Good to Be Seen...

The other evening Brent and I were listening to the radio and Two Princes came on.

Brent: So wait, he wants to buy her rockets?
Me: Yeah, he aint in his head now.
Brent: Okay, so she has to choose between two guys, and one of them is crazy?
Me: Crazy AND broke. The other one is rich and presumably sane.
Brent: That doesn't seem like much of a choice.
Me: Well sure, crazy and broke is always a solid choice.
Brent: (pauses for only a split second) Is he good looking?
Me: You've seen the lead singer. Assuming he's singing about himself well...
Brent: Because good looking...
Me: Yeah, I used to be good looking so I had that going for me.
Brent: (Husband level pro) I know what you were going for there in tense, but you're still good looking.
Me: And now I have money. Granted, it's yours, but...
(neither one of us mentioned my current state of crazy or not crazy)

A few weeks ago we decided to take a walk to the coffee shop. It was a risk, cloudy, maybe rain coming, but we decided to chance it. Made it most of the way before the first drops fell and got into the coffee shop before the downpour hit. Better to be lucky than good. Ordered our coffee and turned around to look for a place to sit to wait out the storm and ended up running into friends of ours we hadn't seen in years. They live in Bend now and were only up for the day for an event that ended up getting cancelled.

ANYWAY...

We visited with them and talked about the current things happening in all of our lives. It was so good to see them. But here's the relevant part to this blog. At one point Brent mentioned keeping bail money handy. I smiled because it's a standard joke of ours. (Well, joke because it's funny, but also a good idea) And our friend Dale said that he knew a lot of people who talked about burying the body in the backyard but only one or two who could actually go through with it and then sleep fine the next night.

I clarified that that was only because if I did kill someone it would be because they really needed killing. Probably not super comforting to his niece that they were having coffee with, but...

Then Brent said, "Why do you think most of the yard is hardscaped?"

Which made me laugh.

The whole thing made me laugh. That someone who knows me, has known me for decades, and has never read a word of my fiction, would comment that I could kill someone, bury them, and not be bothered, and that my husband followed up with the only thing preventing me from going on a spree is the pavers in the backyard.

Like I wouldn't just move them, bury the body, and replace them. Come on. I'm a problem solver.

On the walk back home I told Brent that Dale always says the sweetest things. Brent has to love me even though I am, allegedly, just a few pavers aways from being a spree killer, but Dale made the choice to continue to be my friend even if he recognizes that I did fail (passed?) the quiz in The Psychopath Test book. And not only recognizes it, but says so in an admiring tone.

To be perfectly fair, if I had needed to borrow a truck to move a body Dale is who I would have called before we got the SUV. So, I mean...game recognizes game.

It's good to be seen. It's good to have people around you who know that things other people would consider terrible insults, you find flattering. It's good to be liked and loved by those that understand your sense of justice might be more drastic than others. And those that give you gold stars for all the times you didn't move the pavers. And those that share you dark dark sense of humor.

(Funny aside, when I read the psychopath book and took the quiz I mentioned to both Katie and Brent what my results were and both of them were like...yeah? and this surprised you?)