“You’re gonna lose everything you have. Mark my words.” This was the prediction I shared with Tim, my neighbor. You see, Tim was just another Portland douche bag, software engineer, 46 year old fat ass liberal, had a Subaru covered in Grateful Dead stickers and life affirming politically correct slogans. Very anti-racist, SJW, you know the type. He was also a classically trained violinist. Sometimes in the summer I’d share a beer with him out in the driveway, and question him about different things involving music theory. Why is the D suspended 4 chord suspended? Oh, you omit the third....
Late last summer, he paid off his house, quit his job, and started doing meth.
He got skinny, shaved his head, and went off the rails into a paranoid fantasy world. Almost overnight, he became a screaming, ranting, fucking lunatic. The old Tim died. He’s long gone. Two things I’ve learned from first hand observations are, when people go nuts on meth, there’s no turning back. That, and people who start doing the shit later in life, are never equipped to handle it, and will always lose everything they have.
So, now his yard is filled knee deep in trash and junk, over 6 feet high in some of the piles. His Subaru is long gone. His hipster friends are long gone. His house is tore all apart, in a never ending search for government listening devices.
And the vultures of this city finally caught his scent.
The dindus showed up a little over a week ago. Blacks never used to touch meth. I mean, they just didn’t fuck with it at all. According to someone I know, the reasons they started doing meth was the low quality of cocaine, and the availability of meth. So, now the dindu’s are tweakin’. This ain’t good news. They ain’t sleepin’ in til noon anymore. They’re 24 hours a day now.
One night last week, I wake up to the sound of Tim on the receiving end of a beat down. “Oh god! Stop hitting me! Oh! Oh! You’re killing me! Oh my god!” I am hoping that Tim finally earns his place in heaven. He’s a pain in the ass to live next to. I’ve been extremely patient in dealing with his abuse, but even my patience has it’s limits.
I rise to go out on my porch and see some violence. Cops are there now, and poor little Timmy is throwing a tantrum, “He won’t leave my house! This is my property!” But the cops are sick of him too. They’ve been yelled at and insulted enough times by Timmy, always with the admonition “This is my property!”
The dindu very calmly tells the police that he is a tenant who pays monthly rent to live there. Good enough for them. Tim is booked for trespassing and advised he may contact eviction court if he wishes. That’ll take 6 months.
But wait. Early Friday morning, around 4am as I pull into my driveway, I see Tim and a war party of white tweakers celebrating in the front yard. They were drinking beer, and laughing, even burning torches. This party of mercenaries took back the castle. Of course, mercenaries can help you take a castle, but not keep it.
Saturday morning, the dindu slipped in under the moat and caught Tim alone, and asleep. Beat him with a metal pipe, then called the police and had him hauled away for trespassing, and domestic violence to boot.
I already introduced myself to the new neighbor. He’s from Seattle, just like me, only a couple years younger. “Dathan” is his name. He has a dead eye from taking a bullet there. I think we understand each other ok. See, he’s only a temporary neighbor, but his presence helps my goal in the long run. Don’t ever fuck with my house or my family, and I won’t kill you. That’s all we can ask for in a neighbor now days, it’s sad to say.
Alienation Nation: Surviving Cultural Free Fall
Psychotic episodes worry me, but only as "appalled bystander". Greater than the fear of personal danger is disgust at the physical ravages. A classmate in junior school had a giant blackhead on his nostril. You could have seen it unaided from the Moon. Even now, many, many years later, I still think the world would have been a better place if he'd just squeezed it and relieved my tension.
It's the esthetics of rotting alive that is The Horror!
Have you read the Burning City duology by Jerry Pournelle and Niven? It is a quite normal fantasy story taking place in ancient America, but the social structure is somewhat familiar:
Here is the description from Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_City
"the Lords, the ruling class, who live in a separate area of the town; the kinless, essentially a slave class forbidden to carry weapons, descendants of a people conquered by the allied ancestors of the Lords and the Lordkin; and the Lordkin, proud, uneducated, undisciplined and indolent knife fighters organised into street gangs, who live by "gathering" whatever they wish from the kinless. The Lords supervise the kinless and placate the Lordkin. The kinless are unarmed and untrained in the use of weapons, and cannot resist the Lordkin. Some leave the town, but the surrounding vegetation is malevolent. The town is the base of a fire god, Yangin-Atep, who possesses the Lordkin every few years to burn the town down and rape any kinless woman they can catch.
The main character, Whandall, is an 11-year-old Lordkin boy severely beaten unto scarring and broken bones by Lordsmen (police) for associating with a Lord girl and illegally entering the segregated Lord's Hills. As an adult he becomes a product of his culture — a thief, a rapist, and a murderer, but, strangely, not without regret, not without honor, and not without the reader's sympathy. "
Kinless wear neckties as a sign of slavery. Lords have a small, but disciplined group of soldiers/police who keep the whole circus where they want it. If I remember right, there was also an intelligence/secret police group disguised as lumberjacks.
In Warsaw Pact countries that kind of SF stories critisizing the system in disguise was quite popular. When I understood what Pournelle was doing, I saw that the situation in USA is - quite surprisingly familiar.
To Baduin's comment, "Ex New Yorker" has interesting comments about informers, student loans and the dystopia that awaits.
stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2017/11/his-name-is-alexander-wroblewski.html?m=0