ACCOZZAGLIA

Even having to write this makes me angry, but anger as usual is yielding to resolve.

On Tuesday, my life was stolen from beneath my seat.

My messenger bag, which was at my feet (and even touching one of my shoes) and half beneath my seat and half to its left, was pickpocketed — or “pickbagged” — by a person or a team of persons at the Starbucks where I was interviewing a roommate candidate (or more to the point, having coffee with a candidate whose place had been taken, but whose erudition for obscure 80s German dance music was as formidable as my own and worth getting together anyway after my fourth interview of the day wrapped up and his work at the office was done).

If you live in or are visiting Montréal, just don’t even bother thinking about offering your patronage at the Starbucks on Guy and Maisonneuve (or the one on Ste-Catherine a few blocks over), as both are demonstrable hotbeds of theft activity.

I feel like I’ve repeated this story a hundred times since the night I filled out the report at the SPVM, or the Service de Police de la ville de Montréal — which I should add were most apathetic to some stupid anglo with a petty panic over being victim to a social-based crime (even as property was involved). I can’t really pick on the SPVM here, as the TPS (Toronto Police Service) are arguably no more useful, if not less so. Nevertheless, you can’t really dismiss the feeling of being violated by this, because you were.

I think I’ll either copy/write what was in the police report or try to recant it later for sake of chronicling it in my LJ archives. In short, the ever-familiar, bright-orange Crumpler bag you might have seen me with, usually quite full and heavy of academic or photographic crap, was somehow nabbed from underneath my chair, and at 35-40 pounds and the heft of it being filled, it still unnerves me that no one noticed anything, myself included. It unnerves me further that that Starbucks has had their security camera disconnected for months and gave no answer as to why they hadn’t bothered repairing/reconnecting it (maybe their minds might change if there were an aggravated robbery at that location, but somehow I doubt it).

What was taken away from me?

My legal paperwork, which was an unusual circumstance in itself thanks for provincial and federal bureaucracies. Pretty much my entire identity was in there (including passport and birth certificate). My essential McGill paperwork was in there. My laptop, known as tautologia, which I always kept in the protective green-yellow case. My two 35mm SLR cameras, both loaded with Kodachrome. Three shot rolls of Kodachrome taken in the previous 48 hours. Lenses and filters. A flash unit (small, but useful). All of my phone contacts of the past several months (I hadn’t synced my phone, which was in there too, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since the syncing computer was said laptop). My phone, known as grammatologia. My digital point-and-shoot, worth little to me, but great for shooting pictures of parking violators. And, well, my messenger bag and bike repair tools, a source for income in of themselves.

What did they not take?

My keys. These were on the table. Had those too been taken, then goodbye to my locked-up bicycle, my hotel room, and my house keys. So at least I had the means to ride my bike down to the popo-stop.

In all, I’m just very cranky the more I think about the intangibles that were lost: my working thesis notes (the draft and bibliography are archived in email); my short stories; my entire academic work for most of 2008-09. Other critical documents in PDF format. Any and all graphic-related work over the last year, including my portfolio kit I’d prepared for McGill that probably didn’t hurt getting me into the masters programme.

I think just writing this again is making me really wickedly cold and vengeful. I want the intangibles back — they can keep the material stuff if that’s what matters to them. I want the drive’s contents, the Kodachrome rolls (both shot and unshot), and my legal identity paperwork so that I don’t have to grovel to every ministry and agency that I am who I am and won’t-you-please-give-me-another-passport-drivers-licence-SIN-card-student ID-birth certificate-loan paperwork-etc.?

I have a lot of rebuilding to do, so I’ll have to write more some other time.