Occasionally a stoner will come to our house. He (almost always a he) is remembering a time when a drug dealer lived here. "Remembering" might be too active a verb. It's more like an instinct. There are other times when a drunk or wasted former resident will show up, insisting that they still live in our basement.
We have an alarm system, and it works. We did once have a situation where one of these guys got into the basement back when the basement door was sticking and not quite latching.
The alarm went, the police were called, they came and they took the man away. He was confused and on the belligerent side, but he didn't mean any harm.
The police officers were apologetic - they thought he must have been in there for some time, searching the place. It had been thoroughly tossed.
I reassured them that it always looked like that.
I have too much stuff. Or too little organization for the stuff I have. The valuable stuff is the least likely to be stolen, because the market for it is not the local pawn shop. I don't have much in the way of electronics - no television, a couple of obsolete laptops I keep for sentimental reasons. Not much that is portable and valuable. A crackhead is not likely to wrestle the heavy antique furniture out the narrow door and up the outside stairs.
The alarm is more about saving the hassle than saving the stuff. After a theft, you either have to report the incident and go through all the nuisance of explaining it to the police, the insurance company etc OR accept your losses and find a replacement for what was taken, knowing that you will spend the next couple of years occasionally looking in pawn shops to see if anything looks familiar.
So the alarm goes on. We even have it turned on most of the time when we're home. The alarm isn't about fear as much as it's about having limited energy to deal with thieves and addicts. At times I look at the mess that is my basement and think "Let them have it!"... but then I realize I do have an attachment to some of the things I have inherited or scavenged over the years. Not ready to downsize yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment