Feel my rage, thief!

Dear douchebag (or douchette, whichever you happen to be) who stole my umbrella today,

I hope you fall in a puddle.

Best,
Me

You know, it's a darn good thing it wasn't a baby or something because I swear, you leave something unattended for 10 minutes and the vultures just swoop on in.

So I then, in response to this dreadful event, went and racked my brain and recent history to see if there might be some kind of karmatic reason for this all. And the only thing I could really come up with was a few weeks ago when I laughed a little bit inside when I saw some girl's shoe fall off when she was riding her bike. It was raining and she was hopping around on one foot after getting off her bike and she was trying not to step on the wet ground and she was using her bike for support but it was teetering, and you can't really hop in high heels, so it was more just stretching out her body in an awkward way and it was all really quite a spectacle.

But then, UCD seems to have recently become a campus rich in spectacles, most of which are not amusing much at all.

In any case, and in my defense, high heels are generally not considered adequate rainwear, so it really was coming to her, a little bit. And I don't think the punishment here really fits the crime, so maybe the umbrella-stealing is actually in reference to something else, and in addition to that payback I am also still awaiting the universe's wrath for the internal-mocking-of-inappropriately-clad-girl incident.

How grand.

Elias Canetti tells us that laughter is, at its core, an expression of pleasure taken in food or in prey. And that tells us that the reason people laugh when others fall is because it's some kind of hearkening back to our innate animal instincts in which we reflect this shift in power dynamics, or the emergent vulnerability of the fallen one, in the same way that a predator bears its teeth when its prey falls before him. Canetti says that instead of eating, we laugh--that laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food.

So what it really ultimately demonstrates is that human beings, over the whole course of history, have actually not progressed much at all.

Maybe my laughing at high-heel-girl really was my predatory instinct rising from deep within. Which could easily be true. But nevertheless, I can look into my apparent latent desire to eat high-heeled women some other time. For now, I still maintain the position that a) you shouldn't wear high heels in rain, and b) you shouldn't wear high heels in rain while simultaneously attempting to ride a bicycle.

That's sure some deep life advice if I do say so myself. Maybe I should start charging. I can't just be doling out all this uber-profound stuff to readers for free.

Anyway, I guess I'll leave with some Beckett because I started off this whole thing by talking about sticky-fingered-umbrella-thefting-vultures and it reminded me of one of his poems:

The Vulture

dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal