Event Review - Vigilante Night Patrol

I don't feel like reviewing a game tonight. I have one all ready to go, but I'm just not in the mood. I just found out that one of the best friends I've ever had is moving to Oklahoma, and in honor of how much I'm going to miss him (never mind that he's only three hours away and will still be coming back to town every weekend), I'm going to review vigilante night patrol, instead.

Most of the time, when I write an event review, the purpose is to tell you about a cool thing you could do that you may not have considered before, or to warn you away from doing something that would suck. However, vigilante night patrol is not the kind of thing you can plan, unless you do this kind of a thing for a living, or are Spider-Man. So the purpose of tonight's event review is not to give you advice about whether you should wait outside the trailer of an armed fugitive. You probably should not. Instead, the purpose of tonight's review is merely to tell you a story about a stupid thing I once did that turned out awesome (as did most anything I ever did with the friend who is moving).

My friend lived in a trailer park. That's just unfortunate, and he doesn't any more, but while he did, we regularly convened at his double-wide for Halo LAN parties and cheesy horror movies. After a neighbor broke into his home, my friend decided it was time to do something about the crime in his community. Namely, we were going on vigilante night patrol.

The neighbor was a known, wanted felon with multiple warrants, and my friend even knew where he lived, but the police would not enter his trailer without knowing for certain that he was inside, because the trailer was not his residence of record. Or something - I'm not a cop, so I don't really know why they wouldn't just knock down the door and haul his ass out. So despite multiple attempts to apprehend this dirtbag, the rotten crook still walked around a free man, attempting to crawl through trailer windows to steal very small televisions.

The plan was that we would convene at my friend's trailer early in the evening. We would park up the road, so as to allow the house to appear empty, and then sit in the dark with baseball bats and hope the neighbor took the bait and broke in again. This was a dumb idea, and it failed almost immediately because we got bored and turned on the television. We watched belly dancing, which is awesome because it's one of those things that's not supposed to be hot but is anyway.

After we finished watching exceptionally fit middle-aged women pretending that their workout wasn't sexy as hell, we decided that we wanted ice cream. So we piled into the crappy station wagon I drove at the time and went for milk shakes. For no reason I could explain, we brought our bats. I guess maybe we were hoping the neighbor would be in the trailer when we returned with our frozen treats.

At any rate, on our way home, we took a spin past our target's trailer - and there he was, sitting on the front porch. My friend, in a state of excitement brought on by a combination of sexy aerobics, ice cream and the thrill of the hunt, urged me to stop immediately. As I brought the vehicle to a complete stop in front of the trailer, the villainous neighbor leapt to his feet and ran inside. But he was too late - my friend had his scent now.

It was obvious what we had to do. Immediate action was required, if we were to help the police bring this dangerous scumbag to justice. There were three of us in the car, all big guys armed with baseball bats, and we knew exactly what the situation demanded. We turned off the car, called the police, and then sat in the car and ate our ice cream.

Seriously, the ice cream place was like half an hour from the trailer park. No way were we going to let it go to waste. And the would-be burglar wasn't going anywhere. We had time.

Once we finished our ice cream, my friend hopped out of the car with his bat and began to patrol. We had the perp cooped up in the trailer, and as long as we knew he was in there, the police could go in and drag him out. So we watched the doors, and my excitable friend walked around the trailer, making certain his prey didn't escape through a window.

It was a good thirty minutes before John Q Law arrived, and in the interim, not a damned thing happened. It was shaping up to be an extraordinarily uneventful night of crime fighting, not counting the belly dancing or delicious frozen snacks. The black-and-white stopped just up the street, and we went to talk to them. We let them know that their target was inside the trailer, as we had waited the entire time and knew he had not left. After a brief discussion, the police went into the trailer, and five minutes later, emerged with the bad guy in cuffs.

My friend taunted him all the way back to the police car, and then the cops shook our hands and thanked us for the assist. We went back to my friend's trailer and played Halo for a few hours to celebrate our victory over the forces of evil.

Since we apprehended our nefarious arch-nemesis, we have had no more good reason to battle villainy in the dark of night. We also haven't watched any more belly dancing. I'm not sure which I miss more.