Author: Jim Dowd

When our daughter was born we lived between junkies and a liquor store. It was a gorgeous apartment, the owners of the store were great people. We loved everything about it except for the constant parade of despair seeking one or the other (or often both) fixes.

It was pretty much a nightmare. Our stuff was always being stolen. Sometimes I’d be filling the coffee pot in the morning and look out the window to find people crashed out on our deck. The junkies in residence had literally burned down their previous house trying to convert the hot water heater to propane grill tanks because their natural gas had been shut off, so there was a constant fear they were going to do something similar and endanger us as well. Out on the street mothers left babies in hot cars to go inside and buy (they were selling). As for the booze crowd, there is apparently a thing where you buy two single Twisted Tea tallboys, chug one on the sidewalk, throw the empty into the back of your truck and then crack the other, putting it in the beverage holder, and then take off down the street. This is, like, a normal part of some peoples’ day. I saw this out my window multiple times a given week. I was a regular on the police tip line.

“Daddy, there’s a man sleeping on our porch and he smells like tinkle”

It sucked. We moved.

So, given my experiences, I see a massive challenge for myself at least with our new compassion policy toward addicts here in Gloucester which we here at The Clam whole heartedly support. Namely: Some addicts are frequently really fucking annoying and even dangerous. I’m not blaming here, It’s a disease I get it, I’m just stating a fact. It is a pain in the ass to have people nodded out in your deck furniture and having to check for needles before you let your toddler go out and play in her own yard. It’s dangerous as balls to have blitzed dudes driving around in huge trucks.

What are we supposed to do with our anger and annoyance at the breaking of the social contract that comes with a highly visible percent of a group of people in the full blazing flame of their addictions?

I don’t have any good answers. I’m tremendously glad the police, as a matter of policy, are making a change. I hope beyond hope that those in need take the police and public health system at their word and get help and that it works, that folks get into treatment and their lives and their families lives and the life of our community are transformed as a result. This is a fresh start for us all and I and we here at your favorite snarkblog intend to put all our effort and energy into making the new system successful even past its inevitable hiccups as it comes on line.

But I’m still going to be pissed as fuck when my bike gets jacked at the train station for the fourth time so someone can sell it to one of the scrap dudes for just enough to score on. One of my favorite quotes is by one of the pioneers of quantum physics, Niels Bohr. He said, “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth.” Let’s apply it to this situation:

“I like to think my bike is there even if some jackwad stole it”

Derek Potocki was ensnared so tightly in the grip of his addiction he donned an absurd disguise and robbed a local bank in a generally safe, trusting community, apparently without any kind of even rudimentary plan to ensure his own success.

Derek Potocki is an idiot jackhole.

Both of these are true. People in the grips of their addictions do things they otherwise wouldn’t. Idiots in the grips of addiction do astoundingly stupid things involving false beards and running around town like some kind of whacked-out Papa Smurf until the cops nab them at the train station in what would make the lamest episode of “The Fugitive” ever.

This kid is stealing…my heart

So, I’m asking myself, where am I going to find this compassion as the inevitable visible reality of addiction hits me in the face when I’m least suspecting it? I am most certainly going to dig for my better self, but I have to admit I don’t feel an increased need to tolerate the nuisance or dangerous behavior caused by addiction, plain old garden-variety uncaring  stupidity or the all-too-prevalent cocktail of both. I have compassion for addicts as human beings. But I have none for behavior that makes my town feel like a shithole or endangers others. It’s just that simple.

My fervent hope is that the new policies and support systems provide actually less of an excuse for chemically-induced dubmassery as now there is a place where addicts can go for support and thus even less call to steal a bike or rob a bank or pass out on the bench in front of Clammedia Tower surrounded by Dunks cups and sandwich wrappers.

So with that hope in place I’m going to do my best to make this work. I commend everyone involved especially Chief Campanello . It’s not going to be easy and we can’t give up. I want to break the back of addiction in Gloucester and move on to our future, which I know is bright.

