https://hazlitt.net/longreads/everything-open
"The first lock I ever picked was my own: one day in my sophomore year of high
school I came home to find that my bedroom door wouldn’t budge. I must have
grazed the lock button with my thumb as I closed the door that morning, or else
the internal springs had become loose and excitable from overuse.
I’d gotten into the habit of locking my door before going to sleep. Stories of
murders were dominating the local news at the time; two girls about my age
whose bodies and bones had turned up by a lake not far from where I lived. It
wasn’t clear or logical, even to me, what protection locks were supposed to
afford: both victims had been killed while out jogging during the daytime, not
snatched out of their beds, and the attacks had taken place along a nature
trail and not in a quiet suburb. Still, the steady drip of stranger danger
messaging I’d absorbed over the last decade or so meant that any new threat
could be absorbed by osmosis and incorporated into the faceless, ever-present
figure of the Kidnapper. In this context, my door-locking was less practical
than ritual, one that brought me some inchoate sense of safety and wellbeing,
like a psychic sugar pill.
I passed the better part of the afternoon jabbing and scraping a straightened
paper clip into the hole in my doorknob, waiting for whatever happened inside
locks to happen. At one point, nearing defeat, I asked my stepmother if we
could go to the hardware store to buy a lockpicking kit. There’s no such thing,
she said firmly. I frowned; I was sure I’d heard the phrase before, but it was
true that the more I turned the words over in my head the more implausible they
sounded. A box full of tools purpose-built for break-ins? That you could just
buy like it was a candy bar? Surely that couldn’t be right. But then I heard a
click, and I felt the door give way, and suddenly the question was moot, and I
allowed it to submerge itself in the lower depths of my subconscious for
another decade or so."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-inequality-aids-south-africa-tortoises-galapagos/>
Well written. And a great intro to
Lock Picking Lawyer!
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
