March 2012 – moocow in the city

Grenades and Pipe Bombs and Opium, oh my!

moocowinthecity 2012-03-10 No Comments

So, I was originally posting this on my Facebook but I didn’t think the broken posts could really put this bullshit into proper context and perspective for people.

You see, there are certain people that I trust with Grenade launchers, like stoicdaydreamer who uses one for a living as a combat commander in the Border Guard over in Israel. She knows what she’s doing with one, and I think it’s awesome that she does.

There are other people, however, that I wouldn’t trust with a pair of rounded off safety scissors…I like to call them everyone else I share this Island with for the next 132 days.

You see, on March 6, 2012 police found explosives and what amounts to an insane amount of weapons in a Woodmere home on Long Island, New York.

Included in the stash were things like pipe bombs and grenades and guns. He was also apparently growing a LOT of weed.

Apparently he’s going through a divorce (I can’t imagine why) and this is how he’s coping, or something. Also, it’s not even his own house…oh no, it’s his parents’ house which he was staying at while they were in Florida.

What I found most impressive out of this whole thing (and the resulting and continuing ‘developing story’) was the balls that are attached to this guy’s lawyer, because it takes a serious pair of balls to be able to write off a weapons stash and enough weed to incapacitate an elephant as if it were nothing more than a parking violation, plead not guilty, and then challenge the search and seek to have the evidence thrown out in open court without cracking a shit-eating smile.

I thought to myself “well, I don’t often give the police force on Long Island a whole lot of respect, but well done guys, well done…” and returned to my busy day of doing whatever the fuck it is that I do these days while ticking off how much time I have left until I move off this sandbar.

However, the doing whatever the fuck it is that I do was soon interrupted by a rather troubling news story on March 9, 2012…because apparently the first crazy dude isn’t the only one on the Island who’s looking to blow shit up with grenades!!

Oh no, not fifteen minutes from where I live, in East Meadow, a man apparently thought that his life was just a little too mundane (and lacking in firepower). Being a prodigious and highly motivated pothead, he decided that he need to grab himself some assault rifles and grenade launchers while also doing other things, like assaulting his girlfriend.

In both cases – by the way – neither person would have been caught if they weren’t face slappingly stupid. The first tripped a silent alarm IN THE HOUSE HE WAS LEGALLY STAYING IN FOR GOD KNOWS HOW LONG IT TAKES TO AMASS A WEAPONS ARSENAL. In the second case, it was because Mr. Domestic Violence himself was walking along the highway after having another domestic violence dispute with his girlfriend AND GAVE THE POLICE PERMISSION TO SEARCH HIS HOME WITHOUT A WARRANT!

Also, both guys have no known connection to terror, extremist, separatist or supremacist groups. Just two dudes, living on Long Island, who needed some weed and firepower.

I thought to myself, well…at least NOW we’re in the clear…only to refresh my browser and then see that I had MISSED a news story from the day BEFORE the second stash was found, because why wouldn’t there be an international opium smuggling operation with ties to both Long Island and Iran to keep the Long Island police force busy as well?

What absolutely pisses me off the most though is that here I am, shmucky the clown, working a barely above minimum wage, absolutely thankless job and these two losers somehow can afford property AND WEAPONS ARSENALS on Long Island while I can’t even get my Carmex through JFK airport without putting it in a little zip-lock baggy.

open pasture

Ashdod

moocowinthecity 2012-03-03 No Comments

Ashdod, Israel
2011

Beautiful…simply beautiful, I thought, standing out on the balcony – the mirpeset – of my apartment in Ashdod. A city of beauty, though not one inclined towards academics…the veneer of new apartments hiding what was, in reality, a fugue state of mind more worthy of a Buffalo bender blackout weekend than a deluxe beach city with stacked high rises, the waves crashing just a few blocks from our building.

I thought of the old, yellowed copy of Rumble Fish I first picked up when I was six or eight and sleeping on a basement floor in Philadelphia, and I was suddenly sad that I had given up smoking tobacco a few years earlier, and shamelessly mournful that other substances couldn’t be enjoyed until after my military ID was cut in two and I was discharged in what then seemed like something that would amount to multiple lifetimes.

Laundry spinning…sort of…in a mostly working washing machine, a beautiful new kitchen completely empty and devoid of anything that any human would consider food. Some bread with all the nutrients removed that was whiter than my Ashkenazic skin was freshly purchased and waiting on the counter next to some army cheese I had stolen from the base kitchen earlier in the week, in what had now become a routine of constantly swindling the base chef out of any food that wasn’t locked down (and even then, locks have a funny way of opening when you’re hungry enough). We had purchased an onion earlier in the day, the biggest one we could afford, in the hopes that it would last through the weekend and it was tempting us next to the sandwich press to start early, to eat all of what we had now. We knew better…we knew what giving into that temptation would mean, and so we waited.

The usual filler of a box of popcorn alongside a jug of the cheapest store brand cola that a pair of starving soldiers could afford to buy on military welfare sat in front of the microwave, borrowed packets of ketchup from the local fast food restaurants were kept neatly in the fridge.

British comedy subtitled in Hebrew flickered across the television screen in the living room, like the ashes from the cigarette dangling from my friends mouth – I can’t remember what brand he smoked now, but I remember it being only one step better than the Nabalus brand that the Kibbutznikim smoked and miles away from the Marlboro and Lebanese Cedar that I used to enjoy as an undergrad. Whatever it was, it smelled good on him…he was incredibly handsome.

We were other men, in another life, we were the story, both trite and real, experienced by so many and only understandable by those who sat in the same two seats that we sat in every weekend, eating the same toasted cheese, onion and ketchup sandwiches, watching the same british comedy. Whether or not they did it before or after us wasn’t as important as the fact that they did it at all.

Brothers.

#writingmusings