Stranger Danger Manger
So there is this app I got on my phone, and it is basically all-day crowdsourced updates from my neighborhood. Like, all the neighbors from a couple miles square, and I learn about their yard sales and lost chickens and a car alarm they got mad at etc. (In the last five minutes: if Lawn-Gro can poison a dog, from a dude who clearly would prefer a suggestion of "wait it out"; a humble-brag disguised as a "tip" about pressure-canning turkey stock; a request for a good celiac-safe naturopathic remedy for kids whose number two is more like a one-point-three.)
Of course here and there you hear about a home robbery or a kid who was trailed after school by a van. I used to think that we worried too much in my generation because with the Internet we started getting bad news from all over the world twenty-four hours a day, but it turns out that if you got your ears on hard enough there's bad news all day long well inside the distance between you and the mini-mart.
Before long this feed started to get me real down, like worried constantly if I had locked the doors, and even turning the car around up to five minutes away to go back and check. I'd lay awake at night knowing that Listeria was growing on the farmer's market potatoes in my refrigerator, and maybe leaping to the soft cheeses. If I drove past a kid in a backpack who was walking to school, I'd fast forward to his parents getting the automated phone call from the Office that he didn't show up for attendance that day, then to the emotionally destroyed dad three days later sliding a pistol into his mouth, etc.
So on the whole as jazzed as I am that I can borrow a circular saw or other woodworking tools from Harvey Brunettoni at 2198 Camino Rosales, and chat over iced tea and have some of his Italian plums that he can never use all of, I think I am going to drop this app. I don't even care that the NIB Asics I advertised ain't sold yet. Whoever came to get them would probably be casing my house anyway. Lord knows I got no firearms. I am just toast in the bed, stabbed and screamin', any time anybody wants to have at it, and I ain't got no need to advertise that.
Of course here and there you hear about a home robbery or a kid who was trailed after school by a van. I used to think that we worried too much in my generation because with the Internet we started getting bad news from all over the world twenty-four hours a day, but it turns out that if you got your ears on hard enough there's bad news all day long well inside the distance between you and the mini-mart.
Before long this feed started to get me real down, like worried constantly if I had locked the doors, and even turning the car around up to five minutes away to go back and check. I'd lay awake at night knowing that Listeria was growing on the farmer's market potatoes in my refrigerator, and maybe leaping to the soft cheeses. If I drove past a kid in a backpack who was walking to school, I'd fast forward to his parents getting the automated phone call from the Office that he didn't show up for attendance that day, then to the emotionally destroyed dad three days later sliding a pistol into his mouth, etc.
So on the whole as jazzed as I am that I can borrow a circular saw or other woodworking tools from Harvey Brunettoni at 2198 Camino Rosales, and chat over iced tea and have some of his Italian plums that he can never use all of, I think I am going to drop this app. I don't even care that the NIB Asics I advertised ain't sold yet. Whoever came to get them would probably be casing my house anyway. Lord knows I got no firearms. I am just toast in the bed, stabbed and screamin', any time anybody wants to have at it, and I ain't got no need to advertise that.
