Gunfire at the Re:Maines Corral

Well, it may be a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, but it's been a busy night in my suburban neighborhood. Just before midnight, I heard what were clearly (to my big-city-trained ears) gunshots, followed by a car tearing away. It was cats-a-poppin' as our critters reacted. Turk, the cat with epilepsy, had been napping under a window and flew right out of her bed and tumbled down the stairs.

Once I checked Turk was okay (being startled out of sleep has triggered a seizure for her in past), and looked out the window for victims--there were none--I called 911.

Rob meantime fled his basement lair, where he'd been iChatting via iSight with Rex Saxi, to see what was going on. Although he said it sounded like something breaking, he was sufficiently startled that Rex phoned immediately to see if we were okay.

And that's when the midnight midwinter block party began.

We went out to see what was going on, and so did many of our neighbors. (Curiously, the neighbors who are most often the source of violent noise on this block never even turned on a light.) We gathered on the corner outside our house as first one, then several police and detective cars filled the street. It must have been a slow night in Nassau County, because I think every cop on the shift must have stopped by at one point or another. One of the first officers on the scene searched with a flashlight and found shell casings (exactly where I had estimated by sound that the shooting had begun). He asked for paper cups to cover them, and another officer began cordoning off the street with crime scene tape. They didn't have enough--either they don't get much call for it, and so they don't carry much, or they use it so often they ran out; I'm liking the former theory better, for obvious reasons--and had to send a guy for more. Used up the four paper cups I had to cover the casings, but found more casings; Stacy across the street supplied more paper cups. Apparently, unlike crime scene tape, they don't bring their own paper cups.

And since she had paper cups, Stacy made coffee and offered it to the police. They declined politely, saying they'd just had some (there's a Dunkin Donuts just a couple blocks away . . .), so I went over and had a cup. Rob hung out on the corner arguing Mets versus Yankees--after he'd checked for any damage to our cars.

The police found seven .38-caliber shell casings, scattered in two groups in the street, the first cluster adjacent to the side of our house, the second in the intersection out front. (I thought I heard five shots; but there were definitely a group of shots, a pause, more shots, then the car gunning northward.) I wasn't the only one to identify the sound immediately as gunfire; my next-door neighbor said he immediately hit the floor. Another neighbor got to a window in time to see the car speed away, but not well enough to describe it.

Although I placed the 911 call, none of the officers talked to me or took my name, although they did talk with a couple others on the street. But then they had pretty much all I had to tell in my 911 call itself.

Crime scene tape and police cars parked sideways across the road were not enough to dissuade one driver who seemed to really, really want to cross the taped-off intersection. He edged the nose of his car under the tape, until an officer stood in his path and waved him off. The driver immediately reversed and sped away.

About an hour and a half after the incident, the crime scene van turned up. (Maybe there had been another crime--one where they used all the crime scene tape--or maybe they had to wake him up.) You'd think that with the popularity of TV's CSI this would be the highlight of the evening for the assembled neighbors. But it was at that point that everyone decided to go inside. I stayed long enough to peep inside the crime scene van: All I can tell you is that it had lots of drawers inside it. Then, realizing I could see well enough from my toasty-warm living room and that it just wasn't as much fun gawking all by myself anyway, I went inside too. The crime scene guy's job seemed to be to replace the paper cups with numbered green plastic triangles (I noticed that he numbered the casings from north to south, which is opposite the order they were fired, i.e., the casing he numbered 1 was the last one fired, based on what all of us heard and the direction of travel of the car) and then take pictures. This took maybe 15 minutes. And with that, the tape came down and the police all left. There are still ends of the tape stuck to the stop sign out front.

The street is quiet now, as it was before the gunshots. (The street on which this happened, at the side of our corner house, is two blocks long; it's usually pretty quiet.) But it's disconcerting not only to have shots fired outside one's house, but to wonder, why here? Especially since I didn't hear a car traveling down the street before the shots (and you can pretty much hear every car), which means for some reason the shooter(s) had turned onto the street, paused or stopped, and then decided to start shooting. Why? At what?

