To The Human Barnacle Who Steals Sh*t Off My Porch

Vengeance cometh.

Photo by the author, so she has something to look at other than her vandalized exterior.

If it was Amazon boxes, I’d understand. Ooooh…what delightful treats await you beneath the hastily taped folds of cardboard. Riches perhaps? Goods ripe for resale via underground markets? Never mind that it’s typically just bulk paper towels and the special hair clips I use when I dye out my grays, no no—you go ahead and thieve those packages, I wouldn’t want to invalidate your hope. I wish, I wish the things stolen from my porch had as much potential value or at least as much mystery and intrigue as the items most commonly zoinked from private property. The shit that gets stolen from my threshold is downright embarrassing.

When I moved from an apartment building with a locked door and a lobby into a house with a front porch, I understood that certain adjustments to expectations were in order. I have a front door that faces humanity for the first time in over a decade. I’m willing to accept the changes, they come with a washer and dryer for fuck’s sake. I never complain about the fact that there are people walking by my actual home at all hours of the day and night. I even got a Ring camera so that I can see what’s happening outside without having to actually…you know, be outside. I’m on board with the new dynamics, but I will never be on board with criminality that serves zero goddamned purpose.

THEY STOLE THE CAT WATER BOWL. A bowl! Full of water! For feral neighborhood cats! Feline hydration? That’s an issue for you? Cunt.

A ceramic bowl full of water that has sat on my porch for the last six months was, at some point between 2am and 3am on Christmas fucking Day, yeeted off my porch by a human being the Ring camera didn’t bother to capture. She captured plenty of moments with zero fucking people in frame that night tho, don’t worry.

What kind of sentient bacterium are we living amongst? Who does this, why do they do this, and how can we gather them into some sort of pen filled with bees? A CAT WATER BOWL? Fuck you and your entire bloodline.

While I had no special attachments to the bowl itself, the fact that it was stolen tells me it will always be stolen, so I can either choose to help the local feline community or I can own bowls—not both. How much do you want to bet they threw it in a…