Urban life

When you insist on dwelling in the central part of a big city — for whatever reason: you hate commutes, you style yourself as an urbanite, you fancy antique homes and neighborhoods — you get used to certain hazards of life. The bums. The burglars. The mail thieves. The car thieves. The nightly visits from cop helicopters. The boondoggles City Hall inflicts on you to “improve” your town by way of enriching the politicos’ sponsors. It’s all just Life in the Big City.

But sometimes “Life” goes beyond the pale.

Not far from the ’hood a few days ago, some guy jumped over the back wall of a yard where two little girls were playing, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. He exposed himself to them and then grabbed the smaller child. (BTW, some of the facts are wrong in that linked story: the guy did not spend 40 minutes in the family’s yard but had been spotted in the area over a 40-minute period.)

When I read this in a local news report, I assumed he’d jumped over the alley wall — alleys being a natural hazard in an inner-city neighborhood. But this morning while the dogs and I were perambulating, one of the neighbors stopped to chat. He said the guy had jumped a neighbor’s wall and then jumped into the girls’ yard.

Obviously, he’d been watching the family, he knew where they lived, he’d plotted a way to get at the kids, and he knew when they were outdoors.

Think of that. You can’t even let your kids play outside inside their own walled yard without their mommy hovering over their shoulder every minute!

I will admit that I was abhorred by the self-righteous attacks on the couple who let their kids play in a neighborhood park all by their little selves. One of the reasons the ubiquitous digital invasion of personal privacy gives me the whim-whams is that when I was a little girl, I was allowed to go outside and PLAY, which is what little kids are supposed to do. When I got home from school, I jumped on my bike and was gone until dinnertime.

But when predators as bold as this one make themselves known, you  have to figure the best thing to do is lock your kids inside and never let them see the direct sunlight. Guys like this jerk are riding up and down the alleys all the time — if you were outside watching, you’d see them every day. Cassie and Ruby go batshit every time they hear someone out there, and they hear someone out there with some frequency.

If those were my kids, the next morning they’d have a new 90-pound pet. They probably also would be looking at a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. No wonder people covet walled compounds governed by HOAs!

When my son was small, we lived in a quaint downtown neighborhood — a very pretty historic area. There were many, many more bums than we have here in the ’hood. You couldn’t stick your nose out the door without seeing a bum. The crime rate was much higher; the present ’hood has a surprisingly low crime rate, despite the neighboring blight. And no, my child did not play outside in front unless either I or the neighbor’s nanny was standing out there watching.

We had German shepherds, and that was why we had German shepherds.

Ever wonder where God is, and why She isn’t taking care of the least of Her creatures?

There are people out there, my friends, who are the least of God’s creatures. The “least” are not amoebae or viruses or organic molecules dwelling on comets floating around in space. The least of God’s creatures are human beings who should be cared for and should if cared for properly be able to care for themselves. Maybe.

Yesterday I had the privilege and the sorrow of  encountering one of the Least, God help her…if only God would be bothered.

I’d had to drive halfway to Yuma to attend a meeting on the far west side of the Valley. On the way out there, apparently I had a reaction to an allergy medicine I’d swallowed after swilling an entire pot of very strong coffee. After nearly passing out while cruising across a surface street at 50 mph, I’d taken refuge in a parking lot where some construction workers were holding forth. When I recovered enough to move the car, I moved it closer to where the men were working, thinking I might need someone else’s help, and when I did that, I drove over the curb around an empty planter bed, hitting both wheels on the right side fairly hard. But the car seemed OK, and the guy I ended up talking to thought it would be fine.

The phenomenon subsided, and since I was more than halfway to my destination, I figured I could get there faster than I could by going home, and there would be people there who could help if need be.

After the emergency flashers had been going so melodramatically, the turn signals stopped working. At least, I put it down to something having to do with the emergency flashers — it wasn’t the first time a turn signal failed, although both of them had never gone out at once. Oh well.

Park, go in, spend three hours in the meeting, and feel OK except for a slight headache and a couple of mild dizzy spells. The meeting breaks up, and I jump into my car and start the long drive home.

About a mile down the road, my car stops dead in the left turn lane of a major intersection. It’s DEAD dead. No response at all from the ignition switch.

The police come and two burly cops push my car out of the traffic and park it in a bus pull-out. I cannot for the life of me make my cell phone thingie work well enough to reach the insurance company’s roadside assistance feature, so one of the cops calls on his much fancier cell.

We’re told a tow truck will arrive in 30 minutes. He arranges for them to meet me in a QT across the road, since it’s over 100 in the sun and he’s very skeptical about the 30-minute promise. He says it usually takes about an hour for a tow truck to show up.

An hour later…two hours later…

My son gets wind of this and drives all the way out to the west side to babysit me — it’s twenty miles. He’s an insurance guy himself, so he attempts to negotiate their roadside service by phone.

Long story short: we end up waiting FIVE HOURS for the tow truck to show up. Hilariously enough, the towing company calls itself “About Time” Towing.

