Control + Alt + Delete

junta (HOON-tuh, JUHN-) noun

A group, especially one made of military officers, ruling a country
after a coup.

Yesterday afternoon a man was caught on camera covertly entering the theater behind two badge-wearing interns. According to the tape, he shadowed them as they flashed their badges and appeared to--or pretended to--receive a phone call on his cellphone. A member of the box office, in recognition of the badges, buzzed the front door and all three individuals entered as a group. The only reason anyone would know this detail, or why I in particular harbor this knowledge, or why anyone would consider reviewing a security camera tape in the first place, is universal and assumed: this man robbed us. He stole a recently purchased DV camcorder (high resell value) and a personal laptop (not as high, but valuable still).

Without surprise I am reminded about last year's Autumn Auffense, and all the heartache and anger and money and helplessness. It's quick to come back; it's easy. That specific feeling of invasion only gets repressed. Along with their footprints and sloppy exits, robbers always leave behind the gift of benign malevolence--that learned, jaded human instinct of distrust.

Sometimes I think, "Who has my old laptop now? Did they know it was stolen? Did anyone look at my files, my scanned-in photos, my unfinished essays and sketches? What about my music choices, what did they think of those? Is it all deleted? Wiped clean? Everything? My bookmarks? My homepage? My history?" I'm sure it is, really. I'm sure the motherboard got flogged and a pawnshop dealer turned the other way for $200 and this all happened in under a week's time. They probably took out the memory stick from my digital camera without even peaking at all the photos we took of Madison, Wisconsin on our trip the weekend before. I mean, why would they? Why would they care about our trip, about how it snowed one night and we got drunk at the hotel bar? Or how we drove to a nearby town famous for these little statues of gnomes, but it was a Sunday and everything was closed. So we ate breakfast at a diner. And drove back to Chicago. And slept that night in our dark garden apartment. With flimsy dowels in our front windows.