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Saturday, February 26, 2005
Assigning Weight
At my back fence are two tropical bushes of some kind that flowers year round. One bears gigantic pink flowers; the other is white. These flowers, except in the worst of January, cover the bushes. They are so beautiful as to seem unreal.
Across the street from my house are two apartment buildings full of the worst specimens of humanity you might imagine. Year round they broadcast ugliness, stupidity, and hatefulness on a daily basis. They are so awful as to seem unreal.
Now, supposing I were able to put those people on one side of a balance beam scale and the flower bushes on the other side, and supposing the scale were to measure real and lasting impact...not weight. Which would 'mass out' more heavily? I suspect that this involves a decision on the part of anyone affected. All of which reminds me of verses in the Bible, Philippians 4:8...Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable- if anything is excellent or praiseworthy- think on these things....and the God of all peace will be with you. For my own peace of mind, I must concentrate more on the flowers than on the human flotsam across the street. I must choose to assign greater weight to the flowers.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Lions, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinos, Gorillas, etc.
How often does some Discovery Channel-type labor to make us guilty about extinction of dangerous species in Africa and Asia? You know the shows I mean. A rich voice sorrowfully intones, "Surely a way must be found by which man and beast may co-exist on this planet because when the great beasts have all died, this will be a poorer world by their absence."
About then I always tell myself that those selfish Africans and Asians ought to show a little more flexibility, allowing elephants occasionally to rampage through their useless little farms, allowing tigers to eat a few huts full of overpopulation... You shudder. Right, but you, too, have felt the same way without, possibly, enunciating those thoughts so explicitly. My feelings always run toward exotic endangered animals and against little, scrawny, third-world, way-too-many-of-them-anyway people.
Now, upon reflection, my hypocrisy is apparent to me. I'm wrong.
What has turned me around re. this issue? Answer: the yellow brick apartment residents. They are the local rampagers and eaters of huts full of populace, so to speak. They are the exotic specimens of 38th Street. And I want them locked up.
A Discovery Channel special about yellow apartment dwellers might go like this...
******
They live crowded into shabby, filthy little yellow brick dens on 38th Street, bitterly controversial. Neighbors want these apartments torn down and their inmates sent to jail or, maybe, to Mars. Does this issue allow room for compromise? Tonight Discovery Channel investigates....GOONS ON 38TH STREET.
All they want is the right to prey on those not like themselves. They simply and naturally need to feed off other life forms in their territory. How? Why, they must receive housing, medical care, education for their children, food, transportation and entertainment without working and paying for these things themselves...because that's the way they are. Unless others do all the paying as they do all the playing, they may cease to exist. The closest approach they make to traditional work is to participate at a bottom-feeder level in the drug trade, selling about enough to finance their own needs. These unique and special creatures are not designed with daily jobs in mind. They are predators... some say parasites, bit of a taxonomy issue there.
Surely a big world affords room for them, too. What is the point of blaming a subspecies for being what it is? Haven't we learned enough about ecology to realize that each life form has an important place in maintaining life as we know it? The fact that we can not see the value of a life form simply means that we have not done adequate research. Better science someday will lead to explanations unavailable to us now.
They feel themselves entitled to noisily rampage at will. What does this look like when happening? It looks like nightly noise fests/fights such that working people around them have no opportunity to sleep. It looks like random strewing of trash that blows all over this area to be picked up by people who had nothing to do with introducing it into the environment. The day does not go by when little old neighbor, Joanna, is not forced to detrash her yard. A few minutes ago she was out in the cold rain setting her trash containers at curbside for pick up. Before coming back indoors she noticed and picked up piles of pop cans, fast food wrappers, etc. She has never in her life thrown onto the ground a pop can or a fast food wrapper. Every day, however, she picks up after the rampaging beasts of 38th Street. She feels very cranky about this daily chore. She feels that the behavior of the 38th Street rampaging beasts is unfair to her. What she fails to understand, though, is that she and they are different, created for divergent purposes. She was born to pick up others' trash and the great beasts were born to introduce an element of excitement into a world otherwise safe but bland. Unwilling to accept this point of view, she wants all the beasts either removed to fenced game parks, or caged in zoos.
Please, those of you not immediately threatened by yellow apartment dwellers and therefore sympathetic to their future, please support Keep Our Streets Safe For Goons, or KOSSFOG. KOSSFOG advocates work tirelessly to shackle police and community efforts to silence forever the inconveniently exotic among us.
