Donate A Car

 It wasn't a smash and grab. They took their time. Twenty minutes or so, if you can believe the clock on the security camera. During that time, a number of folks passed by, including a substitute teacher and two guys who were at our school to do surveying for solar panels that might eventually be installed on our campus. 

None of them stopped the car from being stolen. 

Our fifth grade teacher often takes lunch in his car, for the privacy and the opportunity to catch up on sports talk. He didn't do that on one day. On the day his car was stolen. During lunch. In broad daylight. 

As it turns out, the security cameras are more useful if they are being monitored by someone on a constant or at least regular basis. Instead, they have been mostly useful for winding back the tape to see what happened while we weren't watching. This has been the case for the weekend break-ins, and the early morning collision of the trash truck with the corner of the building. They are evidence, but solidly after the fact. 

When our fifth grade teacher came to the office, looking a little confused and angry, he let us know that his car was gone. Because he always parks in the same place, it was easy to figure out at which camera we should look. We watched a car pull up, back up to the car that would be stolen. We watched people go by. There was no sound, but we can assume that someone must have heard the breaking glass that would be the only remaining sign of the theft. Fifty yards away, kids were playing on the playground. Teachers were in the staff room making copies and choking down their lunches in anticipation of the rest of the day. No one stopped the thieves as they did their business. 

They stole a teacher's car. The one he uses every day to take him to school for yet another day of educating. In this case, the discreet irony being that this is the school that he once attended as a boy. He returned to share his gifts and wisdom with his community. He didn't expect to have to share his car as well. 

For a while we stood around the office, exchanging stories of cars we had lost to a tiny sliver of the city that would do such a thing. We commiserated, but ultimately our fifth grade teacher was left with the chore of dealing with insurance and police reports and all the attendant stress of what had happened during lunch. 

Riding my bike home that evening, I thought about how quickly my thoughts drifted to retribution when our car was stolen so many years ago. The stages of grief that were run through on the way to acceptance. I thought about the bicycle I "donated" to the community. And the various bits of wealth that has been redistributed through me and my family over the years. 

I wished for justice, but adjusted my sights on the eventual settlement. 

Go Ahead And Bite Me

 We have a neighbor who takes her little dog out each morning. Usually this is early enough that my wife and I are still in bed. We are awakened by the same basic interaction every day: 

DOG: Arf, arf, arf!

NEIGHBOR: Quiet!

DOG: Arf, arf, arf!

NEIGHBOR: Stop barking!

This is the way they roll. Yelling at one another like an old married couple who yell at each other. My wife and I make an attempt to empathize. We had a dog. She barked at the mailman. Without fail. That was when she saw him. Most of the time she was napping and missed the chance to fulfill a stereotype. This was also somewhere between the hours of ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. Not at dawn. 

It was early in the morning when my younger brother and I made our way out of the hotel where we had spent the night in beautiful Broomfield, Colorado. We were gearing up for our eleven hour trek to Elko, Nevada. That was the halfway point we had chosen as a stopping point on our way back to California. Coming down the stairs to the lobby, we spied a woman coming through the door with a pair of healthy Black Labradors. The dogs were seemingly unclear about just how to get through the door without piling into one another and straining on their leashes. My brother and I paused on the stairway to let her and her puppy pals make it inside. Then we descended. 

On my way out, I paused and looked back at the dogs. I addressed the one who seemed to be most challenged, "Good dog."

I was met with a quick flurry of warning barks. First from the dog, then from the woman at the end of the leash.

"Can't you see they're in training?"

I apologized, not having meant anything but a connection with a fellow resident on the planet. 

This was not enough for the woman whose attention was now fully on correcting me. "You don't do that! It's not cute!"

I apologized again.

"You're not sorry!" And then she called my a name. It wasn't "dog lover." I kept moving and my younger brother and I let the door close with her still yelling after me. 

"Have a good day," I said to no one in particular.

And I felt immediately bad for the dogs who were most likely to be on the receiving end of the invective that I was now missing. 

Suddenly those early morning family interactions with my neighbor seemed much more relaxed. My younger brother and I got into our rental car and headed west. 

Ummm, No

 It should not come as a surprise that the humiliated, twice-impeached former game show host would harbor resentment for those who still have jobs in the U.S. government. Mitch McConnell, for example. Here's what the bloated sack of orange protoplasm had to say about the Senator from Kentucky: 

“Is McConnell approving all of these Trillions of Dollars worth of Democrat sponsored Bills, without even the slightest bit of negotiation, because he hates Donald J. Trump, and he knows I am strongly opposed to them, or is he doing it because he believes in the Fake and Highly Destructive Green New Deal, and is willing to take the Country down with him? In any event, either reason is unacceptable. He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!”

