I left for work this morning seething mad. Monumentally pissed off. Angry to the point of being unable to think straight. Speeding. Screaming at no one. F--------CK!!!!!! [check it -- self-censoring even though I know NOBODY looks at this site] Hating everyone. People are bad. People suck.
By the time I got halfway up 93, the roar faded. Just sad and depressed by the time I drove into the office parking lot. For myself. For the world around me. I suppose it's an improvement. I'm not going to bite anyone's head off at work, but I'm still having a hard time concentrating.
For the past week or so, we've been fruitlessly scouring the house for a CD case, trying to find one CD in particular. It's the 2nd CD from a 4 CD set of Chinese language recordings that I've been using to try to learn... well, Chinese. We didn't really notice the CDs were missing until I recently finished the dialogs from the 1st CD and starting looking for the 2nd.
This morning, we had an epiphany of sorts, after my newly habitual search of the house before giving up and heading to work. The last time we saw the case was when we were briefly in Manhattan where we parked the car overnight in a garage. It all makes sense now. The CD case was stolen while we were in New York.
Cut to: Angry. Visions of amoral parking attendants pocketing the CD case after parking the car, snickering to themselves as the bleary-eyed couple returns early the following morning to pick up their car, unaware. Later, flipping through the sparse selection contained within: two mixes (both birthday presents), Hot club of Cowtown (western swing), David Wilcox East Ashville Hardware (obscure live CD)... and my language CD. I can see 1/2 of those ending up in a dumpster somewhere. Or onto eBay.
It's not the value of what was taken. Sure, there's frustration. The time wasted searching, recovering, replacing. Small consolation that it *is* mostly replaceable. But what really gets me is that it's thoughtless. It reminds me of the selfishness and greed of the people around us. I'm sure whoever took it didn't give a rat's ass about what it might have meant to me. [Geez, that sounds so petty; I guess I can be selfish too. Is that any different? It seems like it is, but taken on it's own, I wonder...] Of course, maybe they did, and they still took it. That would be worse. And if they saw how worked up am was over it, they'd probably laugh. "Ha, what a loser."
But yeah, it reminds me about things.
A few years ago, I had hardwood floors installed in my house. When I got home one day, I noticed that someone had gone through my nightstand and upon further investigation discovered that I was missing a (cheap) gold tie clip, a good amount of cash out of a change jar... and a $20 gold coin circa 1900 that was given to me by my Grandfather ("hidden" in the same case as the tie clip). Livid. Anger. Disbelief. The works. Just like this morning.
A few days of terse conversations with the owner and eventually one of the installers, a kid, fessed up to taking the tie clip and $10 in change. He denied knowing anything about the coin. Lying little sack of shit. But I gave in. It was an impasse: I wanted the floors done, the coin wasn't coming back. It was just a thing. I let it go. Gone is gone, past is past. They took $1000 off the bill.
I still miss that coin. Perhaps I should have been more careful with it; locked it up for safe keeping. It was probably collectible if I had kept it in "mint" condition. Maybe not. Regardless, locking it up would have been a waste. It was a beautiful thing. It had a nice weight and you could feel the textures of its edge, flipping it in your hand. Walking Liberty. Or was it an eagle? I can't even remember anymore.
When my Grandfather gave it to me, it was one of two. It was shortly after my Grandmother had passed away; he told me a story about his first trip to the U.S., coming by way of Europe, across the Atlantic, by ship. On the voyage over, a man offered to exchange a $20 gold coin for 20 silver dollars. He told me that at the time, he wasn't sure it was such a good idea. Presumably there wasn't the same discrepancy in values of the two metals at that time. And if push came to shove, you at least have a lot more silver at the end of the day. But in the end, he took the gold coin. I always liked to think that *that* was the coin that I had, however unlikely. It was a nice story. So there was a lot of sentimental value that was stolen along with the thing itself.
But that's not what was bothering me at its core. As David Wilcox would say, it was bothering me for metaphorical reasons. Like the Big Blue Poodle. (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you have to check out his album Live Songs & Stories
But they're just things, right?
*sigh*
Ok, I'm done thinking about this.
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