Someone stole my bike out of my carport last night. Certainly not a crisis of epic proportions, but consider this camel’s back broken…at least for the moment.
Yes, I was extremely hungry, spacy, and out of it when I got home and parked it yesterday afternoon. Yes, I neglected to bring it in the house or lock it to the pole. Yes, I should have known better, considering this is the second Trek 7700 I’ve had relieved from my possesion in the past 3 years…at $1000 a pop.
Yes, I should’ve learned my lesson regarding renter’s insurance from the last go-round, but I honestly think of such things as a luxury of sorts…I know…my bad again…it’s just that finances have been always been a bit tight for me, like most folks.
Silly me for repeatedly choosing to be a bicycle commuter and public transportation consumer, even though I could very well choose to spend my money and energies on being a single passenger driver, like the rest of unhealthy, smoggy, traffic-congested Atlanta.
Silly me for enjoying cycling as my primary mode of transportation on so many levels, that it is as much a part of my personal identity as being a lesbian.
Yes, I realize the apparent double-standard.
“If it was so important to you, why didn’t you take better care of it?”
What can I say…low blood sugar and shitty luck. I certainly appreciate the possibility that whoever now has the bike has lower blood sugar and shittier luck, it is one of the few things that makes me feel better about overcoming my own shitty luck.
“Why didn’t you get Renter’s Insurance when you moved?”
As ironic/foolish as it may seem, I really can’t afford it. It has been a hard year. It is one of those things that you pay for when nothing happens, then everything happens when you don’t pay for it. I certainly appreciate the possibility that whoever now has the bike has had a harder year.
So I’ll be trimming whatever fat I have left to trim from my lifestyle and sending out another check every month. I’ve a hunch that I’ll have a fire, or a tornado touch down in my living room if I don’t.
Silly me for thinking that moving out of the hood would be enough to prevent my few (yet signifigant to me) worldly possesions from continuing to be “redistributed”. Silly me for trying to do my part for the greater good of community and diversity by trying to live in the hood in the first place, as I did a couple of years back…untill the first bike was stolen…out of my locked and alarmed house…along with my TV, VCR, Playstation, book of checks (not noticed untill someone spent about $2000 of SouthTrust Bank’s money)…during the 4 break-ins I had the pleasure of experiencing within the span of a week.
Silly me for not physically assaulting the scrawny drug addict who knocked on my door on Christmas morning, 2001, asking if I had any toilet paper he could have (which I gave him before sending him on his way)…or assaulting him when I next saw him a month or so later…walking through my jimmied-open front door…on his way back into my house…while I was waking up…to come back for whatever he had his eye on next…after already taking the Playstation and the vacuum while I slept (because the roomie neglected to reset the alarm after she left for work at the butt-crack of dawn)…silly me for not assaulting him, as the cops repeatedly told me I should have…each of the 4 times I had them at the house after Mr. Addict and his friends had continued to help themselves to what few things I owned.
“You actually recognized and spoke to the perp during the first break-in?”
“Yes. He’d knocked on my door once before, on Christmas morning, saying he was sick and needed toilet paper, so I locked him out on the porch and gave him a roll. When I saw him this morning, I shoved him out the front door and slammed it in his face while informing him that I was calling the police.”
“Why didn’t you rough him up? You said he was a little guy, right? You look like you could even do some damage to a big fella…Don’t you have a gun or anything?”
“Excuse me??”
“I’m just sayin…I bet he wouldn’t have come back if you’d hit him around.”
“Beating up on malnourished, mentally incapacitated, desperate people isn’t really my thing. Are we done here?”
[internal rant] Why don’t you get the hell out of my house and go get some fucking krispy kremes, you ignorant ass…[/internal rant]
But those days were behind me. I broke my lease and fled to the pleasantly calm suburban Decatur neighborhood I currently live in.
Yes, my wonderful cat Rowan was mauled by 3 stray (yet collared) dogs in my front yard this past 4th of July. Yes, I still had to put her down the next day, after spending $1060 trying to save her, because the first vet I talked to said he couldn’t see any skeletal damage in her x-rays, and he said that he felt it was worth a try. The first words out of the 2nd vet’s mouth the next morning were, “I think you should consider putting her down”.
But I still liked my neighborhood…and I continued to endeavor to not be a cynical asshole, as I’ve always tried to do.
I’d even let go of the bitterness I had choked on when an investigator (not even assigned to my hood break-ins case) ruined me as a witness in my own case by showing me a picture of Mr. Addict without showing me any other pictures in a line-up, asking me “Is this the guy?”.
I even got over taking time off of work for mistakenly being called to appear in court during what was someone else’s case, also against Mr. Addict…or when they neglected to call me to court when it was my case.
Those days were behind me…untill this morning.
So I get it now, Life. I read you loud and clear. Fuck optimism. Fuck benefit of the doubt. Fuck the Golden Rule. Fuck me for not locking anything and everything away from you, be it my things or my optimism.
This is war.
I can be a cynical asshole. I can be a really good one, that’s fine. So, Life…fuck you too.
(Not to be confused with suicidal tendancies…I’m entirely too alive, perplexed, intruiged, curious, pissed off, irked, and in a state of defiant vendetta to somehow get the upper hand over this odd experience I find myself living…to throw it away)