Car Chases. Explosions. Mouse Turds.

I have always wanted to be involved in a high speed chase. Whenever I find myself in front of a policeman, I automatically go through the mental checklist of things I might be doing wrong: turn signal? Check? Taillights? Functioning? Inspection and registration? Current? Speeding? Never more than four to seven miles per hour, depending on the posted speed limit. I am such a rule follower, that the chances of me getting a ticket for knowingly breaking the law are very, very, slim.

(Now sometimes, I might be driving my husband's car and he has failed to get it registered on time and I get a ticket, which is not only grossly unfair, but really quite assholey of him. Unintentionally. Allegedly.)

Yet, despite my intrinsic nature as a hard core rule follower, my first thought when I see Roscoe in my rearview mirror is always the same - run.

I drive an eight year old Tahoe, loaded with carseats and juice boxes and the detritus of small children and, more often than not, the small children themselves. I never cut through the parking lot, always going down to the very end of the aisle before going up the next one. I have an arthritic big toe in my right foot, and if I brake too fast, it really hurts.

But, I really think I can take the po-po in their suped up Camaros.

I also feel pretty good about my ability to tuck and roll, should I have to jump from a moving vehicle.

I have a fantasy about walking away from a car, lighting a cigarette, throwing the match over my shoulder, and the car bursting into flames. Machinehead by Bush is always playing. I have long, curly, hair and it is backlit by the flames. I take a long drag from my cigarette, look straight ahead, and give a half smile.

I don't know whose car it is, or why I've blown it up with my one, really powerful match, or why I'm smiling, or why my hair has grown two feet and gone curly. I don't even smoke, people. It doesn't matter.

Outrunning the fuzz, blowing up cars, robbing a bank (very politely, they would call me The Lady Bandit), these are all things that I imagine would make me a hard core bad ass.

I spent four hours cleaning out our embarrassment of a garage the other day. I must have swept up and blew out sixty five gazillion mouse turds. I am deathly afraid of mice and, by default, mouse turds, but I soldiered on. I am pretty sure I have a respiratory infection caused my inhaling a mouse turd, and the possibility that there is a mouse turd floating around in my lungs makes me want to simultaneously throw up and pass out. Maybe even die.

When the coroner does my autopsy, they will find that I was the first person to ever die from mouse turd inhilation, a result of a rare, genetic anomaly that made me deathly allergic to mouse turds.

"Did she know she had the allergy?" the coroner will ask (it will probably be Dr. G, and they will get Claire Danes or maybe Kate Winslet to play my dead body). "Surely she knew; how could she not?" replies her assistant, a small, neat, Indian man with a trim little mustache.

"And yet she kept on cleaning. How brave." Dr. G sighs at the tragic loss as she pulls the sheet of Claire Danes' face. "And she had an arthritic big toe? My God! What a bad ass!"