After midnight again. Drinking wine again. Here I am again, though less happy, this time.

I should be writing fiction, but I'm too bummed about our car being stolen. Heather worked her ass off getting us that car -- she made all the calls, looked at lots of cars, handled all the paperwork, negotiated, everything. All I had to do was pay for half. And she got a great car, a sporty little Saturn, which we named Phoebe. (Because it was the prettiest name for a moon of Saturn, we thought.) She zooms, she has a nice radio, she has a moonroof, she gets decent mileage for an automatic, she's comfy, and black, and we hardly even notice the hole in the driver's side door anymore, though that's why we could afford her.

And now some bastard stole her from the street right outside our house. I'm not even that depressed about the inconvenience of not having a car. Sure, it sucks, but I can take the bus to work -- it's only a fifteen minute ride from here. Heather can get to BART via bus, too, and from there to work. It doesn't even change our schedule that much, really. Sure, cars are useful for other things (like shopping and going to parties and so forth), but mainly we used Phoebe for the daily commute. What pisses me off is the fact that we like the car, that Heather went to so much trouble and got us such a great deal, and now it's been snatched away by some asshole. The thought of going through all the effort to get another car is most disheartening. We were finally crawling out of the debt-hole a little bit -- I've been in the process of drawing up a real budget, even -- and now we might be facing a serious financial setback in the form of acquiring another car. We haven't even had Phoebe for a year yet! We could try to do without a car, I guess, in theory, but public transit is unreliable and often infuriating, and neither one of us is comfortable with the idea of having no readily-available transportation. It's rough enough, sometimes, only having one car. Which means, if the cops don't find Phoebe, we're in a vicious financial pinch. Heather and I live very much paycheck-to-paycheck, right on the edge, but with my recent raise and prospect of her doing some fit modelling, things were beginning to look up. Now we're headed straight back into the hole again. (Well, deeper into the hole. It's not like we're out of the hole now. But I was down here in the bottom, fashioning a crude rope from roots and grasses, before this. Anyway. I'll stop with this metaphor.)

It's really depressing, and that's why I can't seem to write fiction, because my mind keeps whirring and whirling around.

We walked down to the movie theater this afternoon, because we thought it would make us feel better, and it did -- there were whole stretches during The Return of the King when I didn't think about our car at all. Though before and after the movie, while walking, we were looking at every car we saw that looked remotely like Phoebe, hoping she'd been abandoned... but, no. We'd planned on going grocery shopping after the movie, which we still did, though we couldn't buy even half the things we'd planned to, since we had to carry them home on foot. Still, we got enough food to see us through the week, probably, and I made us a nice dinner of pasta and bread and olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and we drank wine. We're both bummed, and feeling slightly surreal, and we both keep wandering to the window and looking down on the street, as if expecting to see our car returned to the position it was stolen from.

Anyway. I should go read or something, try to take my mind off this. I'd play computer games, but somehow the prospect of playing Grand Theft Auto is strangely unappealing...