Death of Innocence and Whatever

Hey so here is a short list of things you shouldn't do: leave your credit card sticking out of pay machines. There are probably other things you should avoid doing, I don't know, make up your own rules but I can tell you definitively and objectively that trying to set up unplanned tests in civic ethics involving dangling credit cards will only end in disappointment for you because people are jerks, all people, ever and there are so few good people that they are statistically insignificant and can be safely disregarded without affecting the results. I lucked out essentially. Distracted by whatever, my friends, the booze swishing around inside me, the loud sounds and pretty lights I don't know but I do know that twenty minutes after I last saw that piece of plastic I had this horrible sinking feeling while I sat in the theatre and groped for my wallet and tried to remember putting the card back where it belonged.

I did not remember doing it because it did not happen which is the right way memories are supposed to work so it was into the lobby I rushed and I had another sinking sensation as I saw the streams of people flowing through the doors, the great mass of potential card thieves each one of them. The manager, a slightly portly man who looked like he got more satisfaction out his job than he probably had any right to took me over to a desk and flipped through a pile of lost and forgotten pieces of plastic, pieces of plastic who had been chanced upon by those statistically insignificant good samaritans I mentioned earlier and who were just waiting for their masters to return to them and then clutch them to their breast and say things like "oh I was so worried I thought someone might be doing something awful with my card I've definitely learned my lesson" except you can't learn your lesson until your card really has been stolen by someone who skipped out on the classes on mutual respect and brotherly love and rings up as many charges as he or she can because who knows how long the shelf life on a stolen card is.

I reported the card missing not thirty minutes after I last used it, and the card was blocked promptly but not before my enterprising card thieves had dinged it for a $170 worth of merchandise which is what you do when you find a credit card kids, you run out and you buy as much crap as fast as possible, forget about turning it in because that's for squares and losers who don't see the possibility of a new wardrobe hidden within that small rectangle, that small rectangle punched with that name of person you're never going to meet, right? Everybody needs to learn that the world is an ugly, grimy place eventually and if you can do it for at least one person by joy riding down a hill made of expensive goodies then I think you have made the world just that much more sober and grown up and good for you sir, just don't get caught by the credit card company bastards because if there is anybody more soulless and more able to kick ass on credit card fraud, it's the companies who issues those magnetized beauties and if you get caught I can only hope and assume that there are secret Siberian gaols set up in the post-Soviet meltdown designed for the unique set of human beings who somehow get off on fraud and identity theft and if Dante was still around to write the sequel I'm sure that they would receive their own layer of hell. This is what I hope.

I had to fill out a police report, was what the credit card company rep told me because this fraud under 5G's is serious business which meant I had to make my first trip to a police station and had to talk to a policeman who took down all the deets and the whole thing felt kind of silly because their was sense a between us that we both knew not much would come of this because it was just $170 and it was just one missing credit card, and if the police don't do jack all when cars go missing why should I hope for anything here and don't I feel special giving the mundane details to this man in uniform who I took off the street just so I could complain about the bad men who found the valuable slip of plastic that I carelessly left in a place I should not have and it's not like I had any right to expect a different outcome when I've already established that the world is populated solely by jerks and the losers who want to be jerks and if you are sitting somewhere reading this shaking your head saying to yourself I am most certainly not a jerk and I know at least three, four, five people who I would define as being not jerklike, to which I would reply, no you are probably wrong about the jerking tendencies of both yourself and the people you know and that furthermore if you are one of the good ones, the kind of person who turns in credit cards that have been forgotten in compromising places, and promptly returns mail addressed to your neighbour and holds the door open whether the woman is hot or not, and who doesn't scowl when you need to make way for a space hogging wheelchair and a thousand other small courtesies that are pretty easy to forget about, well then hey there brother or sister ain't life a funny pickle?

No, it's a shriveled, dried up and crusty pickle, long forgotten and rightly so behind the fridge. Let it stay there.

Horatio