So I finish up with the e-mail, turn the laptop off, and set the VCR to tape "We Built this City: London", and turn over to go to sleep.

I'm most the way there when I hear a crackling noise, somewhere, perhaps distant. I ignore it. It continues, getting louder and louder. Finally, some part of my brain decides to cancel our regularly scheduled sleep: Something is wrong here.

I get up. There's a loud crackling sound happening outside my bathroom window, which I've left cracked open because it's cool outside and a bit too warm inside. I look out. I expect to see a possum, or something along those lines.

Instead, there is a young guy, a full blown human being, for heaven's sakes, standing in the short tree directly outside my window, shaking it back and forth so that the branches are scraping against my bathroom window! He's shaking the whole thing quite vigorously.

I'm dumbstruck, and can do nothing for a moment except watch this bizarre spectacle. Sadly, I have my short-focus glasses on, and it's dark and cloudy, so I can't see anything much about the guy except that he's wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

I grab the cell phone, quietly move to the other end of the apartment, and call 911. I describe what I saw as best as possible. I can hear them talking on the other end of the phone, saying we got a "prowler", in sector four. A prowler. Yeah. That's what we call this. A prowler. My very own personal prowler.

What did my poor tree do to deserve this?

I suspect this has to do, somehow, with one of the girls upstairs. They're both quite pretty, I could see young some guy getting really stupid over either one of them, and thinking a twelve-foot-tree is a ticket to their (tiny) bathroom window. Either that, or the guy's high on something and has just chosen my bathroom-window-tree, of all the trees in the world, with which to have a nature experience.

Not too much later, I see flashlights outside my front window. I go back to the bathroom window and poke my head into it again, and greet the cops when they round the corner. "The can of beer he was drinking is still here," one of the cops -- a policewoman -- says.

I decide to put on my sandals and step outside. There's a young man standing in front of my apartment building, suspiciously. I ask him if he lives here. He says no. He says he's associated with a girl upstairs, that she called him and told him about the commotion. He describes what's going on in detail. Interesting. I want to know how he knows this. I try to find out without giving much away.

The cops come round again, and see us, and asks who we are. I identify myself as the one who called them. They ask if he's the guy: I say his shirt looks a little lighter, but I can't tell. It looks like they're going to let him go, but I suggest they check out his alibi with the girls upstairs from me.

Female cop takes him out away from the building, male cop (very big guy) goes upstairs and pounds heavily on their door. Nothing. Pounds again. And pounds. No answer.

"Nobody home, eh?" I inquire.

"Yeah, that's very interesting," he says, and wanders back to the parking lot with a look like a guy who has just realized he's been sold a false bill of goods.

I suspect they're really home, and go up and knock once more, lighter and more rationally. A girl asks who I am and pokes part of her face out. I name the guy and asks if she knew him. She says yeah.

I head back and tell the cops this. Lady cop says they've already discovered he's been drinking, and the same kind of beer they found outside my window (apparently, he'd brought along a few more for company), that his girlfriend upstairs had broken up with him, and that he was trying to make his way back into her "good graces" (her words).

I thank her for coming out and helping, and head back.

Young guys sure can be stupid sometimes. Beer never helps. Good graces? By standing in, and shaking a tree outside my bathroom window? Sounds more like a campaign of intimidation to me.

Now I've just got to convert this adrenaline into something useful.