Wednesday, May 08, 2013

A couple of months ago I read an article about some people who up and stole a whole bridge in the middle of the night. It seems like it would be hard to be sneaky, creeping up to a bridge with your wrench and a big truck and maybe one of those cartoon black holes in a suitcase, but I guess that's just what happened. And when the townspeople woke up in the morning it turned out that they just had to go ahead and wade to work.

Anyway, it turns out that stealing bridges is not an uncommon occurrence. I suppose if you're going to pull off a caper it might as well involve stealing a bridge with some fake papers and a winning smile. Bridges don't just walk away, so it's hard to say that we would even notice if one suddenly did, if we would just roll up our pants and wade to work as though it was what we had been doing every day. If our bridges suddenly disappeared it's pretty even odds that we would just retroactively decide that bridges had never existed anyway. What bridge? No one here but us and the leeches.

In the meantime the bridge thieves are probably sitting somewhere close, on a pile of ill-gotten gains and suitcases full of black holes, wondering how to separate us from our socks.

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