Things I Know For Sure (at 5:00 a.m., Monday, September 22, 2008).
I don’t know much, but I can tell you this: when you wake up to the sounds of someone trying to get into your house through your bathroom window just before 3:45 a.m., the number of police officers you have to let in and out, coupled with the number of lights you have to turn on, added to your need to stop and spell-check the e-mail you write to your landlord about it (because you know that your facility with language is diminished when you are tired), makes it very difficult indeed to easily fall back to sleep when you’re finished.
It was probably just a drunk guy who got locked out of his apartment and was trying to get back in, but who was so drunk that he mistook my bathroom window for his own. Happens to the best of us, I’m sure. No one could get into my house through a window if they wanted to, without breaking one, at least, and I don’t think anyone really wants to get in here anyway.
So the guy leading the meditation this Sunday* talked for a while about the “impermanence of sound”, and so now I’m thinking about that, and about the fact that if I had been sleeping more deeply, I might not have heard any sounds at all, and instead slept right through the time when someone was attempting to get in through my bathroom window. I can’t decide right now whether that’s a good thing or a bad one. (Maybe the important lesson is that things can be good, bad, or neither good nor bad. Perhaps this whole episode is neutral.)
The other thing that I can tell you for sure is that there is no one online to chat with at 4:30 a.m. I mean, there are, likely, but not people I know and want to chat with. Even the people on the West Coast are asleep.
There are all sorts of other things I could tell you now, not having written here since Tuesday, but further blog entries may just have to wait until I have found a new place to live. I had intended to make some progress on that front this weekend, but instead spent my weekend doing other, more pleasurable things, things which I shall not recount here except to say that I had McDonald’s for breakfast on Sunday, and having breakfast at McDonald’s always makes me glad, particularly if I have a companion (even a begrudging one).
_____
*Yes, I went again. It’s like a thing I do now. Get over it.
Goethe wrote:
Did they clap the malefactor in irons? Cart him off in the paddywaggon? Are charges being preferred?
Goethe
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 2:50 pm | Permalink
Jennifer M wrote:
That would have required, um, catching him. Or her. I’m trying to convince myself it was actually a raccoon, and not a human being of either gender, because that somehow makes me feel better, as denial tends to do.
J
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 2:54 pm | Permalink
False Fable wrote:
If only there was some kind of window-barrier system, such as BARS. The kind of thing that was previously requested, and nothing was done about.
Oh, wait.
Posted on 24-Sep-08 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
Jennifer M wrote:
FF,
I guess you don’t need a codename anymore, eh?
The thing about the bars is that they go both ways: a) they make you safer, b) they make you remember every single moment that you are inside your home that you live in a place where you are made safer by bars on your windows.
So I don’t really want them, but that’s partially me rationalizing, because I know I’ll never get them. If I were somehow allowed them, I’m quite sure that I would get some cut-rate bars that would, say, jam closed during a fire.
However, a nice alarm system that would alert the police for me when someone was trying to get a window open would be nice.
J
Posted on 24-Sep-08 at 9:11 pm | Permalink