Yesterday, somebody nicked my bike. Lifted it out of an iron-fenced, locked (faculty ID card required), video-camera-surveyed enclosure on the U. Cal. Berkeley campus. I'm not happy. Yes I know: what else is new?

No, it wasn't one of these really flash machines. Better than a Wal-Mart special, but you wouldn't be taking it to the Tour de France. Was hardly new, but not old enough to be antique. I got it, in fact, in 1996 to get to places in the Washington DC area that I couldn't reach conveniently with the car I didn't have, or on public transportation. So it had a bit of sentimental value. But it also was probably to the point where I'd have to have started investing in replacement parts soon. If I could find any. The new possessor will soon find out about this.

No, I wasn't stranded. I've been living a mile or so from campus, an easy walk. To tell the truth, the bicycle was proving to be a bit of an albatross. I hauled it all the way out here from Maine so I could have alternative transportation to shops, parks, excursions, you know. But I found I couldn't take it anywhere. Not without lugging front lights and rear lights and reflectors and helmets. Not to mention fifty pounds' worth of locks and chains and brackets and alarms. And that was on the presumptuous assumption that you could find anything to lock it to once you got wherever it was you were going. If you got where you were going. Riding the roads of Berkeley has been an adventure to say the least. Not from the cars. The cars are cool. The real road hazards are other people on bicycles. Shortly after I got here, I nearly got mowed down after dark by two cyclists that roared down a hill and through an intersection, running a stop sign. No lights on either of 'em of course. If I'd seen them two seconds later than I did, the world would never have seen this blog. To its great loss. Not. I can read hit counts too. If you're reading this, you're in a special class. That's your mother crying over there. Anyway, then I left the helmet on a BART train. Did without thereafter. I'm such a danger man. I also sell shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. Cheap.

No, I didn't report it. Why? What's the first question they ask you? "Did you spend more than the bicycle was worth new registering it and engraving it and taking its DNA fingerprint? Where's the 500 pounds of paperwork documenting that you did all this?" And even if by some miracle I can so much as remember the serial number on the frame, my chances of recovery are negligible, unless the bike gets pulled out of a ditch and dropped in a holding garage somewhere, and somehow there's a match on a computer search. By which time the bike will be in such a state I won't want it back. "Well, there's always the chance." Yeah, the chance that my report will be one more tally on the work-rate sheets that will appear at contract time, arguing that a mere 15% pay increase for the police forces will mean only a 10% reduction in assessable services. I'd rather those tallies meant they were at work ferreting out corruption in City Hall. Oh. City Hall pays them. Sorry. I forget what kind of people we've allowed to be in charge of this country.

Besides. It's a bicycle. They go missing all the time. 80% annual theft rate on our California college campuses, as Tall One, Lois the Landlady's younger son, reminded me last night. Eighty per flippin'-the-bird-in-your-face cent. I mean waitaminute. It wasn't all that long ago that we fed our transportation oats instead of petroleum products, wasn't it? That a horse thief was the scum of the earth? And people didn't tie their ponies up to the hitchin' post with fifty pounds' worth of locks and chains and brackets and alarms either. You take somebody's horse, they go lookin' for you. And if they find you, they hang you. Forget the six months of courtroom delays while the defense lawyers work on their presentation of the extenuating circumstances. Or on their argument that the owner is a rapacious saloon proprietor who deserved to have his horse stolen. (Hands up all you old farts who remember Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book). You don't take somebody else's horse. Period. Everybody got that.

What's the response now? "Buy another bike. Insurance will cover it." Yeah right. And you wonder how come your rates just jumped 25% last week.

Am I the only one with enough psychological problems to see links here?

Between our disregard for each other's personal property and billionaires with their gated communities patrolled by armed guards and no respect for "real people"? Hell, if I thought I was surrounded by goons who thought they were entitled to take my stuff because I have wealth and they don't, I'd be living in a compound too.

Between our "take what you can get" mentality and Abu Ghraib? Because we've lost our ability to sense what the other guy feels when we impose our wantonness upon him? I mean, everybody's got a plausible excuse ...

What kind of a society have we made for ourselves here? And that we think is worthy of exporting to other countries? Like Iraq? At gunpoint?

So if you happen to be in Berkeley and see a green 1996-vintage GT Vantara bicycle being ridden on the streets, wave goodbye to it for me. And spare a thought for the rider, who may be the one who needed it so much more than I did that he risked getting himself pictured on some piece of security videotape to get it. Until they erase it, that is.

Meanwhile, I will take comfort in the thought that no one has yet, to my knowledge, figured out a way to steal feet.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.