Eminent Domain

9.4.2k9

I got the Movin'-In Blues.

My little wife, Ez and I moved into a little house in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles. It's a several steps up and to the side of our apartment which I continue to call "Broadway." (The new place is called "house.")

This part of Mar Vista (which I call "Sea View",) is mostly single-family homes and schools. Not a lot of markets or churches or busstops or, it seems, sidewalks. "House" is on a corner, and only one street edge of the two street edges has a sidewalk. Weird Beard. No lack of sidewalk will stop the denizens of Sea View from walking on the area a normal street-edge sidewalk would normally appear, though, and this has drawbacks: Ruffians in my yard!

Not that at this point in time it's much of a yard. The previous tenants didn't water it and there seems to have been a tree in the middle of it at some point and the only vestige of it is an oddly-shaped shallow hole. It's certainly not a lawn.

I was reclining in the living room Sunday and through the front door screen I saw a woman walk her dog through my yard ... she cut the corner of the sidewalk-side to the no-sidewalk-side pretty dramatically and came only a few feet from my door. I popped up and said, "Hel-lo?" To which she replied, "Hi," and went about her walk. I wanted to say, "I didn't say 'Hello,' you skank, I said, 'Hel-lo?' As in, "What the Hel-lo are you doing three feet from my front door? This ain't a public highway, you know."

So, with visions of a piranha-filled moat, concertina wire, claymore mines, a staked pitbull, punji sticks, vietcong-style mantraps and a good-old whitewashed picket fence danced in my head, I plan my strategy of dealing with the neighborhood in my yard. Stay tuned for developments.


Tonight - Annie's Social Club.


bye-ee!

whrr ... clik!