After my last blog post, a whole lot of you wrote to me, asking for the details of the robberies I mentioned in that post…99% of the letters ending with “Dear Lord, Dave, you’ve got to move from where you live.”
So! With the goal of reassuring you that they didn’t all happen in the same place, and that I don’t live in a crime-ridden cesspool, here’s a brief history:
GRAND THEFT AUTO:
I grew up in San Diego county, and was the lucky recipient of not one, not two, but three cars stolen from me while I lived there. In fairness, two of those cars were my pop’s, but I was driving them at the time they were stolen…so I take responsibility for those as cars stolen under “my” watch.
HOME INVASION/BURGLARY:
This one happened when I lived in London. When it was reported to the police, we were super excited to take advantage of the (kinda Orwellian) CCTV system that London has in place. If we’re going to be watched by hundreds of thousands of secret cameras every day, then by gum…how exciting to put the system to use and catch a criminal with them! But dang it all, after watching tapes of the criminal run past like 20 cameras at the police station, darn it if the dude didn’t *disappear* between two cameras. The little jerk knew where the blind spot was!
ROBBERY W/ A DEADLY WEAPON:
This one was a genuine bummer. On my third day of living in Los Angeles, my fiance, good friend and I were robbed right outside my new apartment. And from the three of us, the guys got like $17. And I know you won’t believe it when I say it, but the whole thing just filled me with a tremendous amount of sadness, not rage or vengeance or anything like that. Even with the gun to my head and all…it was just a sad, sad moment. For lack of a better phrase, I was very aware of the *humanity* of the person holding the gun to my temple.
And while it sort of put a stink on my initial impression of LA, I’ve never had an ounce of trouble in the following 10 years… so it’s been a nice place to live.
Anyway! Those are my crime stories. Nothing extraordinary, nothing particularly terrible (thank God). Just a string of unfortunate events, really.