Home of the Snarkmaiden

Via kiplet I find that The Portland Zine Symposium is upcoming. Themes for the year include Back to DIY, Back to Community, and Back to Roots. Wonder how many mimeographed fanzine producers will be there?

The center, it cannot hold...

The SRT truck pulls away again, and the SRT guys mill around the power pole a bit. Eventually they, too, settle into postures of waiting. One of the men has some chunk of metal that he uses as a makeshift stool. Another crouches down on his haunches. A third shifts from foot to foot, while the fourth keeps watch down into the yard. It begins to drizzle. Time passes.

You can always tell when the SRT truck is coming up the street. It has a monster engine, rumbling along like a muscle car on MLB steroids. The black SRT truck prowls up again, one back door swinging loose. Another armored guy hands out big, blocky, bright orange flashlights to the team on the ground. They stow them by the power pole. The truck rumbles away. It stops drizzling.

The sound of splintering wood can be heard from across the street. The team are prying boards loose from the fence of the corner house. Whether to allow a rush from the back, or to clear their line of fire is anyone’s guess. Two of the SRT guys go into Ray’s yard, prowling along the fence line above the corner house. Lucky for them, Ray’s dogs aren’t out. Ray has three raucous mutts who bark like the devil, most times. God alone knows where they, and Ray, are. Maybe another camping trip.

The gloom settles on the street, and I pull down the shades and draw the curtains again. Once it's brighter in the house than ouside, anyone inside is lit up like a light-painted target, and I can’t see out anyway. Time passes.

Eventually, Sarah insists on a walk. I stay mostly out back in the cover of the house, but from the side of our house I can see the corner house illuminated brighter than day. The cops have set up big arc lights along Ray’s fence, and around the corner, right up against the target house. The two SRT guys I can make out are vague shadows in the darkness by the power pole. Up the street I see that Leather Cop, or someone else, has parked a patrol unit in the middle of the road and left the bubble gum light bar flashing. So the street’s closed off now, at least. Might make it tricky to get off to our party tonight. Might make it trickier to get back to the house afterwards, if they’re still at it. Sarah and I go back inside.

Some time in there, it occurs to me that my former workstudy student, who now works for the Seattle Times, might want a scoop. I e-mail her in the forlorn hope that she will check her mail on a Saturday afternoon in the Christmas season. In fact, she does check her mail, and she passes the tip on to the weekend news desk. Eventually, a small squib appears in the web version of the Times.

Time passes. Some time after 7pm things apparently settle out peacefully, without any shots fired that I can hear. When I look out into the street again, the SRT guys are gone, as are many of the arc lights illuminating the corner. By the time we drive off to our Christmas party, all that remains is a single patrol car in the driveway of the corner house, and a dry rain shadow in the wet street above our place, where the road block car had parked. In the end, not much happened.

Except that it did. The Seattle times has updated its article now. Apparently it all started with a domestic disturbance 911 call, and the reason for the standoff was the guy was holding his own toddler hostage at gunpoint, after the kid's mother had fled the house.

Fucking humans.

Ah, the joys of modern life in the electrified world. First thing I did once the power finally came back on was turn on the stove and start heating water for a nice big pot of hot tea. We had been without electricity for 34 hours, when it finally flicked back on at 11:00 this morning.

( 34 Hours Without Juice, The Gory Details )

Oh, and as you might be guessing from this post, my computer's not dead, after all. It seems the power supply overheated but did not burn out, during that power spike. We went out to CompUSA and got a pair of cheap UPSes, and each household computer system is on its own now, so maybe they're a little better buffered against flutters and spikes in the electricity. So we get a little smarter every time something goes wrong.