[Ed. note: if you’re squeamish about harsh language, be wary. F-bombs and other nastiness follows.]

Last night, right around the time I was posting the previous entry, I was startled by a sudden noise at my bedroom window. It was sort of like that sickening whump you hear when a bird ends its life against a pane of glass, but it also had a tinkling quality to it. The sound of something breaking.

For a brief, confused moment, I thought something had fallen inside the house, that a delicate knick-knack had somehow slipped off a shelf or something. But then I realized that my first impression was correct; something had hit the window. And I had a pretty good idea of what it must’ve been, too… you don’t usually get birds flying around at 11.30 at night, and I haven’t seen a bat around my neighborhood in years.

I shoved myself back from the keyboard, went to the window, pulled open the drapes, and pried the Levelors apart to see what had happened. Sure enough, there was an elongated hole torn in the screen, with a corresponding hole punched through the window’s outer layer. The inner pane had apparently stopped the projectile.

I immediately went into Grumpy Old Man mode and began cursing those damn kids. Which damn kids, I had no idea, but I knew that it must’ve been somebody’s damn kids who’d just taken a pot-shot at my house with their shiny new pellet gun. From the shape of the holes and the height of the impact (not to mention the height of the wooden fence that surrounds my place), I figured the shot must’ve come from across the street, probably from the handy parking lot that sits on a diagonal line from the empty lot to the north of my house, or maybe from a passing car. Aside from the fence, which the shooter was obviously tall enough to fire over, there was nothing to interfere with a nice clean shot straight into my room.

That thought gave me a nice attack of paranoia. What if the shooter had used something with a little more oomph than a pellet gun? A .22 or something even bigger? A real bullet would’ve surely penetrated both panes of glass, and I doubt if mini-blinds and curtains would’ve slowed it down much. The angle of the holes suggested that it would’ve gone straight into my bedroom TV… or maybe the computer monitor on my desk… which is, of course, where I had been sitting when the pellet smacked into my window. If it had been a real bullet fired at my house last night, I could have been shot. A surge of ice water poured through my stomach, immediately followed by something hotter and uglier as my fear turned back into anger. That anger still hasn’t gone away now, some eighteen hours later.

I’ve never understood the “li’l bastard” mentality, that destructive impulse that seems to possess certain kids like some kind of a demon. (Yes, I am assuming it was kids — you don’t hear about too many grown-ups plunking away with Daisy pump-actions — and I’m further assuming it was boys instead of girls because boys seem more prone to stupid shit like this. Although, these days, who the hell knows…) It’s sometimes hard to believe it now, but I was a boy once and I did own a pellet gun, but I never even thought about shooting at a house back in my pellet-gun days. Barns, yes. Abandoned refrigerators, certainly. Maybe even junk cars. But a house? An inhabited house, with lights on to indicate actual people inside? What kind of an irresponsible, testosterone-addled, pizza-faced, genetic-screw-up, punk-ass, delinquent little cretin shoots at a house for kicks, even with “just” a pellet gun? If I found out my kid had done something like that, I’d wrap his fucking pellet gun around his neck. If I ever find out who did that to my house last night, I’ll wrap his fucking pellet gun around his father’s neck, because obviously the guy is falling down on his parental obligation to kick his little bastard in the ass once in a while.

At the risk of sounding like my father, who seems to genuinely believe that Salt Lake in the ’50s was just like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, this sort of crap didn’t use to happen around here. That’s not to say I never saw any vandalism or that we didn’t have bad kids in my day. (There was a whole clan of ’em that lived down a little lane to the north of my elementary school, a bunch of genuine white-trash troublemakers called the Spidells, or something like that; all the other kids were terrified of them.) But it never used to happen in my neighborhood, along my stretch of the road. When I was a kid, there wasn’t much traffic out in front, the neighbors were mostly of retirement age, the yards were all neat as a pin, and all the houses were sheltered by giant box-elder and elm trees.

That all started to change about fifteen years ago. Now all of the neighbors I knew as a child are dead, and the new people who have replaced them are, well, less desirable. The Spidells are long gone, but I’ve got their soulmates living all around me. One neighbor — who not only knows that people call him “Junkyard” but actually encourages it — routinely gets into screaming matches with his wife that are loud enough to be heard inside my house, across the street and several doors down. That is, I can hear them if they’re fighting at night, after the steady drone of passing cars has died down a bit.
The tidy old bungalows and historic churchhouse that stood alongside my house were demolished a couple years back to make room for a parking lot that never materialized, and most of the big trees that shaded my youth are gone. My neighborhood, the pleasant little spot where I’ve spent my whole freakin’ life, is beginning to look downright blighted. Part of the reason I was so upset over my mother’s trumpet vine coming down is because its loss only makes this part of town look that much less attractive.

And what’s really unnerving is that this transformation, this decay, seems to have snuck up on me. It’s like I woke up one morning and the street had magically become shabby as I slept. It’s become the kind of street where guys named Junkyard cover their lawns with greasy engine blocks and fight in the gutters with their slovenly wives, where weeds grow so rampant in the unkempt dirt-patch next door that a big sheet of unadorned asphalt really would be preferable, and where undisciplined little shits take potshots at houses in the middle of the night. I’m just glad they weren’t using a real gun, or that my Mustang or one of my dad’s classic cars wasn’t out in the driveway where they could’ve shot out a windshield.
How the hell did it all fall apart like this? Progress my ass…

Incidentally — and I think this is really weird — I never did find the pellet, or BB, or whatever it was that hit the window. You’d think that it would’ve fallen down between the panes, or between the screen and the glass, but I never did see it. Reminds me of that old story about the guy who murders someone with an icicle.