So that cop stopping me has been bothering me all weekend. I really didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, and it freaked me out to be stopped for doing something I didn’t even know I was doing. So I decided to look it up in the MO Drivers Manual just now, and guess what? I WAS DOING IT RIGHT! Totally right! From the manual, page 38:

Exactly what he said not to do is what I was supposed to be doing. What a jackass! He didn’t even know what he was talking about. I am printing this shit out and taking it with me in case that fucker pulls me over again. What an idiot! And made me broody all weekend! Ugh!

I was leaving work today, and as I pulled out of the parking lot I realized that there was a cop not too far behind me. And there are four four-way stop signs between me and the next main street, and no one’s ever at any of those intersections. I determine that I will stop completely at every single one and go 25 MPH on the street, as I am supposed to. So I do. Full stops. Excruciating slowness. Last stop sign I look behind me and the fucking cop has his fucking lights on. What the fuck? So I pull over. He pulls up beside me and says (with an attitude like I am some kind of moronic fuckwit)

“Where did you learn to stop at stop signs?”

I look at him like “Wha?” And then he says to me, for real, that I have been stopping PAST the stop signs, by a FOOT. AT LEAST. I am not stopping level with the stop sign, but the front one-foot of my car is past the stop sign. I don’t know about you, but I stop with the front of my car positioned somewhere between the curb and the stop sign. I don’t know anyone who stops with the front edge of their car directly level with the stop sign. I just gape at him. His attitude is very rude and assholish, he’s gesticulating wildly and talking about how I am “halfway into the intersection” before I stop. And he does this mock ‘looking around cluelessly’ motion, like that’s me in the middle the intersection, looking around and not knowing where I am. Or something. And he’s saying I am stopping “in the middle of the intersection” right after he’s just said I overshot the signs by a foot. Which would make for a smallish intersection. He’s talking to me like I am the most retarded person, doing the most insane thing, that he’s ever seen.

So he’s all berating me, and saying how he’s supposed to write me a ticket (In the meantime, he’s never even left his car. He pulled up next to me and is blocking traffic himself in order to bawl me out through his open passenger window.) Then, weirdly and suddenly his attitude changes. The more I gape at him the more conciliatory he gets. “It’s alright.” he says “I got you covered, I am not going to write you a ticket. But you have to watch out, there’s lots of us out here, and we’re hiding all over the place. We’ll give you a ticket for that.” And I am thinking “Mother-effer, I KNEW you were behind me. That was my cop’s-behind-me stop. WTF?” So I said “Sorry, I had no idea.” And then he tells me to drive carefully and takes off. I am just sitting there like “WTF just happened here?”

I don’t know what his story was, or why he was so rude, then so faux-nice all of a sudden. It was so ODD. I mean, maybe he thought I was a student and could be easily intimidated by him, then saw I was a grown woman. Maybe he thought that in that neighborhood I would be someone who was up to more than over-shooting stop signs and he could drug-bust me. Maybe he was just pissed that there was someone in front of him doing the speed limit and coming to full stops at stop signs like cops NEVER do. It was bizarre. So I drove home. And there are a LOT of four-way stops between work and home, and I watched very carefully to see what other people were doing. Guess what? Everyone stops with their front bumper beyond the stop sign. They stop with their body right behind the stop sign (bumper somewhere between stop sign and curb.) Everyone. And the cop acted like I was the only person who ever did that, and I was like Speed Fucking Racer behind the wheel.

I don’t know. I hate to make generalizations, but cops can really suck. Power-mad weirdos who act all erractic and have the power to arrest you. It’s unsettling.  I’ve been driving for 20 years, I’ve always driven the same way, plenty of cops have seen me stop at a stop sign, FFS, then this one freaks out on me. It makes me feel paranoid and it makes me think cops suck ass, all cops. And I know they don’t, but they need to really stop with the random petty and subjective shit and get to busting all these people who are shooting people.

STLtoday - 4 injured in 4 shootings in StL

Four shootings yesterday. Four separate shootings.This city is insane. Do not linger on the streets, people. It’s not safe.

Favorite badly-written PD sentence in this article has got to be:

The girl and a woman were arguing and a man in a crowd that had gathered fired shots.

