Investigations!

Gas Grill dept.

As an investigative reporter, it is very important to get the facts right..

Everyone in the United States is under investigation.

There is just so much to investigate!

We cannot investigate the President, of course, or the Congress, or the Courts.

The courts have seen to that!

But everyone else is under investigation.

Right now I am investigating my neighbors, Greg and Tammy Johnson. Three years ago they bought a gas grill from Walmart. Greg arranged to make four payments, over a 4-month period, for the grill. Tammy says she didn’t know that there would be four payments. But the money was coming out of a joint account. It’s very hard to believe her story. I will persist, and get to the bottom of this.

Everyone also has at least one documentary film made about them. There have been three about me so far, and Greg Johnson, across the street, has another one, about my investigation of him and his wife, Tammy, in pre-production.

With so many investigations, and so many documentaries, you’d think no one would have time for anything else. But not so! Everyone, to my knowledge, has written at least one memoir, and many people have written two or three. Tammy Johnson, across the street, has written two memoirs and is working on a third. I will be particularly interested to see whether her third memoir mentions the payments for the gas grill from Walmart, and when she knew about them.

Today I will be visiting my son’s kindergarten class. They have a unit on sports betting that I’ll be helping out with. Over the course of the year they’ve covered or will cover parleys, betting against the spread, and how you can verify bets you make at recess—for example, if you bet a certain person will swing more than 125 times during a single recess, how can you verify that? That’s what I’ll be talking to the kids about. I am also investigating my son’s teacher, on an unrelated matter, regarding her use of a coin laundry and why she happened to have so many quarters without using the change machine. So it’s a win-win for me, and a good use of my time.

Last time I visited the kindergarten, there was some uncertainty as to whether one of my son’s classmates returned from lunch in time for the sports gambling class. I would tell you the student’s name but I cannot, as the matter is still under investigation—not by me, incidentally, although I have considered taking up the case myself, as the investigation seems to have been compromised and I’d like to find out what’s going on. They are still reviewing video of the student re-entering the classroom, but apparently the footage is inconclusive and may have been tampered with. Whether the principal warrants investigating is one of the things I hope to ascertain today at the kindergarten.

You might be surprised to learn that in addition to my investigative reporting, I also make film documentaries. I have one in the works about my neighbors, Greg and Tammy Johnson. The raw footage currently runs about 9 hours, and ideally I would cut it to about 6. But there’s so much great stuff, and I worry about leaving out some gems, like for example:

ME: How did you feel when you bought the gas grill?

GREG: Good. It seemed like a good purchase. I wanted to grill outside, and the old grill got ruined when I left it uncovered before the big rains came.

ME: And the payment—

GREG: That was another thing. I was able to spread the payments out over four months.

ME: Did Tammy know about the payments?

GREG: (Garbled)

ME: What was the first thing you made on the grill?

GREG: Well, it’s funny. I wanted to do steaks—I love steaks, and Tammy does too. But her brother and his wife were down from Steamboat, and they wanted shrimp. So I grilled shrimp.

ME: And?

GREG: Well, I’m allergic to shrimp. But they seemed to like it.

I’d like to print more of that particular interview, but I’m actually investigating Tammy’s brother and his wife for possible discrepancies in their mileage logs on two separate trips down from Steamboat. Eventually you can see the documentary and, hopefully, the rest of my conversation with Greg.

Well, I’d better get going. There’s only so many hours in the day, and I need to get up to the roof before I head over to the kindergarten. The roof is a great place to see what folks are doing. I’ve got seven investigations going right now of folks just in the neighborhood. There’s a high-powered telescope up there and you’d be surprised what you can learn just by looking. Also, the way the caulking was laid down on that roof seems a little suspect, and I've opened an investigation into why Eddie chose to do it that way, and what the caulk may have been covering up, and if there was a cover-up to the cover-up, so to speak.

If you want to know more about what I do, I have a new memoir coming out, which will pick up when I moved the second time from Jersey, this time for tax reasons. Hopefully, if you’ve read the last one, it’ll all make sense.

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Song: “Road Movie”: