A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

by Jim Washburn

I’ve been asked several times, “Hey, Jim, how’s that ‘Winnowing Year’ going? You know, the pronouncement you made last month about divesting yourself of 40% of your belongings over the next 12 months. By my reckoning, you should be rid of 3.3 percent of your stuff by now. That’d be eight guitars, 360 records and your Davy Crockett hat. You keeping pace?”

These people are not my true friends. Why I let them buy me lunch I’ll never know. My true friends know I already miss that hat, and that’s the extent of my progress. The coonskin cap actually made the move with us, as I’d fished it out of the trash after my wife threw it out at the old house. But she found it again at the new house and out it threw anew. She said it looked like a dead rat, but it didn’t look that dead to me.

I’ve been so busy with work that it’s only in this past week that I’ve begun unpacking more than the essential items we dug out when we moved in. I’ve also just moved from one storage unit to another less expensive one, a subdivided cargo container doing a slow roast behind an industrial building on the west side of town. That’s the gang-speckled side of town, but also where the Westside Renaissance or somesuch is taking place, where vital young enterprises and edgy artists are making their vital, edgy young mark on the culture of our times. I like to think of my excess junk as right in the thick of that scene, perhaps even leading it.

Do you know there are studies showing that for freeway-widening projects and other highway “improvements” the time lost to motorists is never made up by the time purportedly saved by the improvements. A study of storage units would reveal a similar truth: that in very little time at all, the value of your stuff will be exceeded by the rent you’ve paid.

What’s the sci-fi book where in the near future the only jobs left are as pizza deliverymen, and people are living in converted storage containers? You could do worse. On a very hot day, I found it not too hot inside, though my unit does have the benefit of a dead cedar overhanging it. It seemed dry, weather-tight, probably rodent-proof, possibly even bulletproof. And if enough of you living in the same cargo container wanted to take a trip somewhere, you could just load up the container on a ship and go.

Here’s a little interlude: For the past half-hour a neighbor’s dog had been making the most lonely, distressed yelps. Its owner obviously was not home or was unable to come to her dog’s succor, so I finally went out to my driveway, and when I saw the dog’s shadow through a fence slat, in my most soothing coo, I whispered, “Hey, buddy, how ya doin’?”

Except it wasn’t a dog’s shadow, but a guy’s, I realized when I saw the top of a human head bobbing along the fence-top. A burglar?, I wondered, then figured it must be the neighbor’s son who lives with his family across the street. But mostly I wondered, did he hear me cooing at knee-level through the fence? If so, in well under two months at our new address I’ve become the neighborhood Boo Radley.

Only last week we were the cause of a gigantic fire engine showing up on the block, which could scarcely go unnoticed since a pill bug could flip itself onto its feet in less time than the engine took to negotiate the end of the cul de sac. (We don’t really thank the French enough for cul de sacs: Without them, all streets would go on forever.)

Our Passat had been leaking gas for a while, but never enough that our mechanics could determine the source. Not a problem this particular day, since our car started gushing out gasoline like it was starring in a German porno. Not too safe to drive, and AAA said they wouldn’t even tow it unless the fire department came and signed off on it first. So this sideways skyscraper of a truck arrives with a crew in full fire gear, not looking altogether sure why they were there.

We explained the situation. “And it’s only leaking gas when you turn the engine on?” one asked, and when I averred that was the case, he shrugged. The other firemen shrugged. “Well I guess it should be safe to tow as long as you don’t turn the engine on,” one said, and others nodded in assent. Then they drove off to the next emergency. A fireman once told me they only rescued cats from trees for PR purposes; that cats generally can find their own way down. “You don’t see many cat skeletons in trees, do you?” was his argument.

“Why don’t islands sink?” one of my sixth grade classmates asked our teacher one day. We’d already none-too-kindly nicknamed the kid Gigantor, and his numbskull question did not increase his luster with us. Mr. O’Neill quickly put us in our place, explaining that the stupid people are the ones who don’t ask questions, that if you don’t ask you never learn and grow and shame on us. He was right, even if he did drive a Rambler.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a few of your neighbors—looks like 2 million to me!—visiting our nation’s capitol:

Makes you feel proud to be an American, seeing so many uncurious, unquestioning, reality-averse persons in one place. You know there’s a major factual disconnect when most reliable estimates of the Tea Party Express place the crowd size at 60,000 to 70,000, while its organizers and other wackos insist it was 2 million and that anyone who says otherwise is part of the conspiracy. Moreover, the organizers announced that ABC News estimated the crowd numbers to be 1 to 1.5 million, despite the fact that no one on ABC ever said any such thing, but did report the 60,000 to 70,000 estimate. So to get an idea of how far off the right-wing estimate was, just take your penis or breast size and multiply it by 28.57.

And then you get Fox News taking out full-page ads claiming that ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN ignored the event, despite them all giving extensive coverage to the protest, even though it was practically a Fox-branded event, what with Glenn Beck heavily promoting it and one of the network’s producers being caught on camera coaching the crowd response.

Why report news when it’s so much easier to fabricate it?

This isn’t a new activity. Back in the Bush years, when the largest anti-war protests in our history were taking place across the nation—and were very much underplayed and undercounted in the media—a conservative-owned radio station network organized its own pro-war counterprotests, which even with the network providing country stars to draw a crowd, were not very well attended. But they got nearly as much news coverage as the huge antiwar protests.

That’s probably because the fix is in. We’re not yet Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls over 90 percent of the media, but we’re headed that way. Rich people own our media, and they have a vested interest in the other things they own, like insurance companies. And when so much of the money in TV advertising these days is from the pharmaceutical industry, do you really think any legislation that might upset the gravy train is going to get a fair shake? Several polls have shown that a majority of Americans favor a public healthcare option. You hardly hear about those people or their troubles. They’re all but drowned out by 70,000 noisy citizens with their Obama = Hitler posters.

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