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Urban life

High Noon: Concealed Weapons on the College Campus

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Having been vetoed by our governor last year, our wacko legislators are trying again to make it legal for students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.

Does anyone need any other evidence of how crazy these people are? Even after the bonkers defunct Senator Russell Pearce was yanked out of office by a recall election, they just don’t get the picture that Arizona still has some rational citizens.

Pearce promptly found new work as the state Republican party’s vice-chairman (its no. 2 position) and still maintains a Web page describing himself as Senator. Why bother to take it down, after all? He intends to run again to take the seat back.

When (not “if,” I’m afraid) they finally push this crazy legislation through, I’ll need to consider whether I really want to stay in the classroom, or if there’s some other way to make what passes for a living here.

It sounds melodramatic to say you’re not going to stand in front of a class when who knows how many students are toting pistols around. But to understand the situation, all you have to do is watch the video of Pima Community College that poor nut case Jared Loughner posted before he shot an elected representative and a bunch of innocent citizens, including a child.

Loughner is far from unique. Every college and university campus hosts a few people who are so far lost in the wilds of mental illness that they’re capable of anything. The last thing we need to do is make it OK for them to arm themselves. And between you and me, I don’t think it’s worth risking my life to earn $2,400 per 16-week class.

The idea that if everyone is armed we’re all going be safe…my god! Is it even possible to express how absurd that is?

In the first place, the fact is most people do not easily shoot another human being, all bragging to the contrary. No matter what we think we’ll do, few of us know exactly how we will react under stress. It takes training—a lot of it—to prepare a person to make a decision, under duress, to kill another person and then move to do it quickly and accurately.

And in the second place, few American citizens get that kind of training. At civilian ranges you learn to shoot at motionless targets. By and large it takes military or police training to learn to shoot a moving target accurately, and it takes a great deal of psychological preparation to shoot a moving target that happens to be a human being. How many of the 18-year-olds wandering around college campuses have that kind of training? A few returning veterans may, but that’s about it. And I can guarantee that not one in a hundred college professors have a trained shootist’s mindset.

My father was a military sharpshooter and he remained a firearms enthusiast all his life. I have one of his guns, and yes, I’d use it against an intruder, given the right circumstances. But I don’t practice often enough to delude myself that I could strike an assailant in a classroom without hitting a kid, too—or even that I could get at a pistol in time to do much if such a person burst into the room.

My own strategy for avoiding harm is simply to stay out of harm’s way. And since our legislators propose to bring a lot more harm into my workplace, I guess it’s time to consider how I might find some other workplace.

At my age, there’s not much I’ll be able to do. But I have considered that during this relatively slow semester I could get myself licensed as a Realtor. The course, I’m told, is very easy, and as an adjunct “employee” I can probably take it for free through the community college. While I’m not much of a salesperson, I certainly could work as an assistant in a real estate office. In Arizona, you need a Realtor’s license even to work as a gofer for a real estate office. Pay would be low—but what I’m earning now is lower than low. A part-time job filling out forms and answering phones would at least bring in money through the summer instead of just eight months a year.

Real estate. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at that.

Black Friday: Turn Off Your Phone at the Mall

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If you’re planning to dive into the Black Friday maelstrom, you might want to think about turning off your cell phone before you walk into the mall. That is, if you’re the type who passionately values your privacy.

In the latest encroachment by the quasi-government that is Corporate America, a couple of malls will experiment with tracking people’s movements as they wander from store to store by tracking radio emissions from their cell phones. This will be a lot subtler than some of the earlier strategies, which have even included hiring employees to stalk you through the mall. Forest City Commercial Management, which runs the malls in Southern California and in Virginia, claims this is not an invasion of your privacy because supposedly they can’t personally identify you without a court order.

Well. One man’s “not an invasion” is another man’s “get out of my face!” And as one reader pointed out, eventually computerized face recognition programs will make it easy enough to connect the image gathered as you enter the mall with the image you posted on Facebook. Nor is it impossible to imagine hackers breaking into the system and identifying users. If a hacker can do it, big business or government can hire the hacker to do it.

