  Thieves. It came to pass that after seeing Phone Booth with a few friends on Saturday, I went to a the best take-out Chinese restaurant in Nashville, Hunan Express, where I got a Hunan-style beef and two egg rolls. But that's besides the point. As I was driving home, my dad beside me and I at the wheel, I drove by "the car". This car has been sitting here since two summers ago. It's an old blue car, it looks sort of like the Shelby from Gone In Sixty Seconds , and it is in the worst possible position, half-way on the road at the veritable apex of the curve leading to my dad's house. As we drove by, I told my dad my plans for my sixteenth birthday in two months: I'm going to drive the car to the very place I was presently at in that road, take a crowbar, and bash that thing until it was little more than a crushed Pepsi can.
Suddenly my dad became very somber while saying, "You could put that to a more practical use," We pulled into the driveway. As we sat there, he said, "What's different? " After making several guesses about a change to the house, even being so optimistic as to infer that something had been done to the house: he said it was something bad. After further pushing, he told me: someone had stolen my bike. I didn't ride the bike much, I was going to when I first bought it, but it needed a lot of work and no one was really listening to me when I said as such; plus, this summer gave me little incentive to do so: this of course, is the reason why I didn't notice it at first. Afterward, my dad gave me the speculation that someone had cut the padlock and taken not only the bike, but the broken padlock and chain as well. I was stunned at first, then I was angry, and almost backed out of the drive to start looking: my dad informed me that he had already been doing that since it had been stolen...
But the bigger suprise: it happened while I was in Destin, on Thursday, he even heard it when it happened and disreguarded it. It was a pretty quiet neighborhood, I thought as I walked inside. Of course, to add insult to injury, as we were watching TV that night, a white Cavalier was being pursued by three blazing police cars.
My dad and I gave each other a look, whereafter he took his gun from his backpack, unbuttoned the fasten for the holster, put it down on the coffee table, and continued watching our Buffy the Vampire Slayer second season on DVD, woot! That is a pretty good show, by the way. Which is better: to be optimistic, or to be realistic? Optimism for comfort, realism for reality. Is reality such a good thing? Is it even necessary anymore? Humanity subverts its reality with TV and video games, with the Internet, they subvert their love with pornography, they subvert their beliefs with the good guys in the movie, they are serial murderers with a license to kill, they are puppeteers with the right to control humans as they see fit.
It really leaves one to wonder if the world should be entirely optimistic, because, truly, their is no more reality to address. We can make our own now, anyway. 
