"How's that?" My own faith in humanity is never more than dubious at best.
He said that he'd left his camcorder on the subway, displaying all the practical responsibility that's to be expected of any professional musician. For anyone who has even cursory knowledge of public transportation, the general assumption would be that Mark is pretty much fucked. Thou shall not leave thy shit on the train or said shit shall be stolen. Who actually thinks that someone would find an item of any value and say, "Well, hey now! This isn't mine, and I could probably sell it to my cousin Frank who fences hot property. But I really should find a way to return it to it's rightful owner"?
Meet Mark, optimist at large. The MTA has been aggressively promoting it's new Lost & Found hotline of late, with cute little drawings of all the various things that the MTA thinks you might lose during your commute. Like, you know, your pet cobra.
So Mark went down to the lost & found office. Contrary to the laws of logic, the MTA Lost Property Unit gave Mark back his camcorder. He either had seriously good karma coming to him or we've been miraculously transported to an alternate universe where people in NYC don't all but steal your iPod right off you to sell it for crack.
I tend not to lose things. I was the kid who wrote her name on all her school supplies, even the 99-cent plastic ruler, and kept an ever-vigilant eye on every one of her Matchbox cars. I've managed to hold on to every cell phone I've owned for the last 10 years without dropping it in a toilet or leaving it in a hotel room in Ohio or any of the other reasons why all the guys in any of our bands need to replace their cell phones weekly.
Of course, there are exceptions. I've had stuff forcibly taken from me at gunpoint. Occasionally things just disappear. For the most part, though, any time that I've lost something, it's been a direct result of my own stupidity.
When I was 13 or 14, I went with my mother to Circuit City to look at car stereos (for her, not for me). I was wearing those nylon mesh basketball shorts, which was a mistake - and not just for the obvious, sartorial reasons. Basketball shorts don't have pockets, a functional necessity that designers have even seen fit to incorporate into eveningwear these days. Because I was of the mind that there could be something at Circuit City that I might want to purchase (jumper cable? air conditioner?), I tucked a folded $20 bill - the equivalent of 4 paid hours working at my tedious job at the library - into the waistband of my shorts. This was both a) stupid and b) very obviously stupid, as opposed to bad choices that aren't really evident until after the fact. No, this was just your garden-variety, straight-up dumb. Needless to say, there came a point during my wanderings through the audio section of the store when I realized that my $20 was gone. My mother called me a moron three times in the car ride home.
I used to have a ring that I really liked. It wasn't expensive; in fact, I think it was from H&M. But I got a lot of compliments on it. A couple of years ago, I wore it to a Def Leppard show in Boston, and the drunk girl next to me couldn't stop talking about it for about 20 minutes. As a matter of fact, I got to thinking that she was going to kick my ass in the parking lot after the show and take it. The Def Leppard fanbase has a violent streak, despite all their appearances that they just want to rock it (yeah). That same fall, I was at the the Mercury Lounge for a showcase of yet another thunderingly average band that Atlantic Records had signed. In the bathroom, I took off the ring to wash my hands and left it on the sink. It only took about 5 minutes of watching an underwhelming stage show for me to realize I didn't have it on, but when I went back to look in the bathroom, it was gone. I suspected the rather large, goth-looking girl myself.
Most crippling of all, I once lost my wallet. Not to be confused with the time I was mugged because, I don't know about you, but conceding to a semi-automatic isn't so much a loss - I'm just going to chalk that up as an investment in my personal well-being. When I was in college, I carried one of those shoulder bags without any kind of closure - things fell out of it all the time. Stupid, yes, but moving on. During one of my women's studies classes, I must have kicked the bag under my desk and knocked my wallet on the floor. I didn't even realize it until about an hour after the class was over. Frantic, I ran back to the lecture hall and crawled on my hands and knees under all the desks. It was in vain. You never realize how much of your life you keep in your wallet until you lose it. Concert tickets, business cards, receipts - all gone. I didn't even think of it in the frenzy of cancelling my bank cards, but I had also been keeping my high school IDs in my wallet. They were the things I regretted losing the most. Not because it was an especially flattering picture (it wasn't) or because I had fond memories of high school (I didn't), but they were pieces of my past that I could never replace, unlike my Food Emporium rewards card. That's when it dawned on me exactly what caliber of idiot I was, stopping to consider how some things increase in value only when they're lost. That Joni Mitchell, she wasn't just blowing smoke, was she?
It's not just Mark's recent camcorder incident that made me revisit the ghosts of things lost. Earlier this week, for reasons equally as stupid as nylon mesh shorts or leaving expensive electronics on the A train, I effectively lost a friend who was really important to me. If he ever speaks to me again, I will consider myself lucky, but there are some parts of the relationship I know I can never replace. There is no lost & found for someone's regard. Consequences such as these are a necessary price of flagrant stupidity, and that's what makes this particular loss so much harder than a piece of cheap jewelry or some scrawling in a notebook. People don't simply disappear one day into some vortex, like single socks that make it into the washing machine but don't come home from the dryer. People have to be relinquished in a moment of blind carelessness. And I have no one to blame by myself.
Losing something is a one-sided pain, unfortunately. What's lost is unconcerned; it goes on to a new life. It will get found eventually by someone else who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe someone who better deserves to have it.
1 comment:
I fucking hate Mark.
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