Identity Theft or Identity Crisis?

Checking my bank account is not something I particularly enjoy; personal grooming is often a preferred pastime over a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. It's as if I half-expect to see all $.79 of my account drained like a Larry Bird three, shorts, 'stache, and everything else. Yet, such a fear is there, as irrational as the avoidance of aluminum foil or pickled beets. The end result is that I don't monitor my checking account as close as I should monitor it.

Until today.

Going through a bank statement is sometimes like reading over an old paper you wrote and received back with a grade. You tend to skim it over, expecting the usual comments and nit picking, but tend not to pay much attention to it as you'd like to put the whole process behind you and have no interest in reading something you wrote some time ago. However, you still have to peruse it thoroughly because you never know when WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!!!!?1?!/?!!ONEwhoaONE!!!!1!??/1/!?1

But wait.

Take that.

Rewind it back.

Secondhand Smug's got the beat to

That's too many syllables.

Why didn't I preface the preface with this preface? Last week I received the Gap card in the mail that I applied for two weeks previously. However, the next day in the mail I received a notice from the bank that the Gap uses (with the curious moniker "GE Money," as if the organization were secretly a member of Master P's old No Limit Records label) informing me that my application for a Gap card had been unceremoniously denied, based on the existence of a previous card in my possession.

Jigga what?

What would have caused me to forget about applying for a card? I remember far too many tarradiddles to let a credit card application slip through a fissure in my brain. Then, my extremely boorish inner monologue said: "Hey asshole! Maybe it wasn't you!" For once I thanked my extremely boorish inner monologue and debated the possibility that someone was trying to steal my identity, in a very methodical and ultimately stupid fashion.

I decided to make the pilgrimage, or hajj (I'm huge in the Middle East apparently) to a local Gap establishment to determine the root of this evil. It turns out that paranoia and delusions of grandeur really do cloud one's judgment and make things transform into something more nefarious than reality has them appear. It turns out that a system error caused my information to be reentered into Gap's database two days later, making it seem as though I were either quite stupid or I had decided I liked the Gap so much I would prefer to have two of its credit cards in my possession just for the hell of it.

Thus, with some excellent sleuthing, I put my fears to rest like a baby with colic.

Because like a baby with colic, my fears would soon wake again.

*flash forward whoaaaaaa on tachyons*

I decided to do something remotely mature and investigate the balance on my checking account. It seemed, at first glance, to be at a reasonable amount, so I paid no further heed to it and prepared to let my brain rot reading baseball trade rumors or the allmusic.com blog or something equally as trivial. Yet for the hell of it (and because I wanted to see how much I really spent on certain nights that will remain unmentionable), I chose to revisit my online statement and comb through it...with an imaginary...fine-toothed...comb.

That's when I discovered that I spent, or some identity thief spent...seventy-nine American dollars on Amazon.com. Frantically, I checked Amazon for my most recent purchases, in the event that one early Sunday morning I decided to buy a bunch of motion-sensing LED lights for my bathroom or somesuch nonsense. However, no purchases had been made on my account since October, when my grandmother made her quarterly charge of me to purchase several out-of-print novels by expatriate Frank Yerby; I doubt my grandmother knows he was an expatriate.

Scanning further up the statement, I then discovered that someone, myself not a party of the first part, or at least in my opinion at the moment of truth, had made a six dollar purchase at a place indicated as "201 HAPPY OWL AKA." Thus, after several scrolls of the touchpad, I tallied up the oddities on my statement, and only the two previously mentioned were the aberrations. The game was still most certainly afoot.

The bank was actually helpful when I called its toll free number and I reached someone no more than several states away rather than on the Indian subcontinent. However, they could either cancel my card or let me take care of the transaction myself. Back to sending some carrier pigeons Amazon.com's way. After faking mental retardation, I was connected to a delightful young woman from...guess where?

The Indian subcontinent! Oh boy!

After several minutes of miscommunication and both parties being completely baffled as to what the other person was saying at the other end of the tin can telephone line. While checking several network news websites, I noticed that Congress had passed several bills on immigration reform, Iran promised to put a stop to its nuclear program, and Alex Rodriguez hit his 800th home run to an empty crowd in New York as the Yankees dropped to a season-low 20 games below .500. Mind you that I am talking about the far future. That was a brief illustration, because I am clearly such a self-enamored, cocksure clairvoyant that I can predict the future in the most asinine way possible.

It turns out that on Monday December 3rd, 2oo7, Amazon.com woke up and decided to make me a member of its Prime Club, to the tune of seventy-nine American dollars. Did I want my account to be sapped of precious resources so Jeff Bezos could put a couple gallons of premium in his tricked-out Hummer? Hardly. In a boon of good luck, the young lady half a world away informed me that she could remove me from Prime Club membership and give me a full refund because I hadn't used its benefits yet. What damn benefits? Faster shipping? It already gets to your doorstep in two days! If you're that impatient, go out and get it yourself! If you're that impatient and also an agoraphobic, you should consider suicide, since you live your life in a contradictory manner.

With seventy-nice greenbacks corralled into my little ranch of an account, I sojourned forth to determine what this Happy Owl place could be, so I phoned a friend WHO WILL REMAIN NAMELESS. Not that anyone cares. We walked through the previous couple of days to analyze how some $6.19 might have fallen through the cracks, and then, like a crappy episode of Lost, the proper flashback came to me.

The previous Friday I had attended Richmond Renegades hockey game, which was sort of like a roller derby on ice with the amount of white trash that populated the backwater Richmond Coliseum. My quarry that night was granted with the possibility of ten free bones covered in hot wing sauce from the fifth-rate "restaurant" known as Hooter's, if only it could even be called such. Really, it just collects overweight, pasty white men in sleeveless shirts, so it's kind of a clearinghouse for that precious...commodity. In any case, if the Renegades happened to score five goals that night, we'd get free wings. Miraculously, they did, and somehow it was Christmas day in the morning. My party collected its due and I forgot all about it a few days later. How could I forget our charming Eastern European waitress and her insinuations that we split the check three ways, despite ordering completely different items off the menu? It was pleasant, all around.

So, at the end of the day, I realized I was not the target of identity theft, but rather a victim of identity crisis, having not remembered what happened the day before or having the rug pulled out from under me by Amazon.com. In some way, I feel like my parents' generation, with their constant fears of being wiped clean by some faceless, devious entity in a way that might resemble some mid-90s movie about the Internet. I suppose I should understand that no one has your information, they can't steal your identity. I have enough trouble being myself anyway, so who would possibly want take the reins instead?