The House Of The Rising Crap (Photo One)

Photo by John Hoff

Here is Brain, the Minn Post reporter who did that great story, standing in front of "The House Of The Rising Crap" which had an unsecured side door, which "Jane" says was kicked in by police and just left that way. His description of the interior is certainly creative...

...and, in fact, I was intrigued by a bold and experimental literary artifice he used to describe the state of the house. I plan to try something similar with my "send the party patrol to the North Side" column. (Excuse me...my English Major nerd personality, bubbling to the top, here)

Completely different things caught my attention in contrast to what Brian found notable. I would have written about the spilled boxes of computer discs. (Data! Documents! What might it contain?)

Half a bottle of cooking sherry, in the cupboard. (Why haven't the chronic inebriates snatched that, yet?) An unopened can of Alpo. Interesting how I noticed the unopened and salvageable stuff while Brian took note of rancid dog food still in a doggy dish. You can tell I am an eternal optimist, like Sponge Bob Square Pants.

We were both struck by the sight of ankle-deep possessions which (as Brian put it) it is impossible to avoid stepping on.

Brian is a decent person. Decent people don't like to step on other people's stuff, even within a ransacked and abandoned house. (We were checking for any trespassers before I took the initiative of boarding it)

One can ignore so many personal flaws or distinctions on the North Side, and just put everybody into one of two categories: the decent people and the people who are not.

I spotted a robin's egg blue envelope with a return address from a prison and I snatched it up for examination, like finding the needle in a haystack right away. Here was a clue to the puzzle about why things were so messed up in this house. Incarceration.

Decent people are still living upstairs. The house is in foreclosure and they are caught in the middle. Downstairs, the first floor apartment was open to trespass and ransack, looking like Hurricane Foreclosure blew through...yet they are afraid to secure the door, even though they are the ones who would burn up and die if (oh, gee, for example) some crack head carelessly dropped a match in a pile of ankle-deep clothing.

How many times do I need to shout it? The city needs to let people know (explicitly, not by common sense implication) it is acceptable and reasonable for citizens to secure doors left open to trespass by crack heads. Even if the city must use words like "we're not interested in pursuing people who are just taking desperate measures to assure the safety of their neighborhood, like boarding up doors that have been kicked in."

I can't do it all myself! Though I took care of THIS one.