After a commercial break we will frankly and fairly address the issue of rogue specimens which kill. Do they exist and if so, what price is paid by allowing them continued free range?
>>>>>>>>>>break<<<<<<<<<<<
Legends persist of the occasional rogue 38th Street specimen killimg for entertainment, not for survival. What about old stories of murder, child molestation, domestic violence, drive-by shootings, cruelty to pets?
After reviewing many hours of police footage and tons of court files, our investigators conclude that, yes, residents of the yellow apartments have shed blood and have caused terror, grief and every kind of physical harm. However, what statistics fail to reveal is that most violent confrontations occur between members of the yellow apartment community and have nothing whatever to do with outsiders. Where their behavior impacts a broader population, in each instance, that population invaded yellow apartment territory during the residents' waking hours. An outsider on the sidewalk near the yellow apartments between 2:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. finds himself in their little remaining area of control during their time to feed and has therefore brought upon himself whatever the nature of apartment dwellers indicates to them that they should do under these circumstances.
No one, though, has been able to document incidents of violence arising from contact between an outsider and a yellow apartment resident between 4:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. During this period, they sleep and are therefore no problem to passersby. KOSSFOG works diligently to make the Kensington area aware of possibility for peaceful co-existence with apartment residents. If only enlightened neighbors could avoid apartment dweller territory during a mere 14 out of the 24 hours/day. With a little understanding, a little flexibility and planning, violent confrontation might all be avoided. Give them their space. Respect their right to be themselves while awake, and stay away. Is that too much to ask?
And ask yourself this question; do you want your children to grow up in a world where the last remaining yellow apartment dwellers have been relocated to fenced and guarded promises? Must children of tomorrow peek at them through the bars or see them only in photos and police videos from a former time? Are these creatures not like the canary in the coal mine, indices of what real freedom is still there for the entire human race? 99.9999% of the human race are passive rule-keepers and as boring as dirt. Let's keep some of the inconvenient, violent, predatory subspecies alive and free, reminding us of the full range of what it means to be human.
*********
Yeah, well, that's how The Discovery Channel would position this problem, but I say, "Crap, crap, crappity crap on all that nonsense." I have seen the light. I have found solidarity with Asian and African villagers threatened by tigers and lions and elephants and gorillas and rhinos.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Viewing With Suspicion
Yesterday was my usual walk-to-the-ghetto-grocery day. When I woke up, rain poured down in buckets, but by 9:00 A.M. that had cleared. So I dragged my collapseable shopping cart out to the sidewalk and away I went.
I worried about everyone I passed all the way to the store. This has not happened before. The difference yesterday was that I passed so many young adult men behaving oddly. On other trips I have passed just a few men and none of them particularly scary, not even the drunks. These people scared me because they all seemed to be anxiously looking around for potential attackers, hunching and slouching along,nervously licking and licking their lips, furtively darting their eyes, left/right, left/right. All of them expensively dressed in new-looking hip hop attire and big-bucks sneakers. Each of them had the demeanor of someone ready in a split second to duck, dive, or dash behind protection. The frightening part of this was that the only explanation for seeing so many young men like this in a small area, all of them anxious as they were, the only explanation I could come up with...there had to be some kind of gang thing or drug war underway...and I did not want to get hurt in the middle of it.
The only way I ever get up nerve to walk to the store is the knowledge that I am walking along a very busy street, cars and trucks buzzing by all the time. I like to hope that should I be robbed/beaten up/shot, some passer-by would at least use their cell phone to call the police. Yesterday I reminded myself several times that many people would see if something bad happened to me.
As I reached the store's parking lot, a man was putting his purchases into his car. He called out, "Hello," to me. That was kind of odd since he was at a distance, but OK. Then he closed his car door and stood with his back to the car watching me go into the store. From inside the store I saw him still standing there looking my way. I went on into the store and was in the produce section when he came back into he store. He stood on tippytoes in the entry bouncing from foot to foot, looking around. Seeing me, he dashed through the checkout and into an aisle. As I went down a different aisle, he went down the next one and at the end, he peeked out of the neighboring aisle as I emerged from the one I was in. Then he jumped back. Now is that crazy or what? It was like he was scared to let me see him, but at the same time afraid to let me out of his sight. This happened three more times and I can honestly say, I was creeped out. I am a little old lady with white hair up in a bun. Anyone seeming to be terrified at the sight of me has to be a lunatic.
Why didn't I go to the manager's desk at the store front and complain about this person? Well, what was I going to say? "Some man keeps acting afraid of me?" I don't think so. The manager would wonder if I had excaped from a home.
