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A Response
to Your Stereotypical Stereo Theft |
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Congratufu... (pause for an explicative of seething wrath of the most uncomplimentary kind), you’ve made it into my writing. Which means, you’ve made it into my life, you’ve pried your way into my world of thoughts. And that might be a very good thing in the big picture. After childhood filled with the peace of the Salmon River, I had found the time to squeeze a weekend of backpacking in the nearby mountains. Having restored faith in my own ability to miraculously continue juggling all the china I have precariously thrown in the air, I crammed myself into my well-loved little car waiting for me in the Seattle dankness. As I ducked into the driver’s seat, I felt intuitively that things were not as they should be. Though I do have a tendency to accumulate things in my car, I do not often store the contents of my glove box on the passenger floor. Seriously messes with my disorderly organizational scheme, if you know what I mean. Mostly, however, I was keenly aware of a gaping hole below my heating system and a strange black frame obscuring my gear shifting abilities. My whole existence seem to have heaved the sigh that escaped my lips. Ever since the day my dad installed that sound system, I’d been waiting for some Cherry Hill occupant or passerby to recognize its economic value in their life as worth the trouble to force a lock or break a window. I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of time. But dammit, that stereo only lasted five lousy months before it was boosted, and sold into the great socio-economic pawn shop we know as wealth disparity in this nation. Vayas con los angeles del infierno al FBI, for re-enforcing negative, classist, racist stereotypes of my neighbors, that middle class white girls like me have spent a short lifetime ignoring and suppressing, trying in vain to erase as they ooze in around us. Damn you for making me face the fact that it isn’t always so easy to erase. Que dios te robe el doble de lo que me robaste, for tampering with the lock on my ’89 Honda Civic, simultaneously tampering with the growing feeling that I trust the people in my neighborhood, and like the people in my community. Where I come from, in a small mountainous community in Northern California people never locked their doors or even took the keys out of the ignition. I was practically born trusting my community. Suddenly being robbed of that trust was more shocking to me than a jump into Russian Lake, after hiking in to it all day, in summer heat. Que decaigas en carcel con el RIAA, for depriving me of a combination vital to young people in our culture; mobility with music. Henceforth, my car will be dubbed the car of good conversation. |