Day CXXX: Ransacked!

On our way to coffee this morning, Mike and I were chatting about break-ins.

We were heading out the door and he happened to start toward the front of the house, but I stopped him and said we should leave through the back. He joked that he was just locking the door, not leaving. This prompted a quick recount of unnecessary it was to lock the door, given how easy a house is to break into during the summer. You throw up a screen, and you're inside. It's not that tough.

A little more difficult: breaking into a car, specifically when it's parked and locked. Regrettably, in the year and a half or so that I've been in the city, Apollo--my treasured Rav4--has been attacked three times. Only once was there damage dealt to my car. It was also the only time anything was taken.

And that's almost equally unnerving. Someone put forth the effort to break into your property, shake it up, and then leave it alone. That's strange, right? If you're going to go through the effort to damage or invade a vehicle, you might as well make the most of it and take something for crying out loud. To messy it up, to manufacture some small disquiet: it seems somehow worse when no further destruction is done.

So we talked about Apollo's bout of bad luck since moving to the twin cities, about the misfortunes of thievery, its pointlessness. We walked to the corner and parted, Mike to a conference call and back home for me, back to the car, and off to work.

Welp.

I guess that's four times.

Arriving home, I discovered my back passenger side door unlocked and muck dusting the back seat. Someone was searching for something!  

You'll notice that the glove box was looted, as was the center console. The pockets of the back seats were also emptied; an almanac, some deodorant, a deck of cards, a CD, and three Pilot G-2 pens littering the floor behind my seat. 

It's unnerving that nothing was taken, but I am almost a little offended! My sunglasses are cool, those checks aren't going to bounce, my headphones maintain great sound, and that Playstation 2 memory card is completely empty! You could store, like, 32 MB of Kingdom Hearts data on that shit! There's a five-dollar scratch off right under that lotion, three dollars (CASH!) in the console, and a copy of bell hooks's All About Love in the passenger door! Where's your taste, anonymous thief?!

Which leads me to believe, given the absurdity of their looting skills, that someone's trying to play a game. That some schmuck is messing with my head. And, of course, because I am a lunatic, I'm a little flattered! 

Making light of a grave situation tends to be my coping strategy. And I am okay with that.

But, seriously, mysterious threat, if you're reading this: 

I'm the wrong one.