9:05 p.m. - 2008-04-08
I LIVE ON THE SAFEST BLOCK IN BROOKLYN
There are fifteen police officers outside my house. Seriously, I counted. Twelve in uniform, 3 plainclothes, one cop car, and one cop van with its lights on. Until a few minutes ago there was a plain white van sitting at the other end of the street, stopped in the middle with its lights on. It's gone now.
I had been hearing walky-talky noises for a while, but since I live next to a dry cleaning warehouse I figured it was the people who worked there talking to their delivery vans on those annoying shouty walky-talky phones they use, but no. I finally looked when one of my roommates called me and asked what was going on. He had been heading home, but turned around when he saw the flashing lights.
When I stuck my head out the window to see what was going on (desperately hoping that I wouldn't see a dead body), one of the cops noticed me, and we had the following conversation:
Cop: Hi there.
Me: Hi. Uh, what's going on?
Cop: Not too much.
Me: Are you sure? Because, um, there seem to be a lot of you here.
Cop: Just keeping you safe.
Me: All of you?
Cop: Yes.
I went down a few minutes later to smoke a cigarette (after first calling out of the window to make sure I wouldn't interrupt any drug busts or anything), and it seems that the cop wasn't kidding. There was nothing going on. Just 15 cops standing around, lights flashing, talking about what bar to go to after the shift.
I called JJ and told him this, but he still declined to come home until the siege was lifted. I don't blame him. Boys in heels often aren't as safe around police officers as they could be.
Remind me not to make anymore NSA jokes on the internet. This is getting weird.
--------------------------------
I am reading the most horrible book right now. Not horrible as in badly written, just in that its a really graphic account of the sexual and physical abuse of a teenage boy (well, there were two, but one already overdosed) and heroin abuse. It's called Try by Dennis Cooper, and it's making me nauseous. I haven't decided if it's disgusting in a valuable this-is-reality-and-we-should-acknowledge-and-deal-with-it way, or if its just being brutal for brutality's sake. If I didn't have to read it for class, there's no way I would be sticking around to find out.
Fortunately, next up on the reading list is a Willa Cather novel (not for the same class, that would be weird), so after this is done I'll rehab my psyche with some good, homespun, 'hard toil on the prairie but we found beauty in the work' Americana. I'm a total sucker for that stuff, too, so it should help.
Well, I should get back to the underage rimjobs and freebasing. If I get through this book without vomiting, I'll consider that a win.
-Britt
�
Email me at [email protected]!�
