Liberty and Death

I’m a burglar. Well, my day job is as an accountant for a paper company, but it feels wrong to call myself an accountant. I won’t call myself a modern day Robin Hood because that would be a bald faced lie. I steal from the rich yes, but there is a reason Robin and his merry band of men are a myth; There’s no such thing as a generous thief. We’re in it for us. I’m 34 years old and I’ve been in “the game” for the past twelve years without seeing any differently.The reason for my choice in career is, in my opinion, a simple one. There is a certain exhilaration that I thrive on, that drives me, seduces me, makes me do what I do again and again and over again without tire. Getting away. That triumphant heart-pounding feeling of showing The System that it cannot tame me.
Men want to catch me. Police officers, detectives, and others who work for The System. They want me to stop. They want me to go to work, then have a few drinks at a bar, then head home and watch television until I’m tired enough to go to sleep only to wake the next morning and start it all over again. They want to bend me to their will and have me play the nice obedient lap-dog citizen. To be honest I’ve considered it. It would certainly help me with my stress levels and amount of nervous energy I have.
I am plagued with paranoia. I think it really started becoming apparent in the latter end of my 25th year. You see, I started having close calls. I’d get into a house and disable the alarm and the dog would be asleep and the owners would be working late. Everything clockwork, and smooth as silk and… until all of a sudden, things would take a maddeningly unpredictable turn for the worst. A nervous old neighbor would see my unfamiliar car parked down the street, and put a call into the police about it. The owner would realize they forgot something and come back to look for it. One time I broke into a house and found over forty marijuana plants growing in the basement. Then when I walked back up the stairs, the Police were in the process of breaking down the front door armed with a battering ram, and a search warrant. Time after time I found myself only narrowly escaping discovery, diving out the window in the nick of time, or hiding myself in away in the smallest of places until danger had passed. I’d hoped that exposure to such constant stress and adrenaline would somehow condition my state of mind to a point where I was perpetually confident. Instead I got jumpy one night, and sprinted out the back door into the arms of a police officer with $8,000 worth of jewels in my bag.
The fantastic rush I have always felt after pulling off a heist, was not even close to as strong as the the crushed feeling of defeat I had when I was arrested. Prison did not help with my paranoia in the least. It was torturous to me. The System had me and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a rat, a simple filthy rat to them, trapped in a cage with dozens of other rats just like me. For once, The System had beaten me. They could do whatever they wanted with me and I knew that I would be able to nothing to stop them. This was what pained me the most, almost to the point of suicide. I thought to myself that if I can’t do what makes me happy in life, living just isn’t worth all this pain, this frustration, this suffocated feeling of claustrophobia. When I left that place I made a decision. A life changing decision. Quite possibly a life-ending decision. I would never, under any circumstances, return to prison.
last night, I was on a job. A house, in an upscale neighborhood. Big nice cars, nice green lawns, lot’s of enormous houses and not very much crime at all (save maybe tax evasion, god bless their rich greedy little hearts). It was a fresh, not so cold spring night. Everything was nearly dead silent, and I was in a wonderful mood. I sat perched in the upper limbs of a great Oak growing next to the house. There are many who would tire of sitting in a tree for four ho