Aardvark Art Glass

Last evening there was this tremendous wind storm and a giant branch broke off of a tree by our driveway.

The cracking sound was really quite something so I went outside to see what the hell was going on. All my neighbors were there, too, so I embraced this chance to caught up on the blood trail story. I stopped wondering about the blood’s origin about a week ago I asked a friend who works 911 calls about it. She said someone punched through a glass window about 3 blocks away. No stabbing or gunshot, just drunk people. That’s really all I was concerned about. Anyway, my neighbors affirmed that the two men involved were very inebriated. I guess my neighbor just found a collapsed bleeding man in his front yard around 1:30am and called 911.  The man left standing repeatedly referred to the other as “bro”, so we know they were bros, but not much else. I’m sure they’re fine now as drunk people are surprisingly resilient and almost always survive drunken brushes with death so they can do the same thing next weekend. One person’s wake-up call is just another day at the office for others.

So you see, it isn’t disinterest or fear or anything that keeps neighbors from talking to one another–it’s a lack of shared common experiences. Now in the evening when I walk T-Bone the hedgehog people ask “What kind of a creature is that?” and I say “It’s a hedgehog. He likes walking on the sidewalk.” And they say “What a great little animal! Say, did you see that trail of blood on the sidewalk?” And then we have two things to talk about, three if you count the tree.

On Tuesday morning I noticed a significant trail of blood on our sidewalk starting (or ending) just up the street from our house and continuing all the way down the 800 block of Dayton Street. Emergency vehicles arrived but I was asleep so I don’t know what the heck happened, though I am quite curious. I could knock on my neighbor’s door and ask them what happened but, just as I prefer to ask the computer what the weather is rather than stick my fat head out the window, I decided to look up police reports on the web.

So I’ve been browsing the Madison Police website for the past few days looking for information. I haven’t learned anything about what happened in front of my house  but I have discovered completely by accident that the police blotter is an awesome read. I also found out that I am the last to learn this.  According to this article, the Madison Police blotter, written by Joel De Spain, is actually an “underground cult sensation” replete with Facebook fan page. I’ve been browsing through it and the longer entries are really good. It’s in my queue now like a blog.

Meanwhile, I’ll post a picture of a portion of the now 4 day old mysterious blood trail:

There must be a pint of it or so as it goes for more than a city block. Not everything goes into the Police Blotter so it was probably just a fight. I guess I’ll have to ask the neighbors next time I see them.

I was eating pizza today and little strings of cheese kept falling on my bosom. I glanced down and tried to pick off what I thought was cheese but  turned out to be a  long-legged spider, which ran away when my hand came near. Scared the shit out of me. Don said I should make that a Facebook post but I don’t like Facebook so I wrote it here.