Coming on the heels of my recent mention in the Washington Post, in which I claimed that our President-elect might be a robot, the news that I'd shown up in Maxim magazine was almost too much for me. I bought a copy in the train station, and all the way to Philadelphia I kept flipping back through it to the special pullout Web Guide that mentions the Deadly Sins site. Of course I carefully avoided lingering too long on the pages with too much cleavage, to avoid inspiring any negative impressions of me in the minds of my fellow passengers. You simply can't care too much about what a bunch of total strangers on Amtrak think about you!

One of the things I realized as I proudly ogled the magazine's tiny screenshot was that the site is truly ugly. The basic look, particularly the baby-shit-brown background, remains unmodified from the earliest days. While my friend Doug de Maine says he likes how quickly the whole thing loads up, this might be an coded means of saying "your front page has all the design sophistication of a high school syllabus."

Susan's downstairs tenant announced before Christmas that he'd be moving out, and sure enough when we returned from a weekend away we found him gone for fairer lands. All his stuff is still packed up in the filthy apartment, awaiting the arrival tomorrow of some brawny dudes who'll pack it off into storage. Mark has never been your standard renter. He makes his living in what might favorably be termed the margins of the economy. Susan and I were completely accustomed to seeing mail for him under one of the many business names under which he transacted his affairs. For a while, he hunted down bad debts for doctors' offices, locating and freezing the assets of the defaulters in exchange for a piece of the recovered funds. "I know where to find these people's money," he told me once. "I can think like them. I know where they hide it."

Mark parked his car in one illegal spot with such regularity that we began referring to it as Mark's Space. He didn't care about parking tickets. His favorite trick, as he related it, was to wait until he'd accumulated three tickets -- after which he'd be targeted for booting -- and then take one license plate back to Virginia DMV, claiming the other had been stolen in the District. The DMV would then obligingly provide him with entirely new plates, and the cycle of illegal parking could begin again.

One day he strolled into the DMV with his plate under his arm, looking for another trade-in. The clerk frowned at her computer screen. "I'm sorry, but you've received the maximum number of replacement plates," she told him.

"Really," Mark said, in what I imagine was his finest aw-shucks tone. "Yep, DC can be pretty bad that way. How many replacements have I had, anyway?"

"Six," she said.

When we returned from out of town, Mark had already been gone for a couple days. The apartment was packed with his belongings -- most of the stuff in boxes, but some of it just stacked up against the wall. We wondered if the movers would take the loose stuff or not. The apartment was pantingly hot. "It's like an oven in here," I said as we picked our way through the boxes towards the kitchen.

I soon found out why. Mark had left his oven door open and the gas oven on. Susan had told me she suspected he was keeping his place extra-toasty in this way when he lived there, but I was floored that someone could be so reckless as to leave a gas oven running flat-out with no one home. A gas explosion recently caused a house in Silver Spring to detonate with such force that many nearby homes were severely damaged. In this case, if the flame had blown out and the gas continued to run, the entire basement could have filled up and the resulting explosion (triggered, for example, when we flicked on the light switch) could have easily killed a half-dozen people. The sight of such an irresponsible act nearly threw me into a rage, and I momentarily considered if smashing all Mark's stuff would make me feel much better. Alas, I knew it would not, and we set about the painful task of cleaning up the place.

One of my rescue squad colleagues has expressed resounding enthusiasm for renting the vacant apartment. Although she's as responsible as they come, I still don't know how I feel about having her living under my feet. The rescue squad has always stood a little apart from everything else on my life. I have the strangest feeling my worlds are colliding.