My beautiful houndstooth coat

I have misplaced my beautiful houndstooth coat. It is black and white in a houndstooth pattern and is attached to two sirens. There is a button in each sleeve that controls each siren -- the button in my right sleeve controls the siren on my left shoulder, and the button in my left sleeve controls the siren on my right shoulder (something about how the wires are crossed). The sirens are for, when I see an attractive woman, I blast my sirens at her as she walks past.

I also blare the sirens for other reasons, for example, if I'm watching a television show with someone else, I will blare the sirens at important moments in the story to alert people that they should be paying attention to the television.

I blare the siren on my left shoulder for a mildly attractive woman, the siren on my right shoulder for a moderately attractive woman, and both sirens for an exceptionally attractive woman. In this way, I am able to differentiate between four classes of women (including, of course, no siren for women I do not find at all attractive). At times I've experimented with blaring the sirens in certain patterns -- quick alternating bursts, for example -- in order to make finer distinctions for women of varying attractiveness within smaller subgroups, but for the most part, I'm satisfied categorizing most women within the four main groups and I don't find the more complicated patterns to be necessary.

I think I left the coat in a restaurant. I remember blaring the sirens when my plate of food was delivered, but it was a warm evening and when I passed a woman in the parking lot and reached for the button in my left sleeve to blare the siren on my right shoulder, I realized that I'd forgotten my coat inside. When I went back inside to look for it, the entire restaurant staff denied that they had ever seen a coat matching my description, even the waitress in whose face I'd blared the siren so suddenly that she dropped a soda.

The first thing I did was go home and wake up a lawyer and explain my problem. The lawyer's recommendation was that the restaurant owner and I enter arbitration. As it was explained to me, both I and the restaurant owner would have an opportunity to present our case to an unbiased arbitrator who would then make a decision on the merits, as to what kind of I don't know financial settlement or how and when they would give me the jacket back and with what kind of apology, I don't know, however it works. That seemed fine, so I agreed to enter into arbitration.

The restaurant owner, though, completely ignored my arbitration offer and responded instead with a curt message that the jacket had been thrown into the garbage because it had disturbed customers at his restaurant. So they had lied! They had thrown out my fine, expensive jacket and sirens, and then told me they had never seen it, out of malice. I printed two copies of his response, which I felt would be key in winning my arbitration case.

So when I showed up to the arbitration office some days later with my copies of the email and knowing the restaurant owner wasn't even going to show up, I was confident in my chances. But the arbitration office, when I arrived, was gone -- in its place was a pile of wet, smoldering ashes. I asked a fireman loitering nearby, who had moved the arbitration office? where had it gone? and who had moved this pile of ashes here in its place? and he impatiently explained to me that the building had burned down overnight.

My first thought was that, of course, the restaurant owner, faced with a near-certain loss in our arbitration hearing, had burned the building to the ground in the dead of night. I began yelling at the fireman that, this had been no accident, it was arson -- perhaps MURDER! He wandered away and knocked me down when I tried to grab him (I wished I'd had my jacket to blare my siren at him, to get his attention).

I ran straight to the restaurant and found the owner behind the bar. I again wished I'd had my sirens to get his attention, so instead I began screaming "WAAH-AAH-WAAH-AAH" (like a siren) at him and grabbed him by his shirt and began screaming phrases like murderer and building-burner and arbitration-shirker. He said he had no idea what I was talking about or who I was. I started screaming about my jacket which he'd thrown out and our arbitration and he insisted he didn't remember, and then I was thrown out by somebody. That the largest single problem in my life had been caused by this man, and that he didn't even have the courtesy to remember it -- this was too much, too much to bear.

Over the following months, I followed the investigation closely, and it was determined by the "powers that be" that the fire had been an accident. I was enraged and pored over every inch of the public report, determined to poke holes in the case and find the truth -- was it incompetence? A cover-up? Something even more terrifying? And, my conclusion was, that, I have to say, they did a pretty good job with it. Good report, solid evidence all around, nothing to dispute. I guess I'd been wrong. Egg on my face! But at least I had the maturity to recognize it and change my mind in the face of overwhelming evidence. I never received a response to the beautiful apology note I wrote to the restaurant.

I guess it's hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes powerful, oppressive forces are arrayed against you, determined to crush you, obliterate you, wipe your existence from history. And sometimes, a wire sparks, an old carpet ignites, and there is nothing more to the story. Was I denied justice by a powerful conspiracy or an accidental fire? Do we live in a civilization built by the powerful and maintained by the exploitation of the powerless, or is the overriding principle of the universe chaos? Well, yeah. All of it is true, all at once. And it also doesn't matter at all, because the end result for me is the same -- I have no jacket, I have no hope of justice. And the universe does not care. It does not care; it does not care!