Well, it's been an interesting week.
Rand Paul tore through Kentucky like a Wolverine-Pit Bull crossbreed tracking a wounded housecat; Inter Milan tore through FC Bayern Munich in much the same way to clinch the UEFA Champions League Title; two Santa Monica High School students, caught at school with backpacks full of chickenshit weaponry, were found by the crack SMPD to have been making threats and lists of targets; and the beach surrounding the Santa Monica Pier has been deemed so dangerous for humans that our best Lifeguards wept openly and advised against being within two hundred yards of it, jabbering frenziedly about Bacterial Pneumonia and E. Coli infection.
Total loadout for the two young malcontents at SAMOHI was, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press, thirteen knives (the largest of which had a ten-inch fixed blade), six throwing stars, one BB gun which "looked like a pistol", one bamboo blowgun with a nail for ammunition, two black masks, two ropes (length unspecified), and a wristband with spikes.
Let's take a moment to think about this.
Two nincompoop outcasts flashed pocketknives, camping store trinkets, and army surplus bargains around school, and now their shiny new punk wristband is going to rot in an evidence locker until they're deemed stable enough to handle anything sharper than french fries. The situation is strongly reminiscent of my own teenage years; feeling out of place and pissed off is not unusual for intelligent young people. The response, however, is rather extreme, considering that the most dangerous weapon they managed to acquire would have trouble stopping a half-determined squirrel.
Does anyone remember that small Colorado town? Ten years ago our children were wandering around with sawn-offs and TEC-9s, not chintzy dime-store arsenals that even the Police giggled at. Considering serious punishment is folly beyond words. Give them an afternoon with me... Or anyone else I was close with in High School, for that matter. My friends and I made Napalm in our garages, broke windows, collected bullets, fantasized about slaughtering everyone we didn't like, then got into more constructive things; Electronic Music, the Visual Arts, Dungeons & Dragons, Pornography, even Marijuana.
Why not? Give the Kids a gram each and plop them in front of the television with a bag of Fritos and a soda. I would much rather see them chuckling good-naturedly at Spongebob Squarepants than screaming and crying, waving around throwing stars, BB guns, and lengths of rope. Those are the actions of Speed Freaks and longtime Alcohol Abusers. Someone needs to sit down, knees to knees, with both of them and explain that High School is a complete Shitstorm, and that life after High School improves tenfold, almost immediately. It is not the End Of The World, and if you can slog through the chest-high pool of shit for four years it will retreat to a comfortable ankle-high level for the next fifty.
Which brings us to some depressing but unsurprising news. The waters surrounding the Santa Monica Municipal Pier, our world-renowned Theme Park By The Sea, are apparently so filthy even the Homeless are said to be getting leery of it.
We should never have rebuilt the damned thing in the Eighties. Tourism and Prestige are vacuous, cynical concepts when your four-year-old contracts Meningitis because she wanted to look for sandcrabs. At least when the Pier was in ruins you knew where you stood. The Boys from Zephyr ran things with a heavy hand, and setting foot past the high-tide mark was something only close insiders and lunatics considered seriously. It was a sure ticket to intensive care at St. John's, and never mind the embarrassment. Trespassers were lucky to escape with all of their limbs, much less their clothes, money, surfboard, car, or sanity. There are some unlucky souls who are still unable to speak of the day they tried to paddle out at The Boneyard.
But at least the water wasn't filled with Feces and Semen and Used Syringes. Being in the Bottom Five Beaches in California is a special dishonor, along with voting for Ronald Reagan or investing in low-income housing in Tijuana. The Z-Boys may have been crazed, territorial, and terrifyingly violent, but they would brook no Shit in their Waters.
There is no shit in the water in Milan, at least this year. Inter Milan, finishing with a score of 2-0, are the Champions of UEFA's Champions League. Already there are ugly questions pertaining to FC Bayern Munich's continued insistence upon referring to themselves as a football team, rather than a motley gang of grinning simpletons who somehow manage to wear matching clothes once a week.
It was all over by sixty-five minutes or so. Sporting a deceptively healthy 1-0 lead, Inter played their signature stranglehold defense to perfection, and a successful challenge was passed to Milito, who was had scored previously as well, and he sank an elegant shot that reminded me of why we call it The Beautiful Game. Munich, by contrast, played the first half like demented fools, and in the second half found themselves windmilling crazily in the face of a serious and humorless onslaught of Italian footwork. Gone was the clockwork precision that had served the side so well; Bayern was caught so heavily off guard that they couldn't even look convincing past midfield. There are always mutters of discontent from somewhere in a football stadium, but by eighty minutes the palpable silence of Munich supporters only highlighted the victory-drunk carousing of a rabid Inter crowd. At approximately eighty seven minutes Bayern's Gomez, stymied in the middle of a harebrained attacking drive, stopped dead at midfield and visibly shrugged, drawing jeers from Milan's side and causing his own bench to hide their faces from the cameras. It was an ugly scene, and these men from Munich will not be able to buy a beer for at least nine months without being beaten around the head with hoses and belts. Their shame is not that they lost, but that they didn't even seem to to notice or care that they were playing a match, much less a title match.
Inter Milan deserves the win, however, if only because it's been over fifty years since their last. They play a classic Italian football, in that their defense allows almost no significant movement within ten yards of the goal box, and their offense is characterized by calm, measured advances sprinkled tastefully with flashes of Brilliance by their very able strikers. Consummate actors, they were fouled almost thrice as much as Bayern's hapless twinkletoes, and whipped the crowd into such a frenzy that even the announcers began to sound nervous. They don't have England's sense of gallant warfare, Brazil's almost febrile obsession for frenzied attack, America's childlike enthusiasm and gratitude just to be included, or Mexico's cutthroat and vicious rage, but they play quite well. Indeed, they have managed to put together one of the best teams in Europe, and perhaps the world, and there are very few chinks in their gilded armor. If they can keep their team together (always a relevant concern in the wealthy and treacherous European transfer market), I would not be at all surprised to see them tear through UEFA like a pack of wolves this time next year.