That’s not only badly written, that’s also funny in that it makes it seem as if the man got fed up with their arguing and shot at them. Which may or not be the case, actually. Hrm. Must rethink guns as a solution to making people STFU. Though I do understand the urge.

At home tonight, after a sleepy/lazy/industrious day, then a shopping trip then a jaunt over to Todd’s for Chinese food and backlogged Tivo. He watches shows that I only think are funny if I watch them with him. Like Reality Bites, which is just retarded and offensive, but when I watch it at his house is kinda funny. And Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! same thing. I brought magazines to read so as not to distract him from his mission of Tivo-clearing, and caught up on some 3D World.

My Mom kept asking me what I wanted for my birthday and I kept saying “nothing” because there’s honestly nothing (that I would ask my Mom to buy me) that I can think of that I need. If there’s anything I want that’s low-to-medium priced I buy it myself, and I am at the age where it’s no longer OK-feeling to ask my parents to buy expensive things for me. So she ended up taking my word for it and giving me cash. I decided to spend it, and went self-birthday shopping for me.

I went to the Galleria which has instituted a policy of no under-18’s alone after 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. That was in response to some violence at the mall involving youth, and it’s been in effect for several months. Maybe a year even? Anyway, whether in response to the ban or the good weather or the fact that people now think the mall is violent, it was dead there. And even though it was dead it felt run-down and dirty. Like a big, sloppy crowd had just cleared out five minutes before. Lots of closed stores with no “coming soon” signs on the boarded-up storefronts. Things like the Kenneth Cole store and the BreadCo closed down. Who ever heard of a BreadCo closing? I grabbed some coffee at Starbucks and it was grimy there, like no one had wiped the counters down all day. Gross.

I went first to Sephora to get a new bottle of Euphoria, and they were doing a decent business. Decent enough that no one asked me if I needed any help, even though I was in there for a good 10-15 minutes looking around with a bemused expression on my face. Deciding that they must not carry Calvin Klein fragrances anymore, and that I was damned if I was paying $22 for a tube of Stila lipgloss, I headed into the Apple store. (That shitbag place is always hopping. I swear that if I had to work in there I would kill myself and others within an hour.) Anyway, I wanted one of those iTrip things like I borrowed from Todd for my Savannah trip. But if you can imagine, no one asked me if I needed any help, and I couldn’t find it on my own. I found one that was similar, but the price tag was torn off, and there was no one to ask about the cost. It wasn’t the same model anyway and I wanted to get the same one because it had worked so well. So I fought my way back out through the crowd and left.

OK, 0 for 2. I am beginning to form a theory of inverse helpfulocity, in which shop workers only ask people who are clearly browsing if they need help, because people who look like they need help may want… help. And that’s work. It’s much easier to swan around bothering people who are just looking. This is based on my own personal experience of being bothered by many, many shop people when I want to be left alone, and never finding anyone to help me when I want to ask questions and buy something. I headed to Aveda to see if they’ve come to their senses and brought back Deep Penetrating Hair Revitalizer. (They have not. I hate them.) If you can bring yourself to feel astonishment one more time, no one asked if they could help me as I searched fruitlessly for anything that might be a decent replacement. (Seriously. I got home last night and my hair looked like it belonged on a deranged maiden-aunt who’d escaped from a period romance via the tropical rain forest.)

Not quite so much gray, but seriously it was huge and scary-frizzy.

They have some new moisture line and I have to commend myself for not just buying it, but testing the conditioner on one wrist and the masque on the other. A few hours later when I was at Todd’s and scratching at both welt-covered wrists I knew I had saved myself a trip back to return the stuff. Anyway, I bought some Anti-Humectant pomade, as if anything could fight my hair’s attraction to humidity or vice-versa.

After Aveda I went down to Macy’s, where a girl actually asked if she could help me! I asked her if they had any Euphoria gift sets, and she pointed out to the ones which were cleverly hidden right where I was standing. Genius strikes again, in the form of my enhanced powers of perception!

