peristaltor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peristaltor) wrote2006-12-26 07:57 pm
peristaltor) wrote2006-12-26 07:57 pm
Entry tags:
Over the River and In My Sights
Remember my coworker Lenny? Well, he came into work today with another doozy of a story involving threats to his family's safety thwarted only by the timely and judicious exercise of his Second Amendment rights.
This time, no shots were fired; but more guns were involved.
Driving home from a Xmas evening with the in-laws, Lenny's family Durango was blocked from merging on the freeway by a dickhead in a big-ass pickup. You all know the kind of truck to which I refer, I'm sure. Way too big by a factor of five to do anything but look large and in charge, and thereby to divert attention from the miniscule proportions of the driver's dick. Lenny, though, grew up learning to drive from his father, a truck driver, and his grandfather, a bootlegger (I'm not kidding). Also, he raced in the high school equivalent of NASCAR, so has a bit of high-speed experience.
And he grew up driving on LA freeways. Therefore, when necessary, he knows how to merge in the face of adversity. You know, like a prick.
Since the little dick with the big truck refuses to acknowledge the blinker, Lenny cancels it, then pulls a trucker merge. I'm familiar with those from driving the busses. You signal, then go. Busses can't really accelerate, so we just rely on the Rule of Tonnage to "create" merge space. The family Durango has more ponies under the hood. He was able to gun it forward during the two blinks of his signal and insinuate himself in traffic.
The little dick didn't like that one bit.
Big truck and little dick proceed to tailgate the family, including Lenny, the wife, the boy and girl, and grandma (Lenny's mom, who lives with them). For over ten miles. They finally exit in Everett at Highway 2.
Highway 2 near the Ebey Slough tressel has a wide offramp merge to the bridge crossing the slough itself. On that wide spot, a third car guns ahead of the Durango, cutting them off. As this happens, the ld tailgater moves alongside, blocking the Durango to the left.
Then both cars drift toward the concrete barrier to the right, and slow, forcing the Durango to a trapped stop.
Lenny has a few words with his wife, then steps out of their truck.
{As you might remember in my first post about the adventures of being Lenny, he's not a born storyteller. The tale thus far and beyond I got from him the day after all this went down. A couple of days later, he told the story to another friend and remembered details that, once again, made the story that much better. I can't fault him. Drawing a gun to defend one's self and family is jarring enough. Remembering all the details? Fergetaboutit. I've underscored additional narrative detail, striking that detail Lenny glossed over in his first retelling.}
"Is there a problem?" he asks.
ld from the bt says, "You cut me off. So we're going to fuck you up."
"So?""You don't want to do this over a lane change."
Both strangers start moving slowly toward Lenny.
At this point the sound of sirens approaching can be heard, no doubt dispatched by the 911 operator. "The cops are going to be here in a second. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"By the time they get here you're going to be in a pool of your own blood!" ld asserts.
"You don't want to do this," Lenny advises.
"Yes we do!" says ld. Both strangers start moving slowly toward Lenny.
Lenny, drawing his Colt 45 automatic from under his jacket and lining ld in his sights, "Now are you sure you want to do this?""No, you don't want to do this." At this cue, Lenny's wife opens the passenger door with its window down and, using the door as a shield and to steady her own 9mm, takes aim at the driver of the third car.
Grandma is still on the phone to the 911 operator. The kids are screaming. Ah, but what they scream!
Grandma: "Yes, my son has the gun!"
ld, seeing the guns, stops and raises his hands to his side: "Hey, it's cool."
Girl child: "You picked the wrong man!"
Boy child (all of 12, wouldn't you know): "Shoot him, Dad! Shoot him!"
Grandma: "No, he hasn't fired yet!"
Girl child: "You REALLY picked the wrong man!"
Boy child: "C'mon, Dad! Shoot! SHOOT!!!"
Girl child: "Dad, shoot the motherfuckers!!!"
