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Thursday, February 3, 2005
You've Got To Have A Dream
Here's a problem; how, if at all, might one go about getting all the people to move from the apartments across the street, and then getting those apartments torn down? Surely I have not spent a lifetime crafting answers and solutions only to be foiled at the last by that shabby pile of yellow brick, crack heads, prostitutes, child molesters, welfare frauds, and burglers. I need workable ideas. Anything. I'm not getting anywhere.
One day a Jehovah's Witness came along wanting to chew my ear. I told him that before I'd listen to him, he'd have to go over there and convert at least one adult in each of the twelve apartments. No, he has made no progress. As a matter of fact, he looked across the street, scratched his head, and said, "Not me." Some kind of chicken missionary he turned out to be.
Then I thought of setting up a web cam in my office window and recording the video feed every night until I got enough evidence for the police to finally and forever bust that dump. First, of course, I would have to get the necessary hardware and set up a wireless network reaching the upstairs front. Given the pace at which I adopt new technology, this is never going to happen.
OK. Then completely screwball ideas. For example, I remember at one time spending quite a while reading web sites re. homemade propulsion devices. There are many varieties of hand-tooled potato launcher and catapult. I wondered if, should I spend time collecting roadkilled small animals and trapping rats, it might be feasable to launch dead animals onto the roofs over there, onto the porches, between the buildings...and just keep it up until the smell drove everyone away. Aha. Now you begin to recoil in horror. You say to yourself, "This Doubledog is crazy. She's going, sooner or later, to become a resident of the loony bin." Well, hey. I just thought of it. I didn't do it...chiefly because I couldn't think of a way to do it without being caught sometime in midlaunch, a dead rat hurling across the street from a spot on my porch...and me trying to cough up a sensible explanation for what would be completely idiotic to anyone not really fed to the teeth with the wretched Cracke Arms.
Another wacko idea was the incentive program I imagined. I thought, "What if I made up a lovely, official-looking bit of mail and sent a copy to each apartment...proclaiming March to be 38th Street Home Improvement Month on behalf of a nonexistent neighborhood do-good society. I could announce prizes for the best-maintained residences of various sorts on this street...a house category, an apartment category...with prizes to be window boxes of flowers or something. The idea was that if those freaks were competing with one another re. whose frontage was the best maintained, they might experience a corresponding improvement in behavior. Yes, I know. Crazy idea. I didn't do it. In order for that idea to have a hope, the intended letter recipients would have to be able to read...something I seriously doubt is true.
So there you have the cream of my cogitations..all of it crazy. I need some sound thinking of the sort that would lead to the desired result. No, don't e-mail me brightly, "Why don't you buy those places, evict the tenants, and demolish the buildings yourself?" Someone bought one of the buildings just before Christmas, got rid of half the tenants, repaired and refurbished...and now has even worse tenants than those who were turfed out. Apparently there is some ordinance in effect which will keep The Cracke Arms badly occupied in perpetuity...something to the effect that once a landlord qualifies a place for low-income tenantry, he is not able to pick and choose new customers, must take whoever is at the top of the waiting list at the welfare office. Also, the landlord may not evict except for egregious offenses scrupulously documented over a long period of time. AND it is nearly impossible to get all the tenants out at one time, so given that a landlord would have to maintain the building for at least one crackhead, he'd no doubt feel he owed himself the rental from all available units.
In the paper the other day was an article about some minister who made a practice years ago of doing a daily walk through a terrible neighborhood. As he went, he made the sign of the cross and prayed for each house and it's residents...every single day. Now, it seems, that's a great place to live. Very nice. Given how long it took for his idea to work, though, I would not survive to see results should I set out to pray 38th Street into submission. I don't know what to do. Officially stumped, here.
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