welcome to my neighborhood

This morning around 5 a.m. I was awakened by what sounded like a low-flying plane. I got up, went to tinkle, came back to my bedroom and peeked out the curtain to see if I could catch anything in the sky.

Sure enough, my groggy early-morning eyes caught sight of a helicopter (with the letters NJ something or other printed on the side, but I was half-asleep) floating just above my house. I was annoyed, but it was 5 in the morning so I accepted that me and the helicopter were going to coexist for a little while and I crawled back in bed.

So when I actually got up and out of bed this morning, naturally, I Googled the whole sitch to find out what was so important that I needed to be roused from my sleep at such an ungodly hour. Turns out that down the street from my apartment, actually right near the place where I buy my fruit and veg near McGinley Square, there was a full-blown cops-and-robbers shoot-out going down. Perps shoot at cops, cops shoot back, perps hole themselves up in nearby drug house, local residents are evacuated, five cops get shot, perps get shot dead and the whole thing is captured by the ABC news-copter that wakes me up at 5 in the morning. (You can read the full story here.)

I don't know what's worse -- that the shooting itself even happened in the first place, that I was totally unfazed when I finally got to the bottom of the story and realized what had been going on literally two blocks from where I was sleeping peacefully, OR that the emotion I still feel most strongly about the whole shebang is straight up aggravation that my slumber was interrupted by the GD news-copter.

Just send a dude with a camera next time, ABC. You're messing with my beauty sleep.


cheers,
elizabeth