Paranoia

What’s worse, thinking you’re being paranoid or knowing you should be?
~ Aaron, Primer
It was a nice afternoon today. Harley was down for a nap, Paul was working diligently at one of his sketches, and I decided to take a walk to the McDonald’s three blocks from our apartment building. I always try to walk somewhere at least once a day.
As I was leaving the McDonald’s parking lot on foot, a white truck pulled up and parked in the space I was walking past. A man, the sole occupant of the vehicle, leaned out the window and asked if I had a light. I politely told him no (it was true) and kept walking.
I turned up a residential street and kept going, but out of the corner of my eye I saw his truck pulling out of the parking space. Oh hell… he’s gonna follow me, I thought. Sure enough, the truck began creeping up the hill behind me. There’s only two reasons for a man to follow a woman like that: he wants to hit on her or he has worse intentions. I really didn’t think I looked all that enticing in my jeans, black t-shirt, and winter coat which was way too heavy for the nice weather, but some guys will hit on anything.
I’m walking against the grain of traffic. It’s harder to get grabbed if you’re walking against the grain of traffic, I thought, except this is a fairly traffic-free residential street and he can easily pull over to the opposite side of the road. I moved to the left end of the sidewalk as far away from the street as I could get, slipping my hand into my pocket and wrapping my fingers around my keys in case I wound up having to use them as a weapon. I hurried past a side street leading into an alley so that it would be difficult to force me into the alley when he caught up with me.
Sure enough, he drove his truck onto the opposite side of the road and pulled up on my right with his driver’s door to the curb. He began asking me dumb questions. Where was I going, nice weather isn’t it, what date is it. He was talking kind of softly. I didn’t want to be rude but I also didn’t like having to move closer to his vehicle to hear him. He asked me if I wanted a ride, and I told him no, I enjoy walking (also true). He finally gave up and took off. I watched him drive up the street and disappear around the corner.
I have good reasons for my paranoia, or at least I think I do. Consider all of the following:
  • I have a close female relative who was raped as a young woman, by a cop in his patrol car.
  • When I was 9, an 11 year-old friend was kidnapped, raped and murdered. It was one of the more famous cases in Alaska in the 90s, and later the subject of an episode of Forensic Files.
  • Verbal and physical abuse growing up. Can I say what a marvelous society it is we live in where kids can try to tell other adults what’s going on at home and ask for help only to be told that they must be exaggerating, they brought it on themselves, or they should otherwise deal with it? I wish everyone would stop being so good at minding their own damn business.
  • My Internet activities starting when I was 16. What a parade of perverts I encountered just by having my own personal homepage in the pre-MySpace era.
Is it a bad thing that any time I get into a situation like the one I was in today, I always analyze it defensively? Exits, things to use as weapons, things to hide behind, the fastest route to more people, and how to make access to me most inconvenient, I run them all through my head and I prep them. I’ve studied violent crime in my spare time since my friend was kidnapped, and I know story after story that starts with a woman getting into the car of a strange man, but sometimes I still feel like I’m just being a huge dork, making big deals out of nothing.
Is “better safe than sorry” really the best way to live?

Comments

Paranoia — 12 Comments

  2. Well, I’m bold enough to blog freely under my real name and make pictures of myself and my child readily available, so if it controls me, it probably doesn’t control me very well. I’ve never given it much thought though. It kind of just is.
  3. You’re in a metro area, and you’re a young woman. What you’re describing is not paranoia in this age, it’s simple caution.
    Frankly, my advice is if a stranger give you unease like that, ignore normal social graces and ignore the stranger. If you have a cell phone, dig it out, punch four buttons, and pretend you’re talking.
    He’ll think you’ve called the authorities.
  4. I’m reminded of Viktor Frankl: “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
    Seems like being followed by a guy in a truck on the wrong side of the road is pretty abnormal.
  6. I rememember standing at the bus stop in front of my parents house when I was in kindergarten. I lived in a very small bedroom community outside of Portland, OR. A black car pulled up, and as some hobbled white-haired old person started creeping towards me, all the time, me being clueless. My mother barreled out of the house, and 150′ down the driveway in her nightgown at 11:00, yelling at this person. The old person jumped in their car and sped off.
    I had always thought my mother was paranoid and overprotective. In this case she wasn’t. That day I wasn’t kidnapped or molested. Thank God.
  7. The burden in this situation is not on you; creepy people are responsible for knowing when they are acting creepy. I think you did the right thing.
    Now, if the truck had come from a Burger King parking lot instead of a McDonald’s, I might answer differently. Anyone who goes to McDonald’s without kids is not in their right mind.
  8. Alas, there is no Burger King anywhere near my home. Several Jack in the Boxes and a Taco Bell, but the McDonald’s is the closest thing to my apartment.
    The reason this guy creeped me out was because he didn’t actually go to McDonald’s. I saw his truck pull into the parking lot and park next to me, then as I left I saw him follow. Means he only pulled into the parking lot because of me, and that’s creepy. I’m not that good-looking.
    PC, when I was two or three, I slipped away from my parents and got out of the house and was wandering around on the other side of the street when I was picked up by a cop. He took me down to the station, and I just remember drawing lots of pictures of boats for all these cops who watched in amusement until my dad came and got me. This was on the military base, Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, Alaska.
    The cop who picked me up on the street was later arrested himself for molesting his own children. SCARY.
  9. Sounds like you handled it very well.
    Saturday morning I went to see Angels and Demons. To my right there were two empty seats, and then two or three girls sitting together. This guy comes down the row from the other direction, and I’m thinking, “Oh, man, please don’t sit by me. There are enough other seats in the theater.” But he goes by the seat next to me and sits next to the girl three seats to my right.
    I could tell he kept trying to engage her in conversation. The first couple of attempts were reasonable enough–”Is this seat taken?” Then there was some discussion about the use of the cupholder between them.
    But the guy kept trying to talk to this girl, and it soon became obvious he was trying to hit on her. So the two (or three) girls get up en masse, walk to the far right side of the theater, move down a row, and sit down again.
    That guy must have felt like a humiliated idiot. But he absolutely deserved it; he had no business trying to hit on that girl in that situation the way that he did. I thought the girls did the right thing to just move away.
  11. Kevin ~ I get hit on all the time. It’s hella annoying. I think I need a bigger rock on my left hand to ward potential suitors off.
    Glen ~ I am good at guns. Quite good with them.
    The only reason I don’t own one right now is that we still live in apartments, and most apartments have rules about firearms. Nothing to stop us from owning one and quietly not telling our landlords, but we’re honest sorts. My father stopped a store robbery once by having his gun on him, so I’m a big believer in the power of concealed weapons.
    As soon as we’re real-adult homeowners, my firearms collection will commence.
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