I generally don’t take pleasures in the downfall of people. Things the celebrate the worst aspects of Americans, and worse, humans in general, usually is reason for me to run in the other direction (or at least change the channel… I’m looking at you Bravo! TV). Jon Plant has introduced me to one of my guilty pleasures.
This would be Look Who’s Been Busted. This is a monthly newspaper (and I apologize to anyone who writes for an actual newspaper) that publishes photos of people who’ve been arrested in Marion County and the surrounding areas.
Mugshots are fun.
Okay, so these are people obviously not in the prime moments of their lives but for the most of them, looking at what they’ve been arrested for, they had it coming. If you see anyone’s picture and the words “BATTERY/STRANGULATION/FALSE IMPRISONMENT” below it, fuck that guy, he’s a scumbag and I don’t mind paying one dollar to laugh at his ass.
More than likely I probably dated the person he strangled because that’s the kind of guys women have left me for. Completely serious.
My favorite is a guy who’s in for “SHOOT/OR THROW DEADLY MISSILE.” I have no idea what that means but I envision two neighbors having a feud and finally when one refuses to stop his loud Memorial Day barbeque that goes too far into the night the other takes all the South Of The Border fireworks he’s purchased for Independence Day and fashions a hellacious rocket with several empty Sierra Mist bottles filled with gasoline strapped to the sides and spray paints “Memorialize This, Asshole!” on the makeshift m-eighties that fill the warhead. This all goes very Wile E Coyote pretty quickly and this jerk ends up in the pokey.
There is the slight anticipation of flipping the pages waiting to see someone you know. Twice this has happened to me elsewhere and both times of the Marion County Child Molester website when I recognized one of our vendors at the bank and a few years later some guy who worked in the office next to mine. In both situations I asked around was told it was weird circumstances which made them seem stupid but not deviants but then again… what did I expect them to say?
She told me she was into creepy old guys in sweatpants who drive windowless vans with a DVD of the Hannah Montana movie on constant loop… and who am I to argue?
My brother will buy the same newspaper and I find if you show this to men inevitably one of us will come across a woman and make the comment, “She’s kinda cute,” which quickly evolves into a game I like to call Inmate Tap That where you find women who, if you saw them in the wild at let’s say, the mall or the Applebees, and you were unattached, you’d probably take her home… or at least to your car. Keep in mind you don’t know what she’s been arrested for and she probably has cleaned herself up a little wiping the crack-induced saliva crust from her dry lip and maybe a little makeup to hide the black eye given to her when she didn’t give Pretty Tony Playa all his money because she skimmed a little for bay formula and other incidentals (like penicillin… Pretty Tony Playa has a horrible health plan).
I find Citrus County has much more attractive criminals than Marion County.
I wish they would put these people’s ages on there. I’d like to know how many of these people are my age or twenty years older still doing dumb shit. It’s hard to tell since almost no one takes a good mugshot. While few and far between, I find it odd the amount of people who smile in mugshots.
Generally they look like stereotypical criminals or seventies porn stars instead of Disney sitcom and movie stars.

For some reason the smilers tend to be the ones arrested for sexual assault so I am just going to chalk that up to batshit crazy. They should also distribute this in high schools. Maybe put their mugshots next to their yearbook photos so the kids will know what a very small series of bad decisions can lead to.
And if I can diverge for a moment. I know no one anticipates their child becoming a criminal but everything is possible and you probably shouldn’t give your kids overly pompous names just to avoid the irony. Nothing funnier than a cocaine possessing prostitute on violation of parole arrested for battery against the elderly named Princess.
I also have a hard time forgetting people have families, the same way I can’t think of girls in strip clubs and not think, “Hey, that’s someone daughter or mom!” This is probably more benefit of empathy than a problem (although some people in politics would argue empathy is a problem). The same way when I watch Cops I wonder how the hell did this happen to this guy? At some point he was a kid going to elementary school and thirty years later he’s habitually arrested for violation of parole and domestic battery. It only makes me the pressure of being a good parent all the more important or twenty years from now someone will be paying a dollar to laugh at my kid.