{ld's decision to go from fist swinging machine in the land of the Second Amendment to raised open hands and "It's cool" has got to be the surest sign that this dumbshit has got to have the cognitive processing skills of someone bound to a life of making big rocks into littler ones. You're about to beat someone senseless in front of their family and suddenly you get to decide It's cool?!? Judas H. Xmas.}
ld and his obviously stupider friend rethink their chosen course of action. They didn't act fast enough, though, since the 911 operator was given both vehicle descriptions and the plate number of the blocking car. They lefta bit more wide-eyed than when they started in a big fucking hurry.
Twenty minutes later at home, the cops debrief the family.Since the would-be assailants left while the operator was on the phone with grandma, the dispatched units dealt first with pulling over and arresting the ld and his dickless friend. Funny story. The cops sent to intervene did not make the arrests. little dick and dickless were actually pulled over for racing a few miles away by another officer. The all-points went up just as the sheriff was about to get out of his patrol car to check license, registration and all that crap.
{Folks, think about this. You are leaving the scene of a crime, one you have committed. Do you a) drive normally, so as not to attract attention; or b) move like a bat out of hell to get stopped for speeding? Again, Judas H. Xmas.}
Lenny and his family are once again safe.
Pardon me, but I must rant.
People sometimes ask me why I live in the city. Don't you get afraid? they ask. All the violence.
I respond sometimes with disbelief, other times with incredulity, often with frustrated condescension. With all its diversity, with all its concetration of population, I have never encountered in Seattle the kind of raw, stupid redneck road rage and the violent consequences it brings as Lenny has encountered in story after story, many tales corrborated by an official report from some law enforcement agency or another.
Sure, shit happens in town. But with 5 television affiliates and two major newspapers to cover the nearby action, anything that does happen is well within the quick dispatch range of a mobile TV crew. The same cannot be said about the sticks and the hicks within. There, the stupidity happens time and time again, with never a camera near. Lenny himself has returned fire to drive-by shooters. Returned fire from his front porch. That would make the news at ten if it happened in Queen Anne or Magnolia, or even here in my little Ravenna neighborhood. But his place? As common as it sometimes seems to the residents, it becomes passe. Yes, drive-by shots often go unreported to police.
I learned this lesson well in the WTO riots. Locking up my empty shop in the empty Pike Place Market, I wandered a major arterial turned for the day into a pedestrian mall. People walked with bandanas on their faces, on stilts, unicycles, turtle costumes, street clothes. Some participated. Others, like me, just revelled in the novelty. I watched fascinated as Falun Gong Chinese sat quietly with teenagers in military surplus, just feet away from a line of fully-decked SWAT cops guarding the entrance to the Sheraton and its delegates. I mocked hippies who tried to resurrect sixties-style protest chants, getting one of them to shut up in confusion. (I had to mock. Let's face it, the only effective protest has an element of originality. Old chants simply won't do.)
But the real lesson of WTO was the cameras. The many, many cameras.
I kid you not, every broken window had at least five cameras aimed at it, no matter how slight the damage. The shattered ones boasted at least eight. All the graffiti was being documented in detail. And never mind the photogenic quality of the two or three overturned dumpsters being used as fire pits. They were the glitterati of the gathering. They might as well have been upended on a red carpet.
And the people shot by cameras were seldom teetering on stilts or negotiating the street with funny costumes. They had bandanas. Watching the footage on television therefore gave the impression Seattle was besieged by extras from some South American revolution.
The result?
I got worried emails from England, Utah, the east coast, from people who only know me as the guy from Seattle. Are you safe? Is everything alright?
Well, yes, thank you for your concern. WTO was not a Banda Ache beach. In fact, come to think about it, Seattle seemed worse by far than that literal tsunami beachhead. Why? The cameras survived to tell the tale. Those close enough to a hundred-plus foot high wall of roaring water did not. (It's true. All the footage of tsunami damage I have seen come from inside the cities near the beach in Indonesia -- sometimes three miles from the beach -- or from farther away Phuket Beach in Thailand.)
