This morning while trying to get ready for me to go to my Letterpress class (yes, I'm taking a six week course in learning how to do Old Skool printing. With little type blocks. And an electric press from the thirties. I'm making Christmas gifts for people. Because I have geeky literary friends who will really dig a hand set, printed on nice paper, paragraph from À la recherche du temps perdu. Which will, sadly, be in English because they do not have diacritics in their type sets. Sad clown), and while Mr. P was running around trying to load up the car to take his things to DC to be hung in the gallery for his opening next week, that some jack. bastard. tried to break into Mr. P's studio/the garage sometime in the last day and a half or so. The person in question did this by bashing the crap out of the doorknob, thereby bending the cylinder, and ensuring that the door will be frozen in place forever more. On the upside, I believe that this may have discouraged the asshat (likely some stoopid tweaker) from continuing his mission. On the downside, the door is now stuck in place and will necessitate a repair we cannot afford (unless, that is, Mr. P's show sells out. Do you hear this, universe? We need a sold out show). On the upside, the key for the lock was bent and very near breaking in half, so this was going to be on the repair agenda in any case at some point. On the downside, I'm very unhappy that some freaking tweaker was in our backyard, bashing the hell out of the doorknob to the garage, which is about fifteen feet from the backdoor of the house.
Needless to say, this is not in any way raising my somewhat anemic affection for our current home city. I lived in three different developing countries for almost five years, including one that had no rule of law, and the sum total of my encounters with crime were the loss of two cheap bicycles and a shirt stolen from a laundry line. Almost ten years in New York City and I once had someone take two subway tokens and two dollars out of the pocket of a jacket I'd left unattended on a couch at a club. Four years in Washington, D.C. and once someone broke into the building where I lived (but not my apartment) and stole cash from my landlady's purse. We've been in this house a year and a half and we've got tweakers in the backyard wielding 4x4s. Makes me long for those halcyon Phnom Penh days....
