What I am about to relate is possibly nothing more than coincidence abetting paranoia. As my webmaster has recently told me, sometimes I need to check the creases in my tin foil hat…

As the shadows of noon lengthen to a slant over Baltimore County, just as I return from a five-mile circuit, which included my taking out the trash at two Baltimore County safehouses, the BPD helicopter, shared by the City and County forces, dips, yaws and soars like a flying eggbeater overhead, shaking the cheap architecture of this brick rowhome.

As I left this safe house two hours ago hours ago, I saw a large black pickup truck, without an extended cab or toolbox, an ordinary model, a Ford 150, with its engine on, idling in a parking spot at the end of this street, where I typically cross to an alley and make my way south.

I left via the parallel alley instead, glimpsing it once between the end houses of the rows. Taking an unusual route, and staying to parks, green spaces and alleys as much as possible, I made it to the next safehouse via the alley a half hour later.

While checking the mail at the front door of that house I saw the same black, Ford 150 truck idling in park, at the mouth of the alley out front.

15-minutes later, when I left, that truck was still there. Two figures sat in the cab.

I went and bought stamps and mailed a letter, then, when crossing back into the neighborhood of the second house across the main street, the vehicle waiting to make a left, as I crossed and turned left, was the same black Ford-150 pickup, with two thirty-something Caucasoid apes within.

I took a diagonal zig-zag route through this neighborhood, back to the lower income neighborhood in which this house sits, with most of its rooms empty, totes packed, the walls undecorated with the despair of the left behind. As I passed a school letting out and noted various crowds of children and youth escaping their daily incarceration, I entered this neighborhood by the most likely access point, a strip mall, and lo and behold, idling in a parking spot on the corner of two side streets was the black Ford-150 pickup with its two Caucasoid apes.

After walking past, I stopped at the next corner, turned and looked at them, and the driver, taller than the other, both wearing work caps, made a hard U-turn and rumbled off behind the wheel back towards the more southerly loop of my pedestrian circuit.

I kept to the alleys, wending my way to this secluded place in panic, wondering, if when I made my way into this lonely, echosome place and found my way to the unused bathroom mirror, would my tinfoil hat be undeflectingly creased, or God forbid, out of place?