I know. A lot to unpack there. First of all, if it seems that he may have shot on past the two hundred eighty character count for Twitter, that's okay because this post appeared on the terribly ironically named corner of the Internet called "Truth Social." And aside from making extra room for disgraced ex-"presidents," this site doesn't seem to be that concerned about death threats and racism. Over at Truth Social, they just sort of let it all hang out. At least when it comes to disparaging the members of the party most likely to be using their brand. And when it comes to the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. 

Mitch McConnnell's wife, Elaine Chao was Transportation Secretary during the Trump Regime. Appointed by the guy who wrote the post. Is it possible that under the severe mental stress of typing with his thumbs that the man who lost the popular vote in two consecutive elections forgot that human beings out of his small circle of fiends might be reading his rants? Has he ever shown any indication that he cares? 

Well. No. A Sociopath with racist tendencies or a Racist with sociopathic qualities? Does it really matter? Should someone like this ever be allowed to run for dogcatcher for Palm Beach? These are all essentially rhetorical questions, but Mitch - with friends like these, who needs a figurehead? 

The Words

 I started listening to Elton John when my older brother gifted me with the double LP Goodbye Yellow Brick Road back in 1973. I listened to all four sides over and over again, partly because it was one of the few albums I owned but mostly because it was fascinating to me. It came to me as an eleven year old nerd who was still taking piano lessons and was looking for anything that might make me feel like anything but an outcast. Suddenly I was up to my navel in the zeitgeist. I had adopted my very first rock star. 

That was almost fifty years ago. The songs from that record and so very many other Elton John compositions have become the soundtrack of the past half century. Sir Elton was the first arena rock show I attended, and all that music was left literally ringing in my ears for days afterward. It was right about that time that I started becoming a fan in earnest. I picked up the older records, and kept an eye out for new releases. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy came out just before that first concert, and I was consumed by the autobiographical nature of the tracks. It was then that I began to familiarize myself with Bernie Taupin, Elton's lyricist and the man responsible for what has become decades of mondegreens. 

I feel the need to come clean here: I owned the albums. These were LPs with lyrics included in the packaging, and yet somehow I never bothered to take the time to examine them fully. Or perhaps I did. Somehow, the tales of gigolos and prostitutes and Roy Rogers never made complete sense to my incipient teenaged mind. "Back to the howling old owl in the woods/ Hunting the horny back toad?" By this point I had read the Mad Magazine parody of Midnight Cowboy (Midnight Wowboy). I just didn't understand it. Just like it never dawned on me that the words in Rocket Man were "burning up his fuse up here alone." 

And maybe I could place the blame on the accent and phrasing of Mister John's vocals. Some of that rock and roll inflection left me scratching my head a bit. Bennie, of Jets fame? She had electric boots. Just in case you were curious. Twelve years ago, my wife and I went with some friends to see Sir Elton play as part of a double bill with the Piano Man, Billy Joel. It was during this show that it became apparent just how many songs were one big vowel movement on my part. Singing along quickly became an embarrassment, so I loaded up my playlists with songs from my past. I wasn't going to be caught napping again. Or mumbling into my souvenir cup of Sprite. 

Elton John will be playing down the road apiece next weekend. I won't be attending. Not because I don't know the words. I will be staying home because I'm old and the cheapest tickets start at seventy dollars. To see him play in a football stadium. I'm sixty. He's seventy-five. If I need to sing along, I'll be doing so from the relative comfort and safety of my home. Where the lyric sheets are. 

Looking For Answers

 There is no such thing as a news vacuum when it comes to school shootings when you are a teacher. It doesn't matter where it happens. Moments after the first reports, teachers know. Whether it is news alerts shared in the staff room or whispers on the playground just before students are picked up on the playground. We know. 

This was experienced even more intensely on the day gunfire broke out in front of a school here in Oakland. Meeting for professional development less than an hour after the events of this past Wednesday left us all in a state of shock. Which did not keep us from discussing the fragments of information that had made their way to us. We shared what we had heard. What we knew. What connected us to it. 

And what we made up. 

There was a competition for who knew the most. Who had the latest. "Well, I heard..."

But ultimately we returned to the heart of the problem for all of us educators: how can we keep this from happening again. At our school. That was where the conversation stalled, after we had all laid out our fears. How could we stop a carload of teenagers from unloading their weapons in front of our school? The tragic reality is that we can't. We can prepare our response. We can imagine scenarios. We can practice drills that we hope will keep our kids safe. But way down deep inside, we don't talk about the part where we don't want to know any of the shooters or the victims. 

