Yesterday Dom came into town to photograph WWI veterans’ memorials. Acting as his guide I decided to take him to some obscure 19th Century plantation graveyards lost and forgotten in the midst of the subsidized ruins, where he was able to get some photos from which he may select a graphic for our upcoming Hemavore book. The highlight of the day was standing over Sergeant Gunther’s grave, the last man killed in combat in WWI, in the last minute of the war; a man who was against the war and who was sent to the front from his clerical post as punishment for writing a letter to a friend telling him what a nightmare it was in the trenches.
Dom decided to give a lady friend of mine a lift to work. As we were driving across town she said, “This is so sweet of you. Yesterday when Haley and I were out walking these four younger teenagers—three black boys and a white boy—began yelling curses and threats at us and following us. Haley picked up a rock and we ducked into the liquor store to buy some longneck bottles to fight with. They were messing with the two wrong women.”
Fortunately for Ellen and Haley the ‘innocent unarmed teenagers’ backed off. Had they defended themselves with their makeshift weapons surely Chief All Sharptongue and the DOJ goons would have descended on Overlea in force…
A few hours later after our boxing and stick session at the dojo was done, Reggie, a lawyer, originally from New York, stopped in to train and spent his warm up time talking to us about how nice it was to speak to human beings after spending all day with his reptilian fellows at the courthouse speaking their automatonous dialect.
Just before we left a young lady entered—always an occurrence of interest in this sweaty den of masculinity. Andrea, a sales rep dressed like she was filming a Saint Pauli Girl commercial, and noticeably over-equipped to fulfill the ogled role, stopped in to see the proprietor. Unable to answer the young lady’s questions as to the advertising needs of my superior I did assure her with a wink that he would be more than glad to make her acquaintance. She smiled with pursed lips and gave her sales assets a flotational heft, “Tits sure do help!”
“In a just world, no, but in my world yes,” I opined. After shaking hands with the young damsel as Dom tried not to laugh at my Santa Claus as pimp shtick, we headed out into the unjust world to enjoy the evening, beginning with a trip to Dick’s Halfway Inn, where it appears Andrea’s older sister had found a job behind the bar, earning far above her IQ with similar appeals to my Neanderthal proclivities.
It is interesting, after writing so much about the feminization of America on the media level, and having recently been so saturated with those fictional values during the recent weekend spent out of town with relatives in TV Land, that the women I run into in my daily life want to be protected and desired by respectful men and are fine navigating life along that axis. This continued at the next bar we visited after parking his car at my place.
On the way to the bar and the pizzeria we walked past a crack house that has been in steady use for at least 4 years. It was suffering its annual bust with three cop cars clearing out residents, all middle aged whites. Many of these people have recently been mugged and beaten by the four ‘innocent unarmed black teens’ that hang on the corner across from the ATM, and who watched this process with a look of studied melancholy, like a house cat who sees the goldfish being removed from his fishing bowl.
After a discussion of our Hemavore project and a few beers, we grabbed a pizza and headed home just as darkness fell, past the corner boys and the crack house. The four ‘innocent unarmed black teens’ were watching us as one yelled questioning threats at Dom and I. They did not cross the street or follow.
Then, out of the crack house, scampered one of my middle aged white trash neighbors, the Joe Dirt-looking blonde guy who used to yell at his girlfriend when she’d lock him out whenever he came home stoned. He now gets his dope, brings it home, and then gets stoned, so that he does not have to sleep in the yard, which I suppose is a kind of behavior evolution. This however, was not to be. A cop car followed him up the side street past us and stopped him. The cop in the passenger seat got out, searched him, cuffed him, and stuffed him, and off they drove into the night, back to wherever the Northeastern District Police, were stacking up all these non-violent drug possession dangers to society.
Of course, the ‘innocent unarmed black teens’ who rundown, beat, and rob these menaces were not even questioned by the cops, not told that they are not permitted to stand on the church steps across from the ATM and yell threats at passersby. This brought me to a moment of reflection. Dom and I had been discussing predation in terms of horror writing. Although we American Bots are conditioned through the media to regard this middle aged white trash loser who simply wants to smoke his dope in the basement as the greatest threat to civilization since Genghis Khan, I saw no civilization.
What did I see?
I saw numerous watering holes clustered together in the midst of hundreds of lairs and dens.
Between four of these watering holes—including the poison one that Joe Dirt scampered away from like a small skittish ungulate—perched the minor predators who prey upon the old, the sick, the wounded [numerous older people dependent on canes have been robbed and beaten by these guys this summer] the weak, the young, the females.
As the skittish prey animal nervously exited the kill zone of the jackal-like teens on the corner the apex predators swooped in—bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, better armed and efficiently organized.
It seems to be a healthy functioning ecosystem—a self propagating circle of lies. I don’t, however, think it is what Will Durant had in mind as he charted the ‘ascent of civilization’.
