Welcome To Paradise

The news here in Oakland has been very entertaining lately, from a vicarious point of view. Living here can be a little nerve-wracking at times, what with all the seeming contradictions flying around, narrowly avoiding the eerie coincidences. This past week has been a good example.
On Saturday night, the kid across the street had a "little party." To his credit, he warned most of us neighbors ahead of time, but when our house continued to vibrate past two in the morning, it began to press on a nerve that I try hard to ignore: the "those darn kids" nerve. Having once celebrated Bruce Springsteen's birthday on a Thursday night by splitting a keg of beer between two of us and finishing off by pounding on the floor, which happened to be someone else's ceiling, to the beat of "Born To Run," I find it hard this pot to call that kettle black. I get youthful exuberance, but three in the morning passed and it was still going on. That's when it occurred to me that Oakland's police force, which had just been pared down by some eighty officers due to budget problems, was no longer responding to non-violent crimes. I couldn't imagine how filling out an on-line report would help me get to sleep. And so I partied into the night with my pillow over my head.
The next morning, my son and I walked up to the park where a number of local merchants were sponsoring a community picnic. As we made our way under the highway overpass, we noticed that traffic was stopped in both directions. Later I found out that it had been blocked off in both directions due to an overnight shootout between a self-styled anarchist and a number of different law enforcement agencies, including the Oakland police. Luckily, no one was killed as an estimated one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition were exchanged. The bad guy never did make it across the bridge to the San Francisco ACLU, where he intended to set things right in his own inimitable fashion. Even if I had called the police about my neighbor's party, I doubt they could have made it over much before the time it finally collapsed under its own fun.
All of this happened in the wake of the riot that followed the verdict in the Johannes Mehserle case. Many of the officers who held the line and helped quell the ugliness that night were among the ones who were let go. Such is the nature of things. Much in the same way that Oakland's city council voted on Tuesday night to permit industrial-scale marijuana farming, initially to fill the needs of medicinal pot users, but with the anticipation of a November ballot measure that could lead to the legalization of recreational use.
And so it goes here in the city by the bay. Not the one that Steve Perry sings about. The one that shows up in those Green Day songs.