Folks, face the facts. Though incidents of road rage and other violence are higher in population centers, per capita incidents are often far lower. Meaning every one of those rural residents has a greater likelihood of being involved in an altercation than denizens of the big bad city.
Yet the Ex-urb folk constantly defend their bucolic domeciles as "quiet."
I think I know why. They define "quiet" quite differently than I would. I define "quiet" as relatively without threat to self and home.
They define "quiet" as relatively without threat and surrounded by a) fewer people; and b) people that physically and socially resemble themselves as much as possible.
There is the distance factor. Fewer people means fewer eyes. If my neighbor goes postal next door, I'll likely hear it happen, as will neighbors ten, twenty, maybe fifty houses distance (depending upon the caliber involved). When someone shoots at Lenny's house, at most ten houses are within earshot of the shot. The result: Over-reportage of an incident, this time from witnesses outside the media.
Does this mean the added acreage between family plats increases safety?
Hell, no. If anything, it detracts from the safety by isolating potential victims. I've seen it time and again. A truck or car makes more than one pass in front of the house and half the neighborhood notices. More eyes on a house means a decreased likelihood of shenanigans. By contrast, I could hide in one of several bushes near Lenny's house and go undetected by anything but dogs for hours. It was worse where I grew up, with nearly a mile separating me from the end of our driveway and no visible neighbors whatsoever for the first ten years we lived there.
(Maybe that's why he has those two big dogs. . . .)
The homogeny of the neighborhood populace, my b) example, is a bit less defendable an accusation in this age of supposed tolerance. That doesn't mean it ain't so. I grew up in what I once referred to as Crackerville. I know such neighborhoods are often bastions of attitudes that would make Jefferson Davis proud. Worse, those folks (like my young self) inclined not to harbor such antipathies to "other" folk are hard-pressed to find examples of people that defy common stereotypes, simply because such examples are non-existant or too rare to matter. Lenny, in fact, had an uncle that moved from neighborhood to neighborhood everytime the one in which he lived at the time "got too dark." He wound up moving so far from the city and his work he had to rent an apartment in town to avoid the massive commute his knee-jerk emotions forced upon him.
This where-to-live connundrum is a simple case of the devil you know being safer than the devil you don't -- though, as Lenny and his family learned at the hands of two very white guys with very short fuses and impossibly short cocks, it often ain't even true.
Rant off. Goodnight.
Addenda January 2, 2007
This time, no shots were fired; but more guns were involved.
Driving home from a Xmas evening with the in-laws, Lenny's family Durango was blocked from merging on the freeway by a dickhead in a big-ass pickup. You all know the kind of truck to which I refer, I'm sure. Way too big by a factor of five to do anything but look large and in charge, and thereby to divert attention from the miniscule proportions of the driver's dick. Lenny, though, grew up learning to drive from his father, a truck driver, and his grandfather, a bootlegger (I'm not kidding). Also, he raced in the high school equivalent of NASCAR, so has a bit of high-speed experience.
And he grew up driving on LA freeways. Therefore, when necessary, he knows how to merge in the face of adversity. You know, like a prick.
Since the little dick with the big truck refuses to acknowledge the blinker, Lenny cancels it, then pulls a trucker merge. I'm familiar with those from driving the busses. You signal, then go. Busses can't really accelerate, so we just rely on the Rule of Tonnage to "create" merge space. The family Durango has more ponies under the hood. He was able to gun it forward during the two blinks of his signal and insinuate himself in traffic.
The little dick didn't like that one bit.
Big truck and little dick proceed to tailgate the family, including Lenny, the wife, the boy and girl, and grandma (Lenny's mom, who lives with them). For over ten miles. They finally exit in Everett at Highway 2.
