A Few Small Things

[ateolf]

Was getting pretty frustrated yesterday with my laptop's trackpad being all glitchy (even after cleaning it and restarting my computer). So far, coming back today it maybe (inexplicably) seems back to normal? But I've only been using it for a second so I'm probably jinxing it. Also yesterday, I enjoyed using the hot water bottle on my neck/shoulder. Mary Beth and I did our Fresh Market run during the ol' lunch break. Given all the external work being done on the buildings these past couple of weeks, we were a little worried that our landlord was just getting things ready to sell off. Our neighbor called our landlord yesterday and just straight up asked and he said definitely not. So that's about as good as an assurance as we can get so it was at least a relief to us and Mary Beth got a bit less stressed about it. At night, we happened to be outside on the deck enjoying the weather and a neighbor from down the street came by screaming (an angry scream "FUCK!" not a terrified scream or anything like that) and she saw us and started telling us about her food delivery just getting jacked by someone. Then she was telling us about the mansion across the street being occupied by squatters and she was blaming them for it. Hearing about the squatters I guess clears some things up. And that the guy who had lived there before had died. (And her narrative wasn't even definitive, but peppered with "I think", etc.) But this big mansion (well, big house, small mansion, I guess...and this is the old one, not the new mcmansion) across the street has had people over there and they make fires in the yard at night sometimes and there are never any lights on or anything, it's the one that a few months back had the generator going constantly almost 24/7 for a few months solid. I guess it would make sense that there are people squatting there. Also, I don't care about squatting, I think it's a good thing in a world with so many unoccupied residences and homeless people. Also, I mean, maybe it was someone from there that stole her food, but she didn't actually know and that part was just an accusation because she obviously doesn't like the fact that they're squatters. But I dunno, anyway, now it's time to start my "Friday."

Comments

[ifjuly]

this is one of those things were you can see in action tech opaquely, quasi-invisibly encouraging and (distortively, at first anyway) boosting fascistic social thinking, frankly. reading those next door-type threads (she mentioned the very one that that day had caught everyone's attention--i don't even fucking go on those things and i heard about it anyway!--and you could tell the linkage in her mind was because of it) is awful, always has been. and you can tell it's the way having these very platforms do what they do, it's this sleight of hand rendering everybody a little individual-minded HOA without thinking it through deeply or allowing any thoughtful kind of veto/self-questioning reflection. kind of like how all these goddamn doorbell cams in a blink got everyone mindlessly on board in an active way with the online surveillance state thing.

and gah this is also so entwined to me with the depressing mayoral/local election thing, and the whole periodic alert to think more decisively about living here wake up call thing (and the way this neighborhood has become very clearly more polarized, with the "nicest"/most moneyed drifting farther and farther from the "lowest", the space between them growing all the time--nothing here was as numerously and overtly soulessly "manicured" 15 years ago, but there also wasn't the relentless/inescapable horrifying degree and volume of open economic degradation alongside). i really don't know, i continue to fight despair that majority visible memphians are going to keep falling for it, getting scareder and scareder of its effects without recognizing the real root cause and just being convinced by said actual cause through optics (poor people not poverty conditions), to their own peril, and falling and falling...