Proof Hell Does Freeze Over

I must be a very, very bad Buddhist with a crappy understanding of dharma because I can't seem to get past the First Noble Truth lately, if ever. Especially here, in this G-dforsaken hole that is proof that hell froze over years ago, only the damned were too busy gnashing their teeth to take notice.

Since my first car at age sixteen, I've never had my car broken into or stolen from, let alone totaled. In the past two and a half years of living here, however, I've had one car totaled by a speeding car, and two different cars broken into/vandalized/burglarized. Today I received a dubious addition to my resume of Life Experiences That Suck when a Target customer deliberately rammed her cart into my car bumper/trunk multiple times. She claimed we'd stolen "her" parking space you see, her rationale being she has a baby (she ended up parking two slots further away from the store), and we were, in her studied and well-practiced words, "motherfuckers" for parking our car, depriving her children of fifteen fewer seconds in the shopping cart.

I know what you're thinking. You've got to be kidding me. Really, this sounds much more like a Walmart story than a Target story, Jamie.

I stopped listening the moment she jumped out of her car and started moving her mouth. It's a nursing-born reflex. The moment patients start shouting at me, I stop listening and start playing that Strawberry Alarm song 'Crimson and Clover" in my head, "Crimson and Clo-oo-ver, ov-er and -ov-er!" I usually don't even get to the cool echo/voice distortion part before I'm out the door. It probably makes me look slightly glazed-over, but I love that song and it makes a whole lot more sense than the anger and the yelling and the noise.

We simply walked away, and Ibrahim didn't think she'd do anything, but I hung around the inside Target lobby in front of the door motion sensor (after taking down the make of her car, color, and license tags) and watched her come up to our car, take her baby out of the shopping cart, set the bassinet on the ground and ram the cart into the rear of our car, one, two, then three times. What about your baby, lady? It's twenty five degrees out! In the time you took to damage our car, you could have been in the store, warming your fat ass and that of your child!

She was almost arrested, but she had the baby, so the police wrote her a ticket (her license tags didn't even belong to the car) and sent her to court. It's too bad, really. I've actually never had anyone do anything to me that I could have them arrested for (well, I have, but I've actually never witnessed willful destruction of my own property and been able to do anything about it). I mean, hello, the car didn't even have valid license tags, so you'd think she would have at least had the sense to limit herself to something that she couldn't be arrested for, such as hurling ghetto invectives.

Meanwhile, my poor car has a small dent in the rear trunk area that wasn't there before. And that poor officer had all that stupid paperwork to write up. I know it's his job, just like it's my job to document the amount, color and consistency of fecal material, but knowing what the job is like, I felt a little bad.

But still. My car.

It's too bad we can't all just get along. There'd be a lot less paperwork involved, for one thing.