The police seemed to think it was kids firing into the air for the heck of it . . . okay, but (leaving aside the question of why they had guns in the first place) why here? Why now? People do irrational things, sure, but they don't act without motivation. When we say "senseless crime," we mean that the crime doesn't make sense to us, but the fact is that every act makes, at least for a moment, some kind of sense to the person who does it: As a fiction writer and actor I believe that, because it's at the heart of creating plausible characters who do plausible things; and that is because at some level all of us as the audience for those characters know that that is how real people operate. Even the craziest nutjob is operating within some reality in which his or her actions make some kind of sense. Some kind of motivation makes people do what they do when they do it.

What set of circumstances motivated someone to choose this particular spot on this particular little street, this particular night?

Of course I will probably never know the answer. But because it's my own little universe, a place in which I have come to feel secure, that has been violated, I have to continue to ask.

Shopping for the Apocalypse

We're supposed to get a foot or so (depending on whom you listen to) of snow today and tonight. Now, coming as I do from the frozen midwest, and having lived for seven years Upstate, where a foot and a half of snow wouldn't even keep kids home from school, this doesn't much faze me. But we were out of essential items like milk and cat food, so I ventured to the stores as planned this morning.

So did everyone else.

Lines at gas pumps as if this were the 1970s. (For you young'uns, in the '70s gas was cheaper than it is today, but feared to be running out, so you could only buy it on certain days of the week, according to your license plate number, and lines for gas stations frequently stretched into the street. If someone had told us then that there would be two-dollar-a-gallon gas and people would cheerfully fill their negative-miles-to-the-gallon Hummers with it, we would have laughed ourselves silly at the very thought.) No room in the parking lot of the usually not too busy specialty store, and lines down the aisles. No carts to be had at the supermarket, and little on the shelves once one got inside, as frantic Long Islanders piled provisions in their baskets as if expecting not to see daylight until June.

I can just imagine what it must be like at Costco. People are probably backing up their SUVs to the door to fill them with giant crates of bottled water and toilet paper. Oh wait, that's how Costco is all the time.

The fever becomes contagious. At first it's just "well, as long as I'm here anyway..." which segues into "this place is going to be cleaned out so if I need anything I better grab it..." evolving rapidly into "what if the delivery trucks can't make it through to replenish everything Monday? I better stock up!" and a trunk full of groceries, content leaning more toward comfort food than a balanced diet. But then I was never a diligent practitioner of the balanced diet thing anyway.

Now, four hours or so after snow started falling, the streets are dark, silent, and empty, like a post-apocalypse version of suburbia. And I realize I forgot to buy beer. There's a bottle or two of wine downstairs, but the cavedweller-survivalist part of my brain is debating whether I should try to slog over to the liquor store while there's only a few inches of snow on the ground, because liquor can help warm a person should the power cut out, or be useful should we need emergency treatment for infection...

Oh yeah, we have Bactine for that. I guess I can get by on a bottle of cabernet.

This is what happens when you live in a (suburb of a) city where hats are not worn lest they mess the hairdo, and "winter shoes" means a touch of fur trim (faux or real, depending on your politics and economics) on your high-heeled leather mules. Ugg boots? No, those are so over. And anyway, even though it's snowing on Saturday, everything will probably still be closed on Monday so it's not as if anyone will have to go out anywhere.

I should be laughing at these thin-blooded New Yorkers in fear of a good deal less than a yard of snow. (My sister certainly is. Her place gets drifts deep enough that she has to enter and exit the house through a second-floor window, and she still gets out and about.) But I'm kind of liking knowing that there's plenty of peach salsa in the kitchen and I won't have to wear shoes for a couple days. Maybe a hot bath...hmm. I think these New Yorkers are on to something.

Sponge-worthy

Religious Right group Focus on the Family is apparently all in a tizzy about SpongeBob SquarePants. Because he's supporting multiculturalism in a video.

On Wednesday however, Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family, said the group stood by its accusation.

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," he said. "It is a classic bait and switch."

Okay, the video does also feature Barney, so you can kind of see where the brainwashing idea comes from. But I'm pretty sure SpongeBob is not out to turn anyone's children gay. He's an effin' SPONGE, people, a CARTOON sponge! Apparently genuinely daunting family issues like, oh, child abuse and neglect, or poverty, say, are just too fuzzy for the Focus folks.

