TAMPA, Fla. – It really must have been a special item. According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, two men entered a man's home early Sunday and demanded his eggbeater. One suspect was holding a pistol while the other brandished a knife to the resident's neck.
Police caught the men outside the home and they are being held in Orient Road Jail. One suspect also faces a charge of aggravated assault.
Police found the eggbeater in the man's left pocket.
The first line sums it up. To us, this story just sounds odd, stupid even. But nobody breaks into a house just to be odd.
Somehow this eggbeater had powerful symbolic value to one or both of the robbers. The hardboiled detectives on the case have yet to figure out why, but it stood out to the criminals as an object of very special significance. It was sacred--worth risking their freedom over, even though it means nothing to the world at large. Perhaps the judge will go over easy if one of the robbers proves a Benedict Arnold.
They have seen a hierophany, the revelation of the sacred. We have not. The sacred is relative. What to us is scrambled to them is crystal clear.
No word from the victim on whether he's steamed that they almost poached something from him. I hope he looks at the sunny side of the situation: at least he got it back!
This story is so much better than it would be if the eggbeater had been made out of gold, or if it had belonged to Khrushchev. That sort of symbolism would be far too obvious.
No word on a possible sentence, but I don't think they'll fry.
Why do you think the eggbeater was special? Whip up your best story below!
What is even more interesting is that two men entered the house demanding the eggebater, which means that even if one of them was batshit crazy, clearly somebody else was willing to risk jail time on the suspicion that the eggbeater was important enough to reclaim
ReplyDeleteI assume this was a manual eggbeater, since it managed to fit in the man's left pocket.
I think this article would have benefitted from a picture; this is surely more interesting than covering the printing of Barack Obama's innauguration invitations or telling us how he will keep in touch with his friends while living far away from Chicago