blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch.

I always stop to check my mailbox when I get home from work. My mailbox is one in a pair of clusters in a tiny building attached to the apartment building next to mine. From my mailbox, I can see my front door. And so one day last week, I could see the little red and white pieces of paper as they stuck in my screen door from my mailbox. How exciting!

Not really. The red piece of paper was from my rental office, saying I needed to come see them ASAP regarding March's rent check. Eh, whatever. The white piece of paper was a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper folded in half twice. At the top of the page it said, "Blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch." And that was it.

No, it wasn't a very odd sexual predator. It wasn't even your run-of-the-mill sexual predator. The sentence fragment in question is a song lyric that I know well, from They Might Be Giants' "Birdhouse in Your Soul." You would probably say the fact that a person who knows such a bizarre little snippet says something about the person who left the note. You would probably also say the fact that I recognized it immediately says something about me.

The best thing about the mystery of the weird note was that there were multiple suspects. If it says something about me that I know someone who would leave a note saying "Blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch" in my door, what does it say that I know multiple someones who would do it? What if I had, in fact, two suspects in mind, and that I called the wrong one first because of geographical evidence?

Josh very nicely said it wasn't he who left the note, very nicely humored me and said it did sound like something he would do, then probably hung up the phone laughing at me. First suspect eliminated, I called the second, my brother, Sid. He laughed at me, too, because I called the wrong guy first. Then we talked a minute, and hung up. Then I laughed at me, because it was all very ridiculous.