Agitating Teens

I've lived across the street from an elementary and high school for most of my life. The brief respites from this living situation had their own horrors conceived of ill-planning and zealotry. I'm moving soon. A proper move, hopefully before the end of June. I can't precisely articulate how living practically door-to-door with these institutions is bothersome without just sounding like a curmudgeon. Surrounded by youth, and fun and excitement!? Right?
Children don't really bother me, and generally I think I'm good with kids. I throw their assorted lost sports balls back over the fence a few dozen times a year and they don't actively do something to antagonize the weirdo across the street.

No, the problem with the elementary kids is the din. Every single day I wake up to 300 children screaming for purposes across the spectrum. It leaks into the house through cracks in the windows and instantly submerges me in the activity of the world when I wake up. It is the least restful noise you can possibly imagine. Because of my insomnolent fortitude gained from power-napping through 300 tiny 'LOOK AT ME!' voices I can restfully and comfortably sleep beside massive chugging industrial engines. At least they have some rhythm.

The high school is another matter. Pretty obviously because my adolescence was mostly a miserable stinking shitshow I think teens are stupid and ought to be kept out of sight and out of mind. Everything they do is unthinkably obnoxious, something I thought I'd perfected as a teen.

I need to take a break here and emphasize that I've lived at this place for 15 years. Ten of those years I was a student at these places, building up plenty of subconscious aversion to catholic academia and the institutions that perpetrated it all over my childhood. The last five years have seen me grow to understand precisely why grumpy old men exist.

The big issue with high school kids is a trend of speeding down the street as loud and hard as possible. This is a residential street, a tiny 1.5 lane stretch that lasts the lengths of 5 houses, 1 apartment and 2 duplexes. And they'll just blast on down because hey, that paunchy cashier at the McDonalds isn't going to flirt with herself.
Now, teenagers drive like shit. It's a given. They do stupid things. Teens are learning, so even though they're dumb as fuck and do and say the worst things, they're not necessarily going to stay that way.

Unfortunately, their parents did. Behind every stupid child is neglectful dipshit of a caretaker. Every weekday, without fail, a legion of breeders sets up shop to pick up their kids. Fat, tired, and angry looking people line up and down John St. clogging traffic and honking at each other. They will drive into oncoming traffic, block driveways and generally care I could slap all of them.

So this is a cocktail for some resentment without a clear target. I mean 'the institution of children transitioning into an academic mindset' isn't really something I can be bothered to start confrontations over.
Thank goodness I found an outlet: Cleaning their dipshit graffiti off of the neighborhood.

I like graffiti. I think street-art in general is pretty captivating because much of it is inoffensive and evocative, but it can still use obscenity to make a point. Like this Wanksy character; drawing dicks around potholes to get them filled in. What a hero.

My neighborhood does not have any Wanksys or Jean Michel Basquiats. We have the 'FUKREW'. A group of kids that sprays tags that look like diarrhea on the telephone poles of an otherwise quiet, gentrifying neighborhood. They also leave these fucking stickers on things. Little office stickers.

I could go out, park the car, keep my eyes peeled for hours on end and then presumably brutalize some dipshits hands so that he can't tag anything for 6 months. Some pack of three or four mildly-stoned, slightly buzzed teens could come up tough so I can spaz out and fuck their shit up. It would be easy, because I'm bizarrely strong and an adult man and they would ostensibly be children.

However, how quickly would that get me arrested? Sure, graffiti looks bad, but some fat idiot attacking kids? I'd be down for menace, at LEAST, and pretty easily assault if I actually harmed someone. Plus I'd get a reputation as a legitimately psychotic fuck. I felt like something needed to be done.


Last friday I'd just dropped the car off to get the winter tires taken off, because it was the middle of fucking april and still snowing for some reason.
I picked up some beer and noticed one of these insensate tags on the way home. An odd, thoughtful calm came over me. With little effort, I picked up some drywall scrapers from the basement, loaded a spray-bottle with water and vinegar and set to work.

I was at it for about an hour and a half, traversing the block. The biggest offender was a mailbox covered in stickers, tags, rends in the metal and not exaggerating here a plastic bag with a putrefying lunch inside that someone had added a used disposable dog-poop bag to. Several recipients of what the mail box was intended for came out of their homes to complain at me, assuming I worked for Canada post. I explained I was from the neighborhood and had simply gotten sick of looking at the ratty stickers. One them, an older gent, got some tools and set to work repairing the hinges and rends in the metal as I scraped it clean.
This was tough; the water wasn't doing me any favours and my scraper was just about all scraped out. I needed something to reach things like stop signs and I needed something to get the remaining grit.


This week I took my lessons and put them to use; making use of a steel brush, a short stepladder, a higher quantity of vinegar and a fresh ergonomic scraper. I covered much the same ground I had last week, but there was significantly less this to remove time around. Of particular note was a fresh sticker on one of the first poles I polished: A conglomeration of signatures, meaningless symbols and lovely note hastily stuffed into a corner: "Leave a name u pussy".
And if I'd seen the guy, or you know left my own sticker or whatever, I'd have said 'Don't leave obscenities around the infrastructure of my gentrifying neighborhood, you ignorant fucking cunt.'
Obviously that didn't happen. I thought it sounded kind of cool though, so there it is.
Thus it was scraped.

No one bothers me. No cops stop by to say 'Why the heck you cleanin, bub?' and even the rubberneckiest of neighbors give me peace to get the thing done. It feels good just to be busy for that little while, and the neighborhood looks better.

I see a fair share of people feeling trapped, nervous, depressed. I'm not getting on a soapbox here, what works for me is not implicitly going to work for you, but finding something to do even though it's as mundane and innocuous as this, has done wonders for me.
In conjunction with trying to communicate with a fresh crowd and distancing myself from drug addicts. And it was right in front of my eyes on the walk home from the beer store.