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Crime Scene

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 15 May 2009

Hits: 2054

This morning, 3:00 AM, the doorbell rings. A midnight cab. I sleep through it. There's no way I'm getting up in the middle of the night to redirect a taxi driver, they can miss it.

And then, 7:00 AM and I'm vaguely awake, making coffee in the kitchen I notice a big yellow crime scene tape winding around to the back door. And I go outside for a cigarette and there's a police car, the crime scene tape winding around the whole front yard, I think they (the neighbors) must have gotten home late, played a little joke...but there's the police car, and I'm still a little groggy....

And a police officer gets out and tells me that he tried to wake me, that there was a fight in the yard last night, I need an escort if I want to leave the house.

The neighbors.

And I'm still a little groggy, but when it sinks in I finally ask: "All this for a fight?" and he tells me that it was a stabbing...

I wonder which of the neighbors or many guests it might have been. I was tired and didn't hear a thing. There's some blood on the sidewalk, the victim's fine (whoever that was), just stabbed is all...they're waiting on the CSI to show up and get some pictures, shouldn't be too long. ...

Now it's me, I know it's me, I'm a snob, everybody's different; probably they would write (if they could write) equally damning things about me.

And I'm worried about the utilities they owe, because I'm small-minded like that and money's tight, and I wonder if I should send a photo to the landlord, the skip on my lawn, police car, the crime-scene tape. The great impression we're making with our neighbors on the block, take a chance, maybe I can get new neighbors, not that there's anything wrong with the ones that I have, but they're, well, .....

They're not my sort of people. 

Neighbors..

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 15 May 2009

Hits: 2095

The new neighbors moved into the basement in January. The basement had been unoccupied for the first few months that I lived here, mainly because it was unlivable, but with enough time and renovations and numerous price adjustments the landlord finally found tenants. 

Now they weren't, off the bat, my sort of people. But they don't have to be, they're neighbors, they live in the basement, not with me.

We can share the utilities, and this has to be a good thing, on my own they're killing me, electricity, power, phone, internet, together they are approaching $400 per month. And while more people will mean larger bills, they can't be THAT much larger.

They're a young couple, maybe 17 or 18, with a young child and another one on the way.

He had a job for a while, construction or drywall or something, I'd see him leaving early in the morning, he'd get picked up in front by a truck.

But he hasn't been leaving to go anywhere this past month, and I'm beginning to think he might be unemployed.

Now I don't like living with people. Hate it, in fact, it's rare that I get along well enough with anyone that I'd let them move in. 

And having them live in the basement, well, it's not been the happy neighborly thing I'd imagined. Not that they've been unpleasant, but there are the typical grievances of anyone who lives in close proximity with people they don't know.

There are the smells, for instance. I don't know what they're cooking, one night it's sour milk, the next they're boiling the flesh off of human sacrifices. Strange, unpleasant smells wafting up through the vents.

And the child, strange crying noises at all hours, starting, stopping...

Then there are the parties, strange people over visiting, some over every night, every morning; old faces, new faces. I initially thought there were only 3 downstairs, now it appears there may be more...5? 6? 7? After watching one midnight evacuation, someones belongings thrown onto the lawn, I discreetly asked how many were living downstairs. He evades the question by answering that they had been moving people out for drinking too much. I wonder what "Too much" is, every night they sit outside the back door smoking and drinking, beer cans crushed and thrown over the fence into the back yard. In the winter they leave the back door open, it's easier than trying to shut it, -30° outside and the door isn't closed, it's easier when you want to go outside and smoke.....

The bills haven't dropped. We're splitting them, but somehow I seem to be paying $100 - $150 per month more than I was before.

The washer and dryer run 18 hours a day. I go down, every week, to do my laundry, fight my way through half a dozen oversized trash bags filled with detergent boxes that clutter the hall, there are several boxes of detergent, dryer sheets, liquid detergent, piled up upon the shelves, wet clothes piled on top of the dryers, lint balls woven into a mat on the floor. 

It's like going for dinner with a family of 10, ordering a salad while they all order steaks, and then splitting the bill. I'd like to get them on their own bill.

Family and friends come to visit at all hours, a young couple, they are well connected. They find their way to the back door by following the trail of cigarette butts and trash they've left for them, a gutter filled with debris running beside the sidewalk.

The taxi drivers and pizza delivery men haven't learned the drill yet. Every morning a taxi driver rings my bell looking for the people downstairs, they never feel it necessary to provide directions, I redirect them. And every evening there's a couple of pizza's delivered, always ringing my bell first before I redirect them downstairs. I need to make a sign for the porch - "Pizzas and Taxi's Use Side Entrance Please..."

Then yesterday, a brutally long day of work, going outside for a smoke and I see in the middle of the front lawn a skip. For those of you confused, an oversized industrial trash bin. A dumpster. Smack dab in the middle of the lawn.

And so I go downstairs, I need to collect on the electric bill anyways, and while I'm showing them the bill I ask about the bin...

"Is it yours?" I ask

"Oh, yeah. I got a lotta trash...."  He looks a bit sheepish, but he's right. In the backyard is an upended sofa, chairs stacked beside the house, empty Wal-Mart boxes filled with empty Wal-Mart products, pizza boxes, used diapers.....

"Do you know when it will be removed?"  I ask, it's an eyesore that clutters the street.

He looks confused. Utterly perplexed. Stumped. It hasn't even occured to him that someone would want to remove a skip from their front lawn. Flabbergasted even. He hasn't even considered it. It's a question that's so far off his mental map of the world that he can't even formulate an answer.

They're not my sort of people. 

I am a Strange Loop

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Books

Published: 07 May 2009

Hits: 1646

Just finished reading "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. Author of "Godel, Escher and Bach". Which started off enjoyably enough, but somehow he's turned what would have been an intriguing chapter in a book into a tedious book all and of its own. This despite the wonderful reviews posted all over the dustcover and bookflaps. 

And again we come to the theme of "Preaching to the Choir". In that I was initially quite sympathetic to his arguments, not 100%, but there is much in them to think about, but he develops them, rephrases them with different examples, repeats them, repeats them, repeating them again and again (over and over) ad nauseum. The point would have been better made with fewer words.

Overall I'd give it one out of eight bananas.

TO save you the trouble of reading it for yourselves I'll summarize his arguments as follows: The Mind - Consciousness - "I" - The sense of self and individuality we all feel is an illusion created by nested patterns and thought processes running in the brain. This is expounded with many examples from Math and Physics; and using some of the techniques of his earlier books (the dialogues, for example). That's it.