Commiserating

Back in 1998 when I was living in downtown Salt Lake City, in a pretty sketchy neighborhood, or I guess as sketchy as a neighborhood in Utah could possibly be (where people smoke cigarettes! and drink tea!), someone broke into my four-door Honda Accord and stole my state-of-the-art JVC cassette stereo. And I was hopping mad about it until I noticed that the thief had broken in through one of those small triangular windows in the backseat, making the clean-up and repair minimal. He could have smashed any of the four bigger windows, or even the windshield, but he didn’t. He cared that much.

That is a thief making his mama proud.

I should have opened up comments on my last post (so I will on this one) because many of you have sent me stories of your own encounters with car thieves, and my God, they are too good to keep to myself. Like this one from Alyssa:

My friend and her boyfriend were driving across the country back to college with an entire carload of stuff when the car was stolen.

They were stranded in Arizona, but managed to get back to Chicago where they got a call that the car had been recovered.

There was almost nothing left of the carload of stuff, save for one thing – every last book.

So at least we can rest easy knowing that the thieves have our crap, but we can kick their asses on Jeopardy.

Shit. You’ve gotta believe something.

Jon and I heard recently that Utah has one of the largest rates of car stereo theft in the country, and we were sitting around trying to figure out why, what is it about Utah? And why car stereos? And the only thing we could come up with is that thieves in Utah are so inbred — see: a history of half-brothers and sisters getting it on at the compound — that they are too dumb to know how to steal anything of real value. LIKE THE ACTUAL CAR. And when I think about it that way it just makes Utah seem so cute.