love thy neighborhood.

Funny how a neighborhood can change.A turn of a valve and your world is floating.
A little long time ago I lived in Cabbagetown which back then was a run down community on the wrong side of the tracks in Atlanta. On Saturday nights the rowdys on the corner would fight with shovels and picks. No fooling, it was like watching a live performance of "Braveheart".There were blood feuds that went back generations and in the heat of summer nights blood would flow freely on Berean st.
The combatants couldn't have cared less for the new arrivals to the neighborhood. We were like just plain old Palestinians amongst the waring factions of Hamas and Fatah. Stay out of the way and you won't get hurt.
This was the only neighborhood I've ever seen where crack heads would steal 90lb bags of cement (estimated value $5.00)off of someone's porch and lug them off down the street to some deranged fence who specialized in worthless overweight swag.
Over time the old mill families were over run by brave young yuppies that knew a hip new location when they saw one. The shotgun shacks sprouted second stories and burst forth with bright designer colors overwhelming the dingy old white clapboards.
The police and higher rent cleared out the old timers leaving a cute in-town neighborhood.
Then came the C.S.X. rail yard at the north end of the hood. There was always a rail yard at the north end. Hell this was the rail yard that caught fire in "Gone with the Wind" and burnt Atlanta to the ground.But it was a quiet rail yard till C.S.X came in with their grand plan. A transfer yard where thousands of trucks could pick up thousands of trailers that came in on trains.Brilliant!
The new Cabbageheads lost their minds. All the trucks and trains and giant cranes and nonstop 24 hour a day crashing and banging which sounded like the soundtrack to a Godzilla VS. Mothra movie was going to seriously bring down their home values.
Well Duh... you live in a inner city neighborhood next to a century old established transportation line. It might get noisy. What did Sam Kinison say...."Don't live in the fucking desert!" You want quiet move to Snellvile.
Of course there are always surprises to every neighborhood.
In Florida we did a sex offender search of our area and learned that there were 45 predators within a five mile radius of our happy home. Zoiks! lock up the livestock.
And sometimes you find you yourself as the agent of chaos in an otherwise happy block.
In the summer of '88 we, which is to say most of the members of our very loud psychedelic reggae band lived in a quiet corner of Little Five Points in an enormous forest green house on the corner of streets I cannot remember....It was the best of times... We were benign as neighbors I thought at the time. Well ok, we did practice in the house some times and did keep very late hours with an odd assortment of people coming and going at any given moment.
Our neighbor was a business journalist from France named Sophie. There were other neighbors but they never really interacted with us and rarely came out of their homes, at least not during our business hours.
Sophie would acknowledge us, gazing at us like she was witnessing a time warp to a hairier, freer time. We missed much of the Reaganomic revolution she was reporting on.
She finally snapped during our big Little Rascals moment when we found a pile of scaffolding in the basement and thought "Hey these look like amplifier towers. ya know like at Woodstock...Hey kids, lets put on a show." In the vacant sunken lot next to the house we built a subterranean amphitheater complete with 15 foot high towers for the p.a. and all invisible from the street. We put on a day long festival of music, love and happiness, well except for Sophie who was beyond pissed. She called the cops. They told her as long as we stopped the music by 6:00p.m. we could play all day. We had the forethought to hire an off duty cop that put us in square with all the working blues. So for 7 hours we had a grand performance complete with naked dancers and a scandalous amount of fun. During a break in playing we met Sophie up at street level. She crossed the street with her arms flailing. "What the hell is wrong with you people? You don't belong in the city. You need to be in the country where you can be uncivilized all you want."
She was not expecting such madness in such a quaint location.
But there you go, some things you can figure. Living next to Wrigley Field. Living above an Hawaiian drum school.Living in Carteret N.J. Life is going to be loud and sometimes smelly depending on which way the wind is blowing or how bad the Cubs are playing.
Life in a flood plain is a guarantee that sooner or later the creek is going to rise and the river is going to get up out it's banks and just meander all over the place. If it's where you live you gotta love it. No place is perfect (San Diego was burning like Hell last time I was there)so you best make peace with where you are and love it like home.
"Ah Loki, was Wisconsin all that bad?"

The Basic Skill.

Woah! That first draft was WAY too big. Anytime Cleveland, Dinosaurs, Cod fish and some asshole on the Dan Ryan expressway make it into the same blog you know you might have to focus a bit tighter on what the hell it is your trying to say....try again.
I'm still upset about Fred. Despite the coordinated efforts of a half dozen vets and hours upon hours of research on the Net and hundreds of people praying, Fred didn't make it. We know so little about what makes us tick and sometimes have no answers when our bodies break down. It is a humbling experience to have no control over the fate of a loved one.We care and love and learn through these times so that we may become more skilled at living a good and graceful life.

The basic skill of of caring and nurturing for what we love is a skill we still struggle with as a species.
War and killing we have down to a science. Hell on a good day we could wipe out almost everyone...at least back in the good old days before nuclear disarmament.
It's funny how hard we struggle to keep people housed and fed and healthy sometimes barely pulling it off and yet we can kill people half way round the world by remote control. I guess it is harder to make a life than it is to take a life.
Nobody said this was going to be easy but I am positive if we put our minds and hearts together we can become as skilled at living as we are at dying.
I've heard it said today that it is a dangerous world we live in. Very true.
I also believe the world is what we make it and I know we have the skills to make it a better place.
Amigos,I'm all for trying.