He's mentioned in the newspaper for the strangest things: using suction cups to climb up the side of an office building, bicycling against traffic on the freeway, making strange threats in front of the library.
He has an unidentified wife and two unidentified children. They all seem to find trouble wherever they go, whether they instigate it or not. The unidentified man, however, seems to get the most attention.
His antics can be so reckless, it seems like he's trying to get caught. There are often hundreds of witnesses, and he's frequently caught on video, but he's proven elusive to those who would apprehend him.
It's difficult to imagine what motivates his actions. There's just no reason to dump mercury on a women's underwear display at K-mart or perform a high-wire act on the ski-lift cables at Giant's Ridge.
The unidentified man is not always looking for trouble, though. He can be a victim of circumstance as easily as anyone else. One day he thought he was acting perfectly normal and suddenly found himself handcuffed in the back of a squad car. It wasn't easy to explain why he walked past the Minnehaha Elementary School playground during recess carrying an axe and tossing toys to the children.
"I was just in town to do some laundry," he told the police detective. "I went into the mercantile and saw they only wanted three dollars for this used axe. So I bought it. Then the guy told me he had a whole bunch of Frisbees he was just going to throw away."
The unidentified man really thought he was going to be a hero for once -- a springtime Santa Claus tossing plastic Hamm's beer promotional flying discs to the children from his gift bag. Instead, he became the subject of an incident report.
"The police were called and the children were brought in from the playground," the school principal wrote to parents. "The police quickly apprehended the man. A lockdown was not needed."
The unidentified man was questioned for two hours about every unsolved crime in the region. He denied everything. No charges were filed. His name was kept out of the press, again.
One time, a dozen witnesses saw him jump off the Blatnik Bridge. The unidentified man was presumed dead until someone spotted him the next day running naked through a graveyard, jumping tombstones like hurdles.
Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. His e-mail address is paul [at] geekprom.com.
