For the next few days, I’m staying in a posh, white outer layer of The D - Birmingham, one of Michigan’s last bastions of prosperity. Though I’m several miles from the actual city of Detroit, this video whisks me back to those cold, grimy street corners where I got robbed my senior year of college.

Though I won’t recap that whole robbery story, I did lose a bag of cookies, $500, a watch, a Nextel cell phone, ingredients for making soup, a series of university textbooks on international relations, chocolate chip cookies, my sweatshirt, the keys to my house in East Lansing, and some tomatoes fresh from the garden. The robbers did not want our car. They also did not want my shoes, which I had recently purchased in San Francisco and thought highly of. I felt slightly offended that after taking even the textbooks, the criminals didn’t consider my shoes fresh enough to jack. Of course, I was clearly in the wrong, wrong place.