Here’s something I put up on Facebook (originally as a reply to someone else’s thing) in March that I should have put here:
Hear the beating of the heart, Deadly heart! What a world of agony that music does impart! How the beating, beating, beating, Like a watch wrapped up in cotton. ’Neath the flooring, ’neath the seating, All my plans it is defeating With a pleasure misbegotten; Going thump, thump, thump, With a sort of muffled bump, Oh the tachycardiation of his disembodied part! And the beats, beats, beats, beats, beats, beats, beats— Stop the roaring! Tear the flooring! There’s his heart!
Our buzzer goes off. About 8 PM. We’re not expecting anyone.
I go downstairs. “Police,” announce the two guys outside our building front door.
WTF? I can’t think of any reason actual police should be demanding admittance to our Park Slope apartment.
(Yes, we moved since the last time I posted to Making Light, back in a long-ago geological era.)
I was suddenly very conscious of having said critical things about the NYPD on Twitter this very day.
Indeed, it tells you everything you need to know about the utter lack of democracy and freedom in 2018 America is that this is the first thing I thought. Americans used to mock the petty indignities of the Brezhnevite USSR. Now we accept them as normal.
“Do you have a warrant?” I asked. “We don’t need a warrant,” they answered.
“WE DON’T NEED A WARRANT” DING DING DING DING DING DING DING
Needless to say, we didn’t let them in.
Also needless to say, TNH phoned 911, and some perfectly nice actually-obviously-NYPD people came by and spoke with her. We didn’t let them into the building, either, but they didn’t make an issue of it.
As of 9PM tonight, we appear to be OK. But holy crap, that was a thing. If we didn’t know all of you? If we didn’t have the social capital we have?
There are people serving decades-long sentences — there are people on death row — because they didn’t have the friends and connections we do.
As it says in Ecclesiastes, of the making of books there is no end. And Seneca is (dubiously) said to have told us that errare humanum est1 (to err is human)2.
A side-effect of these two universal truths is that this thread is onto its third iteration.