The old woman who lives in the other side of the house where I rent a place moved a black mother and daughter into her apartment and then killed them. I’m inclined to believe this is what happened going by what I’ve seen. About a month ago, on most evenings this shifty chickenhead sat on her porch with an older black woman and a younger one, and the old woman showed the other two around the property and brought them inside. Some days later the mother and daughter had parked their car in the gravel lot behind the house, and I saw them carrying bags into the old woman’s apartment. For weeks now the car has remained parked behind the house, but the women have disappeared. No one has seen them, including the other tenants in this building, who know exactly what I’m talking about when I mention it, and also think they’ve been murdered. In what circumstance does a dingbat 70-year-old white woman who owns half a mansion and zip ties a Ukranian Flag to her porch, who last year had some Ukranian musical act stay at her place a few nights for some jerkoff concert, a member of all these neighborhood associations and scuttlebutt clubs and prattle and tattle leagues, start hanging out with two black women never before seen in the neighborhood, have them park their car behind the house, and then there’s no sight of the women but the car hasn’t moved for weeks, without meat cleaver deaths. What else could’ve happened. This neighbor, she epitomizes the modern philanthropic spirit of ostentatiously helping the downtrodden and dispossessed peoples of the world, festooning her facades with patronizing signs and foreign flags and dream catchers and prayer rugs, running a refugee bed and breakfast and crocheting tote bags and playing ethnic instruments while acting like a rotten spiteful harridan towards those who live right next to her, those who must put up with her bizarre tight-assed and two-faced rictus, her strangely menacing greetings, her oddly attentive questions about all visitors and minute deviations in schedule, her accusations of tampering with peonies and vandalizing the yard with dog poop, her carping about cluttered back porches and her attempts to persuade the landlord to evict other tenants. What a wonderful person, so empathetic, so generous and spirited and active in all the greatest struggles and issues of our time, she who had a man’s broken-down car towed off the street outside the house without talking to him about it would never lure two African women into her home and stab them in their sleep and cook them in a stew; she hangs a Ukranian flag from the rails of her porch in an affluent midwestern American neighborhood, she couldn’t possibly sell human flesh and organs to eastern European mafias.
Surrounded by wonderful people on these streets, late middle-aged professional oboists who jog and hang signs about thanking civil servants, asking have you served a civil servant today, have you washed the backfat of a front desk scheduler of a government agency today, have you sung your deepest hopes and fears to your local CIA agent; richly humane people waving unearthly slogans like abide no hatred, phrases no organic human being would ever say in any realistic situation, some Vulcan approximation of a sentimental injunction; when I look at that banner all my brain comes away with is HATRED HATRED HATRED. If you’re going to be inane, you have to keep it positive. Love is love is terrifyingly stupid, but it works on the simplest level of programming; love is love, can’t argue with that. We unconsciously filter out negations, so that “Hate has no home here” becomes “hate has home here”. It’s suspicious to list out qualities and beliefs and rules and conditions unprovoked, to declare presences and absences of emotion, predilections, racial and ethnic and religious preferences. If I’m a dipshit, it should take people a second to figure out what flavor. Check out my new line of t shirts, with such embroidered sayings as “and if you’re wondering, there are absolutely no dead hobos in my basement” or “I never molested my cousins, thank you”, “In this house we (DO NOT) abuse our pets and compose limericks about religious and racial minorities committing bestiality, and we have never donated to vigilante militias.”
A few nights ago a limb from a massive grey oak tree fell onto my 2011 Ford Focus, cracking the windshield on the driver’s side. I park down the street from my apartment because the space out in front is taken by the downstairs tenants, and the next closest space is unavailable because the old woman organ trafficker demands that it be kept open for delivery vehicles; the old bag who owns the house and the yard where the tree with the limb that fell on my windshield was walking her latest dog, the one she bought immediately after the last one died, as I looked over the damage she said your car was lucky, apparently not seeing the fractured glass, and I said no, it wasn’t lucky, a branch the size of a small tree landed on my windshield, and she said nothing and was yanked into her backyard by her dog. I don’t expect this woman to hand me hundreds of dollars or bake me a chicken pot pie but the slightest show of neighborly concern would be appreciated. She’s probably thinking about civil servants.
I’m surrounded by people enveloped in a fart cloud of affluence and hypermediated causes, plights, events, conflicts, affiliations, sympathies and antipathies (I notice this and it bothers me because I’m one such person); my most directly pressing problem, a return of the repressed in the form of a tree branch falling and breaking my windshield, a reminder of a surviving outside, the natural world’s capacity for unpredictable action, is swamped by the artificial sign systems of doddering tech-heads and the clashing of global labor flows, authoritarian states and rival political organizations. If the branch had landed on my skull and my brains had squirted out of my ears then I’d still be a selfish bastard for worrying about it and my neighbors would still ignore me or tow my car or evict me because they have to train their dogs and prune their peonies and mend their Palestinian Rainbow flags; each person is at war with everyone lying within the scope of an organic eyeball, engaged in a flabby arms race that combines the most radically squinty preoccupations with grandiose utopian activism.
Instead of paying for a new windshield I’m going to punch out the remaining glass and replace it with a Mexican flag.
Truly, Mrs Jellyby lives on.
Contra to the public slow motion satire. Women are a tribe. Their court of last resort is to each other. Examine their blogs for permission to traffic in organs i have not seen it. Take down this post. Verifiably half of the wealth in the 90th percentile is held by femmes. Therefore this by virtie of loyalties w get back to her. I fully understand your positon, my current Landlady moved me in by saying yes when she meant no. All verbals from her tongue are the Georgian opposite of what she assents to. She is a rock and roller. Works as a radio dj for a Sirius robot corporation. She now wishes me gone , but to express t she called my brother while we were on a death watch with my father to tell him to intervene with me. Because says she i am a 50 year old undiagnosed loon. Operstive words. Undiagnosed. Take your time and play at rushing but mistly take your time they remain what Freud said. Reactive horsies.