I decided to admit that I had lost my nerve and call a taxi to come and drive me home. Having made that decision, I felt better and finished my shopping. Happily I saw no more of the peek and jump fellow. Through the checkout and into the foyer where the phone is situated, I saw that the his car was gone. Apparently he had tired of playing "I'm scared of that old lady." So I summoned up my determination and walked home dragging the groceries. The trip home was fine, no nervous drug guys, no crazy people.
Finally I rounded the turn at the Post Office, getting close to home. Here came the biggest man I've seen in a while, not just tall, but wide, too. He was wearing two hats, large hats. The hat next to his head was bright green. The one on top of that was bright yellow. The top hat had some kind of stick-out decoration on the sides which sort of vaguely gave an effect of little Dutch girl. Also he wore a heavy lumberjack-type jacket. The hats and jacket were peculiar because this was a very warm day. The strangest thing, though, was that his eyes were shut and he walked along with his hands out feeling around in the air.
My first thought was to jump off the sidewalk and give this fellow lots of room. Then I thought, "No way. I can't jump the cart of groceries, too, and I don't want him to knock the cart over." So in a very loud, firm voice, I barked out, "Good morning!" He walked around me without reply busily feeling the air ahead of him.
Another morning on 38th Street. Whatever else may be said of this place, it hasn't bored me yet.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Volunteer Dog, Etc.
The longer I live here, the more I believe that there is no limit to the craziness possible to see here on 38th Street.
Yesterday began in a not-at-all crazy way. Benny was here all afternoon. We had a wonderful time. We made peanut butter chocolate bars. Then we played video games. Then we drew for a long time. I love to draw with Benny. He approaches it with all the intensity he brings to everything else. Now and then he jumps up, grabs his paper, and dashes all over the house making little noises...clearly he has taken his drawn things into an imaginary activity only visible to himself. Yesterday he drew vultures and gnorcs from the video game.
Since it was a bright, sunny day, we made many, many rainbows with my crystal paperweight. Lucky I did not succeed in giving this away. It is engraved to note my 39 years of teaching at Clintondale. On retiring I determined to accept no junk like clocks, etc. However a number of items came my way. I firmly gave them all away. Funny thing. Those to whom I gave them, managed to smuggle most of it back into my possession. When I unpacked boxes here, after the move, there was the megaton crystal vase from Tiffany's, the crystal bowl fron Lenox, and the crystal paperweight. The crystal bowl and vase are fish bowls and the paperweight is Benny's rainbow maker.
While making rainbows in the office upstairs, I noticed an old thermometer left on the windowsill. Aha! Benny and I began a temperature pilgrimage all over the house. Up in the office, the temp was 80. Downstairs in the unheated laundry, it was 60. In the kitchen, it was 72. Out on the front porch, Benny by now was madly into measuring temperature. Holding the thermometer, "It's going DOWN, Ahno! Still going DOWN," leaping and shrieking for joy. Soon he was rushing from place to place making the red mercury go up and down and calling the score back to me resting on the sofa. After a while he calmed down enough that we could draw thermometers and make each other guess where the thermometer was, based on it's temp reading.
Finally it was time for Benny to go home. He had been wrestled into his shoes and coat and was actually in the door way when the first crazy thing happened. Lydia, carrying the baby's bag of stuff, and also carrying the baby, was in the doorway behind Benny and she seemed to be fighting something. She yelled, "Look at this DOG!" I crowded in to see and sure enough, a dog was trying to get into my house. I mean it was madly struggling to get in past Benny and Lydia. Lydia managed to yank Benny back indoors behind her and, holding the baby high, tried to force the dog out of the doorway using her legs and feet. I pulled the door open a bit more so that I could get out and help her. The dog took this as a gesture of welcome and forcibly mashed it's nose and neck in past my legs. Lydia yelled at me, "STOP! Don't let it in." There we all were squashed into my front doorway; Lydia and the baby, the dog, me, and Benny trying furiously to get back out where he could see what was going on. It was a squirming, yelling mangle of flesh there for a while until Lydia succeeded in getting herself and baby and dog all the way out the door and closed the door behind her. The dog gave the dog equivalent of a shrug and an, "Oh, well," and ran on up the street. Whew! Lydia has been taking karate and said, "I didn't want to hurt an animal, but that dog was about a second away from getting a roundhouse kick out into the middle of the street." In no way did the dog appear to be pathetic. It was chubby, had a shiny coat, wore a collar with a bunch of tags. I have never before seen or heard of a dog that tried to force a strange family into adopting it. Crazy.
