journal features

someone's got a grow-op in my apartment

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2003.07.02

I almost always use the stairs to go up to my apartment, rather than the elevator. For exercise, mostly. On some occasions, though - such as when I've been lugging groceries for blocks through the thick smog of Summertime Toronto - I do take the elevator. Tonight was one of those nights.

As often happens, there was a scruffy looking kid also heading for my floor. Not one of the same scruffy kids I've ridden with in the past, but he headed for the same apartment that the others always go to. It's a trend I've noticed. Morning, noon (I work across the way from my apartment building, so I frequently come home for lunch), and night, one of my neighbours has a steady stream of young men coming to his apartment. This one had the usual hesitant approach and quiet knock.

So my neighbour's probably dealing dope from my building. I guess I'll start locking my door.

I wonder if that's an interesting lifestyle. Today at work, I learned how to do some kooky PL/SQL stuff involving in-memory tables. In a hurry, cos it was billable. And after that, I bought placemats.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)