Atomictumor

“You better start locking stuff”

Thats what the ladyfriend (still no name) told me the other day.  See, I’ve always been pretty unafraid of crime, on account of I’m a big guy trained in like 400 different ninja arts, and while I lock the house at night (uh, except for most of the summer because the door swelled up and the lock would latch and I couldn’t be arsed to do much about it) with the deadbolt, I usually leave it unlocked during the day.

Thing is, tho, in the last year, it seems that the crime in this town is getting a higher profile.  Most recently, there was a stabbing and carjacking a few blocks away from my house.  While it looks like the thing happened in a part of town known for having a rotating collection of ricers parked out front, and there are good odds that there was a relationship of sorts between the stabber and the stabbee, this, along with a recent murder, a heist and kidnapping at a local pizza place and a summer full of this kinda stuff, (like a drive-by shooting near a friends house in a sleepy elderly neighborhood which apparently isn’t good enough to make the news) has me wondering.

I wouldn’t say concerned, necessarily.  I think, pound for pound, this town is much safer than most around us, including Knoxville and Clinton, tho I don’t have any numbers to back it up. I don’t feel an air of menace when I go about my daily business.

The conversation came up with the lady and myself were at one of my favorite places in town, a small tiny little wooded park next to the Museum of Science and Energy one night about 8 PM.  We had just had a great date, a dinner out at Applebees, which I normally eschew on general principle (yes, I’m snobby) but found to be mighty damn tasty anyway, and I wanted to take her to the little wood thing to sit around on a picnic bench and chat.

No, we weren’t making out.  I’m too old for that, and besides, I own my own house.

I digress.

As we were sitting around, the only people in the little grove, cuddled up next to each other, a jeep drove by shining a spotlight on us.  I saw the rack of lights on top, and realized it was one of the security marshalls, so I waved at him.  I intended the wave to communicate “hi there, nice to see you. we’re fine here.  all adults, no alcohol, no drugs, no deviant behavior. please stop shining your big light on us and have a nice day” and I think it did a pretty good job, because the jeep didn’t stop, it just slowly kept driving.  The spotlight moved down the woods.

And then moved back on us, as the jeep turned down another road, still shining its bright ass light directly on us.

At this point, we were discussing our ‘dealing with the law’ techniques.  The lady is more of a “yes sir” kinda gal, and I’m more of a “is this breaking any posted laws, sir” kinda guy, so we agreed that I’d do the talking when the jeep inevitably stopped, but it just kept slowly moving, shining a bright ass light.  Finally, it left.

And then it came back, 5 minutes later.

We found out later, or rather she did, that they’ve stepped up patrols in that little grove because apparently, in my little favorite place, some kid got his head cracked open by some other kid.

I keep telling myself that this stuff happens everywhere, and its just modern living.  I don’t feel insecure, but I wonder how much of that is me just not WANTING to feel insecure.

Besides, I know ninja moves.

Only a year or two after it started up, Oak Ridge’s online mind has melted down.

Several of the local blogs have been inactive for months or just outright shut down.  The online forums have become one sided pile-on’s, with people jumping on their favorite rants, throwing out few new ideas, or any kind of postive feedback.

Last year, I saw hope in it, that so many people in this normally fractious town are getting together on a common pedestal, disagreeing as necessary, but generally trying to get a point across.  Now I’m really just kinda seeing static.

Problem is, this reflects Oak Ridge’s mind as a whole.  The town has always been one, for the decade or so I’ve been here at least, to hunker down into camps, almost like the idiotic blue/red mentality that has hamstrung politics in this country for so long.  The same people who pile on board one topic are likely to pile on board another, unrelated one.  Is it because they just happen to keep agreeing?

Or is it the thinking that “My buddy wants this, so I’m going to want it too”?

One of the issues I see are that people are all set to leap together and work on something, whether it’s a senior center, a shopping center, a hotel, with a myopic focus on that one object, without ever working on the larger picture.  After the one object is achieved, or not, as the case may be, there’s no getting together in the aftermath to try to figure out how the victory or defeat can be parlayed into something decent for the town.

Is there no deep thinking?  Is that the problem?

