Daily Diatribes

Monday morning, I made the fatal mistake of placing a one hundred dollar bill in my wallet. Normally you will not even find a one dollar bill in my wallet, let alone a bill of even higher currency. However, it was money we had gotten for Christmas and I was going to spend the money buying my goddess some new blue jeans, the old ones being too tight in the butt and torn at the knees. (Aside….can you tell I have been reading Dickens? My sentences are growing longer.)

Anyway, I call the placement of cash a fatal mistake because somehow the cash in my wallet triggered a chain of cosmic events which resulted in my wallet being stolen. I set out that bright morning to buy the jeans, but, in fact, never actually bought jeans because MA had soccer practice at 11:30 and so instead of buying jeans, we went to Krispy Kreme and bought donuts and then I took her to get her nails done, which, incidentally, was another fatal mistake. By the time her nails were dry, we had to rush home so she could change clothes, so I paid for the manicure, went straight to my car and drove home. At home, she went upstairs to change and get her soccer bag and I carried in a bag of dog food and fed the canines. I then drove her to soccer, she got out of the car and I drove straight home. Where I made the discovery that my wallet was missing.

At first I thought it was in the car. I searched the car thoroughly, overturning fast food bags and empty Diet Coke bottles. No wallet. I retraced my steps through the house; no wallet. I emptied all the dog food from its bin into another bin, just in case I had accidentally dropped it in the bottom and then covered it with the food when I poured it into the bin. No wallet. I called the nail salon. No wallet. I drove back to the nail salon, searched the parking lot and visited every business in the strip mall. No wallet. I drove to the high school, dragged MA out of practice so I could search her bag to see if she had it. No wallet. It had vanished without a trace.

To this very second, I cannot fathom how it went missing. Did aliens aim their death ray at my car and suck it out through the sun roof? I have no viable explanation for where it went. The only scenario I can come up with is that when I dropped MA at soccer, the wallet fell on the floor of the passenger side and dropped out when she got out of the car. It’s not a perfect fit, but I didn’t go anywhere else. And it’s gone.

I went home and reluctantly canceled everything, convinced it was going to turn up in my freezer or under the bathroom sink. But this morning, I received confirmation of my worst fear: a bad person had my wallet and, even worse, had used the girl scout check card that I had forgotten to cancel. I had even forgotten I had it. But this lucky person found it and used the sweat of innocent girl scouts to fuel up his vehicle. Vile, indescribable bastard!! There is no torture in hell worthy of someone who would rip off the girl scouts. Why not torture a few kittens and steal a homeless woman’s shopping bag? Same thing if you ask me.

But at least now I knew the wallet was not going to come back to me with its nice, shiny hundred dollar bill intact. Probably the thief bought beer and munchies inside the gas station with my Benjamin, filled up his car with girl scout cookie profit and then drove off to party with hordes of crack whores. May his testicles be stricken with flesh eating fungus!!

Forced to face the reality of my loss, I went to replace my driver’s license this morning. I had been putting it off just in case I found my wallet in the dishwasher, but now I knew it wasn’t coming back. So I located the proper documentation and made my way to the license office.

Surprisingly, the office was devoid of customers. I walked to the driver’s license counter, where the clerk was busy scrubbing the desk with a Lysol wipe. As I watched, she scrubbed the counter furiously, wiped down the signature pad, ran it up the pen and chain that were mounted on the desk and then rubbed down her computer monitor. “Be with you….in just a minute…” she huffed, scrubbing away. “It’s just….that people come….in here with…their germs….and I don’t want….to get sick.” She got a new wipe and started going over everything again. Then she disposed of the wipes, got a big squirt of Germex, and made a big production of lathering up. You would’ve thought she was about to perform open heart surgery.

Reader, I am not proud of my actions. You would’ve thought I had been humbled by my recent loss and filled with a desire to treat my fellows more kindly than I myself had been treated. Alas, my soul had undergone no such conversion and as I stood and watched her scrub, I started coughing as loudly and violently as possible. I channeled the spirit of all those who had gone before, after succumbing to tuberculosis and I coughed and choked as if I were about to expire on the spot.

“I know what you mean,” I gasped between paroxysms, “I am just getting over a cold myself.” This is not an exaggeration; she actually shuddered. And the sight of that shudder filled me with an extremely mean-spirited glee. I continued to cough as she entered my information into the computer and took my money. I coughed even more loudly as she took my picture. I silently offered up entreaties to the Gods of Mucous that I might be given one really big, really juicy sneeze, but alas, it was not to be. I contented myself with coughing visibly into my hand, then using the same hand to sign my license with the pen she had just wiped. “Thanks and have a nice day,” I said cheerily, eyes tearing up, as I coughed my way out the door. She didn’t say anything. I wanted to stick around to see if she was going to scrub down the counter after I left, but I didn’t want to be too obvious.

So ends the saga of my missing wallet. Not only did I lose my wallet, I have lost my faith in humanity. At least temporarily. I’m sure I’ll be back to my Pollyanna self tomorrow. By the time my new check card gets here, I’m sure I’ll have recovered my optimism. I am trying not to obsess about the fact that somewhere, someone has all of my personal information and now knows where I live. I am making Nancy get my mail as soon as it comes, just in case the perp is lurking around, waiting for my new credit cards to appear so he can party with the crack whores again. Oh well, c’est la vie!! I wonder if the driver’s license lady started doping up on Vitamin C as soon as I left?