I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard.
by Matt Worley

I've got a lingering fuzziness from the Sam Adams keg at the party last night. I've got splinters from putting up a blown down section of fence yesterday. There's a sense of appreciation for Sam Raimi's gunfighter western, "The Quick And The Dead," which was screened in our little home theater called "The Living Room" in the early evening before the party. And on my scanner I've got my car insurance bill (liability only) resting on the detachable face for my car stereo, neither of which is useful since my actual car was stolen Friday morning fifteen minutes before I got up for work.

I heard it leave, although at the time I was exercising self-control over paranoia by telling myself it didn't sound like my car. Fifteen minutes before this, my roommate walked back into the house (around 4:30 a.m.) from an early morning look at the comet. I rushed out of bed to confront what I thought was a stranger walking into our house. By the time I was out of my bedroom door, my roommate was crossing my path, probably wondering what the wild-eyed look in my eyes meant. I didn't get back to sleep.

I heard a few cars pass the house, a few bumps in the night and what was my car being started by someone who didn't know the best way to massage my aging monster to life. And then there was a squeal of tires and roar of the engine as someone drove my car away. I didn't get up because I wanted to believe things were different from my time in Florida--when I trusted nothing. During that time, I rushed out of bed at any noise, usually meaning I was up until five or six in the morning. I made sure I was out of bed by noon so that no one could steal our mail. When I moved back to New Mexico the change in mindset was almost immediate. Suddenly everything was normal and safe.

Just like the cop who took my report, I questioned my actions on Friday morning. Why didn't I get out of bed at 4:45 when I heard the car leave? My only answer was, "I didn't think it was mine." And what could I have done? Called the cops a few minutes earlier, run out into the street in my boxers and yelled crazy profanities into the night, grabbed the keys to my brother's car and followed them as they speed away in the night? None of this would have kept my car in the driveway.

Fantasies abound. If I would have just bought a gun like the rest of the country and never trusted any noise I ever heard, I could have been out there to shoot the tires of my car (to keep them from getting away) and held them at gun point until I could get the cops to show up. Or maybe I would have run outside while they were still getting the car hot-wired (because my instinct nerves would have sensed the badness before it happened) and shot the thief in the face. Or, in a less violent scenario, I would have scared them away by merely turning the lights on in our house.

My comet-watching roommate now wishes he had stayed outside a little bit longer. My younger brother, who also heard the car leave, wishes he would have gotten up at the noise as well. And maybe if I would have been as paranoid as I was in Florida, I would have put the Club on my steering wheel when I left my car Thursday afternoon. All of these things might have changed the outcome, although none of us had any idea we were supposed to be thinking this way. And I don't want to think that way at all.

I've spent the last six months or so trying to get away from the paranoia that everyone is out to get me. It's not a good way to live. Sleep is almost impossible, everyone looks strange and possibly armed, and even the postman is suspicious. I've seen what happens when people let paranoia take their lives over. They believe in people like David Koresh. They think Texas is still an independent country that is owed trillions of dollars by the U.S. and the (bogus) state of Texas. They are people like Timothy McVeigh.

Maybe it's just me, but I think I'd rather sacrifice a faithful car of seven plus years to the evil god of paranoia just so the rest of the world doesn't have to be inundated by scary news reports of a freaky guy from New Mexico who decided he wasn't going to take it anymore. It's really the only way to stay sane.

Matt Worley would also like to say that if the people had come by on Saturday morning instead of Friday, the car wouldn't have been there. He had to be at work earlier than usual to cover all the tabled bills at the end of the New Mexico State Legislature session.

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