Peace on Earth... or The Milk of Human (Un)kindness

Dumb and dumber, shit luck, bad luck, no luck at all, the holidays are a strange animal, on the one side there is the overwhelming joy i feel while hanging out with the boyos, doing X-mas type shit and laughing at the man i was and am no more, the one who spent large portions of X-mas's past crawling out of the gutter and loving every minute of it... but mainly just enjoying the moments i have now before the dissipate into the timelessness of memory... and then of course there are the never-ending reminders that humanity is a house occupied by countless fucking shitbags hell bent on being the most fucked up species on the planet and doing their damnedest to prove we are a detriment to civilization and the universe and each other...

And so it was that i went to get a pizza... an innocuous event in and of itself until of course i came pulling down the pitch black street to see Dumb Criminal walking up my neighbors front yard and towards his car with a couple of packages, Eddie you ain't okay as the headlights washed across him, i exited my car and watched as he just kept walking fully aware he'd been seen... you see there is a houseful of transients living out here in the lily white, a bunch of guys working for a captain of industry who decided it would be a good idea to cram 16 or so people into a house and let them stay there, a few families of the workers, single guys and their visiting or live-in girlfriends, it's all rent free so the more the fucking merrier right? Except of course if you live next to it and you catch one of them lifting shit off the neighbors porch...  undeterred Dumb Criminal tossed the stuff in his SUV and drove off... i shook my head in amazement and went inside...

About an hour later my neighbor who is a dead ringer for Frank Stallone came driving up and began looking all over his porch, i walked out and asked if he was looking for some packages, he said yes what do you know about it, and i took a step back cuz this motherfucker is a tad unhinged, he reeks of ex-cop, think undercover narc squad, and for a minute i thought he was gonna punch me, so i told him what had happened and he went steaming to the White Trash Motel and pounded on the door and i went back inside... a few minutes later i could hear his wife screaming at the top of her lungs to "get that asshole back here now or i'm calling the cops", who pulled up within minutes surprise surprise, of course the back story here is that the denizens of the White Trash Motel used to let their kids run amok over the neighborhood, i'm talking 3 and 4 year old kids and unsupervised, one fine day one of them (Dumb Criminal's daughter) ran their bicycle down the side of Frank's brand spanking new, shiny black truck, so there's a bit of history between them to say the least...

I sat waiting for the knock and fretting that in my front room was a cabinet that smells something like an Amsterdam coffee shop and debating in my mind what to do, opening the cabinet would definitely not be a good idea but the fact is now and then you can catch the beautiful scent of Jah's good herb and the last thing i wanted was suburban five-O getting a whiff, i began doing shit to confuse the olfactory system just in case, you know make things a bit less defined when it came to what the nose knows and not minutes later came the knock and the officers came in and we went over what happened and then Dumb Criminal came driving up and out went the Fuzz and i got my ID which they had requested when asking if i had a problem testifying, not that they thought i would have to but just in case...

Now let me say i'm not a huge fan of law enforcement, i spent a huge part of the Wilderness Years actively avoiding them, i also felt a bit of a moral dilemma about my actions, was i ratting Dumb Criminal out? no one likes a rat especially someone who spent as much time in the game as i did, a rat is someone who sings to save his own skin at the expense of his fuck-up but i figured i just alerted Frank Stallone and he took it from there, part of me also knew that i live in this community and if some moron was walking off the porch with my shit i'd want my neighbors to say something, maybe i'm just justifying my actions in my head, maybe i'm the shitheel that Dumb Criminal and his wife accuse me of being, of course Dumb Criminal claimed that he was just holding them for Frank Stallone, a guy who wasn't his friend and didn't know his name, and felt the need to drive away with them instead of leaving them next door at White Trash Motel and leaving a note saying as much (a fact the fuzz pointed out to him), of course Dumb Criminal and his lady felt the need to look inside the packages hence his free ride to the station to be booked on petty theft while his young daughter danced around the car and it dawned on me then that this wasn't the first time she had seen daddy taken for a ride in the shiny police cruiser...

I won't even go into the conversation i had with the police about the Megan's Law web site and the fact that he told me to punch in the address next door, something i did and about hit the ceiling but it seems as if our local sex offender is/has already moved out...  a guy living with a bunch of children which apparently is perfectly legal and where Dumb Criminal and wife willingly left their children because apparently it was to much of a hassle to take care of the kids themselves...

