Self-Examination

If the recession of 2008 hadn’t maimed so many of us accountants, I wouldn’t have started shoplifting. And though I floated towards homelessness, I clawed my way back up the economic beach, even after watching that ebb tide sweep so many bellowing colleagues out to sea. I don’t mean to lack compassion, no, really, but like they say, “if ya done it, it ain’t bragging.” At that point I realized my salvation lay in the collection plate of petty crime. I mean, wife and kids sayonaraed me long ago, and I’ve been on my own now for one hundred seventy-eight weeks.

My initiation into larceny began with basic needs stuffed down my pants — snickers bars, white bread, tins of potted meat, and pony bottles of beer, really just things to tide me over, but then a better plan skipped across my mind like the way a crumpled styrofoam cup skates over an oily canal on a windy day.

Reaching back into my old quantitative tool-bag, I began computer-scamming — targeting the idle rich, sweeping their crypto out from under their noses, while posing as a 40ish blonde widow whose nipples peered like shy buttons from a sheer black nightgown.

Twelve years later, sometimes I ask myself “do you really know the difference between want and need”, even though these economic curves are the basis of civilized capitalism? Yet neither produces the orgiastic thrill accompanying a successful theft, abdominal muscles contracting involuntarily at the start and relaxing with each exhalation as the crime struts forward.