There’s no seating in the QT, and it’s nonstop crowded and hectic. So he decides we should wait in his car, despite the heat — he will run the AC for a few minutes at a time. He backs the vehicle, a crossover type Ford, into a space in a row of empty spaces on far border of the lot, where we can see my car across the gigantic intersection, lest the tow guy go there instead of the QT and lest the city come and try to impound it.

We sit there for quite a while, the only car in this empty row of parking. The sun goes down.

After dark, along comes an old junker of a pickup with a camper shell on the back, jam-packed with junk. The occupants park it right next to us, even though the entire row is empty.

They sit there for about 20 minutes. Eventually, they both climb out of the truck through the passenger door — on my side of our car.

When they get out, we can see these two people are in pretty bad shape. The woman in particular is a wreck: she looks like she hasn’t bathed in two weeks. Her hair is filthy, and her threadbare clothes barely hang on her scrawny body. She’s listless and looks exhausted.

I wonder if they’re homeless, living out of their truck — though with all the stuff crammed in the back, it doesn’t look like there’s  room to sleep in it. He thinks it’s possible, and remarks that Walmart allows the homeless to sleep in their parking lots: maybe QT does, too. Besides, the guy has on a workman’s uniform. I think the Walmart thing applies just to RVs; he points out that their truck could sort of qualify for that. And the guy could have found the “uniform” (it doesn’t look like that to me) at Goodwill. Besides, in Arizona plenty of working-class jobs don’t pay enough to keep a roof over your head.

They walk off into the field behind us and disappear into the darkness.

My son figures they’ve gone off to do some drugs. I think they’ve gone to meet a dealer and score some dope, because they seemed to be waiting for the right time to set out.

When they get back, it’s clear my son is right — maybe both of us are right.

Now they sit on the ground, hiding between the two cars. It’s like we’re in a bathysphere, looking out on some strange creatures in an alien environment. The guy is speeding, babbling on and on in a loud voice. The woman is wilted. She just sits there curled in a ball, her head down and her stringy, dingy hair flopped over her face.

It’s impossible to put that abject woman out of one’s mind. I can’t even describe how destroyed she seemed to be.

The man, a big, tough-looking guy with a shaved head, at least looked reasonably clean and healthy.  On one occasion he appeared to try to help her — eventually they climbed back in the truck, and since she got in first he had to try to settle her into the driver’s seat. But in fact, his definition of helping her entailed keeping her company in getting high.

Finally, a little after 8 p.m., along comes the tow truck driver: another of God’s neglected creatures. We decide to have him tow the car to my house, since I don’t know whether Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic has space to park vehicles after hours. I don’t think so, though.

This shifty little guy is one of those folks who’s so dumb you wonder how they learned to tie their shoe laces. But cheerful. Cheerfully dumb.  He manages to haul the Dog Chariot the twenty miles back to my house without breaking anything obvious. Once we got back here, I have a chance to chat with him and realize that he’s not only child-like but also behaves as though he’s high.

That, I suppose, explains something about why he was 4½ hours late.

By the side of the road, Tow Dude has found one of those ball-point pens that have a tiny flashlight in one end.  So tickled is he with this prize that he shows it off like a proud little boy, waving it around and clicking it on and off. But he’s not a child: he’s a man in his mid- to late twenties. But this one at least has a job: average pay $26,000; median pay $30,000. Not enough to put much of a roof over your head…but a roof.

Welp, tomorrow is going to be another Day from Hell, especially if I have to go out and buy a car. And so, to bed…

Some “vacation”…

 

 

So along about 4:30 yesterday, along came a message from the local homeowner’s club announcing that a pow-wow was to be held at a church in a different North Central neighborhood on the subject of the rapidly growing transient problem — at 7:00 p.m.!

Jeez.

So I skipped rehearsing the dog & pony show I was supposed to give this morning in order to go to that.

Turned out to be an interesting meeting and one well worth sitting through. It’s too bad they didn’t get the message out soon enough — quite a few people showed up, but a LOT more would have, had they known about it in time.

The “homeless” situation has exploded, especially in this part of town. The county, state, city, and a homeless rescue mission have developed ways to turn at least some people around, and they’ve now got enough understanding to distinguish between people who are down on their luck and open to rehabilitation, and chronic street dwellers and drug addicts who are by and large impervious to treatment efforts. They’re also figuring out that a certain set of homeless people will need permanent welfare housing, period — and again, they seem to be developing the insight to recognize who will never be able to care for themselves and who might be helped back onto their feet

Two things they admitted that I’ve never heard a politico or bureaucrat fess up to:

1. The  endlessly ballyhooed light rail has hugely exacerbated the problem in our neighborhood; and
2. In our part of the city, it’s not so much a “homeless” issue as a “drug addict” issue.

The addicts ride the light rail to get into the air conditioning. They ride it to the end of the line, which is Dunlap, where they have to get off. From there, they disperse into the surrounding neighborhood.

One of the audience members remarked that you can’t use the fancy new QT the city’s so proud of, across the street from the new “station” because when you get out of your car to pump gas you’re accosted by panhandlers, and another person said that the Fletcher Tire guy told him he has to chase off around 15 loiterers every morning to move cars into his shop for servicing.

