Let's Hope Nutter isn't a Crackhead

Yesterday I walked into the bathroom in Suburban Station and I could hear someone talking inside a stall.

Voice: “I just need some peace and quiet and a bathroom”
Me (inside my head): “Please don’t let this woman be talking to me”
Voice: “Just count to 10 and relax”
Me (inside my head): “What in the hell is this crazy person talking about”
Voice: “Don’t you be passing judgment on me, you could be in my situation tomorrow”
Me (inside my head): “Dear lord, this crazy woman is reading my mind…pee faster!”

A hasty hand wash and dry later (yes, I was traumatized by the lack of proper sanitizing resources, but at least there wasn’t a door to touch on the way out) I was out the door to tell my husband. He confirmed there was also a crazy dude in the men’s room. May I ask just one question? (Ok, maybe it’s the start of several probing questions, but who’s counting.) When was the last time you went into Penn Station and heard someone screaming in the stall? Ummm, in my experience, never. Perhaps this is yet another example of why we’ll never be a tourist destination like NYC.

At a minimum it might explain why Philadelphia gets such a bad rap. It has come to my attention that I am hopelessly desensitized. This is especially evident when we have someone visit from out of town. There are several things they notice, in no particular order:
1. It’s dirty
2. Every corner yields a new homeless individual begging for money
3. Our nightly news is horrific to watch (lots of stuff catches fire and people get shot…daily)

Having grown up in the suburbs I had a fairly low radar for dangerous situations. While most parents were giving their kids sound advice like, "Study hard" or "Don't drink too much", my father's advice was "Listen, if you get mugged just give them what they want, it's not worth dying over" and "If someone tries to pull you into a car, die on the street before you let that happen because death will be better than what they're going to do to you." If he was trying to scare me, it worked.

A weird thing happens when you live in the bad lands, you start to notice things. Which corners are dark, alleys that are poorly lit, which way home has foot traffic, the people around you, etc. You also start acting goofy (which I still do and my husband finds amusing) like pulling all personal identification out of your wallet and purse, hiding it in your pockets so if they do mug you, at least they don't know where you live. Separating your keys from your address so they can’t come find you later. Similar in concept to the "mugger money" we used to carry when we would go out drinking in college. Keep $10 bucks in your pocket and the other $40 in your bra. They leave happy with $10 and you have a better cleavage.

I eventually moved into Center City where you don’t have to worry so much about getting jumped on the street for 75 cents. Over the last 14 years I’ve watched it get better and now progressively worse. Thankfully today marks the end of John Street’s eight year tenure as mayor. What a bum. Under his watchful eye we became the city with the highest murder rate. We’re visibly dirtier than we were 8 years ago. He was a target of an FBI investigation and he gave his idiot brother a few million and a job he clearly couldn’t handle.

And to think we made fun of DC for their crackhead mayor, Marion Barry.

I hope this guy Nutter is a good guy. He seems normal and so does his family. He also appears legitimately pissed off about the state of affairs. I feel bad for him, he really has his work cut out for him here.

Good luck man, you’re gonna need it.

Ps – Today my shiny pretty lady got the boot. Poor Alycia. Bye-bye shiny pretty lady.

picture credit: cnn.com

Master of Suburban Warfare, Protector of God Given Rights!

Recently a co-worker forwarded me a letter that another co-worker had placed in the mailboxes of his neighbors. Apparently they had received complaints about their dog and his constant barking. Please see letter below:


Neighbors are an interesting thing, especially in suburbia. This thing reads like an FAQ off a corporate website. A twelve step program for reorientation of your dog. I especially like the creative use of the baby monitor with service level agreements! “target within 5 minutes” This is exactly why I live in the city – I don’t know my neighbors, I don’t want to know my neighbors and if they piss me off I’ll call the cops. It seems a lot has changed in suburbia land since I was a kid. I vividly remember the disputes in the ‘hood, there were plenty.

