Areas of Unrest

30 May 1999 - Neighbors and Crime

I had planned to have my journal stuff all moved over to my new site, Areas of Unrest but cinenet has been down all day Sunday, sigh. Soon, I promise. That is also, of course, why this entry is delayed. I'm not sure when I will be able to upload it given the holiday weekend.

I've decided to create a new television game show. It will be called "What Are They Doing?" and contestants will have to come up with the best explanation for the noises my neighbors make. For example, all day today I have heard various outcries that sound like two men cheering at a sporting event. There are, indeed, two men in the apartment next door, but I haven't heard a television or radio and I seriously doubt that they have the Dodgers in their living room. Any guesses?

Some of my past living situations have had even more challenging variants of this game. Like the year that I lived in an apartment immediately underneath one occupied by six members of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. We could deal with the continual footsteps and music (they must have slept in shifts). But there seemed to be much more furniture rearranging than made any sense. And, while fencing practice may look quite nice on stage, living underneath it is another matter.

One guess for some of the sounds we heard then was "dragging coffins across the living room floor". Which brings me to the subject of crime. I've just concluded a minor Raymond Chandler binge and had very mixed reactions. I had picked up this 3 in 1 collection (The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye) largely because I'd felt vaguely guilty about not having read Chandler before, seeing as how I am into detective fiction and he is considered the L.A. writer and all. The writing is definitely good. But I found myself majorly annoyed at the racism and sexism. I know all about different times and different standards. But Marlowe is fundamentally such a decent man in other ways that I wanted him to be better than that. I still prefer my murders to be rather cozier at any rate. But next in the reading queue will be some non-mysteries. I've started Josepha Sherman's Once Upon a Galaxy which is a collection of folktales linked to science fiction themes. And I've got the new Vikram Seth novel.

To move onto real life crime, I look through the police report sections of the local papers and a piece from the Santa Monica police beat page of The Argonaut has me irritated. A homeless man was arrested "on suspicion of stealing a dollar bill out of a tip jar at a pretzel shop." Fair enough. But what got to me was that he is being held on $35,000 bail. Doesn't that seem out of proportion to the offense? I understand that bail is a means to make suspects show up in court, but don't you just have to set it high enough to be a burden if the suspect doesn't show? And in the case of a homeless man, wouldn't that be a much smaller amount? Obviously, I don't know all the facts here from reading one paragraph in the paper. I am not exactly crazy about all the homeless people over on the Promenade and I understand the pressures the City of Santa Monica is under to clean up the area. But homeless people have civil rights, too, whether or not we like it.

I had one minor accomplishment at home this week, by the way. I finally finished the shelf paper in the kitchen. I have been whining and procrastinating for 6 months on doing the last cabinet, which was a pain because there are various nailed on bits of wood one has to work around. Once I actually just got down to doing it, it took roughly 20 minutes.

My final bit of news for the week is that my car was not recalled. I do have a '94 Saturn but when I called I found out that my vehicle id number is earlier than the batch with the collapsing seat problem. I do wish I could have found that out from one of the news stories or from Saturn's web page, instead of having to deal with several hours of minor anxiety before I could call and check. But I take good news where I can find it.