Because what we’re doing now clearly isn’t working.

Cake sleeping. No one is doing that, right?

Tyler McGrund, a hipster, has found himself at a loss for any more things to do that are off-beat and avant garde. Having cycled rapidly through absurd facial hair styles, clothing representing numerous historical periods, a pet skunk and traveling everywhere by pogo stick, he suddenly discovered himself at a loss for new ways to come off as free from the bounds of society.

“It just gets tiring, you know,” said McGrund, eating his lunch of croutons dipped in caramel fondue. “My fixed gear bike was just awful on hills, but then everyone got one and I had to switch to one of those old-timey bikes with the huge front wheel just to keep ahead. Do you know how hard those things are in traffic? And you can’t just stop and put a foot down at a red light, you have to get all the way off it at every stop. I’m actually glad they became a ‘thing’ with yuppies and I had to go pogo.”

And it’s an arms race of originality that has cost him financially as well. Current estimates put his annual spend on terrariums, glass-blowing lessons, trips to Brussels (McGrund claims he’s “All about Belgium right now”) and mismatched patent leather shoes at upwards of 45% of his annual income. It’s also hurt his personal life.

“My girlfriend was all into it for a while saying I was, like, the only true individual she’s ever dated so on our fourteen and a half week anniversary I took her urban spelunking. We wound up to our necks in wastewater in an abandoned electrical service tunnel and after that she stopped returning my texts. Now I only use payphones.”

He was recently fired for showing up to work in a suit of bees

McGrund is part of a growing number of urban individuals suffering from what experts call “Hip Check.” Marcia Wellington, professor of Sociology at SUNY explains: “You can only go on so long being the driving force of cultural adoption before you just burn out,” she said on a call to her office in Albany. “You spend all this time discovering a band, restaurant or hairstyle from feudal Japan and next thing you know some asshole digital marketing manager for a pharmaceutical company has adopted it and is telling his friends in sales. At least before social media the process used to take a few months, now you can probably only ride a really good bit of artsy bullshit for three weeks, tops.”

McGrund did not know what the future held as he looked out over his shared backyard full of Chinese dragon costumes, homemade hovercraft and mobiles made from taxidermy.

“I might become a farrier. For a while.”

Last year, on this date, I flew a drone for the first time with Martin DelVecchio. It’s my first doneversiary.

A few weeks later we were asked to shoot a drone-picture of the new Cape Ann Food Pantry groundbreaking. I remember thinking, “How is it we’ve solved the problem of quadcopter control dynamics but we still have working people who go hungry?” As we were getting “Droning Myrtle” into the air a super-enraged guy who lives next door to the site saw the drone and leapt out of his car. He literally shook his cane at us, shrieking, “I know my constitutional rights!”

He was approaching in a not exactly unthreatening manner when he fell over, obviously painfully. I was going to go help him up, but this would have meant switching over to a landing cycle and he sort of scrabbled off before I could react. I think he was OK.

Somehow I feel like this scene spoke a lot about where we’re at as a culture right now. We have incredible new technology but the same social problems. Some folks are angry and confused, but mad at the wrong things (Dude could rage at a system that won’t pay a living wage to retail and service workers, forcing them onto public support maybe?). Our most passionate arguments seem to be about stupid fake bullshit like Fluoride, not actual pressing issues like changing economies and climate.

Last week we went out to LA on a drone-related project (much more to come on this in upcoming weeks). At the Logan Hudson News there was a drone magazine right out front next to the sudoku puzzles and US Weekly. In LA some dude was flying a lit-up drone down Hollywood Boulevard for no apparent reason (Because LA). There were still people sleeping in the streets and the news was full of Baltimore.

Technology does not change who we are, it just makes it far more efficient for us to be ourselves, for better and worse.

I suppose the takeaway for me was this: alongside our exponentially developing tech we need to keep improving who we are and the ways in which we relate to our fellow beings. Speaking as someone who loves the gizmos and what they can do, it’s all too easy a thing to forget.

