As If I'd Find The Thief Nearby

This is the rim of my yellow bike. I'm riding it today because my red bike got ripped off while I was at the library a few days ago, leaving Eleanor and me to hoof it the mile or so back home. If there's a universal law I've subscribed to most frequently the past ten years or so, it's this one: Leave everything unlocked to repel thieves...but don't be a sucka. Muhammad said it a bit more poetically: Trust in Allah...and tie your camel. Guess I was a sucka. Guess I shoulda tied my camel.

And so at roughly 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday I was seen exiting the library on a late summer's day, with the sun at my back and all of Creation basking in the sun's terrible incandescence, staring at an empty gap in the sidewalk where the Red Bicycle should have been. "Oh snap," I said to The Eleanor, who was riding on my back, "the jig is up."

I spun around like a keystone Mevlevi dervish, as if I'd find the thief nearby, crouching under a Dracula cape. But no. Just humanity. Billions of perfect strangers going about their daily business in the town square. Children laughing. Fountains spurting. An old man with bright blue eyes scratching his arse with his palsied, spotted hand. Nowhere was my bike.

There is a tendency to blame oneself after such a misfortune. And yeah, okay. But yet sometimes one simply needs to trust in one's fellow man. If one's fellow man happens to let one down, it has to be okay. That is, one must find an inner-way to make it all right. Such is the lot of modern man.

"It's not the end of the world. Just the end of a bike. And the birth of a sunny walk home." This is what I tell myself, though I only half believe it. I really want to catch the thief and break his toes. "You took my bike, you bastard." But the ship is perennially going down. Everything is passing.

Earlier this week, I got the news that one of my old clinical supervisors from grad school lost her son to a swimming accident. He was eighteen and full of life. Got pulled under a pier and didn't come back up. So in a world of degrees, bikes don't mean shit. We can't break the toes of death - or life's slings and arrows - but I would if I could. I'd be sadistic. And in my my own mind, on my best day, I am Sadistic Toe-breaker of Suffering.