Just another week in Los Angeles…

Just about every day I start my morning with a fifteen mile bike ride down Venice Blvd. and back. My route takes me past several huge homeless tent cities and I often experience some very weird and/or alarming things as I ride by. But this week has been a doozy, and it’s only Thursday…

Here’s a summary of what I’ve seen just this week.

Monday: I rode by a naked guy having aggresssive sex with his mattress… before you ask, I cannot confirm whether or not the sex was consensual.

Tuesday: While waiting at a light, a drunk guy charged at me screaming “you’re wearing faggot shoes, man!” Now, with language like that you’d expect the assailant to be a white dude in a MAGA hat, but you’d be wrong on both counts. That said, there is no accouting for taste and I’ll take the “L” on the issue of the quality of my shoes.

Wednesday: A older lady stood on a corner shrieking hysterically at everyone who passed by. And no, this lady was not Nancy Pelosi.

Just another week in the City of Angels….

I thought about my week of fun with the homeless while reading Kurt Schlichter’s column today about passivity being a choice. In it he points out that as private citizens in a progressive hellscape like CA we don’t really have any other choice.

That was made clear to me late last year. We have a neighborhood watch where I live and some of the folks in it reached out to me because they knew I had some familiarity with weapons and self-defense. With the escalating homeless crisis in our ‘Hood, they wanted to know if I had any thoughts about how we might defend ourselves in a worst-case scenario. I decided to seek professional help and a friend (whose name rhymes with Furt Glichter) put me in touch with a self-defense lawyer.

The lawyer was very nice and graciously listened to my story. When I finished, without a moment’s hesitation, he deadpanned… “Look, you really don’t have any good options. You need to move.”

So that’s pretty much where we are.

“You don’t have any good options… you need to move.”

If there’s a better one-sentence description for the political reality in which we find ourselves here in 2021 America, I have not heard it.