I make good fucking fences.
Notice I did not say fucking good fences.
Compliments come in many forms, and here’s one of the truest compliments I’ve ever received.
On the side of my house is a shared no-man’s space of grass between me and the church next door that I used to call the shooting gallery, until I made an actual pellet gun shooting gallery and had to stop that usage for clarity. Now I just call it “the churchside.”
The churchside is an open air shelter space somewhat concealed from the street where people can do what they need to do in privacy. So that’s like a lot of drugs, either a visit of minutes when smoking something alone or with a friend, or a visit of hours when shooting something, alone or with a friend. There’s also the usual pissing and shitting and overnight camping and quick clothes changing.
I’ve long had a policy that people can stay a max of 2 nights in the churchside. There’s plenty of people who wind up homeless, traveling on a downward trajectory or whatnot, and it’s a safe place to stay, so I let them, within limits. Those are future stories. Suffice to say, I’m accustomed to at least one person a week loitering there, or quickly passing through because it’s also a convenient way to short-cut the block between streets, especially if being chased by cops with or without dogs. Dogs can’t climb fences and neither can K-9 handlers, so scrambling over the chainlink fence often results in solid liberation for suspects being pursued.
I developed respect for one guy who came every day around 2-3pm. (This is when the house next door was selling drugs, so the churchside was a convenient stop after purchase for many consumers.) He’d designed a portable shelter system that could rival any YouTube survivalist channel. A smallish blanket, connected to the church’s doorknob, propped with a stick to make a fully enclosed bivouac where he’d shoot and sleep. Then he’d wake up in the early evening, smile and stretch his arms out like a cartoon indication of excellently restful sleep, break day camp and move along. I was happy to host him, if just to be inspired by his embrace of routine and leave-no-trace. And to wager imaginary bets on his departure time.
I have a perimeter defense that forms a buffer between my house and the churchside. It’s a white picket fence I got free on Craigslist and set it up in minutes by just pounding rebar into the ground and attaching the panels with u-bolts. With those deep-seated rebar springs, the fence has considerable bounce, like amusement park level. There’s also rose bushes and a tangle of hardy orange with 3” spikes (Citrus trifoliate).
Besides the security camera, the window at the head my bed looks over the churchside, and there’s not much I miss. So on this particular morning, when I was awakened by two voices down there at 6am, it was hardly startling. I did the familiar finger-parting-the-blinds to get my bleary eyeballs a quick peek.
What sounded like two quite distinct voices was in fact one singular fellow, who was talking to himself and answering in a different voice. Chatter about if they should really doing this, and hurry up, and stuff of that nature that two people doing a thing they shouldn’t would speak to each other.
Also, the fellow who was talking to himself in two different voices had his pants down to his ankles and was making sweet rhythmic love to my reciprocally bouncing fence, while chiding himself for doing it.
So I say to you again, grammatically accurately – I make good fucking fences.
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