"Won't get fooled again"
I'll admit it. I fell for it, and it's one of those insidious pranks that rankles my pride everytime I think about it. Standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change in my favor as a pedestrian, I noticed a quarter on the pavement. Bending over to pick it up, I was shocked to find that it wouldn't move, not an inch. Someone with a really twisted and demented sense of humor had gone to the trouble of gluing the quarter to the sidewalk. Afterwards, my only thought was that my actions, along with countless others I'm sure, had provided this very person with a day's worth of guffawing as he or she peered out of a window from a nearby vantage point.

Having suffered this cruelty once, I've since greeted most such chance occurrences with a healthy sense of skepticism. So, as I was preparing to start my run and nearing my starting point, I happened to notice in a bus shelter a large stack of VHS tapes, perhaps twenty or so stacked in unequal distribution on the pavement and the edge of the shelter's bench. I told myself to keep walking, but I slowed up long enough to catch that written in crude lettering on the spine of one tape was "XXX," a rather awkward way to label a tape which I assumed had it actually contained the type of content the marking is associated with it would be hidden away with all the other materials. Regardless, I just kept moving. Again, the fear crept up inside of me that anyone who took even a moment longer in their curiosity, would be doing nothing more than providing someone with innumerable kicks.

Yesterday, I passed the very same bus shelter. To no surprise of my own, the tapes were all gone, whether they were picked up by city workers or unsuspecting citizens, I'll never know.