that. I'll even close my eyes and meditate so you can rest assured that you won't miss anything.

. . .

Ok. Thank you so much for doing that. I have a confession. I didn't meditate. I just watched a cat gif for 3 straight hours while you were gone. THIS cat gif.


I've been more than slightly paranoid lately. I have no idea where this is coming from but I decided some time ago that someone is probably trying to kill me.

I'm basically turning into my crazy grandpa, who I think has spent at least 45 years of life sitting on his front porch holding a rifle.

It all started about a month ago when I noticed that some sort of tree or bush or something or other that was growing in my backyard was missing. On closer inspection I discovered that it had been sawed off completely.

I swear I heard thunder when I noticed this. You guys. I'm not supposed to have a crazy stalker. I'm supposed to BE the crazy stalker.

This bothered me for a few days. And then I returned home from the office one evening to discover that my back gate had been left open. Footprints in the snow revealed that someone, presumably a man, based on the foot size, had walked in circles in my back yard before wandering back down the driveway.

I immediately retrieved my industrial-strength bike lock and chained the gate tightly shut. And then I continued to live in fear.

I had told Matt about this concern but I suspected he thought I was imaging things. And he asked, astutely, what someone would get from walking in a circle in my back yard and from chopping down some kind of tree or bush or something or other.

He pointed out that nothing on the patio had been stolen, and that it seemed like if it was terrorists scoping out the joint, like I had suggested on several occasions, surely they would have executed some kind of plan by now.

But I'm old enough now to know that, by definition, crazy doesn't make sense. And so I stopped trying to make sense of what was happening and instead just assumed that death awaited me.

I have told everyone in my life about this fear. I have stayed awake in bed, imagining my murder and wondering who would attend the funeral and how my hair would look and stuff. This has consumed a lot of my life. I'm not kidding you about this. I really thought someone was stalking me and preparing to kill me in the most inhumane way possible. I even wrote out a speech in my head, which I was going to use to plead with the perpetrator. It was very good and involved quoting several of the founding fathers. I may use it at the DMV one day for completely unrelated reasons.

Then, two days ago, a note was left on my door on a day I had inadvertently left the gate unlocked. The google fiber people notified me that they had walked into my back yard to access a utility pole of some sort. I wandered back there and verified that fresh footprints came from the same shoe that had left the footprints previously. (I had taken pictures of the first set of footprints and texted these pictures to several friends for the FBI to investigate when I wound up murdered).

I still don't have an answer about the tree or bush or whatever that thing was. But this experience has made me realize that I've probably spent too much of my life hanging out with Rebecca.

~It Just Gets Stranger