Oh those heady, happy moments before we were informed the beverage cart had run out of vodka.

Well Clamicitos, we’re off on our great westward adventure. Our flight out was fairly uneventful with the exception of discovering the luggage box on KT’s Pathfinder is exact height of the lowest horizontal structural supports at Logan central parking. “Are we scraping?” She asked. Yes, we were scraping.

For this Clameditor the flight was particularly enjoyable. I myself flew on a fairly heavy schedule from about 2000 to 2013, at one point obtaining enough miles on American so if they ever broke into commercial space travel I would have been business class to Mars. This timing means with the increased security protocols following 9/11 I have been subjected to every bit of TSA security theater as it’s evolved.

First there was the “turn on your laptop” phase which was always sort of loony. What was that supposed to prove? Then the “s” on your boarding pass concept, which meant agents were supposed to single you out for additional scrutiny (we would just hold our ID over that part to fool them.). There was a thing for a while where some of the x-ray bins for your stuff had red electrical tape marking, also designed to “randomly” select folks they’d pull aside. When I saw one of those at the top of the stack I always found an opportunity to let the person behind jump ahead while I checked my pockets one last time. “Have fun in Guantanamo, sucker,” I’d think.

Once, flying out of Benton Harbor Michigan, they handed me a red plastic card and said, “you’ve been selected for additional security, please present this to the TSA officer as you enter the terminal,” which you have to admit is just…beautiful in a way. In the meeting where they dreamed that up apparently not one person thought of a way for terrorists to potentially spoof that system. Amazing.

Terrorist 1: “Achmed, they have given you the red card! For sure now the infidels will find the cantaloupe-sized lump of semtex hidden in your carry-on when you dutifully present it to the security agent at the gate! We are ruined! Whatever shall we do?”

Terrorist 2: “I am sorry, but I can think of no other way around this problem but to hand the agent the card as instructed. What other options could there be?”

I should note here that Benton Harbor Airport doubles as the regional bus terminal. I’m not thinking this was the TSA A-Team on this one. Seriously, after a year of this crap flying once a week at least I could have been hired as a consultant to Al Queda on how to avoid airport security simply because I’m not fond of being groped by random frumpy people in ill-fitting uniforms. I sure somewhere someone is into that, I don’t judge, it’s just not for me.

And let’s not forget the shoes.In the past you spent your time outside the gate trying to pick the security line most full of people with slip-ons rather than the one with that goth chick sporting 19 eye Dr. Martens and piercings with enough collective metal to build a working toaster. You did a lot traveler profiling, actually: “Oh, that dude? He looks like he hasn’t flown since his honeymoon to the Poconos in 1963. Don’t get behind him, he’s got a metal hip and a pocket full of lucky silver dollars. That Indian lady in the sari and flip-flops who’s already got her laptop and plastic bag full of shampoo out? Get behind her, she knows the score.

But you know what? Something changed over the past few years my flying has diminished. At Logan at least you can leave your shoes on now. And the laptop stays in the bag along with the toiletries. Wow. It’s a whole new world. They did a hand screen for explosive chemicals which always makes me nervous because in Gloucester you never know what you’ve touched on a given weekend: a creosote-covered piling, diesel fuel, taxidermy chemicals, whatever the hell is that keeps soft serve from melting at the beach. I always worry at the hand screening.

But it was fine and we wound up on the plane and ready to wait a full half an hour on the runway in record time.

So here we are now in Los Angeles. LA and Boston are truly antipodes. Opposite sides of the country, opposite climate and about as different a set of cultural priorities as you can imagine. In our Beloved Hub it’s generally OK to be a blotchy unkempt smartypants in a shitty Subaru, whereas in LA they put up the velvet rope at Starbucks if you’re trying to get a latte with last year’s haircut.

The Clam/Flying Car crew on this little voyage fully expect to be treated as malformed hunchbacks on this trip, even though we charitably rate as “average looking” back home and even in spite of the fact every one of us went to Marshalls and picked up a couple of things. We shall do our best.

Onward!