The only way to stop this intrusion is to turn off your cell phone before you enter the mall. Of course, that defeats the purpose of owning the cell phone, for which you pay a pretty penny: you wouldn’t have the thing if you didn’t want to be jangled up at every hour of the day and night, no matter where you happen to be or what you happen to be doing. But nevermind.

Hmm. Actually, this could be a good thing: wouldn’t it be nice to shop for a day without having to listen to people yapping on the phone?

While we’re in the silver lining department, this sort of news invariably makes me glad I can’t afford a cell phone and I can’t afford to shop in malls any more.

😀

Image: Appraiser, Escalator at Edmonton Mall. Public domain. Edmonton Mall is NOT one of the properties reported to track customers’ cell phones.

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Burglar Who Is Still Running

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God, but we were stupid when we were young.

It was late when my still-youngish husband and an even younger me arrived home from a night on the town. We were both very tired.

Our aged German shepherd, Greta, had been cooped up inside all night long and half the day. Her plumbing didn’t work so fast any more, she being an indeed very aged Ger-shep. We’d acquired a new Ger-shep, Brandy, who we hoped would take the illustrious Greta’s place when the time came for Greta to pass through the veil. But Brandy was still a puppy. She knew from nothing.

Greta, however, could open and close the screen door into the back yard. So, that night, not wanting to wait for Her Ladyship to do her endlessly slow Thing, we left the back door into the fenced yard open and the screen unlatched, so she could visit the doggy facilities at her convenience. Without a second thought, the humans fell blithely into the sack.

Well, my not-so-very-young husband, pushing early middle age, was beginning to snore. The volume had yet to reach the stage where I was forced to spend all my nights on the sofa (and eventually in a bed far from his house). But at that time, on occasion when he was very tired he would snore loudly enough that I couldn’t sleep. So it was that night.

After he started sawing logs, I got up and repaired to the living-room sofa, where I pulled a blanket over my altogether naked body and stuck my head under a pillow.

Greta the German Shepherd, half-deaf, was at her usual station, asleep in the hall right outside our bedroom door. Brandy…who knows? Probably somewhere near the bed, or in the baby’s room.

Along about three in the morning, I awoke and heard Greta go boof? A quiet, tentative inquiry, launched from the hall outside the bedroom. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I saw a light in the kitchen: a flashlight beam.

Here’s what goes through the mind of a youngish mother at three in the morning:

Oh! John must have gotten up to get a bottle for the baby, and the power must be out and he had to get a flashlight to get into the fridge.

I go, “John?”

And from the the back of the house a flickin’ NUCLEAR EXPLOSION ERUPTS!

Holy God!

Greta comes blasting into the front of the house with both afterburners roaring.

The flashlight is jerking around frantically. Greta’s savage rage is splitting the air. John and I each shoot up about three feet off our respective sacks. The flashlight goes berserk. Greta goes even more berserk.

Still innocent of what’s going on, I drop the blanket like Venus Rising from the Shower Drain and walk toward the kitchen. As I flick on the light, John comes in from the other direction. Greta is at the side door, hackles on end and mad as Hell.

“Who was that man?” he asks.

“What man?” say I.

“The one who just went out this door!”

The light dawns on the lush young society matron. “Oh, my god!”

He opens the door. Greta charges outside. He slams the door shut.

The guy had come in the back screen door—develops he’d been seen trying someone else’s back door in the neighborhood—and wandered into the kitchen. When Greta heard me call her name from the living room, realized I wasn’t in the bedroom and that wasn’t me in the kitchen either, she went ballistic and got between him and the door he’d come in. Those old houses in the Encanto district are like mazes, with their various additions, so he had a panicky search for a way out.

Fortunately, the burglar had the presence of mind to shut the backyard gate behind him as he fled. So Greta is not still chasing him around and around the world. Still, I imagine by now the poor guy has circumnavigated the globe about eight times.

One thing you have to say for an angry German shepherd: it’ll get your attention. Having an asthma attack, need a shot of adrenalin? Piss off a German shepherd.