And so the next night i needed a beer... among other things and so i shuffled off to the local when everything at the shack had quieted down, i sat and chatted with the usual crew of punk rock kids and yuppie lawyers, it's an eclectic place to say the least, i drank some fine and strong stout, a couple of PBRs and called it an early night, i walked out and headed for the corner when i heard the shouts of a man screaming from his car "call the police, call the police, she needs a PFA!", a guy on the corner was frantically pulling out his cell phone and i rounded the corner and saw a woman sitting on the ground and a guy hovering over her who began walking away when he saw me heading his way, he began to soliloquize, "she's fine, i'm the one who's been abused for 14 years!!! the fucking whore has been abusing me, she's fine with all the strange dick she gets", he was headed for the apartment building above the boozer and when i got to the woman i asked if she was okay, of course she said yes and began running down the street in her heels screaming "i love you baby, i love you, i didn't screw anyone", all the while choking back sobs, i could hear the sirens and had just left the boozer and figured it best to make myself scarce, i know how this story ends, i'd seen it to many times in the city and i was quite sure they'd both end up in a clean suburban cell when she attacked the cops for trying to take her man away... joy to the world indeed...

So the world of my quiet little cul-de-sac has been thrown asunder by the White Trash Motel and it's denizens, it's brought a new found solidarity to the peaceful little hood and has got this big lug out talking with his neighbors more than he has since he moved in... so i was talking to one of my neighbors, she lives across the street in the biggest house on the block, her husband and her are from South America and he's a doctor with a few offices and they own 30 some odd rental properties, the boyos are friends with their son (they also have two older daughters) who's a grade ahead of the I-mac and they often play futbol or basketball or whatever catches their fancy on the given day, i was discussing how the hot shit Zoning Enforcement Officer had suddenly become the world's biggest pussy, one minute talking much shit about what he could do when i was in front of him and then bailing on being able to do anything when i contacted him later, basically putting on a show and then basically being called out on it, i should really post my email stating unequivocally that he was full of shit and that i didn't appreciate the asshat wasting my time, it was then that she looked at her son and then asked if i noticed that his father had not been around, i said i had but that i knew he worked a lot and figured i just hadn't seen him, then she told me that he had bailed, fucked off back down below the equator and didn't plan on coming back...

Later that night while i sat talking with the I-mac about what had happened i explained to him that sometimes money and success and power don't amount to fucking jack shit, or something along those lines... i asked my neighbor if is she was alright and she said she was okay, she was more worried about her children and had them in counseling cuz as i knew this wasn't just a marriage breaking up, i'm a child of divorce, i know it sucks but i was fucking 20 or so when that shit dropped on me but this was more, this wasn't dad moving out and getting an apartment, this was dad fucking off to another continent and seemingly not giving a shit about anything but his money and what i could only imagine was his new, young plaything, i understand that marriages break-up but what kind of fucking scumbag abandons his fucking kids? fuck that asshole, i looked at his son and how his mother had just told me how freaked out he was by what had happened in the hood and now i learned his old man had fucked off to La Paz or Lima or somewhere and all i could see was the fear in the kid's eyes, i went over and talked to him and told him that this was his neighborhood, our neighborhood, and that if anybody from the WTM fucked with the boyos or him or any other kid who lives on the street that they were to come get me and i'd handle it, that there was no reason to be scared on your own street and that i'd see to it that they weren't, i wanted to hug the poor kid... while i was talking with the I-mac that night i told him to be cool to his buddy, the I-mac looked at me and said he never got to say goodbye to his dad, i looked at my son and said what? he said that he didn't know that when he saw him over the summer for what he thought was a vacation that that would be the last time he'd see his dad and that he didn't even get to say goodbye... goodwill towards men, what a fucking laugh...

It was a strange and draining 72 hours or so, i sat and explained to the boyos that the human race as a whole was a bunch of flawed and selfish individuals, then i stated that it was my job to make sure that they were less flawed and more unselfish than most, i told them we are not a perfect species and that their old man was as flawed as they come but that i tried real fucking hard to do the right thing by them cuz they were the two most important people on the planet to him, that didn't mean i disregarded the rest of the opposable thumb crowd, i didn't want to tell them that i did my best to avoid most people and that the skeptic and cynic in me still didn't keep me from seeing the beauty and unbridled joy that i have for my one go round on this ride but that those traits did help me to weed out the bullshit artists, fuckheads, drama queens, asshats, selfish pricks and general all around assholes that one comes in contact with on a daily basis, hell i'm sure i fall into all those categories some days... but the last few days had driven the point home even more, i told them they were to young for Vonnegut and Twain and Celine but that i had a few primers for them to read when it was time, but as it said way up there it will say down here, i don't have much faith in humanity, somewhere out there i like to think there is a higher intelligence, you know, fucking aliens, and they laugh at this shithouse and the folly of our silly lives.. and now back to our regularly scheduled program...

(Up With People- live)