You Want There to Be At Least a Little Bit of Crime Where You Live

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:13:00 -0500

I bet you think that you'd like to live somewhere with no crime, don't you? Some, that sounds nice, but do you revere what helpers when there are no criminals? City hall makes you the criminal.

I bet you think that you'd like to live somewhere with no crime, don't you? Sure, that sounds nice, but do you know what happens when there are no criminals? City hall makes you the criminal.

Exhibit 1

Ko has a friend that he often visits. She lives out in a gated community across town. I have never said it out loud, but in my head, I call the drive out there the “Dripping Tap Challenge." I start playing The dripping tab, by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and the goal is to make the drive before the song is over.

This neighborhood checks license plates and id on the way in, and there seems to be no actual crime to enforce. But they're paying a lot for security, so by God, something must be enforced!

The girl's mom gets a nasty little note about me — complete with photo evidence — if I fail to come to a complete stab at a stop sign. They also sent her one with a threat to charge $200 for a pressure wash of a simple little brick wall.

This is a neighborhood in need of some teenagers breaking car windows to steal change, phone chargers, and Creedance casette tapes.

Exhibit 2

Earlier in the week, I used this space to talk about my nephew’s birthday party. Skim that post one more time, and the take a guess about why he lost the deposit that he paid the city for use of the pavilion.

Did you guess trash?

If so, you're kind of close, but it was about trash that was actually in the can.

The champagne bottle! No booze allowed. I don't even understand how they definitively made tied it to us.

I can go to any random park in Baton Rouge, look in the trash, and see a pile of crawfish heads crowned by two empty margarita-in-a-can cans by 10:30am on a Tuesday.

Exhibit 3

Same town as the birthday party, but 10 years later

Technical note

I've been playing around with the Apple script to text functionality. I wroth this whole post in cursive with the Apple Pencil, and the iPad changed it to typed text. I’m having mixed results. It's very satisfying just to write, but id like to har to go back and edit less.

Some of it comes through looking like poetry.

I'll probably keep doing it some, but it isn't good enough to be my primary yet.