Deep Thoughts, A Code 3 Night, And The Last Sleep

Tuesday unfolding like a Geisha’s fan, revealing itself to us a pleat at a time after a cycle of police pursuits and crashes. We’ll admit, we succumbed to yesterday’s temperature, sunshine and our musical playlist – pondering deep questions like: “who added cowbell to rock songs?” and: “what’s the better lyric – ‘my brain is hanging upside down’ or ‘cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good?'”

Yes, we think about such things, along with how to re-wild our commitment to suburban sprawl and return city blocks to something useful, arable, and enriching? Mark Watney has nothing on us – we just hope we don’t have to fall back on his use of fertilizers.

Of course most of this is purely a mental exercise and fun, giving us a change to sketch out ideas and plans for gizmos that will never be built. It can be cool to loosen the reins on your inner Engineer/Architect/Landscape Designer and see what they come up with.

When we aren’t solving the world’s problems we’re busy doing what pays our bills mostly – tracking the day’s events, unraveling little mysteries and relating our findings in hopefully witty and charming ways to like-minded folks who favor knowing what’s going on in their neighborhoods and who don’t suffer from insomnia and Hyper-Active Mental Disorder.

The fruit of all this, unfortunately, is a morning spent re-tracing our path of the night before, bits of note paper marking our trail like breadcrumbs, bearing such cryptic notes to ourselves as: 230 U-Haul Safeway Texas? Beer & Tide 680 Solano End in Richmond.

Which translates in the light of day to: “2:30 a.m., suspects in a U-Haul truck with out of state plates stole liquor and detergent product from the Lafayette Safeway early Tuesday, dixied north into Benicia before turning around and losing pursuing officers who either ran out of patience or gas – in Richmond.”

And that wasn’t the only Thunder Run of the evening, as communiques from like-minded NightHawkers confirm, with folks making high-speed runs up and down the area in an effort to shake police. We hold our breath on each pursuit, seeing firsthand and knowing how they can go horribly wrong, but grudgingly admitting to ourselves that we’re in a new space, seeing a new street dynamic unfold for us all.

Also surging, but talked about much less often and sometimes swept entirely under any conveniently located rug is the lethal presence of fentanyl in the 24/680, a drug claiming victims young and old and piercing the hearts of families who have felt its sting. We get word of people down, unconscious in an alley, bathroom or car and reacting – or not – to attempts to resuscitate them. Increasingly, we find out whether those efforts ended by interpreting the guarded wording in subsequent, local obituaries.

Along with some crime and the presence of Fentanyl on our streets it appears we’re choosing to live with a number of other things in the country today, and we remain baffled by our apparent inability to address and correct them. Guess we’ll have to put our minds solving them, too, when we find a spare moment and some extra notepaper. There just has to be a better way.