manic monday

sue me, sometimes i get stressed and snap…

…and today was one of those days.

i was at the library – i’d love to say i was job searching, but i actually did that outside and burned out my battery so i was inside, post job search, looking for music. all of a sudden this old lady and, i will assume, her grand kid came in and set down at the table next to me.

and she started yapping. not in her indoor voice, and sure as FUCK not in her LIBRARY voice.

the a/c shut off, making the cavernous room deathly silent, except for her yapping ass. the kid was being loud as well, since kids tend to immolate the volume of the adult they’re with. i put up with it for a bit, but she kept getting louder and louder and then…

“wow – that whole QUIET in the library concept is something you’ve never heard of, huh?”

nope – that’s new to me…

“that’s a damn shame, since you should be setting an EXAMPLE for the kid and all…”

and then she started whispering, and was quiet the rest of the evening. the other people in the huge main room of the library looked at me and smiled; one of them mouthed “thank you”.

so i yelled at an old lady in the library, and it worked out for the best. shit, i even got thanked for it…at least i didn’t yell at the kid. well, at least not THAT kid…

i’ve lived in my neighborhood for over thirty years. it’ll be thirty-one in september. for a guy who’s not even forty yet (thirty-eight on juneteenth) that’s kind of ridiculous. plan on changing it before i’m forty, but i had lots of plans before i was thirty and a lot of THOSE didn’t happen. some (wife, kids) for the better. let’s move on…

the point i was getting at was in thirty years i’ve had two things stolen out of my garage but never had any acts of vandalism save for the booze dump in my front yard (you have to understand the layout of the neighborhood and my place in it – i’m at that turn where you know all the teenagers bail the sonic cokes full of rum and coke before heading to their parents place – i’m kinda used to it at this point). my recent neighbors plan on changing that.

okay, so “recent” and “plan” are the wrong words. you might remember lots of tales from the house across the street from me, discussing midnight cattle trailer runs to get their shit, rent-to-own mafia folk knocking on MY door looking for them, etc. all that changed several month’s ago when mike’s parents moved in. what’s sad is i don’t remember their names to save my ass. but they have this really cool american bulldog named mike, who DRAGS this old man around the block like when alex used to try to walk copper, and the bulldog’s name is “mike”, hence “mike’s parents”.

but apparently they have human offspring, ’cause their granddaughters moved in a couple months later.

they’re skinny, somewhat curvy white girls who don’t like to date white dudes. i can’t hassle it – i tend to not date white girls. in fact, one of the last “real” facebook updates i did was about watching the hysterical movie “i’m through with white girls” (more on that facebook crap on a later entry). but at least my NON-white attractions tend to not be ghetto, save for benita, but she stopped talking to me because i “live my life like a single guy”. party people say “duh!”.

i need to focus more here – back to the grand daughters…

…one of them has a fairly pimped out le mans (as pimped as a le mans can be) with kickin’ rims, limo tint, and a bass thump that can drop a moose at twenty paces. it turned up dented yesterday, and she came by to see if i had seen anything. here’s the time line:

4:00am miss thang goes to bed
5:30am i go for breakfast tacos (and see no damage, but it was on the curb side where it happened)
9:00am thug #1* gets in her car and leaves
9:45am i leave for errands, including the library (car still gone)
1:00pm i come back (car still gone)
1:30pm she comes over to question me

* the term “thug #1” is not meant to give him street cred or make him out to be some kind of badass. quite the opposite, but as i don’t know his name if this were a movie that IS how he would appear in the credits…

so, she comes over with her two rugrats. when the doorbell rang lucky went apeshit – he’s a dog, that’s his job. the girls don’t bark at the doorbell. lucky used to not, calum did. calum’s no longer with us, so the torch has been passed. i open the door to see the cuter, more inked up grand daughter (who i’ll call alice going forward ’cause it’s less to type) with one kid in my yard playing nicely and the other right next to her. the closer one, as we’re talking, and lucky’s still growling at him through the screen (but it’s louvered so the kid can’t see him, just hear him) decided to wedge himself between mom and the screen door and then OPEN the screen…

…survival instinct is clearly not strong with this one.

lucky almost snaps and i calmly step outside, shutting the screen door and REAL door behind me so we can keep talking. her theory is the damage occurred to her car while it was out on my street, which i refuse to believe just ’cause of the way this neighborhood has treated me for a decade longer than she’s been breathing, regardless of vengeful ex’s in her past that now patrol it. my theory is it happens while the car was off site with thug #1 and he just doesn’t want to own up to it OR didn’t notice till she pointed it out (as he knocked the bulk of the dent out i tend to think the latter). jury’s still out on this one.

but as we’re having this discussion the little brat gets behind me, pulls open the screen door, and OPENS THE REAL DOOR to the amazement of me, and going by the reaction he erupted with, lucky as well.

again, darwinian theory has the kid in the ground before his age hits the double digits at this rate.

not only did lucky snap, but so did i…

“you have to be kidding me!”, i yell, and without ever touching the kid my volume alone causes him to reverse his actions. lucky backed off as well ’cause he knows when dad yells, you react. period.

the little rugrat retreats, but then steps out to DO IT AGAIN. i stand between him and the door, look down, point at alice, and just say in a loud, stern voice “BACK!”. that did it. he retreated.

so yeah, in one day i got to scream at a little old (loud) lady and a small (non-minding, surprised he’s survived this far) child. how many days can you say you did that?

(actually, i guess since benita used to work in nursing homes and had four kids by the age of thirty she probably got to do it all the time…felt good to me, now i know why she was typically in a good mood…)