Borderline Creepy Things I Used To Do

At this one particular job I had (at a pretty big company with a big employee locker room and rest room on the 4th floor), I would scrawl indignant responses to the toilet-stall pundits and poets of the main employee men's room. I would craft these responses "in-character," generally from the standpoint of a devout and somewhat puritanical Muslim.

When I was a kid, and I walked everywhere that I went, I always used to check the coin-return slot of any payphones along the way. I'd noticed that people would almost always dip their finger in there, when they heard the change drop through after completing a call. Usually, of course, the change slot would be empty, which was always a little bit depressing. So I bought a big bag of my favorite hard candy - Brach's Starlight Peppermint Swirls - and I began carrying a supply of them on my person at all times. I put an individually-wrapped Brach's Starlight Peppermint Swirl in the change slot of every payphone that I passed by. An unexpected bonus for the next person to check the slot!

Sometimes at work, I would pilfer a small item off somebody's desk, and then a week later (after they'd been looking for it, wondering where it went) I would return it anonymously in a tiny brightly-colored gift box with a little bow.

Back when I was in school, and before I was old enough to fully understand such things, I would sometimes look at the girls across the gymnasium with a wandering eye and mind. One time I looked a little too long, longer than I should have, considering my gym shorts.

When I was first learning to drive, I used to drive past people with my headlights off at night. If anyone flashed their high-beams at me, I would pull an inexorable u-turn, tail them until they stopped at the next red light, drift to a stop behind them, then get out and run around to their driver-side door and fill them full of hot lead.

One time, I put together this whole list of creepy things I used to do, even though I had never actually done any of the things on the list.

Well...maybe one of them. But looking back on all that, I thank God for the maturity and the insight that I've gained over these long years of my life so far, to no longer do any such creepy things as these. I look at the whole thing as a lesson and a testament; that people can and do change for the better. All they need to do is: they have to want to try.

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