Highway 2 near the Ebey Slough tressel has a wide offramp merge to the bridge crossing the slough itself. On that wide spot, a third car guns ahead of the Durango, cutting them off. As this happens, the ld tailgater moves alongside, blocking the Durango to the left.
Then both cars drift toward the concrete barrier to the right, and slow, forcing the Durango to a trapped stop.
Lenny has a few words with his wife, then steps out of their truck.
{As you might remember in my first post about the adventures of being Lenny, he's not a born storyteller. The tale thus far and beyond I got from him the day after all this went down. A couple of days later, he told the story to another friend and remembered details that, once again, made the story that much better. I can't fault him. Drawing a gun to defend one's self and family is jarring enough. Remembering all the details? Fergetaboutit. I've underscored additional narrative detail, striking that detail Lenny glossed over in his first retelling.}
"Is there a problem?" he asks.
ld from the bt says, "You cut me off. So we're going to fuck you up."
At this point the sound of sirens approaching can be heard, no doubt dispatched by the 911 operator. "The cops are going to be here in a second. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"By the time they get here you're going to be in a pool of your own blood!" ld asserts.
"Yes we do!" says ld.
Lenny, drawing his Colt 45 automatic from under his jacket and lining ld in his sights, "Now are you sure you want to do this?"
Grandma is still on the phone to the 911 operator. The kids are screaming. Ah, but what they scream!
Grandma: "Yes, my son has the gun!"
ld, seeing the guns, stops and raises his hands to his side: "Hey, it's cool."
Girl child: "You picked the wrong man!"
Boy child (all of 12, wouldn't you know): "Shoot him, Dad! Shoot him!"
Grandma: "No, he hasn't fired yet!"
Girl child: "You REALLY picked the wrong man!"
Boy child: "C'mon, Dad! Shoot! SHOOT!!!"
Girl child: "Dad, shoot the motherfuckers!!!"
{ld's decision to go from fist swinging machine in the land of the Second Amendment to raised open hands and "It's cool" has got to be the surest sign that this dumbshit has got to have the cognitive processing skills of someone bound to a life of making big rocks into littler ones. You're about to beat someone senseless in front of their family and suddenly you get to decide It's cool?!? Judas H. Xmas.}
ld and his obviously stupider friend rethink their chosen course of action. They didn't act fast enough, though, since the 911 operator was given both vehicle descriptions and the plate number of the blocking car. They left
Twenty minutes later at home, the cops debrief the family.
{Folks, think about this. You are leaving the scene of a crime, one you have committed. Do you a) drive normally, so as not to attract attention; or b) move like a bat out of hell to get stopped for speeding? Again, Judas H. Xmas.}
Lenny and his family are once again safe.
Pardon me, but I must rant.
People sometimes ask me why I live in the city. Don't you get afraid? they ask. All the violence.
I respond sometimes with disbelief, other times with incredulity, often with frustrated condescension. With all its diversity, with all its concetration of population, I have never encountered in Seattle the kind of raw, stupid redneck road rage and the violent consequences it brings as Lenny has encountered in story after story, many tales corrborated by an official report from some law enforcement agency or another.
Sure, shit happens in town. But with 5 television affiliates and two major newspapers to cover the nearby action, anything that does happen is well within the quick dispatch range of a mobile TV crew. The same cannot be said about the sticks and the hicks within. There, the stupidity happens time and time again, with never a camera near. Lenny himself has returned fire to drive-by shooters. Returned fire from his front porch. That would make the news at ten if it happened in Queen Anne or Magnolia, or even here in my little Ravenna neighborhood. But his place? As common as it sometimes seems to the residents, it becomes passe. Yes, drive-by shots often go unreported to police.
