Wrong apartment

[read "wrong trousers post below first]

In case anyone looking for lamb sweatpants wonders, I live in a rather spacious, but way-too-dark studio apartment, in a borderline-bad part of town, and my windows all face an alley, with another building blocking all the sun.

I moved here when I got a job at a local nonprofit, and most of the apartments were occupied by dot-com boomers, so this is what was open. I should have moved when the crash happened and everyone left town, but I was waiting, waiting, waiting for my ship to come in.

My ship has come in, but it needs the bilge scrubbed, so I'm staying here for awhile. I'm very tempted to invest in LIGHTS to transform this dark apartment, and maybe some furniture instead of what I scrounged from the streets and building basement, but why invest in a place I want to leave ?! I must save my money for scrubbing the bilge of the ship that has come for me.

p.s. the saddest part is not the crackheads outside, but the fact that several houseplants, including one nice ficus tree, have died because it's too dark in here. My spirit has withered with the plants, but soon enough my bilge will be clean.

Wrong Trousers !

prologue: web stats indicates someone has found my site (think-local.com) by using the search terms "lamb sweatpants"
===============================
Sorry to bore you with this, but Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B. is Love.Angel.Music.Baby, her first solo album. Boy am I out of the loop -- I thought the hit song was fun, but L.A.M.B. sounds kinda 13-year-old girl to me... or maybe 10-11 year-old girl.

That's probably who found my site using "lamb sweatpants." Someone with lots of time on their hands.

Knowing 10 year-old girls could be randomly visiting my site, should I put up something subversive ? It would have to involve "lamb sweatpants." There's something very not right about 10 year-old girls visiting my site looking for lamb sweatpants.

Can I create a picture of George Bush beating up a girl who's wearing lamb sweatpants? If I did that, would Gwen Stefani's attorneys come and kick my ass ?

I suppose I could just post the text of this email, and get 10,000 hits ?!

Rain, Rain, wash away

Several days of rain have lifted much oil, grease, urine, vomit, and feces from the streets. They look almost clean enough to eat off of. Some of the homeless are crawling out from wherever they weathered the soggy Christmas. Some of them look a little fresher, like maybe they even managed to find a room and shower. Some of them look the same, like they just curled up under a corner and still carry the exudate of living in thick layers about their persona.

Shopkeeper killed

A Yemeni shopkeeper was killed this past week, in a store a couple of blocks over. More joys of the Tenderloin. ugh. Actually, gunplay is fairly rare here, in spite of all the drug dealers and buyers.

You never know whether the killer and victim knew each other, but the circumstances often suggest some prior relationship. It was not a robbery -- the assailant came in, shot the guy and left.

Usually, there is very little threat of physical violence here; just nonviolent drug dealing, prostitution, and crackheads who will steal anything not nailed down. I would hate to be a shopkeeper here. Slime always wanders in from the street to pilfer or ask an unsavory favor, like cashing questionable checks. I guess there are enough good people in the neighborhood to keep the shops going -- they don't stand out as much as the people loitering on corners, because they move from point A to point B quickly.