My Perverse Pleasure

It is a perverse pleasure and I delight doing it in public. I can’t help myself. I found myself doing it again in the Mexican restaurant. As I ate my burrito I eavesdropped on the conversation at the next table. Most of it escaped me except this small sentence. “She really needs to know,” the woman said. She wore plain pants and a shimmery shirt which looked and hung from her shoulders as a shower curtain hangs from the rod. The guy next to her looked like Colonel Sanders with two chins, his attention glued to his ITouch. The man with his back to me was so plain as to be rendered invisible. “This tomato is huge,” the woman said when nobody responded to her earlier statement. “It is the largest I’ve ever seen atop a burrito.”

I almost stood up and walked over to their table. “What does she need to know?” Did she have cancer? Was her husband an alien; all smooth skin on the outside but scaly and oily underneath? Did he have plans to take over the world one woman at a time? Perhaps it was something simple like she’d been watching episodes of 24 on Tivo and nobody dared tell her Jack Bauer wasn’t coming back. Not knowing the rest of the conversation is the danger of my manner faux pas.

Still I can’t help but overhear snippets. Walking down the hall this week I heard, “…and those pictures would make it into porn magazines and be seen everywhere.”

The same day a gal in the back room spoke with a vendor that said, “The blood was tainted.”

“Will you sue,” the gal asked then, her body posture slacking as she said, “Or will you just let it be?” Of course I didn’t hear the outcome. Nor do I know how the blood was tainted. I assume the situation with the tainted blood and the situation alluded to at the Mexican restaurant are one and the same: Aliens are among us.

Now I am faced with a significant moral quandary. Listening in on the conversations is rude and twisted. Yet if aliens are truly amongst us then I have a duty to be the eyes and ears of the good guys. It’s the same problem James Stewart had in Hitchcock’s movie, “Rear Window.” Watching your neighbors through binoculars isn’t right but when one of them commits murder you are bound to make it right.

What is your moral conviction? Do you live in the moment and maintain others privacy? Admit it…there are times when you can’t but help overhear. If you do overhear and there is mention of space ships, mind control or taking over planet Earth…leave me a comment. We will band together and save the world.