So here’s where it gets funny. She walks away and I peruse the prices and the gift sets on offer. Small bottle (1.7 oz) of perfume = $58. Large bottle (3.4 oz) = $75. So I am getting the larger one. You know, value. So I look at the gift sets and realize they aren’t really all that gift-setty. They’re a silver bag that you could reuse for storage with a silver fabric headband wrapped around it, which you could use if you take up being a ballerina. But the price for the bag that contains the 3.4 oz bottle of perfume is $70. I look at the bag which contains the small bottle, and it’s $50. So basically I can save anywhere from $5 to $8 by buying the same size perfume and taking a free bag and headband. Sweet. I go to purchase it and the girl who’s checking me out doesn’t scan the bag, which has a regular price and bar code on the bottom. She opens the bag, takes out the perfume box and scans that. Which rings up $75. I point out to her that the bag says that it’s $70 not $75, and she talks to the lady at the next register, defaming some not-present “she” who “switched out all these gifts yesterday” and “must have not changed the prices” (sic). She then turns to me and says “This has gone up since yesterday.” Expecting that to make sense to me, when I know darn well that the price of the perfume itself is fixed, and if anything the price of the set was incorrect, not magically raising and lowering like a deli special.

Now, if there had only been one set like that I might have gone along with her unlogic, because I don’t want to seem as if I am scamming the store. But there were 3-4 sets just like that, with various sizes being sold at lower than face value because they were in this price-transforming silver bag. So I just raised my eyebrows and looked at her. (Eyebrow-lifting is the first step you take in your transmogrification from regular person to Angry Customer Lady.) Her companion at the other register said “Just give it to her.” (Note: Thanks Macy’s! I love for you to mislabel your shite and then make me feel like a scam artist!) So anyway, that was a bargain. I guess. Todd thought the headband was cute, though he didn’t want it for himself as far as I could tell.

I tried to look at shoes, but their whole shoe department looked like a bomb went off, and even the displays of regular-priced shoes were fudged up. The whole wall that had Born written on it was stocked with nothing but Easy Spirit shoes, and no matter how farked my feet get I will not wear Easy Spirit shoes. I was vaguely embarrassed to be inadvertently looking at them. So I just left. Wow, looking back at my total experience, that whole mall was a real shithole tonight.

I don’t know. All of St. Louis seemed totally dead. There was no one on the roads, no one at Borders when I stopped in there, no one on the highway. I don’t know if people were holed up in their houses or all out of town for one last hurrah before school starts on Monday, but it was dead as a doornail.

And that concludes all of Susan’s Wild and Soapy Showertime Shopping Adventures for this Saturday!

Oh, and one more side note regarding the bar on Friday night: Just because I am at the bar with my friends at/after last call doesn’t mean I am looking to be picked up by your drunken skank ass. I happen to like to stay out late when I choose to go out, and closing down the bar doesn’t mean I care to be treated as if I am easy-pickings, or the last-resort chick. I am planning to go home to bed, alone, and your drunken last-minute ramblings when you realize you’re inadvertently planning the same are not impressive. That’s all.

she says
any two points can make a line
but i know i can never make you mine
i can never make you mine

Deb Talan - Two Points

STLtoday - StL logs 100th murder this morning

ST. LOUIS — In what could be the city’s 100th murder this year, a man was shot while sitting in a car Tuesday night and died early this morning, police said.

The man was sitting in his car about 10:11 p.m. Tuesday night, when a man attempted to rob him and then shot him, police said.

Further proof of the St. Louis maxim “Sit thee stationary neither on thy front porch, nor in thy vehicle. For if you do, surely shall ye perish.”

Click to embiggen, obvy

Why I do not now, nor will I ever, ride the Metrolink. At least if I am in my car I can run your thieving, assaulting ass over, motherfucker.

STLtoday - MetroLink riders attacked minutes apart at 2 stations

ST. LOUIS — Police are investigating two violent attacks on MetroLink riders that occurred within minutes of each other late Saturday night at the Delmar and Forest Park stations.

St. Louis police arrested two teens after one of the attacks, officials said. At least three of the victims were taken to area hospitals.

