[736] Not Worth It

I was robbed. More specifically, my stuff was broken into. Turns out, there is not such a thing as “the middle of nowhere.” It's very much more that “nowhere is safe.”

Let's start with context. This is stuff I've left alone in my field for over a year. This is stuff I've not used for even longer. This is some stuff I've gotten for free. This is stuff that, as I was driving up to check on it, I imagined was burned to the ground before I arrived.

All the same...today I was asked, “You never have problems, do ya?” by a grandma whose house one of my clients holds her visits. This grandma offers me drinks I can't take. She asks about turning on lights I'm not concerned with. She's quick to want to move the clothes out of my way when I'm sitting on the porch keeping an eye on the kids for the report. For everything she's asked me or offered to do, I've responded with some version of, “It's not a problem.” I explained, in my job, you're always reminded “relative to what?” My problems are abstracted out or can be explained away indefinitely.

So what do I call getting broken into? What do I describe of my land, with its overgrown brush spurred on by incessant rain, and littered with ticks? How do I regard walking up to a scene of mostly destruction as boxes were torn through and the things I've accumulated were strewn about the property? Is this not a great and opportune problem if there ever was one? Doesn't it suggest a whole host of problems that had to accumulate resulting in the scene before me?

It's important to note, I have too many competing feelings to let any one win. There's relief. Relief that I've so prioritized the things I own that anything really worth stealing is in a closet here at the apartment. There's pride that I packed that truck so tight that it was difficult for them to even be disappointed. There's fear. Fear that, get this, I'm convinced that were I there, and had taken the advice of my neighbor to own a gun, there would be at least one dead person on my land. But if an emotion might win, I'd want it to be sadness.

Let's do my crime scene show play by play. I walk up and see a gas can next to my van. The cap is missing. It looks as though someone has tried to siphon its gas. I get around the back of the van, the door is left open on the moving truck. 2 bikes are laying down with vines growing over them. It's happened maybe a week ago. A bin and sink are laying there. Pieces of my drum set are sitting next to the front door. My dresser, sitting on my bar, is tipped over, the bar top removed, all crashed into the shit stored in the middle of the moving truck. I look into my coffee van, it's a mess, the only things obviously missing are the Wal-Mart pseudo college dorm shelf bins that housed my cups.

My heart drops further. I try to door to the shed/house. It's still locked. I look around the property for anything else obviously missing, thinking of my ladder. It's still up against the house where I left it. I step into the truck. You can see where they climbed on top of the stuff to rip apart boxes and toss the load of free books I collected. They may have made off with my register, which was empty. It seems they got maybe an old game system and box with assorted dvds or a few games. Whatever else, I didn't stick around to assess any further.

Why does sadness, why should sadness, win? It's one thing to steal something. You can tell their first thought was to break into the truck and drive away with everything in it. Discovering it's a broken piece of shit, they proceeded to trash everything. They threw the books. They left the coffee cups and filters to rot in the grass and rain. My drums are warped. The sink I hunted down so I could afford and meet code had filled with dirty water. Everything about me. Everything about my effort and intention and will just shit on. I don't believe they needed money. I don't believe it was mere mischief. Abject absence of any conception of humanity trash-panda-d my life.

I don't want these kind of reminders about how I think. I would bet that you can read one or a dozen blogs and think it's mostly blowing off steam or some measure of incoherent heartache. No. It's a reminder that I actually am the way I am. I actually think the things I say over and over again. I actually have a solid conception of “not having any problems” and I am prepared to lose things. I'm waiting to die, every moment. What's disheveled storage container pipe dreams in the face of that?

What a situation like this really attacks though is more fundamental and more dangerous. What's it going to take? That is, I've tapped my spine, spent years saving, living frugally, alienating and isolating, reading and writing, planning and budgeting, got a small piece of land, put my shit out there. AND I COULDN'T EVEN GET THAT FUCKING RIGHT! What the fuck does it take to even be left alone POOR, SO FUCKING POOR POOR IDIOTIC FUCKS DON'T EVEN STEAL THE RIGHT SHIT! What THE FUCK am I doing so wrong, or so right, that I CAN'T JUST BE LEFT A FUCKING ALONE TO EVEN FUCKING TRY, IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE, WITH MY SHIT THAT ISN'T EVEN FUCKING VALUABLE BUT FOR WHAT I WENT THROUGH TO GET IT!?

How much lower does the universe need my opinion of people? Don't I shuffle broken and ridiculous children to their broken ridiculous parents for a living? HOW THE FUCK AM I THE GUY WHO NEEDS A VISCERAL REMINDER THAT IT'S ALL FUCKING POINTLESS AND NOTHING MATTERS!? NO ONE GIVES A FUCK. THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OR PERSPECTIVE THAT MATTERS. I've gone several years without killing anything with my car. I've killed a rabbit and skunk in the last 2 days. Not intentionally, but bringing them up feels fitting.

I witnessed a version of my funeral. When I'm dead and gone, that's what my shit will look like after the animals in the field go through it. How am I not already dead?