Some days are a fuck fest no matter what you do. While California is burning, I have been busy trying to put out fires in my personal life. Is it the heat? Is the perfect beach weather not got that great a spin on it for the days when the teens are home and the husband is off work? When the laundry needs to get done and someone has to make lunch?
How about the lesser than less fortunate? Who’ve been up all night sucking on a glass pipe?
Hmmm
So, the other day, I was waiting at a light at a busy intersection and a crazy person walked across the street against the light. With a white hoodie pulled way over his or her head, I couldn’t see the person’s face at all. It had a rope in one hand, twisted with a noose coming out of its fist. Waving the noose as it strode across the boulevard and walked RIGHT INTO THE PATH OF A CITY BUS. The bus was barreling along with the light in its favor, probably 45 miles an hour. I’m stuck in my car, waiting to turn left and the proverbial train wreck was not watchable. I closed my eyes. I covered them with my hands. I felt my entire stomach do a gymnastic routine worthy of Olympic tryouts. And when I looked again, merely peeping at what I expected to be far flung body parts, the crazy was standing an inch past where the bus had pummeled through, screaming in outrage. Then this person proceeded across the intersection in a haphazard path, striking each car with a swing of the rope. “A whack for you motherfucker!” So I called 911 and, after being put on hold for a few minutes for a nonemergency, asked if anyone was not too busy could they come and make sure the person swinging a rope couldn’t be somehow taken somewhere. Maybe for iced tea or something.
You’d think that was enough excitement for one day, but NO. Of course not. Once I made that left hand turn and drove up the street to the post office, I failed to detect danger in the guy hanging out outside, listening to his earplugs. So I was totally unprepared to come out of the post office two minutes later (much to HIS SURPRISE there was no line) and find him looking into my tinted back window. I thought I was smarter, but for a second I wondered if he might have a legit reason for what he was doing. Despite his “I’ve-been-in-the-heat-for-two-days-at-least-in-these-clothes-look”, I thought perhaps he was using the tint on my window to make sure his hair was pretty. Then he leaned in closer, pressed his face against the glass and cupped his hand around the side of his face to keep the glare out. At which point I yelled, “HEY!!!” For a split suspension in time he looked at me like he might rush me and pound me into the pavement. And I wasn’t all that scared because I was still standing in the open door of the post office. But instead he pulls a second t-shirt out from somewhere and throws it over his head. Like a t-shirt doo rag, without tying it nicely. Then he walks across the street into the maze of apartment complexes.
The 911 operator was much more excited by this event than the last one. Hurried me off the phone to get an officer out there. Wanted to know if I would wait for the officer.
I spent an hour in that same post office parking lot last week waiting for AAA to come and give me a battery charge. It was NOT FUN. And it was HOT. I also remember distinctly waiting for an hour and forty-five minutes for the police to come when our house was burglarized a year ago. They never caught any of them or got our stuff back.
So I was thinking, noooooooooo. I had an appointment to get to anyway. I have a friend in town and we were meeting for 11am Bloody Mary’s.
Put into perspective, today’s teen dramas and hostile husband reaction don’t seem as life sucking as I thought.
But what I wouldn’t give to be back at the hotel with my friend sipping on a Mary and chomping on a celery stick.
We also have a lot of problems, probably like most places, with crime. Especially teen crime. I live on the dry side of the island where they have been building all the new homes for the last 15 years. So, demographically, we have the highest concentration of 12-21 year olds. A year and a half ago our house was burglarized and they took all my jewelry, most of it irreplacable gifts from relatives no longer living. Yesterday, while I was having a hell day at work, my kids took my car and went swimming at Port Lock - a million dollar plus neighborhood. Despite my alarm on my car, it was broken into by smashing out the passenger window. The police said teen gangs have been hitting that area a lot. It took the police 2 hours to make a report and the officer told my kids it was because 8 cars had been hit in the area in the same way that day. The teens in gangs also graffitti everything. Overpasses, bridges, fences, you name it. Even stuff out in the middle of the fields where I walk. Like this.
