Yesterday, someone broke into my dad’s place, but whoever it was didn’t steal anything, thanks to the booby traps. Cleaning up the mess must have made him contemplative, because he sent the following:

Booby traps are interesting. They have no conscience, they work around the clock for free, they don’t take breaks or leave for an hour for lunch and they are very dedicated to doing what their job is. The trick is to make them look like they actually belong there so they are not obvious. It’s also fun to make one thing distract the person from seeing the actual threat, and then when they are reacting to the first threat, they fall prey to the second. It’s always fun to try to re-enact the scene afterwards to try to figure out what happened to the “victim.” I can almost hear them, drugged up or not, screaming from surprise. Stuff like that ought to make the newspapers, but then there would be no element of surprise afterwards would there.

The presumption of drugs, the scare quotes around victim (because his property, and by extension his own person, is the real victim), the glee in both plotting the traps and in imagining how they work: these are my father. Some brave psychologist could do a fascinating study trying to discover why, over the course of his life, Dad became neither a sociopath nor a popular genre author.