“So and so leaves their trashcans at the curb too long”
“So and so’s yard looks awful, look at the weeds in those flowerbeds!”
“This one doesn’t trim their hedges, it’s starting to look like the Adams Family”
“That one came over to my house with a plastic fetus and asked me if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my savior”

There was carnage in the wake of neighborhood disputes. People didn’t speak for 30 years over ugly shutters or blocking someone’s view of the street by parking a car in front of their home. None of this wackado politically correct flier in the mailbox crap. We had an air rifle for a reason damn it!

Ah the good old days.

My childhood neighbors were “saved” and as a result, everyone else should be as well. The wife had a curious fear of lung cancer. She was highly agitated that my father had an equally powerful desire to incinerate things. Perhaps he was reducing the household waste sent to the landfill or simply a functioning pyromaniac. Either way, he liked to burn stuff and she was convinced she was going to get lung cancer from his burning.

Makes no sense, but that’s suburbia for you.

As I've said before, I don't remember anything. Life before 12 is a montage of little snippets that don’t add up to much of anything. This pisses my mother off tremendously as she feels her efforts to expose my sister and me to every museum on the East Coast before the age of 10 was completely wasted. I do however remember everything that involved an explosion or required emergency services. Hence my memory of the street fire incident.

Early one summer evening when I was a child we were having cake at my parent’s house for my grandmother’s birthday. That day my father had forced my sister and me to do what we hated most – pick up sticks. We had big ‘ole trees, therefore we had big ‘ole sticks on the lawn. Picking up sticks involved walking around the lawn (significant bitching and moaning was almost required), finding the sticks and then stuffing them in the storm drain. (More on that later) Hours of torture in my childhood simply to avoid damage to his riding mower. He also liked to burn paper, boxes or whatever else he might have lying around that was flammable. On this particular day he had replaced an old wooden garage door with a new super fancy electric one. This gave him lots of wood to burn.

It was fairly typical of my father to burn in the street’s storm drain. He would stand out there and watch smoke pour out the grates on both sides of the street while the inferno raged below. Neighborhood kids would come out to play with The Big Man and his fire. Eventually things would wind down and he could walk away and check back periodically. The entire neighborhood was accustomed to the burning rituals. Everyone except our next door neighbor. On the particular evening in question she was stewing in her house while my father was creating a blazing inferno in the street. After an hour or so he had retired to the house and was about to put a fork full of cake in his mouth when the first siren started.

Mass hysteria ensued. A fire truck, medic vehicle, police officer and a park ranger came barreling down our little cul-de-sac of a street. It seems someone had reported a fire and they were here to put it out. The commotion turned our front lawn into a neighborhood party. My old man talked himself out of a fine by promising to clean out the storm drain the following day. As it turns out burning was allowed in our township but it had to be in a closed container. The next day he returned home with a huge hulking tin can looking monstrosity which he rolled up the back hill to the top of the property line. My sister and I weren’t sure what to make of this thing but we were quite certain it would involve manual labor on our part.

He started burning again, but only when the wind was blowing in the direction of the crazy neighbor’s house. It was far too practical for him and less exciting for the neighborhood kids, but the slow and painful torture of the crazy woman was a labor of love.

And that, boys and girls, is what I call a neighborhood dispute.

Let this be a lesson to all you kids in suburbia land - some of us were raised by the master of suburban warfare and we don’t write no stinking letters!

I think I’m getting old.....

So we've moved and unpacked (mostly). The thing about unpacking is that you get to review your entire life in a few days. I just opened up a box of crap that I haven't touched in probably four years. The stuff inside perhaps more. It somehow managed to move with me all this time and I never saw a need to do anything with it. As it turned out it was a bunch of pictures, cards and things from college and high school.

It's amazing when you think about it. Although I graduated almost ten years ago from college, it seems like yesterday. Perhaps it seems that way because I've kept in touch with so many of my close friends from those years.

