Saturday, June 21, 2014

the downside of living with a fortess mentality...

Some disturbing numbers, bought and paid for, and in the "0h shit" department...

For a time I used to live on the beach right at the line that separates Venice Beach from Marina Del Rey. It was mostly a pretty great place to live.

If you noticed the qualifier "mostly" that's because we were burgled quite a bit so the whole coming home to find your stereo, TV, and anything else not nailed down missing sometimes dampened the mood. In the year we lived there we were burgled seven or eight time. To answer the next question of "why didn't you move?" it was simply that we were poor college students living beyond our means so breaking the lease and losing our deposits would have been financially crippling.

I mention this because having some up close and personal experience with crime, I seem to surprise a lot of people because I'm not phobic about the whole cruising and crime thing. Which is not to say I don't keep an ear open to places to avoid, listen to my spidey-sense when it goes in to "Danger Will Robinson" mode, and pay attention to situational awareness prompts.

I may not be phobic but, then again, Mom didn't exactly raise a fool either.

The last couple of days we've been rowing past a cruising boat on our way to the dinghy dock. Every time we get near them I can feel my hackles rise, my spidey-sense doing it's "Danger, danger, Will Robinson" in my head, and I find myself rowing in a dogleg around them while my situational awareness alarm is whispering accident waiting to happen and all because of the signs that festoon the boat...


Really, is this any way to live?

Sadly, I firmly believe that we mostly tend to find what we expect to find and those with very negative expectations get just that. Call it a harmonic feedback thing... I expect every villain on this island is tuned to the same harmonic scale and vibrating away like a tuning fork on steroids.

Anyway, something to think about.

Listening to Billy Bragg

So it goes...