I hate that my Mom and brother ride the Metrolink to the ball games. I think that whole system is a filthy, gang-and-thug-infested attack waiting to happen. When you have a group of 10 violent thugs who have no qualms in attacking *groups* of people, you have a serious problem with your security presence.

And no, I have nothing against public transport, I used it pretty much exclusively when I lived in Europe. But public transport with free and unregulated on/off access which goes to and from some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the country… that’s just a retardedly bad idea. Especially in a city with the murder rate St. Louis has.

Maybe it’s because Metrolink stations look too much like front porches, people think that the riders are asking for it.

While on a standard type of clothes-hunt at the Galleria today, I spied two rare lifeforms wandering the marble floors. Observe:

To the left of the image you have a rather sad figure, the lone frat-boy.

Observed more regularly in bands of three or more (and in their native south-eastern Missouri habitat) this individual frat boy looked rather nervous and ill-at-ease without his standard protective pack formation.

His posture and body language (clenched fists not visible in this image) indicate his discomfiture at this solo excursion. Though his plumage boastfully indicates that (in their native territory) his pack is “kind of a big deal” I think we can all agree this is not the case at the time the photo was taken and the contrast between his evoked status and actual status make us a little sad.

In front and to the right of the lone frat boy, we have an even more rare phenom the Midwestern Guido!

I was excited to spot these three youngsters together, and wish that the faux-hawk sported by the left-most Guido was more visiible. They are still in a formative stage, as the collar on the middle Guido remains mercifully un-popped, and full-on tanorexia has yet to set in. But the copious amounts of hair gel, the gold chains and those douchey plaid shorts (guy on the extreme right is clearly lower-status, as he is wearing rayon manpris, meaning that either he cannot afford douche-plaid or was not contacted prior to the excursion to inform him that douche-plaid was de rigueur.) show that these fledglings are well on their way to becoming full-Guido.

We don’t see a lot of this in the St. Louis area, so I was excited to get them on camera, with the lone frat-boy as pure bonus!

Built St. Louis: The North Side | St. Louis Place
The Ravaging of St. Louis
In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it’s ranked 48th.

In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That’s out of two and a half million people in the metro area.

In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.

At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They’re stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.

A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they’re empty. Nobody’s there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America’s most devastated urban landscapes.

As I live and work in some of the city’s more economically depressed and architecturally devastated areas, I can attest to the truth of this. There are efforts being made to restore some areas, but the current economic situation is hampering those. The people who want to buy in those neighborhoods can’t necessarily get loans anymore, the people who can get loans are finding more house (and better neighborhoods) for their money due to the soft real-estate market, and developers/rehabbers are pulling out of projects because they understand that the buyers for those projects just aren’t there.

For those of us who are committed to sticking it out in our “developing” neighborhoods, that means watching more and more houses crumble around us, no reduction in crime (empty houses = not only squatters like the houseful of prostitutes in the condemned building behind me, but also a lack of pride in the neighborhood in general which leads to further deterioration and more crime.) that we’d hoped for and the value of our own investments plummeting. In the meantime, more and more buildings are torn down, like the historic African-American movie house that I used to drive by on the way to work. This spring the bulldozers came, now it’s an empty field. I have no answers, I think it comes down to individual commitment to the city and helping it improve even if it’s uncomfortable and kind of scary at times - and frankly few people have the patience for it. It tries mine at times, that much I know.

STLtoday - In StL’s latest homicide, man shot on Emerson

A 28-year-old man was shot to death Tuesday night in the 5000 block of Emerson Avenue, St. Louis police say.

…

Police say Bradley had been near the back porch of a home when there was a confrontation with someone.

This is one reason why I love my privacy fence so much. It makes me harder to aim at when I sit on my deck.

See this on the way to work. The big lock on the gate makes me laugh.We will see if I can get it on FAILblog

STLtoday - Hwy. 40 shutdown prompts new law

“…residents said traffic related to the Highway 40 shutdown had become a burden. A previous ordinance forbids through traffic, but no law had addressed turning around.”

