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Sometimes When You Steal.
Sometimes when you steal,
You can end up ahead . . .
But why take the bonus from one opportunity
And trade it,
For the lifetime of opportunities you could have had,
With the person you stole from?
Could it possibly be worth it?
Besides . . .
Sometimes when you steal,
You can end up dead . . .
-Jeff Gaines
Jan. 2nd, 2001
(I lived in a small cottage on the
Pithlachascotee River in Port Richey for 5 years. It was a
small quiet neighborhood on a dead end street. Across the
street from me was a house that the rotten, greedy owner had
converted (illegally) into a "rooming house", as-it-were.
Basically, he let folks live there, renting them a bedroom
or the laundry room or the back porch or even the couch and
then everyone shared the one bathroom and kitchen. He,
of course, didn't live there. You can imagine the types and
classes of folks that drifted in and out of the "flop-house"
as we called it around the neighborhood.
One morning I woke to police
sirens, fire trucks and an ambulance right outside my
bedroom window. I went outside to see what all the commotion
was and watched as they took a body bag out of the house and
into the ambulance. I asked what had happened and learned
from one of the folks who lived in the house why the peace
was stirred. A woman flopping at the house brought a man
home with her for the night. He put a Budweiser tall-boy in
the fridge for the morning. Alchy's get the shakes without
that good-morning brew, I guess.
Well, when he woke up, he opened
the bedroom door and saw the guy who "lived" on the couch
passed out with a Bud tall-boy and a kitchen knife on the
floor next to him. Assuming the guy had drank his beer, he
picked up the knife and proceeded to stab him to death ...
He never woke up and was pronounced dead at the scene. The
first punch line? The idiot's beer was STILL in the fridge
and the poor guy that he killed had NOT drank it at all, but
brought home his own!
The distance the murderer had to
walk from the bedroom door to the fridge in order to confirm
this fact before changing so many folks lives
forever?
EIGHT FEET!
The second punch line? The kitchen
knife he used was laying by the guy on the the couch because
he felt he needed it for protection from the others in the
house. Irony, somehow, doesn't fit here ... does it? I don't
believe there is a description for such a sad turn of
events.
It so happened, that that same
week, someone I knew (or thought I did) had stolen something
from me and I had caught him. I was brooding over this,
because I had been letting him stay at my house a few days
to help him out. This whole "stealing" thing was swirling
around in my head all week, but this event broke it open and
this piece is what popped out. I wrote it as all the
emergency vehicles left my quiet street and the sounds of
the wind and the birds in the Orchid Tree outside my front
window drifted back. I really loved that cottage.)
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