That's the problem with what is essentially random acts of violence. You don't anticipate them. As our country continues to load up on guns, it becomes more possible for those weapons to be used to settle what has become a life or death issue. The boys who shot at students outside Rusdale Newcomer high school were most likely seeking revenge for some perceived slight based on gang affiliation. Not the kind of thing that teachers spend much time thinking about as they attempt to prepare their kids for graduating. If they do, they don't understand it. Not like those boys do. 

Some will say that Oakland got rid of police in schools, but didn't bother to get rid of gangs. Not unfair, but certainly short-sighted in the long run. Meanwhile, in Washington, the House of Representatives passed a bill to address mental health concerns among students, families and educators aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There were two hundred five votes against the bill. They were all Republicans. The same party that has insisted for a very long time that the plague of school shootings is not based on the availability of guns, but rather the lack of mental health services. 

Now it's time for us in Oakland to pick up the pieces and get back to work. Because that's what we do. And hope that it doesn't happen again. 

How

 "How could it have been worse?" This was the question that a local news anchor was asking a field reporter after a shooting in front of an Oakland school this past Wednesday. Rather than simply announcing that the good news was that six people were wounded and all are expected to recover, it seemed that there was a tinge of disappointment with the tragedy.

She went on to mine the possibility of an "active shooter" scenario, as opposed to the somewhat random and haphazard way that the gunman opened fire just before one o'clock in the afternoon. What if the shooter had gotten inside one of the four schools situated on that block? What if there had been more than one shooter? What if, indeed.

Oakland is currently coping with a record number of homicides. Seven over the course of the previous eight days. Those were killings, and therefore didn't need to be examined through the "what if" lens. They were part of a running total that rings in at ninety-six so far this year, continuing an ugly trend that began on 2020 with the outbreak of the pandemic. How COVID-19 fits into this puzzle is anyone's guess, but even though there are vaccines for the virus, and boosters to continue to protect us from mutating germs, there has been no real progress on the lead poisoning front. 

Of course, there were questions about how Oakland has chosen to remove police presence from their schools and how this may have impacted the events of Wednesday afternoon. If the assigned officers had been outside on the spot at the moment that the blur of violence swept in, the outcome might have been different. 

Maybe. 

It is more likely that the shooting happened at a place at a time that no one would be around to shoot back. That its kind of the way this stuff works. The fact that none of the victims were children is something of a gift, if there is such a thing, since there were children as young as five were nearby at a nearby charter school. Ironically, the campus is also home to Oakland's center for distance learning that was opened in the wake of the pandemic. No students were on site there. 

How could it have been worse? Knock that off already. 

Pinhead - Mark II

 “So, you hate to hype hurricanes, because it’s just a staple of TV and everyone’s kind of onto the scam.”

Thus spake the Pinhead, days before a category four hurricane was bearing down on central Florida. The Pinhead was following in the stumbling footsteps of another tiny brain and drug addict who insisted in 2016 that “It’s in the interest of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they can desperately continue trying to sell." 

Yes, gentle reader, it's time to rip the curtain off this façade. Destructive storms are just a way to "own the cons." It's bad weather that is good business for the libs. The tiny brained drug addict suggested back in 2017 that the left was pushing the bad weather agenda to sell batteries and bottled water. Liberals were trying to push the market for survival supplies. 

All of this was announced with great certainty without a shred of proof. How do we know? We just know. 

We also know that science has predicted a rise in category four and five hurricanes. The kind that crush entire cities and cause catastrophic damage. The folks who came up with these whimsical notions are from places like NASA, a notoriously untrustworthy group. All those fake moon landings, don'tcha know. Once again, just like the so-called "pandemic," we are being aske by Big Science to cower in fear. And buy batteries and water. 

From inside a television studio, this all sure looks like manipulation. Conspiracy of the ugliest kind. Everyone knows that if our reality is going to be manipulated it should be in the service of a twice-impeached former game show host. Still, the Pinhead was kind enough to acknowledge the existence of the "legitimately large hurricane barreling toward the Gulf Coast of Florida." It would seem that the existence of satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts are not currently on the chopping block. Instead, we are left to believe that the FBI was behind the January 6 Insurrection and Obama and Hillary are responsible for the hurricane business that aids them in their sales of batteries and bottled water. 

Severe weather is a leftist plot to get us all to believe that the climate is changing. Sleep tight, Gulf Coast, spake the Pinhead. There's nothing to worry about. Except maybe the continued presence of the Pinhead on your television set.