Oh boo fucking hoo, rich people. So the state shuts down a major highway, nothing is accessible, traffic is terrible, regular people want to shop at your grocery store (which is convenient now, despite being filled with jackass old rich people like you) so you throw up barriers to prevent them accessing it, and NOW you get the local politicians (which your bank accounts allow you to keep conveniently in your pocket) to enact a law forbidding people, who couldn’t get into the parking lot due to the barriers, from turning around on your precious (taxpayer-funded) concrete slabs. Of course there was ALREADY a law that we weren’t allowed to drive through your neighborhood. Now we can’t even use the edge of your street to turn around in. Well fuck you.

Oh, traffic has increased in your neighborhood since the Hwy 40 shutdown? Well no shit. Traffic has increased EVERYWHERE since the shutdown. Maybe you should have paid a bit more attention to what was happening around you last year when this was all being debated, rather than just assuming that since your carpool had a straight shot from your house to Country Day, this wasn’t going to be your problem. I live in the city, and no one is protecting ME from illegal turnarounds, or excessive traffic, or the clientele of the hookers in the apartment complex behind me who favor driving around at night with their lights off, so as to go cleverly undetected. Wait… was that your husband? Anyway, fucking suck it up, for fuck’s sake. Enacted a new law, my ass.

Damn. Whiny rich people work my freaking nerves.

“Beer-food event hosted by Family Violence Council”

The St. Louis Family Violence Council is hosting “All in Good Taste” — a beer and food tasting event from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at Lumen, 2201 Locust Street.

To be fair, I don’t know if I can really call this a crap headline, as the event itself is kind of ridiculous, in context. But the headline is badly written, no matter how stupid the subject matter is.

American Medical Association notes on link between domestic violence and alcohol abuse.

STLtoday - Drivers unfazed by Phase 2

“People are more complacent about the impact,” said Todd Waelterman, St. Louis streets director. “People need to respond. Entire patterns are going to change. It will be a significant change instantly.”

Bullshit. Maybe it’s just that we all know that no matter how much we panic and freak out and try to talk sense into your dumb Jeff City asses, you’re not going to freaking listen.

So don’t expect us to get all discombobulated this time around, we’ve gotten numb to your astonishing bad judgment. Now we just sit in traffic cursing your eyes.

STLtoday - Man killed in collision during gun battle
By Kim Bell - ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

St. Louis — A gunman who forced his way into a car to escape armed pursuers was killed in a traffic crash during a running gunbattle late Wednesday, police said.

Richard Joy, 37, of the 1200 block of South 11th Street, died at the scene about 11 p.m., after being thrown from a car at Hebert and Parnell streets.

Police said Joy was riding in a Chevrolet Malibu that sped through a stop sign and collided with a van at that intersection. Officers found a .40-caliber gun on the ground a few feet from the wreckage.

Police said the 33-year-old driver of the Malibu told them Joy had jumped into his car at a BP gas station at 1235 North Grand Boulevard and ordered him to drive.

The motorist said Joy was being chased by three men in a dark-colored, four-door vehicle that continued to pursue them, firing shots. He said Joy was returning fire until the collision.

The driver of the Malibu was examined at a hospital and held by police on six city probation violations and a federal probation violation. Police withheld his identity.

The van driver, 27, was treated for unspecified injuries. The shooters in the dark-colored vehicle remained at large.

Joy was a parole absconder wanted by the Missouri Division of Probation and Parole. In December 2004, he pleaded guilty in St. Louis of burglary and robbery and was sentenced to seven years in prison, according to court records. He was paroled in October 2006 but was declared a parole absconder in February.

Joy’s sister-in-law, Joanne Lax, said Thursday he was the youngest of 11 children and leaves behind three children, 16, 4 and 9 months. She said he had been unable to find work since his release from prison, and that his extended family was helping support him.

Best phrase in this article = “parole absconder”  - which I think I am going to incorporate into a lot of my insults from now on.

Also, I know I live in a very violent city, and in a pretty shady part of it. But I NEVER see shit like this happening. I have no idea how I would react if I was tooling down the road and suddenly found myself in the middle of a raging gun battle. I would probably think they were filming a movie and I was an unwilling extra.

Also, chances of this guy just jumping into a car driven by a guy with “six city probation violations and a federal probation violation” are… well, actually pretty good in that part of town.