I Am a Dinosaur

No politics for a while; it's just too frustrating and depressing. And anyway, Antonius and company at Boring Diatribe have it covered, so go there for a fix if you need it.

I was browsing other blogs, both on Blogspot and LiveJournal, for bloggers who share some of my nonpolitical interests. The vast majority of profiles say something like "14-year-old Taurus" or "16-year-old male." And then when I read the blogs themselves, most of the posters were high school age or perhaps college age.

Where are all the grownups?! Do we only write about politics or our careers? Or is blogging just adolescent navel-gazing? Although I think as we get older we learn to listen to others more than ourselves (in some cases to the extent of not even hearing the voices inside ourselves that tell us who we are and who we aspire to be, letting them be drowned out by the cacophony of assertions about who we should be and what we should do and want . . .), I don't believe that blogging is necessarily so narcissistic. But maybe a lot of people my age fear that it is. Or maybe most of us just don't have the time or energy, or perhaps the passion. I can only guess.

A LiveJournalish personal aside from the blogging dinosaur: The aforementioned Antonius and Rex of Confessions of a Guilty Bystander joined us for Christmas Eve dinner at a neighborhood pizza/Italian joint. Our group and the other remaining table of patrons had been joking with our red-haired waitress, Ana--we're regulars (Antonius and Rex aren't, but they earn the appellation by being in our company), and so I gathered were the other folks. Somehow as we were preparing to leave this led to a spontaneous eruption of "Tomorrow" from Annie performed in Ana's honor at the top of our lungs by all the restaurant patrons.

We may be ancients in blogland, but we haven't forgotten how to have fun.

Pacem

A tribute to one who is gone.

People of the Year, Indeed

ABC News called bloggers the people of the year; meantime, Architecture for Humanity appealed to bloggers to help them raise $10,000 to build homes in the areas destroyed by the quake and tsunami. People came through. Fast.

Other websites and blogs have picked up and promoted the appeal. Within a day the reconstruction appeal surpassed its goal, and within seven days donations and pledges pushed it over the $50,000 mark. $50,000 will be enough to build more than a dozen homes, a small clinic and a school.

Given the response, we think, we can do more. We have now raised the target to $100,000.

Raising $100,000, when coupled with pro-bono design services and material donations, will allow for the building of more than just basic shelter, but the construction of schools, infrastructure and medical clinics. With a more holistic and sustainable approach of reconstruction, a truly worldchanging idea, the funds will help to build beyond simple dwellings to live but create real communities for life to grow, rebuild and renew.

This is exactly the kind of long-term reconstruction that will be essential once the immediate needs for food and medicine are met. People of the year, unite. I don't know if we can remake the world, but we can certainly help rebuild it.

What Can 40 Million Buy?

I don't often find myself wanting to quote referee-baiting Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, but he had a nice thought with regard to the ridiculous expenditures that will be made on inauguration galas, money that might be put to better use, in his blog:

Its up to President Bush to set an example.

How about it Mr. President. Can you take the first step ? I can help you figure out where to start.

Start by cancelling your inauguration parties and festivities.

Could there be anything more confusing and shocking than to read that our country was offering $35mm in aid to the areas affected by the Tsunamis, but that the cost of inauguration parties would be about $40mm ?

Does anyone else think that this is wrong ?

I realize that the cost for the inauguration is being picked up by corporate sponsors and people purchasing outrageously priced tickets. The question is why.

Why are all these corporations and people spending all that money ? Hey I love a good party, but there aint no party like a $10,000 per ticket  party. Its a 10k dollar ass kissing. As an accountant, fund raiser when asked about the high prices to attend the Inaugural events told the NY Times, “its the cost of playing the game”.

Mr President, its time to change the game.

In your re-election campaign, you talked a lot about leadership.  Your  ability to lead in times like these. Your  ability to set an example. Mr President, its time to show that leadership.  Its time to set an example.

True, the administration has seen the light and increased the US pledge to tsunami relief tenfold, and corporations have been very generous as well . . . but a bunch of expensive parties in honor of the president doesn't seem to send the right message. Better to follow the example of the towns in Italy that canceled their New Year's Eve fireworks and gave the money to tsunami relief.

And the copyeditor in me hopes that maybe someone could spare a few bucks, too, to teach Mr. Cuban about punctuation.