Walnut Creek a Go-Go; Boom Booms And Messages From The Wildlands

Being risk-takers and heat-seekers we roamed the wilds of the 24/680 Saturday night, looking for the latest fashion trends, dance crazes, and conducting our usual hyperlocal study of cultural anthropology – to put a fancy-schmancy name on it.

We can report that hemlines are rising, hotpants still haven’t made a comeback, there’s actually line-dancing going on in Walnut Creek (are they dusting off those mechanical bulls from the Debra Winger Days?) and Go-Go boots are making a comeback.

Fashion is cyclical, right?

Folks’re shuffling to Boot-Scootin’ Boogie and Luke Bryan with parts of Walnut Creek looking like Main Street in a South Dakota town most nights. YeeHaw.

All in good fun and have a good time though care should be taken when wearing the more revealing outfits preferred by partiers of a certain age as, well, alcohol is a factor and accidents can and do happen.

We’ve also learned and are tuning our much older ears to the current patois in use by younger folk wandering the veldt these days. Their language, a curious blend of Kikuyu and Creole, is – of course – designed to keep older people from knowing what they’re talking about. This is understandable, a practice adopted by most preceding generations, as needed.

We reach for our Youth Translators whenever we hear things like: “I’m amped about my drip today,” or “No cap, this acai bowl is bussin’,” or, “Spill the tea, sis!”

Keep mum and dad and any looming oldster at bay and confused. Got it.

Also confusing is the non-directional acoustic path of disruptive nocturnal boom-booms – explosions to some – ripping through the nightscape early this morning.

Now, this stuff lights up our intake systems like a pinball hall on Saturday nights and it wasn’t long before the civilian guesswork started hitting the Social Media channels, apparently, with theories ranging from militia gunfire to ‘splody transformers – neither of which seemed to line up with the facts in hand (no resultant power outages and no dudes in bad camouflage).

So we cooly and calmly reached out to our team of highly-trained roving investigators (one guy with a cellie) and asked, cooly and calmly, “Who the hell is lighting up Southern Walnut Creek?” And they, ever professional, came back with the Realtor’s Response: “Location? Location? Location?” and that was tough to pin down with everyone pointing in every direction.

We ended up chasing sightings of teens/”suspicious characters”/guys in clown suits at various locations in the area, often in high-end vehicles, and eventually closed in on Lar Rieu Park where “teens in a Tesla” were spotted before two loud booms were heard.

In the end, we believed the flash and booms were attributed to sizable pyrotechnic devices thrown into the yards of homes in the 2200 block of Trotter Way at Hackamore, though we remember a series of similar incidents in that general area in recent years.

Other booms involved vehicles t-boning each other at high speed (already on our pages) so we wound down the night, sent our mighty team home to catch some zzzzz’s and pledged to hit things hard again in the morning.

And here we are. Keep those cards and letters coming in, folks…