The second crazy thing happened after dark. I am developing an ear for 38th Street noise. Since the residents of the yellow brick apartments make a lot of noise at all hours of the day/night, I am reaching a fairly accurate filter for what is a really bad thing going on, and what is just noise. Yesterday evening I heard some really special screaming and yelling. Going to peek through the blinds, I saw something frequent on TV, but never before personally seen by me. Two men beat up a third man. They just hammered the daylights out of this fellow. After a while the victim was on the ground. Then the assailants jumped on him repeatedly and kicked him in the head and chest. Eventually the fighters stopped. To my surprise, the victim managed to scoop himself off the sidewalk and shuffle away. Why didn't I call the police? Have I become a person completely without compassion? Well, having seen those monsters publicly shooting one another, selling drugs, having various forms of sex, assaulting the police, spitting at me as I tried to walk to the store and buy milk, etc., etc., etc...I do not believe that I should ever in any way get into their game. One neighbor actually warned me, "Don't you ever call the police about them. If they ever do something so bad the police need to come, I'll do the calling. If they ever learned that you had told on them, you might not live much longer." So I just let them half kill a guy. Probably one of their own fellowship anyway. The fight began on one of those porches. Crazy. You know, when you see violence on TV it just seems like part of an entertainment. I never feel that I'm looking at something a real human being would do to another person. That is probably true in most of the world. On 38th Street, it's just another crazy thing waiting to really happen.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Garbage Revisited
Yesterday just before the garbage and recycle trucks showed up, wearing plastic gloves up to their elbows, two women came out of their yellow brick apartments. First they wrangled all but three of the tubs out to the curb. Those three tubs were the blue ones overflowing with regular trash...but only supposed to hold recycleables. The women took all the dreck out of the three tubs, one handful at a time, and sorted it into the tubs at the curb. Then they swept the entire area and picked up stray bits of trash.
Judging by the fact that they wore plastic gloves and used new brooms, I am guessing that management paid them to clean up their own mess. Better that, I suppose, than leaving the mess where it was.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Garbage Day
The trucks for both trash and recycle will be here any minute and the mess across the street is as it was. This in spite of the fact that yesterday P.M. a man from some management company the name of which I couldn't accurately read across the street showed up and read the riot act to apartment residents loafing around out front. I'm interested to see if the recycle truck will actually take all that stuff. Surely they won't sort it out. Failing that, the only choice would be to leave it all where it is.
Is the garbage going to go? I want to know.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Better The Weather...
Happily, the weatherman is wrong. We were supposed to get more rain. Not happening. Bright sun and the temp outside is 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
The effect on the yellow apartment dwellers is comical. They must have decided to spruce up their frontage. Everyone has some kind of cleaning related implement or rag. Each of the women has her hair tied up in a towel. What that's for, I don't know, maybe the idea was to keep dust from spoiling their "do". No cleaning is taking place, though; the only dust is whatever just naturally floats in the air. The ground is covered with litter; junk lies everywhere. Whole lotta bustle and hustle, laughing and snapping wet rags and popping one's fellow inmate over the butt with a broom. Several buckets of water stand ready for some forgotten purpose.
I was watching this show from a ringside position on my porch when a neighbor came out onto his next door porch and sat waiting for a friend to pick him up. We watched together in silence for a few minutes. Finally the neighbor turned and looked at me. I didn't say anything; he didn't say anything. He just shook his head. We watched again silently. Then his ride came. Standing to go, he turned to me once more and growled out the side of his mouth, "The better the weather, the worse they is."
Monday, February 14, 2005
Scenery
Perhaps somewhere in the world someone has a more wretched, dreary, disgraceful view from their living room sofa, but I doubt it.
Looking out the window here is what I see... directly across the street, an old man has parked his astonishingly decrepit pick-up truck. The abandoned red brick house beyond him has all kinds of dreck sitting on porch and lawn. The old man is toiling arthritically about picking up this and that and adding some of what he finds to the already towering, tottering pile of junk on the back of the truck. Once in a while he performs a sorting maneuver by which I mean he pulls things off the truck and throws them into the gutter. He has smashed a number of glass items there. To the smashed glass he added several strips of metal and some empty cans. Sure is going to be a dangerous place to park a car when he gets finished. Hard on the tires. This old man is one of the dreary items on the landscape.
