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Take My Life, Please As if I don’t already have enough problems, it appears that I may soon be the victim of identity theft. I kid you not--there has been infiltration recently into my checking account, my hard drive, and my credit cards. But it’s not so much the specter of police detention, financial ruin, and worldwide infamy that I find so frightening or offensive. No, it’s something much more profound and personal. You see, it took decades—long, hard, heart-achy decades—to become me. I resent the fact that someone else can become me in a few short minutes, even if I myself don’t particularly enjoy it and have spent years trying to get out of it. What is most offensive about identity theft is not its criminality but its selectivity. In identity theft, as in marriage, one should take the bad with the good. My own glass is half empty, and you want the half full part. So, a few modest proposals. Take my last two lame-o moving violations and the insurance hikes that followed them. Take my TRW and Equifax reports. Take all the people I’ve done favors for who believe that entitles them to another favor. Take my trick knee, injured in a 1995 rear-ender from a New York City taxi. Take my low density cholesterol. Leave the high. Take my cat. Not the calico one. The bushy-tailed one who vomits on rugs for sport. Take the spam I get for online university diplomas, penis enlargement supplements, and generic Vicodin. Take my insomnia and the addictions to Vicks NyQuil, Excedrin PM, and valerian root that go with it. Take my hairline, which by now is not so much a line as it is a Jackson Pollock painting. Take my neuroses, starting with the way I check my wallet twenty times an hour. While you’re at it, take my shirt-collar biting and sleeping on my right hand till it feels frostbitten. And while you're at that, take the carpal tunnel syndrome. Take my car. When you see my car, you’ll know why. Take that recurring nightmare in which I show up to a final exam after never bothering to come to class all year. What’s that? You already have that dream? Keep it. Take my wife, please. Just kidding on that one. But three days a month, I mean it. Take my government, whose foreign policy is based on an insatiable thirst for non-replenishable natural resources. And by all means, take my psycho ex-girlfriend, who eighteen years later is more amorous by way of hang-up calls than she ever was during the seven-and-a-half months we went out. Don’t make me out to be a hard-ass. I have my soft side. Sure, go to flight school as Rich Herschlag. Set up a safe house as Rich Herschlag. Buy cell phones, fertilizer, and knapsacks as Rich Herschlag. But there needs to be a few ground rules. For instance, no use of your own photo in my drivers license. Even if you are olive-complected and turbaned, I must insist you use the bleached out, deer-in-the-headlights shot of me taken in September 2002 by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. And since it’s going to be me out there ruining lives and destabilizing nations, I feel I should have some say in the matter. I’ve done my best to live an unconventional life. The least you can do is be an unconventional terrorist. Stay away from embassies. That’s been done to death. And please, no planes and skyscrapers. But if you insist, learn how to land. Most importantly, before any suicide bombing, may I suggest a full dress rehearsal in the privacy of your own home? To clarify--I don’t do identification theft. It’s identity theft—the whole nine yards--or nothing. Like Sinatra sang, take all of me. Exactly how good are you at running a consulting business while taking care of two children? Precisely how adept are you at solving a saturated soils problem during a conference call while keeping perfectly levelheaded as the little tykes slug it out over a SpongeBob DVD? Your idea of multitasking is crashing an SUV wired with explosives through a barricade while praying to Allah. Sadly, I haven’t had the greatest luck in the world, and with my luck, my luck will change just as you take over. You will make consecutive green lights. You will score easily with the opposite sex. You will hit Powerball. Your dynamite vest will detonate at just the right moment. Timing and punctuality were never my thing, but your friends will never joke about your being late to your own funeral. But while you are having a laugh at my expense, I will be having a laugh at my expense too. Yours will be a life of no one being able to spell your last name. That includes people in my family, who are now, by the way, your family. There are two aunts who hug until your small intestines ooze out your nostrils. I’ll let you figure out who they are on your own. Interestingly enough, my last name does, in fact, have five straight consonants. Perhaps as many as yours, but without the q’s stripped of their u’s. What’s up with that? One more thing. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking after it’s all over, you can simply return my identity even more soiled than when you got it. Well, I’ll let you know. Click here to rant back. |