My father once told me that the friends I had in high school won't be my friends once I'm an adult so I shouldn't make such a big deal out of all of the drama. Perhaps it was his way of telling me to look at the big picture. In some respects what he said is true, but I still have a handful of girlfriends from grade school and high school that I see more than I see most other people. They're visiting for brunch tomorrow, two of them with their children. I can't imagine my life without them. We are, of course, very different people who lead very different lives now but something about the time we spent growing up together keeps us together. The boyfriends we've lived through, the stupid things we've done and somehow managed to come out alive or at least without any permanent damage and the raging wars we've had between the four of us. The letters we mailed each other while we were in college (yes, letters….email didn't really exist until later in our college careers) were quite humorous.

It's also impressive the amount of crap I've kept. I know what I was thinking when I kept it. I wanted to remember small pieces of the life I led, how I felt at that exact moment in time. Sometimes the reality is shameful, sometimes happy, sometimes a bit bewildering. I don't think I would want to go back but it's nice to remember because it helps me understand how I ended up where I am today.

I am notorious for not remembering anything. My friends like to tell stories about things I did, I rarely remember them – maybe I was drunk, maybe I just have a bad memory (I would like to think it's the former). Perhaps that's why I save things; the moment I look at a picture or read a letter it all comes flooding back. I went through a picture drawer and started sorting. I can't believe that in the four years I spent in college I only took less than eight to ten rolls of film. I can only guess it's because film and developing was expensive (yes, film and developing….digital cameras came after college). I wish I had more, then again, maybe I don't. Perhaps the memory in some cases is far more glamorous than the reality forever recorded in a picture. My one college girlfriend recently said to me, "I remember we looked good in college but when I go back and look at pictures I think we look kind of beat-up.". I would guess it's all relative. Of course we look much better now, that's what having a job and money will get you – regular hair cuts and color, massages, pedicures, facials, real make-up, better clothes, etc. I think we looked pretty good for people who drank heavily four to five days a week, didn't sleep and ate like shit.

One of my closest friends just moved to London with her husband and I'm quite sad. I know I'll get to see her more than some other folks she left behind, but as she put it, "it's not the same as just stopping by for a drink.". It's hard when people move away but the beauty of this electronic age is that you can keep up to date with people very easily. Email, webcams, digital pictures, etc. But is it the same? I know basically what's going on with my friends but we're not necessarily making memories together. We're not creating the stories that we'll tell in ten years or at least not with the frequency we once did. Are we just maintaining the status quo? Maybe this is what the next phase of our lives is about. We get married, we have families, we start to create our memories together as a family and we let outsiders in every once in awhile.

I recently read the cover story of Philadelphia Magazine about over-parenting. While I doubt I will ever have the money (or the bad sense) to over parent as it's described there, the basic idea still applies. People are making their children their world and losing their own lives. Perhaps our parents didn't have time to cart us around to fifty thousand activities because they were busy having cocktails with the neighbors. They were still making their own memories. I recall being dropped off at stuff a lot. I remember running wild around the neighborhood with all the other neighborhood kids. My parents hardly ever came to my high school sporting events. Guess what, I'm not emotionally damaged and I probably have a better relationship with my parents than most people. We actually like spending time together. I think I am the person I am because my parents gave me enough rope with which to hang myself. I was allowed to screw up my grades, my college applications, my health, my relationships…geez, perhaps I am somehow damaged? But through all of this they continued to drill into my head the things they thought were important. Be someone that keeps their word, honesty is important, work hard and respect yourself, respect your elders, be thankful for what you have because other people don't have the luxury of the things you take for granted, don't spend money you don't have, life is not a destination; enjoy the journey, get an education so some man doesn't leave you with four children working as a secretary on welfare some day…I think I just channeled my mother for a moment there….

Here's my point, and this is best said through cliché, I think they were trying to teach me to fish. Not that I don't still screw up on a daily basis, but I like to think that they gave me a good foundation based on their own success and screw-ups. I only wonder if I'll someday be able to attempt to parent the way they did. Growing up I always knew that if I screwed up I would be grounded or cracked with the back of a hand. That'll put you in kiddie court these days. Then again, like everything else, I'll have to figure it out when the time comes.