A friend of mine was in legal troubles. He sued an awful lawyer. The awful lawyer did wild shit like brazenly trying to steal businesses by walking into them and claiming he was the heir of the owner or stuff like that. Those kinds of shenanigans ended up being done to my friend, who owns and runs a restaurant. And that restaurant was claimed by the awful lawyer, despite the fact that my friend’s family had owned and ran the place for decades. Needless to say, that is why my friend was suing the lawyer.

Turns out, one night, the lawyer was in the woods that surround my friend’s house. To everyone’s surprise, the lawyer had been going there every other night. Or so they told me. I didn’t believe it.

I happened to be with my friend that night. We heard the infamous sounds in the woods just as we were playing board games. I heard a voice from above whispering “He’s here!” The voice was my friend’s teenage son, who was supposed to be asleep but apparently woke up every time the lawyer came.

I couldn’t believe it. I was gripped by naive excitement. I got into a very playful mood. We could finally figure out what the sound was. We could investigate.

I didn’t really put much thought into it, but I decided the best way of investigating would be by surprising the supposed lawyer. I decided we should dazzle the lawyer with every single source of light in the house.

A bit to my surprise, my friend and his son agreed. Why did they agree? That’s a great question.

Part of me thinks that they just wanted resolution in this whole episode in their lives, this whole awful lawyer and lawsuit thing. Another part of me thinks maybe they didn’t fear the man. Regardless, for whatever reason, we were all on board. We all thought a bit of light would do no harm. Dazzling was the way.

We then quietly coordinated our light-attack. We gathered flashlights and located the light switches. We each went to our designated positions and got ready.

It was time for the attack. I silently walked through the kitchen up to the back door. I slowly opened it and felt the cool air from the woods. And I waited for the signal.

At this point of the story I want to point out that, to any sane person, this whole plan sounds insane. I’m quite aware of that. As you can tell, we weren’t aware of that that night. We did what we did.

To be fair, as I waited for the signal, I did feel a bit scared. Yes, I thought it was practically impossible for a man to camp right outside my friend’s house. But as I waited for the signal my brain started imagining the man’s face and clothes being lit up by our lights.

In retrospect, a man holding a suitcase was the least of my problems. What if this was a massive animal? There are many life-threatening scenarios I didn’t contemplate. But, as it turned out, at the time, our minds were fixated on “lawyer”. They wanted to see if it was the lawyer. I wanted to disprove that it was the lawyer.

And so the signal came: my friend’s son turned on his gazillion-lumen flashlight. Immediately, I also turned on mine. In an instant, the whole house lit up, as well as the forest. Or at least that’s what I assumed, because I couldn’t really see the forest. I was dazzled.

Our plan was so astoundingly short-sighted that we were all blinded by our own lights.

However, something moved outside. And just as our eyes adjusted to our light-attack, we all simultaneously saw the source of the sound: an opossum.

Turns out, the opossum had been going there every other night and making sound all along.

The sound had been misinterpreted by my friend’s son. The poor kid thought that the insane lawyer could actually camp outside. This sort of makes sense because the poor kid was only told that a man was getting sued by his parents. That and that this man sometimes walked into restaurants and stores and claimed them as his.

So what happened? That night, we all had a good laugh. The opossum was given a name, the name of the lawyer. As to the lawsuit, the charges were dropped because my friend realized this man was not targeting them in particular. This man was an opportunist, and he was crushed by other lawsuits and debt.