What’s up with all these people not shoveling out their fire hydrants? Friends and neighbors, we are not down south where everyone expects the city to do it all for them. These flags sticking out are so someone can find the hydrants when we get a big dump of snow […]
Monthly Archives: March 2021
11 posts
The neighborhood hoarder Part 1. Introduction: So, you’re living in the long shadow of a hoarder’s house with never a bit of maintenance on the outside in twenty years. No paint. Gutters fallen off. Yard full of dead cars, old tires, an unplugged freezer with God-knows-what in it. Moss, bushes […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 2. The Players: Owner, Leader, Neighbors, The City, Saboteurs working against you The Owner: The first and most important thing in doing a clean-up is, you have to get the owner’s permission. And get it in writing. Without that, you’re nowhere. For good reasons, private property […]
Neighborhood hoarder Part 3. The Clean-up Organization: Once we got permission to clean up, we simply went over and dove in. No firm plan, no set schedule. We have about 18 hours of daylight in mid-June so helpers could carry on long before, or after, the regular work day as […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 4. Junk Car round-up “We break in to cars when we gotta. With pickaxe and hammer and saw. They say this garage has no license, yet it’s little care I for the law. Ta me weigh hey tow it away, the Lincoln Park Pirates are we, […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 5. Landscaping Satisfying as it was to clean up the junk and cars. A little bit of landscaping after was like one of those makeovers you see where they give a street person a shave and haircut and turns him into cover material for Gentleman’s Quarterly. […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 6. Maintaining the groove and breaking into cars During the clean-up someone raised the question, “What’s to stop it from going back to the way it was?” My thought was that it wouldn’t happen. Almost none of the stuff in the yard had been Dave’s. […]
Black Racists of 2020 Winner Number 7. Robin DiAngelo Our WAZ researcher for this week is Cosmo Fury. Born with a contact lens in his third eye Cosmo, even as a kid was what school teachers, if they were kind, called an alternative thinker. These days he grows some of […]
Black Racists of 2020 The WAZ Awards Winner number eight is Nikole Hannah Jones, a wealthy, highly educated, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has made a lucrative career speaking and writing about black victimhood and white oppression. Our narrator is Al Purdy. Al’s a retired firefighter/EMT, who looks exactly like […]
Winner Number 9 Colorism Tonight’s speaker is Tommy O’Brien: a wiry 60ish man who walks the mountains alone, year round, far from trails, sometimes chest deep in snow, sometimes choosing routes that, if he slipped, no one here would ever know what became of Tommy. He likes to laugh and […]
San Diego: motto America’s Finest City San Diego Unified School District is the second largest school district in California . Jake Paresky was our WAZ researcher for number ten. Occupation: High school biology teacher. Qualifications: Began his career in Southern California in a school where half the kids started his […]