The Sound of Warring Dogs Shall Never Cease
In light of recent events pertaining to the neighbourhood dog-owning gangsta menace I spoke about in the entry Two Dogs Go To War, it is time for an update on this most pugnacious of neighbours.
I witnessed the following scene. It was a Saturday afternoon, and our hero was in the park behind my apartment, yelling. This time he was calling his biggest dog, Naya, a “bitch”—technically a not-incorrect exclamation, but lacking in rhetorical oomph when said by a human to a dog, maybe? Also, he was telling her to “shit, now!” He said the word “now” as an affected “nah!”, the way a true Southern baller would say it. Our man is a player, yes indeed.
An old guy in a bright blue golf shirt stumbled outside and began yelling at gangsta-boy to pick up his dogs’ crap. Gangsta, in riposte, instructed him to apply suction to his engorged genitalia. And with that, it began. You know how in baseball the manager doesn’t agree with the call and storms out of the dugout after the umpire, and they both stand there yelling at each other at the same time, as in actually speaking concurrently and not listening each other at all? It was that sort of an argument. The old man had sort of a frail, rickety voice, and the gangsta was in full-bore thuggishness, waving his arms in all kinds of configurations of feigned menace. The old man hadn’t a chance. He gave up and went inside, but gangsta-boy kept vocally keeping it real. Finally, he turned around towards his dogs, and with a low, laggardly limp forward, he said, I swear to you he said to ab-so-lutely no-one:
“Crazier than Slim Shady his-self, bitch!”
There are no longer two dogs warring, either. There are three, and possibly four dogs now. But more importantly, there is now more than gangsta! One day, the yells sounded different. At first I didn’t notice, but when I caught on that the thuggish growl had been replaced by a bassy, more boisterous shouting, and then joined by a second shouter, I took notice. Out the window were two different gentlemen, a bit taller, a bit more scary-looking, playing with the dogs in the yard. They yell louder than our original hero, but they lack the swagger. Apart from that these are friends of his, I have no idea who they are or why they like to yell as much and as loudly as the OG does. Would the real Slim Shady please stand up?
So, with summer coming on, I was worried. Last summer was not only uncomfortably humid, but was marked by a distinct Slim Shady presence at three in the morning. There was simply never any other way for Slim to be. He was going to walk his dogs in the park and yell at them, and that’s the reality of this neighbourhood. There aren’t options when you’re dealing with a real gangsta. He wants to go out and decorate the air with recycled lines from The Eminem Show, and I want to sleep between the hours of approx. 12 AM to 7 AM, and one of us is going to lose. I expected it to be me.
But Fate, perhaps not such a fan of the yelling herself, had other plans for Slim Shady.
I spent this particular day in my apartment, cooking. As I stood over the kitchen counter chopping root vegetables, noises were beginning to emerge from outside. The noises were unfamiliar. They were voices, yes, but not the usual ones. I wasn’t near the window; nothing was clear. Before long, loud screams began to overpower the chops of my kitchen knife. Outside were two guys sitting in the corner of the park on lawn chairs. They had enormous beards and rather shabby dress, both of them. I assumed homeless. Also they were drinking out of paper bags, unironically. The screams were at each other, the screams of cheap drink.
Nothing to worry about, I thought. The screams subsided for a time, until the sound of a radio emerged. They were having a Sunday afternoon beer picnic in the 10m x 10m dog-doodoo-filled park behind my place. Good for them. I kept cooking, and an hour later I looked outside and they were still there, slumped in their lawn chairs moaning drunkenly to each other and listening to something Steppenwolf-y.
But then… a familiar voice Crip-walked its way through the din. Oh dip, son! It’s Slim! And where his dogs is at? Right with him of course. And he got right into the task at hand, which was as always, the task of yelling at great volume for absolutely no reason.
With a few things going on the stove, I paid them no mind. The voices rose and fell to the rhythm of strong drink, none of them louder than my bubbling Dutch oven and cranked-up stereo. Things progressed as usual until I heard a very loud scream. Not a scream of fear or distress, but of anger. A battle wail. After that was lots of loud cursing. Then: all four dogs barking. Not a playful bark. A violent, territorial bark, in a way they’d never barked before. I ran over to the window.
