Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Young and Stupid Thugs In My Hood





So, it's one thirty AM and I'm deep into one of those sleep cycles where you're about as far from awake as you can get, and I hear a thumping and a ringing doorbell.
I claw my way up to being nearly upright and realize that it's not a dream, and somebody's banging on the front door.
Not having a lot of faith in human kind, I got Kori to get up and follow me down to the front door, if just to have my back if it's somebody with bad intent. It was the cops!
There were two squads outside my front door and a yellow cab. And at the door was a cop with a big ass flashlight. His first question was "are there any kids in the house", then he told us that four kids had called a cab using our address, then waited in the dark beside the house for the cab driver.
When that cabbie pulled up, they jumped him, took his money and knocked him around some.
I saw little of it in the paper or on the news, besides a brief one paragraph story saying they caught the kids who did it.
It's fuckin' creepy to think there are little thugs lurking in my side yard at one Am waiting to rob people.
And to add to the creepifying factor making me wonder about my neighborhood, I found a crack pipe buried in my compost pile last weekend.
It had been there a while, but I suspect my neighbors in the house behind my shop have some rough folks visiting on a regular basis.
Add in last week's murder downtown and it seems Madison is becoming a little more scary than I thought it was.
I hate to do it, but I'm going to put in motion sensor lights on the side of the house and add a gate up by the front porch. And I'm going to keep a baseball bat next to the bed in case the mayhem starts walking into our house.
I think it's all part of the BushCo economy, where it's easier to rob a cab driver or rip shit off from your neighbors than to find a job. After all, respectable people have enough money to live in gated communities.

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"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Ralph Waldo Emerson