Behind the main post office in Modesto, there’s a large parking area surrounded by a cyclone fence. Along with a small fleet of mail delivery trucks, postal workers also park their trucks, cars, and motorcycles there. During business hours, the gate to this area is normally left wide open because mail trucks enter and exit throughout the day. Given the tenor of the times, the open gate represented a significant security issue because, for some anti-government types, the Post Office played a key role in what they considered a conspiratorial shadow government. On the other hand, several strategically placed security cameras recorded everything that happened in the parking lot.
The surveillance recording showed two armed men in baseball caps entering the post office parking lot during the dark early morning hours. They used their caps to conceal their faces because they appeared to know where the security cameras were. They would’ve been able to gain access to the rear entrance of the building, but one of them slipped on a spot of motor oil and fell hard onto the cement floor of the parking lot. His face now exposed, he screamed out in pain, “Ow! Earl! Shit man, I think I broke something; help me get up. We need to abort; come on.”
Video of the incident shows the smaller of the two men struggling to help his companion leave the parking lot, but the police, alerted by the security system’s automatic response technology, arrived on the scene before they took a few steps toward the exit. In the ambulance, the injured one, now strapped securely to a gurney, received treatment for a fractured elbow, specifically an olecranon fracture. Sedated at the hospital, he was not interrogated by the authorities for several hours.
The police determined that Carl Jay and Earl Lee Watson were siblings who succumbed to one of the prevailing political fantasies of the day. Both believed the United States Post Office played a significant role in a vaguely defined conspiracy designed to deceive and oppress the people of the United States. They were convinced that the postal service maintained a secret communications network created for this purpose, part of what they called the “deep state.” As “grab-bag” radicals, it made no difference to them whether any extant objective evidence supported their assumptions and conclusions. They told law enforcement officials that they were on a mission to “locate and destroy” a node of this non-existent secret communications network.
Later that evening, the officers who made the arrest sat around a table at a local bar. Three local cops and a couple of guys from the Postal Inspection Service discussed the incident at the main post office in Modesto from earlier that day.
“Hey,” one of them said, “Can you believe those two clowns?”
One of the Postal Inspector Service guys said, “As far as we’ve been able to tell, these knuckleheads are what we call ‘grab-bag’ radicals. To tell the truth, if they were younger, we’d just call them a couple of crazy mixed-up kids, but these two guys are in their thirties with jobs and families to support. Well, children to support, anyway. I mean, both of them are divorced and estranged from their parents.”
“Really? They don’t even talk to their folks?”
“Not really; they got all involved with an online group of politicized video gamers, and the chatter on their forum got more and more crazy and hyper-critical of the government and all. They kind of intentionally isolated themselves.”
“Were they involuntarily celibate, you know, in-cels? I heard some guys like that go a little crazy, always raging against women that aren’t interested in them and all, and blaming everyone and everything else for their problems.”
“I don’t think so. They were both married, and after their divorces, both had girlfriends for a while. With respect to all the modern-day craziness, this might be something new, but as far as we’ve been able to determine, both of them became voluntarily celibate and thought of themselves as warrior priests on a mission to fight an allegedly secret government cabal.”
“Couple of crazy mixed-up jackasses, if you ask me,” one of the Modesto cops said.
“I hear you, brother. Hey, check this out! I just won $60.00 on this scratcher lotto ticket! The next round’s on me.” He held up his glass. “A toast to the crazy that keeps the crazy at bay! ”