Moving along, I come to the yellow apartments. beside them stands a double row of trash receptacles. The blue ones are strictly for recyclables. It is completely totally forbidden to put plastic bags, food waste, dirty diapers, etc into the recycle tubs. Oh well. The first three containers over there are blue ones and they are stuffed to overflowing with no-no's. The lids won't close and trash is all over the ground. Garbage pickup is four days away. Beyond those three overstuffed containers stand thirteen empty containers.
These trash holders are probably 10 feet from the front door of the first yellow apartment building. Standing in that always open doorway is a fat drunk. He is throwing up. What comes out is red. Must be wine. Once in a while he leans over enough to get the throw-up away from his clothes and onto the sidewalk. Sometimes he just stays up straight and lets the vomit stream down his front. Fortunately rain is coming down in buckets so if he stays there long enough, Mother Nature may kind of hose him off.
Moving along the front of that building, we come to the corner where wires from the electric pole run over to the meter box. Someone tied together the strings of a pair of sneakers and tossed them over this electric line. That bit of urban whimsy has been here at least as long as I have. Since the electric line comes across from my side of the street, those shoes have hung over one lane of traffic all last fall and winter.
Now we come to the front of the second yellow brick apartment building. Spread around on the sidewalk are several old, rotten sofas plus some other housekeeping items. No one has called for special garbage pickup so those things have sat there for quite a while. They're already finding a purpose. Last evening a group of loungers sat there watching as a man pulled along curbside in a falling apart car, got out, took a bald tire out of the other side of the front seat...and with a length of frayed rope tied the tire to the front of his car, running the rope through holes in the hood and the grill. Since he only tied the tire at the top, the bottom of it thumped around as he drove away. Those sofasitters, comfortable on the sidewalk, were loudly amused.
OK, so that's the view from my front window today. As I sat with my breakfast coffee, here came little groups of school children through the rain, past all the trash, past smashed glass and metal, right by the vomitting wino, the old junk stealer, and all the dingbat furniture.
Across the street from all that, at the foot of the porch steps I can see my containers of blue and white pansies. They look very nice, but are a small counterbalance to everything else.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Progress
This A.M. was so warm and sunny that I had breakfast coffee on the porch with no jacket. Very cheery.
Another nice thing...there's a woman at church who has battled brain cancer for over a year. Last fall I went along as Lydia took her to a chemo appointment, and at that time she really did not look like a person who was going to be around come next summer. This morning I noticed that her hair is growing back. She was able to walk without help and was bright and chirpy. This week she had another MRI and there is no evidence of any cancer whatsoever.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
The Little Pig Was Up Early....
You remember that story about the little pig who could not get to the fair before the big bad wolf arrived? Right then. Imagine a little old lady....me....toiling her way toward the ghetto grocery at 6:45 A.M. today, dragging along the collapseable shopping cart, hoping to arrive and return before the people in the yellow apartments are up and out.
The journey outward bound seemed a bit cold for this time of year in this place. I actually had to wear a jacket and I stopped to blow my nose several times. The nice part was that no one but me was out and about. I had all streets to myself...no running across the intersection where toys and a photo on the street light identify the last person to get smashed to death at that spot. I just strolled along and enjoyed the trip. Yes, I did have to pause to engage an elderly drunk in conversation. He insisted and I was glad to oblige. I have no idea what he was trying to tell me because his down-south accent was so thick it could not have been cut with a knife. He seemed to be satisfied that I listened and made sympathetic noises.
Later at the store I had the place to myself and the employees. The checkout was "manned" by their triplefast clerk and a huge, cheerful and funny college boy attending Old Dominion University up the road a few blocks. We all had a bunch of laughs and jokes and the college boy packed my groceries into the collapseable cart far more sensibly than any previous baggers have done. It's hard to pack one of these carts, and if done wrong, the soup cans are halfway to the ground before I reach the SoapSuds Car Wash.
Going home I only met a young man who carried a huge Santa's sack of dirty clothing and in his other hand was a gallon-sized jug of Cheer detergent. He gave me a big, gleaming white smile and a "God Bless". Also, on the way home, the air was warmer.
Whew! I made it all the way home before 8:00 A.M. Just as I reached my sidewalk, the school bus next door fired up. I waited to see who was driving today. It was sonny-boy. He said that he was going to drive neighborhood basketball teams to their games. These good people work all week at their jobs and on evenings and weekends coach basketball, football, and boxing for local youth. They bought a used school bus in order to more conveniently haul the kids to games/events. Nice.
So I was up early and now am home again. Saturday. It's all good so far.
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