Peeking into the rock

I don't know how much I've talked about how much I love my room, and how much I love being in my room again after nearly three years of ceding it to other people for one reason and another. I'll have to be out of it again for a few weeks after knee surgery but I'm getting back to it again as soon as possible.

My house is a high-water house: it was built on five-foot piers before the lagoon  and river were tamed, and there were a couple of flood years in my own memory where it was a definite relief that we lived off the ground. The first floor is tall, too, so my room, at the top of the house, is close to twenty feet off the ground. Stop laughing, you people who live in highrises. Remember I live in a town which has a 3-story building limit (which can be waived by permission if your building plan knocks the socks off the planning department). Anyways, because of these things, my room is above most of the structures in my neighborhood. This doesn't give me a very long view because the neighborhood also has many mature trees, including a number of ill-considered redwood trees (redwood trees have very shallow roots, and the only reason they can stand up, usually, is due to their growing in large numbers and intertwining their roots. So if you have a lone redwood tree, or even a planting of three or four of them, you are reasonable to expect that at some point in its lifespan it will simply keel over, in a high wind or due to soil subsidence, which of course we can expect much more of in low neighborhoods like mine as the sea level rises and also therefore the water table-- drought may drive the water table down here, but that only opens the way to more brackish water down the line, etc. Also drought soil is more brittle and drought trees are weaker. And so on)

So I look out my window and I see bits of apartments and houses nestled in a very mixed forest. I counted eleven kinds of trees without moving my head. My window is most of the back wall of my room, and my room is most of the central footprint of my house (that is, it is almost sixteen feet square! The whole downstairs is almost twenty-eight feet square, though). By window I mean two large panes with a sliding glass door in the middle. There was supposed to be a balcony there but nobody's figured out how to build it correctly. I keep that door open a bit most of the time and the wind from the outside comes right in my room, along with the light and everything. Besides that big window there are three skylights, one of them very large. My room is bright enough to read by on a full moon night.

I'm saying my room is luxurious, right? And it is full of built in drawers everywhere and a little walk in closet.

Okay, well.

When I lived up here before I used to run up and down the stairs. Now I limp up and down the stairs. But I think I announced before that a short time of upping and downing the stairs has restored my spine and hip to a satisfactory degree? I had no idea. But toi my disappointment I have not actually gotten better at upping and downing. I'm still doing it eight to ten times a day, but I'm just as slow and awkward and uncomfortable. But it doesn't really bother me, so that's something.

All this is a long prelude to the drawback of living up here--not only do I see all this, I hear all this. Oh dear me do I hear things.

The other night the crows--surely I've mentioned the crows before?: There's a roost of about sixty of them in the neighborhood, which my reading indicates is not really large for crows. Every sunset they do a magnificent display of wheeling in the air and cawing for a goodly amount of time. It's giddying to stand under and watch. The other midnight though, they started in on the cawing part at least--it was dark so I didn't even attempt to get up and look out to see if they were also wheeling and wheeling. I thought they weren't supposed to be doing that, and then they went on for a long time and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I spent a couple hours reading about crow behavior, and I found out about tail-pulling, which is when they get all assholish towards some other animal, sometimes in order to steal whatever they've got but sometimes just to piss them off or instigate fights. But I didn't find out what would upset them (or excite them, who knows) enough to do their mysterious cawing at midnight.

That was at least interesting. Last night it was inebriated young men. These are not the same young men as the ones who live in the front apartment next door and smoke terrible, terrible, no-good, nasty skunkweed all day and all night: I can't smell that from here because all my air comes from the opposite direction, thankfully.  These are different young men with VOICES LOUD ENOUGH TO WAKE THE DEAD who had INANE SHOUTY CONVERSATIONS for hours in the very middle of the night and I almost yelled at them because it was TUESDAY NIGHT HAVE MERCY! but I didn't, I kept trying to go back to sleep. Finally it got quiet and I started to drift off--only to be woken thoroughly by the very very loud sound of one or both of them retching in their patio...

Oh well, they didn't throw up in my yard at least.

I look like hell this morning because of not sleeping well, and I didn't have the energy to measure K's windows for curtains, but at this moment I am sitting on the bed my nice fellow built for me, looking out on the windy windy redwoods and loquat and avocado trees. And yesterday I did chastise a terrible fat squirrel who had eaten a bunch of my little green apples and was conisdering crossing my clothesline and possibly pooping all over my railing. Little bastard didn't listen to me, but it did notice there was nothing to be gained from it and hopped back the way it came, through the branches of my apple tree and onto Zack's little roof, and thence to the redwood trees.

Other nights I am waked by the sound of sea lions (the literal kind) at the wharf, or crowds at the Boardwalk, but even though that is less than half a mile away, that only happens when the wind is just so.

Give it up already.  You're ten days too late for the fireworks. When you set them off tonight, I thought it was gunfire and called it in.  So you're going to get busted.

It is not my fault that you choose to set off fireworks at random times in a neighborhood which is experiencing a lot of murders by gunshot. It's not my fault that you're going to get cited for illegal fireworks in the city limits.

I don't want to be that awful interfering old biddy who calls the cops all the time. But my friends may recall that there's been several murders in my neighborhood in the last year, one of them being the brother of someone I know.

This is the score:

Last Tuesday early evening. The party at the apartments across Felix from me seemed to break out in shouting and fistfights -- I think I heard someone scream also. I saw the fistfights silhouetted in the light in the breezeway between the apartments. While I was talking to the cops I saw two people run away.

About half a dozen people called besides me: somebody had discharged a rifle at that party. There was another wild party at the same apartment the next afternoon, with people sitting on the patio fence throwing gang signs, but white poser rappers throw gang signs in music videos, and I'm not calling the cops just because people are noisy idiots. It's been quiet since then.


Thursday almost midnight. A single gunshot. I was almost in my bed so I couldn't triangulate the location and there was no more noise.

Tonight. Two guys doing a drug deal in a white American car in front of my house. They're rolling industrial quantities of joints right out in the open with their dome light on. I tried to memorize the license plate before I came in to the house but the cops wanted a description of their clothes. I said dark.

I know, mere marijuana is not a 911 issue. I really don't care about people smoking dope. However. The people who are dealing marijuana on the streets in my town are the same people who are killing the boys and young men in my neighborhood. I have never seen this kind of drug deal on my street before. I think they are here because people on other streets have been calling the cops and getting them chased out.

My neighborhood was until quite recently a sleepy little place you'd choose to raise your children in.