The cop who eventually showed up after John called remarked that someone who comes into your house when he knows you’re there doesn’t mean you any good.

It wasn’t the first time Greta saved her humans. Wasn’t the last. But it probably was the most memorable.

Image: Botticelli. La Nascita de Venere, ca. 1486. Public domain.

Grumpy Old Lady’s Jaundiced View of Fools

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Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.

Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?

We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.

Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?

LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed  he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.

I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.

What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?

When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding  blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.

Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?

Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.

I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?

At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.

So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.

What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?

 

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Night of the Screaming

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Okay, so Stephen says he’ll kick in the price of a cup of coffee if I’ll tell the stories of the Night of the Screaming and the Burglar Who Is Still Running. You know, Stephen, the price of one fancy Starbucks concoction will keep the old lady in premium espresso coffee beans for almost a month…

Ah, yes. The Night of the Screaming.

There was a reason I was a trophy wife. When I was young and nubile, I was…well…damned spectacular. Men would stop their cars in the street to watch me walk by. The occasional lively young gent, emboldened by a rush of testosterone, would even try to get me into his car. It was like that.

On this particular evening, I was still young and lush. My then-husband was a partner in one of the two top law firms in the American Southwest. This august institution had regularly recurring firm meetings, at which all the partners and associates were required to show up. Poor fellows (and in those days, that’s what they were: fellows) forced themselves to gag down a filet mignon with béarnaise sauce and several glasses of wine, preceded by a bit of whiskey, down at the Arizona Club. Afterward, they talked business into the night. He usually got home between 11:00 p.m. and midnight.

I’d fed our three cats, fixed and consumed my dinner, done a set of tummy-tightening and boob-lifting exercises in the living room, and started the dishwasher. Then I set the hated Smith-Corona portable typewriter on the floor in front of the television (this was before the days of the PC) and got to work writing a graduate-school seminar paper that was due the following morning.

So there I am, typing away.

The old Kitchenaid works wonderfully but it’s no Bosch: silence is not its thing. It’s plinking and plonking busily in the background, and I’m mostly ignoring it.

I hear a rustling sound in the service porch between the TV room and the kitchen. Two catboxes are in there, serving as a latrine for the feline livestock. This noise, I register as the cats scratching in litter. It stops, confirming my impression.

I type. I throw out another sheet of paper when the hated Smith-Corona lets it slip loose from the platen on the last line of the page, causing that last lightning-typed line to skew down through the bottom margin and off the page. Pick up another sheet, roll it into the platen, hear more scritching in the service porch.

Insistent scritching.

What ARE those cats doing in there? think I.

I get up off the floor to go see what the hell the cats are doing in the service porch and find…no cats.

No cats anywhere around. Puzzled, I take a closer look and find…

The latch on the door handle wiggling up and down.

Door handle latches do not wiggle themselves. Even I am bright enough to figure that one out.

I run to the front of the house, look out through the French doors into the screened entry atrium, determine no one is out there, throw open the front door, and holler, at the top of my lungs,

F-I-R-E!!

F-I-R-E!!!!

HELP! MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!!!!!

CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!

Well, naturally, all the neighbors come trotting out of their houses, cocktails in hand, to watch my house burn down.

I’d always been told that you should never yell HELP! RAPE! BURGLAR! Because no one wants to get mixed up with a rapist or a burglar. What I didn’t know was

how freakin’ LOUD a woman really can yell.

I had no idea I could make a noise like that.

It worked. Some of the neighbors saw the perp. He’d parked his bike next to the side entry to our service porch, and when the circus began, he jumped aboard and shot off down the alley.

The guy had almost managed to jiggle the dead-bolt open—it was about 1/4 of the way thrown. Another few minutes and he would have been in the house, helping himself to the lawyer’s dish.

So there it is: the moral of the story is “never yell ‘help.’ Always yell FIRE!” No matter what, no matter where. Oh. And never do your exercises in the living room, where anyone loitering in your side yard can see in through the windows that open only to the oleanders.

Tune in on October 31 for The Burglar Who Is Still Running

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?