Holy smithereens, batman. Or are you superman? Either way, keep an x-ray eye open for falling debris. Actually, that’s only if you’re superman. If you’re batman, perhaps you have some kind of protective or repellant device in you utility belt. If so, deploy at once. Use ’em if you got ’em. (That’s what I need… a utility belt! Mitch!)
Hola, you blog browsers out there. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences. Yes, that’s right, my friends… Big Green has made another slight miscalculation. It seems we weren’t real careful about what we were asking for, and Jesus Christmas, we got it. (Or is that Mother of Pearl?) As you may recall (if, like me, you haven’t got anything better to do than surfing the net and catching up on one bogus thread or another), we had resorted to a last ditch effort at getting a-hold of Gung Ho, our militant neighbor, and asking him to use his mercenary war machine to… well… blast our way back into our beloved squat house, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, in a manner of speaking. Now, specifically what I had had in mind was a show of force to intimidate the developers who pulled the mill out from under us. You know what I mean – a couple of ultra-low flyovers aimed at their local headquarters. Maybe dropping a couple of duds on the roof. Leafleting, perhaps. That sort of thing.
Well, we tried to reach Gung-Ho at his remote deployment (destination: classified) via a number of different methods of communication – smoke signal, orgone generator, e-mail, etc. I’m not sure which one(s) actually got through to the old man, but whichever it may have been, the message must 
have gotten significantly garbled somehow. (My vote is on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, which should never be confused with a telegraph.) Gung-Ho apparently got the impression that he should mount a full-scale, sustained bombing campaign against the real estate firm in question. Or maybe he just thought that would be a more fun way to do the job — he’s never been real big on the subtle approach, quite frankly. Either way, he and his A-Team came screaming into town in their surplus F-15’s, shooting up everything within seven square blocks of the real estate office. To make matters worse, he chose the very moment when we were making another appeal for leniency to the local magistrate… on the basis of our good will towards the community.
Awwwk-ward.
Okay, so how did this affect our plea? Never mind that now. Suffice to say we failed to engender a sufficient degree of sympathy from the judge — or so it seemed when he was fleeing the courtroom along just ahead of a collapsing cinderblock wall. (Yes, the courtroom is downtown, a stone’s throw from the developer’s office.) It’s a little hard to describe the phantasmagoric scene that confronted us as we scurried into the street. The word pandemonium comes to mind, but I’m sure there are others more appropriate to the occasion. Catastrophe, perhaps. Suffice to say that Gung-Ho’s principal target — the headquarters of the Madagascarian firm that had arranged for our eviction — had sustained more than superficial 
damage. The basement looked as though it might still be useable, once rubble from the five floors above it could be steam shoveled out. Ouch.
We tried to reach Gung-Ho on the phone, but no luck. He must have just swooped in for the air strikes and then flown back to whatever area of the world he’s destroying-for-hire this week. Seems like the only thing to do is to make our way back to the outskirts of town and see if, by any small chance, a stray round or two might have homed in on… the… hammer… mill……
