2:08 AM

I spend a good deal of my time watching people. Our apartment sits at the mouth of a four-way intersection, and because I'm no good at interacting, I watch them play out their lives from inside. We live in a bad neighborhood of an economically-depressed, crime-ridden city, so a lot of what I see is sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds pushing strollers and gang members yelling things from their passenger windows and people pushing shopping carts full of empties to deposit and twelve-year-olds chain-smoking on the corner.
My dad really hated this place when he first saw it. I guess he didn't quite understand how I was going to fit into it all.
Sometimes, the chaos is joyful. Although firworks are illegal in this state, people were running down the streets, lighting them in their hands and throwing them up to the sky, screaming and pointing at the bursts in the dark. There were little kids being held underarm while their parents assembled cheeseburgers. No police came all night because they only would have disturbed it.
I actually derive a strange sense of safety from the lack of coordination here. Because the police are overrun with arsons and muggings and homicides, the little things slide, which probably sounds like a bad thing, but in the absence of any institutionalized system of punishment for small infractions, a community-based system will emerge. In my neighborhood, we have Mr. Good, a six-foot-seven ogre of a crack dealer. Sure, his facial muscles dance around his smile and he's got teardrops tattooed on his cheek, but he's probably the safest person to take a walk with in this place.
There are loads of people like that in the world, though.