The two homeless guys were standing and waving pointed fingers. Slim was on the prowl. He was storming around the park in feigned indignation, not going anywhere in particular but simply walking in an errant circle with his trademark thug-swagger, thrusting his arms every which way. And of course, yelling. One of the homeless guys had either thrown something at him or hit him, I couldn’t tell. But Slim had a bee in his FUBU hoodie, for sure. He continued to pace and flail his arms wildly.
Then Slim disappeared and took the dogs with him.
I went back to cooking. A few minutes later, I heard “I’m gonna kill you! I’m coming back here to kill you, asshole! You hear me?” It wasn’t Slim’s voice, though.
I looked out the window again. Two cops were taking the homeless guys away.
They disappeared out of sight for a bit, and then the cops came back for Slim. They stood on the front steps of Slim’s building and questioned him. I listened. He was too far away for me to hear every word, but I definitely heard Slim say that he “minds his business” and “doesn’t start shit” when he’s outside with the dogs, and that these guys threatened him. Oh ho ho. Believe me, it took every ounce of energy in my body not to lean out the window and yell “buuuuull-shiiiit!” like the fans do when the ref makes a bad call. Slim leaned forward and the cops started searching in his hair (?). They talked some more and suddenly Slim stormed off in anger (??!). One of the cops must have said something he didn’t like. Neither of the cops followed him; instead, they walked away, laughing. Yes, Slim told off a couple of cops and they didn’t do a thing about it. I stood at my window in a stupor. The scene had unfolded before me in a kind of dream sequence, rendered in an impressionistic haze. I was unsure of what I’d seen, unsure of anything. Interpretations were impossible. It was like choosing ten words at random from the dictionary and trying to mash them together into a sentence.
But days and then weeks went by, and I noticed Slim wasn’t around so much. The yelling decreased, as did the barking and the general kerfuffle outside my window. Then it stopped outright. I started to forget about Slim, and even miss him. One day, I looked out into the park where a mysterious sign had emerged. It was not attached to the fence but stuck on a post right smack in the center of the park where you couldn’t miss it. And what did that sign say?
“Terrain privé — pas de chiens!” (”Private property — no dogs!”)
It’s gonna be a great summer.
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The Textheavy Days
Mere words cannot express how much I miss Fireland. I don’t even miss Josh. Screw that guy. He shares a birthday with me but what’s that amount to in beers? Five. What I miss is myself enjoying Fireland and watching the designs change every week. I miss what Fireland means, not only in the sociopolitical context in which we find ourselves, but in the ways we web-folk once strove to achieve that Firelandic holism, that feeling of sinking into a body of text set in a periwinkle colour scheme and never wanting to come up for air. The me who could not comprehend the brilliance of the mind behind the Fireland FAQ is not the same me, though the brilliance remains unsolved. Those were heady times. Blogs weren’t all that interesting back then, but they were new. Today, blogs are still that, but Fireland is beyond trends, for that would imply Fireland is subject to the circumscriptions of time. Fireland is the best website ever made by a Josh, and the Josh in question is marriedsville now so he’ll probably write about gas grills and universal remotes and joint custody instead of people choking the shit out of each other with their words while Jesus watches. Please consider this my message to Josh, wherever he is. These are Desperate Hours, and they don’t taste so good anymore.
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De Retour
Boiled potatoes, apartments to let, black iron gates and brick smokestacks, steak and kidney pie, tap water, Anglicans, Methodists, heathens, buzz, unrelenting expense, sweet corn, chavs, Camden t-shirt vendors, chicken tikka masala and Cobra Beer, bog-standards, hefty coinage, Industrial tenement hangover, the spindly disembodied “Mind The Gap!” at Paddington, soot, rugger, 3 PM drunkenness, oak, foodcake-shaped cars, unkempt trainyards, ledges, streams, punts, shires, swains with hair spiked in the front, kebab for take-away, footie, Borough Market, grammatical whispers, bodies, sidelong glances, and 800-year-old everything—that’s what my trip to England was like.
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