So I’m walking back from my friend’s house. He lives a block away and we play music together every Tuesday night. I’m walking back from his place, it’s a three quarters full moon and I cross the street like I always do and walk along the sidewalk towards the house before the vacant lot with the sagging chain link fence. I walk past this last house and there is a skateboard lying in the grass on the front yard. The thing is the same skateboard was lying in the same grass in the same place in front of the same house a week before. Tonight it looks as though it was starting to embed itself into the grass.
I wanted to take the skateboard and week before and I wanted to take it even more tonight but you can’t, I can’t. That’s stealing. Bullshit. Sometimes stealing is just taking something that someone else has stopped caring about. Sure it’s this kid’s property but it’s a perfectly good skateboard that is on its way to being decay. All I have to do is ignore the fact that someone owns it and has a perfect right to let it rot if that’s what they want to do – if I could just ignore that fact I would have gained a working skateboard.
That’s stealing. I know there are plenty of more extreme examples of someone forcefully divorcing someone else from their property but this rotting skateboard, if I were to rescue it from this lawn, would be stealing. Police could arrest me for taking inevitable rot and getting use out of it. Maddening. But these are the rules, we are a nation of laws.
Natural Born Convict
Myself I am not cut out for theft. A lucky combination of a generally honest disposition combined with the worst luck in America has kept me on the straight and narrow. Of course I toyed with petty theft when I was a kid. My neighbor’s baseball ended up on my lawn and even though it had his name on it I took it and used a marking pen to cover the entire panel of the baseball so that his name was obscured. He caught me. Naturally. I shoplifted a pack of chewing gum from Obexer’s Market in Homewood on Lake Tahoe and got caught. Naturally. I peeled the “nice price” sticker off of a Billy Ocean album and stuck it to Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning.” I would surely have been caught if the girl at the counter cared. As it stands I feel no remorse for stealing from Metallica. After their Napster fiasco and the tremendous amount of crap they’ve released over the last decade they deserve a lot worse. I suppose I’ve taken things from work – the usual, pens, paper, white out. Nothing major. I could never steal money, not even from a lousy employer. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.
But back to this skateboard. I live in what would be considered a relatively poor neighborhood – but you wouldn’t know that from the amount of expensive toys and junk that the kids around here leave out. If I take a walk down the street or through an alley I could pick up a half a dozen bikes in varying states of disrepair. I think it is an ugly symptom when the poorest amongst us are sucked into the gross consumption – we buy things we don’t need, or even want! We buy just to buy and then we let the things we buy rot as soon as something shinier comes along.
Shit, I’m sounding like a broken record.
Speaking of Stealing…
I’ve recently discovered internet radio. I listen to internet radio at work mostly as my connection at home is dial-up. Sometimes we’ll listen to KZFR, other times KCSC, but just today I discovered a doozy of an Americana station called “Bourbon Disaster Radio.” The station is a sublime blend of classic outlaw country and more contemporary alternative-country and Americana. Get your twang on at: http://www.bourbondisaster.com/.
Honesty is the Best Policy
Seriously. Well maybe it’s just because I’m not smart enough to lie and get away with it. To each their own I suppose and I certainly know of a fair amount of highly successful and extremely devious and deceitful people. But you know, it just isn’t worth it – to sacrifice pride and decency for money or material success. What do I know though? Plenty of people have told me I’ll die broke.
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