Last Saturday I told the neighbor kid he couldn't play with my daughter because it was pouring down rain and she had a cold. He retaliated by cutting up my Christmas lights with a pair of scissors. I discovered it sunday and brought a snippet over; he opened the door, his eyes got big and he said "I don't know what happened!" his grandmother asserted he couldn't have done it because he'd been with her all day but when I mentioned he'd been in my yard Saturday she yelled at him.

And most likely commenced beating him.

I asked the police about it. I explained that I don't want to escalate things with my neighbors but I'm pretty sure they've got guns over there and besides, the kid's eleven now and puberty is around the corner. They mentioned there was really nothing they could do until he turned fourteen.

I asked a social worker friend who fosters. She said there wasn't anything that could be done except to cut off all contact between my daughter and the kid, which might cause him to lash out, but since he's basically a write-off anyway and destined for a life of crime and addiction the best thing was to not get any on me. Then she mentioned that her adoptive son (whom my kid plays with) needed to say goodbye to his mommy because a drunk driver plowed through her encampment at 3am and put her in a coma but he didn't know her well anyway because she's a homeless paranoid schizophrenic with PTSD and a meth problem. My kid probably won't see that much of him anymore because he's having a hard time with executive function due to some in-utero methamphetamine exposure so the last time he threw a rock in class and broke a window they decided maybe they didn't really want him around school in the afternoon anymore.

I'm resentful of the fact that the last project I will ever work on as an audio post guy has a track labeled "bitchface" because the lead actress sucked so hard and another labeled "stam" because the lead actress sucked so hard she called him "Stan" and "Sam" and sometimes "Stam." I'm good at this shit, goddamn it, but the people who I got work from were either so smart they got the fuck out of the industry or so stupid they clung on for dear life making garbage so awful and cheap that they long for the days of Stam. The proliferation of content has not led to a proliferation of jobs it's led to a dilution of funding whereby every fucktard with two semesters at Full Sail is now cutting bullshit Netflix shows in Premiere CC and they all suck.

Fuckin' Altria is paying $10b for a third of Juul and Fuckin' Pinterest thinks it's IPOing at $12b. The guys who sell cigarettes for a living think that Juul is worth more money than Ford. Meanwhile a google search of "stupid things Softbank has bought" gets you this link.

But there are cookies in the kitchen. There's a Porsche in the garage. The neighbor-kid has not yet shot, raped or overdosed my daughter. And if the cameras provide enough evidence for his grandma to beat the shit out of him should he venture onto my property again, it's possible we'll keep the peace long enough for the housing market to capitulate back down to sensible levels.

And nobody here has to say goodbye to anybody in a hospital because some dumb shit drives through a homeless camp in the middle of the night.