Or has everybody given up, burnt out on the work done for those previous victories and defeats, taking on a ‘fuck it’ attitude in the face of the immovable positions of both of the camps.

See, thats what I was hoping the online thing would overcome.  Probably idealistic, but don’t all the good ideas sound idealistic?  A situation where class, or location, or history wouldn’t make a difference, where new ideas could pop out and take root?

Maybe the apathy wins out over idealism.

Stan Mitchell (who turns 30 today, happy birthday) and the Oak Ridge Observer put out their Top of the Ridge award in yesterdays copy of the paper, and damned if the Best Local Blog wasn’t Atomictumor.com.

Course, this may have something to do with it.

But still, its damn cool to get a little bit of local recognition out of this dumb little website. Thanks, Observer, and thanks to the people I paid to vote for me.

Right.

So there’s a grassroots movement by a group called “50 Plus Seniors Club” to get a senior center in Oak Ridge opened.  They have one now, mind, but its sharing an old POS building with the county clerk’s office, and a day care, and a few other things.  The building used to house part of Roane State, and when I attended the place a few years ago I noted that it had some walls, a floor, a roof, air conditioning, and some windows, but not much else. 

Sure, its not the Ritz.  Anyway, the seniors say it’s too small and unworkable, so they want another one.

They want to city to pay for it.  Because, well, thats what cities do, I guess.

What they’re planning on proposing to council is that the city pay for a building to be built specifically for the senior center over there near the civic center (which, it’s been pointed out, would be a great place for fitty plus to hang out) to the tune of “at least a few million dollars”.

Wow.  We have a city that’s prepared to throw a building together just to make a specific group of the population happy.  Thats pretty freakin sweet.

But wait… what happened back a few months ago?  I thought we had a “retail tax dilemma”?  Seems like I remember hearing something about how the city doesn’t need to go around writing bonds and dropping money for private (or semi-public) interests?  Wasn’t that the line back in the spring, when there were a whole lotta people out there beating down the idea of a new shopping center in town?

Now we’ve got all sorts of money to build a senior center?

Oh hell no.  No, noooo, no.  No.  No.  Thats the dumbest freakin idea I’ve ever heard.

Now, I know a lotta haters out there will be all like “AT HATES THE ELDERLY HES BAAAD”, but hell with it.  When I’m 70 maybe I’ll have a different think, but these people wanting the city to pay for their little freakin clubhouse, when they already have one at the city’s expense, are either senile or just plain stupid.

Go to the civic center, bitches.  Damn.  Somebody needs to…

I was a member of my high school marching band. I played the baritone and then the tuba. As far as high school marching bands go, we were OK. There were plenty worse and we even won an occasional competition. I can’t say that I enjoyed playing in the band. I was too worried about making a mistake to really have fun, but that’s beside the point.

I was thinking about these two guys who played saxaphone. One probably had some sense, but the other one was a real nimrod. He made it his task to school me in the ways of band from the very beginning. I bought into it for a little while, till I met some other folks and got on with my life.

What made me remember these two is the Confederate flag. They had one they liked to carry around and flourish on occasion. They usually brought it out on the bus ride home from away games when the teachers were too tired to care what was going on in the back of the bus. The zenith of their color guard was when they displayed the stars and bars from the hotel balcony in Daytona Beach where the band went for a competion. I looked up from pool side and there it flew with them right beside it.

If I didn’t know better, I’d figure that sort of flag waiving patriotism would stay in high school. I don’t get it. Sure there’s the occasional “south will rise again” bumper sticker (That sticker almost makes it seem like the South has erectile dysfunction.), but there’s something about hoisting the Rebel flag and waiving it. I don’t know. Evidently Old Miss University gave up waving the battle flag in 1983, but the state of Mississippi still flies the old battle flag.

Then there is the Warehouse Tavern here in Oak Ridge. They still fly the confederate flag. A friend of mine mentioned that he saw one flying there, but I had no idea it was on a pole, above Old Glory. Indeed.

Charles Bukowski writes that,

the only meaningful thing about

the South is that they lost

the Civil War and still can’t

accept it.

I wrote that line off to him being a crank, then I ran across the picture of the Warehouse Tavern in todays News Sentinel.

Maybe Bukowski is right.