I learned this lesson well in the WTO riots. Locking up my empty shop in the empty Pike Place Market, I wandered a major arterial turned for the day into a pedestrian mall. People walked with bandanas on their faces, on stilts, unicycles, turtle costumes, street clothes. Some participated. Others, like me, just revelled in the novelty. I watched fascinated as Falun Gong Chinese sat quietly with teenagers in military surplus, just feet away from a line of fully-decked SWAT cops guarding the entrance to the Sheraton and its delegates. I mocked hippies who tried to resurrect sixties-style protest chants, getting one of them to shut up in confusion. (I had to mock. Let's face it, the only effective protest has an element of originality. Old chants simply won't do.)
But the real lesson of WTO was the cameras. The many, many cameras.
I kid you not, every broken window had at least five cameras aimed at it, no matter how slight the damage. The shattered ones boasted at least eight. All the graffiti was being documented in detail. And never mind the photogenic quality of the two or three overturned dumpsters being used as fire pits. They were the glitterati of the gathering. They might as well have been upended on a red carpet.
And the people shot by cameras were seldom teetering on stilts or negotiating the street with funny costumes. They had bandanas. Watching the footage on television therefore gave the impression Seattle was besieged by extras from some South American revolution.
The result?
I got worried emails from England, Utah, the east coast, from people who only know me as the guy from Seattle. Are you safe? Is everything alright?
Well, yes, thank you for your concern. WTO was not a Banda Ache beach. In fact, come to think about it, Seattle seemed worse by far than that literal tsunami beachhead. Why? The cameras survived to tell the tale. Those close enough to a hundred-plus foot high wall of roaring water did not. (It's true. All the footage of tsunami damage I have seen come from inside the cities near the beach in Indonesia -- sometimes three miles from the beach -- or from farther away Phuket Beach in Thailand.)
Folks, face the facts. Though incidents of road rage and other violence are higher in population centers, per capita incidents are often far lower. Meaning every one of those rural residents has a greater likelihood of being involved in an altercation than denizens of the big bad city.
Yet the Ex-urb folk constantly defend their bucolic domeciles as "quiet."
I think I know why. They define "quiet" quite differently than I would. I define "quiet" as relatively without threat to self and home.
They define "quiet" as relatively without threat and surrounded by a) fewer people; and b) people that physically and socially resemble themselves as much as possible.
There is the distance factor. Fewer people means fewer eyes. If my neighbor goes postal next door, I'll likely hear it happen, as will neighbors ten, twenty, maybe fifty houses distance (depending upon the caliber involved). When someone shoots at Lenny's house, at most ten houses are within earshot of the shot. The result: Over-reportage of an incident, this time from witnesses outside the media.
Does this mean the added acreage between family plats increases safety?
Hell, no. If anything, it detracts from the safety by isolating potential victims. I've seen it time and again. A truck or car makes more than one pass in front of the house and half the neighborhood notices. More eyes on a house means a decreased likelihood of shenanigans. By contrast, I could hide in one of several bushes near Lenny's house and go undetected by anything but dogs for hours. It was worse where I grew up, with nearly a mile separating me from the end of our driveway and no visible neighbors whatsoever for the first ten years we lived there.
(Maybe that's why he has those two big dogs. . . .)
The homogeny of the neighborhood populace, my b) example, is a bit less defendable an accusation in this age of supposed tolerance. That doesn't mean it ain't so. I grew up in what I once referred to as Crackerville. I know such neighborhoods are often bastions of attitudes that would make Jefferson Davis proud. Worse, those folks (like my young self) inclined not to harbor such antipathies to "other" folk are hard-pressed to find examples of people that defy common stereotypes, simply because such examples are non-existant or too rare to matter. Lenny, in fact, had an uncle that moved from neighborhood to neighborhood everytime the one in which he lived at the time "got too dark." He wound up moving so far from the city and his work he had to rent an apartment in town to avoid the massive commute his knee-jerk emotions forced upon him.
This where-to-live connundrum is a simple case of the devil you know being safer than the devil you don't -- though, as Lenny and his family learned at the hands of two very white guys with very short fuses and impossibly short cocks, it often ain't even true.
Rant off. Goodnight.