They’re going to build low-income housing a couple blocks west of Conduit of Blight Boulevard — fortunately, it will be for the elderly, but one wonders whether that’s just the foot in the door.

Meanwhile, someone brought up the (endlessly sore) fact that no one alerted the neighborhoods before a private subcontractor inserted the methadone clinic at the same locale. This was greeted with guilty silence — obviously that oversight was deliberate.

However, they did openly admit that the meth clinic does draw addicts into the neighborhood.

A couple of people then reported that businesses around there have been under siege from addicts who go there to pick up their meds and then don’t leave. They hang around the area for the rest of the day, particularly at the Circle K across the street. The Circle K manager told one woman that the employees were afraid to go out to gather the garbage and dump it out, because they had been stabbed by needles.

The authorities sounded genuinely surprised by this. One of them said they hadn’t heard about it and that they would contact the neighboring businesses to learn more.

Overall the meeting was pretty interesting. They are trying to do something about the homeless issue, but the City of Phoenix apparently has the worst homeless/drug addict problem in the state. The outlying suburbs don’t have such a large problem with it — apparently they actively send their bums to us. 😮

I reported to WonderAccountant, who was unable to go because she’s still wrestling with clients’ business tax returns.

Said she:

Some cities like Gilbert have done away with the Salvation Army giving utility subsidies to residents in their cities.  They just don’t allow it.  So even though they are a private charity, they can’t help people in that town.  I’m not a fan of Gilbert.  It may be a nice place to live, but I think that there is an element of unkindness in that sort of policy.  Even though you don’t really want “those people” in our neighborhoods, we cannot permanently ignore the fact that they are part of our society, the least among us, if you will.

Nice! Let’s just legislate poor folks out of existence..

Probably a bunch of Trump voters. We’ll build a fence between us and the poor people, and make the drug pushers pay for it!

The Salvation Army guy was really interesting, because he’d been living on the streets himself, after becoming addicted to an opioid prescribed for an athletic injury. He stated the obvious: that like any group of people, the “homeless” are not homogeneous. He felt they fall into three groups, broadly speaking:

• Those who desperately don’t want to be on the streets but are stuck because once you have no place to live, wash up, and call “your address,” it’s almost impossible to get a job.
• Those who are too ill — mentally or physically — to care for themselves and have no one who will take them in.
• And those who truly are criminal, mostly drug addicts who support their habit with petty theft and burglary.

Their most successful program has been an outreach to the first group; they’ve done pretty well with strategies to get jobs and temporary housing for people who are seriously down on their luck. For those who can’t care for themselves, the city, county, and state have finally (I say…don’t know how recent this revelation is…) recognized that permanent housing must be provided. And they’re working on building exactly that: facilities to house people who would otherwise be on the street because they simply can’t do anything to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads. As for the rest: “please call the police.”

I have no idea how this view of the problem matches up to reality. But it surely sounds reasonable.  And at least somebody is trying to do something.

The costs, though, defy belief. One homeless soul costs the relief services and taxpayers $40,000 a year. The city had to shut down a bare-bones shelter because operating costs were running in the millions of dollars, and they flat ran out of cash.

Gilbert, eh? So which is it? Gilbert, or a new German shepherd?

Check out this story about the wacked-out 19-year-old who murdered a random couple who were puttering in their garage when he came upon them: stabbed them both to death and then proceeded to chew the flesh off the man’s face. They think the kid, who went into a decline and is now in intensive care, may have been high on a synthetic drug called flakka, which is related to the dangerous “bath salts” that were popular awhile back. It causes “causes users’ body temperatures to soar to 104 or 105 degrees, causing them to rip off their clothes,” says the Washington Post. “It also sends a surge of adrenaline through their bodies, giving them seemingly superhuman strength and a high pain tolerance.”

That would explain the crazy guy at the Costco‘s behavior. As a matter of fact, the guy had taken most of his clothes off. He had on a pair of pants, but that was it. I believe he was barefooted when he climbed into the tree. And since he’d just crossed two lanes of asphalt percolating, in 110-degree heat, at temperatures that will inflict second- and even third-degree burns, you’ve gotta figure he certainly was pain-tolerant. As for “superhuman strength”? He climbed up in a mature palo verde and was ripping off a whole limb (not just a branch) with his bare hands. The NIH says users can become quite violent (“hyperstimulation, paranoia, and hallucinations that can lead to violent aggression and self-injury”).

You know, this kid in Florida was neither disadvantaged nor, apparently, already mentally damaged. He appears to have come from an affluent, upper-middle-class family, was a good student, an athlete, and evidently on track for success at Florida State. Most recent report I can find in Google has him clinging to life.

Just what we need: yet another crazy-making drug to drive America’s dumb kids, criminals, and already sick homicidally berserk. What a terrible loss, to the boy’s family as well as the victims’ family and friends.

And who knows about our poor, demented crazy down at the Costco? The berserk killer probably was just as damaged as the black guy in the tree. The college kid’s family no doubt will sue the bejayzus out of Florida State and Alpha Delta Phi if it comes out he got into some toxic drug on the campus or in the frat house. Who is going to sue for whatever happened to our guy in the slums?