Hm. It appears I was mistaken in my Party Palace post — les flics did nab the young man in question (he was hiding in the attic, says the legitimate tenant of the actual house on the property). Now, instead of squatting in a refurbished garage with a motley collection of drug-addled evildoers he is enjoying three hots and a cot at taxpayer expense.
His mother, who owns the property, is in no hurry to get Sonny sprung, which suits the neighborhood just fine. Two of his pals who remained at large popped round twice on Tuesday, looking for Christ knows what (perhaps a mislaid debit card that’s now in Mom’s hands). I have photos of both and a license-plate number, and so do the cops.
Meanwhile, today we have enjoyed our first scumbag-free day in many a moon. I should have a case of beer delivered to the squadroom.
Mad Blog Media 
The gal that runs our Lincoln Park citizen’s patrol also owns (along with her husband) the very fine Lake Superior Brewery. Safe neighborhood and just six blocks away, great growlers! At least I got that going for me. Good to hear your neck of the woods is a bit safer, hope it stays that way for a long, long while.
I perform volunteer work in our city’s largest park, picking up trash and keeping the trails clear.
Last April, I had a syringe finding of my own on the Green Trail during our city’s Daffodil Festival. Do a search on the syringe’s labeling and YOU tell ME just what was going on in the woods. Ouch!
http://tinyurl.com/3o7j4yd
As usual, your stories are great!
Ughh. Probably stolen. I’ll bet there were other drugs in play during that escapade.
Good on you for cleaning and maintaining your park and so sorry that sometimes you are at risk of a needle stick.
We were doing a cleanup in a local park a few years ago when we discovered the park attracted a better class of junkie — about a dozen used syringes had been placed in a 2 liter soda bottle before being tossed in the woods.
GREAT news! Good sleuthing, Patrick!
We’re fortunate to live in an actual neighborhood instead of a collection of houses. These dudes had more eyeballs on them than a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl.
As a doper emeritus I look at these kids and think, “There but for the grace of (insert your favorite deity here). …” I’ve made my share of mistakes over the years, but heroin wasn’t one of them. I think it helped to have read William S. Burroughs’ “Junky.” Not the best ad for the lifestyle.
Plus I’ve always hated needles. The summer I spent enduring allergy shots was one of the worst of my life. I felt like a human pincushion.
Amen!
Made a comment to my primary doc about my needle phobia and not understanding injectable drugs while he was giving me a shot. His reply was “If you ever experienced the high, you’d understand.”
Having had a couple of endoscopies since then, I now understand. I was sorely disappointed when he told me I have 4 years to wait for the next colonoscopy.
I had a relative from an older generation who was a heroin junkie for a number of years. Both the relative and the family went through absolute Hell. The relative eventually kicked the habit and straightened out and flew right, but left emotional scar tissue everywhere in the family.
Partly arising from that history, I promised my mom when I went off to college, aka Freedom From Rules University, that I would never use anything that required snorting or injecting or chemical processing. Kept that promise, too, except for occasional inhalation of bromoform-acetone density separation mixtures I used to do mineral separations for geochronology during my Ph.D. research. One day it turns out the ventilation died during a separation. I wondered why I got so high and why the undergraduate optical mineralogy lab next door needed to be evacuated. That’s what really put the hammer on my liver.
I think my current employer thought I was making up that line about my promise to my mom when they asked me the “did you ever…” question. I responded somewhat indignantly that I wouldn’t ever make up such a corny story and if I did, certainly wouldn’t implicate my mom in any part of it.
Heroin and most of that shit sucks.
Oh man you had to bring up allergy shots!
Every week for years for little or no effect. Hurray for modern biochemistry.
Congrats on having the party palace shut down. Let’s hope mom’s loser son finds another garage in another town when gets out.
Well Patrick is back on YouTube and no it is not a surveillance video.
Hah! I wondered when Winona was going to post that. She’s the new-media person and we dead-tree types gave her a bit of ribbing during the show for being all tangled up in Al Gore’s Innertubes.
She asked if she could grill me a bit on camera and I mumbled something about having a radio face, which should be obvious to anyone with a functional pair of eyeballs. Then she caught me in a weak moment at the Adventure Cycling booth and I trotted out the usual lame-o patter. Glad to see she got some use out of it.
Sorry ’bout the retina burns all y’all are suffering as a consequence. The only thing uglier than following this blog is seeing its author in person.
Patrick,
As a friend of mine once said, “God is great, God is fair, to some he gave brains, to some he gave hair.”
Bruce
btw: I got the hair. 😦
Shoot, Bruce,
What did I get? I got no hair, I got no brains … hey, wait a sec’, I got Herself, who must have gotten shorted in the eyes department. Not even Lasik helped.
Well she got a great line out of you “it’s black, it matches my aura. ”
Was Winona responsible for AC now being available as a PDF? A small but proper step forward. The dead tree types must have fought that for years.
Gotta admit the magazine has gotten much more interesting in the last year. The bikepacking article was good.
Got a direct link? I keep getting an error message to come back later.
Khal,
Here try this or go to the blogs section of adventure Cycling
Listen for the giggle after our dark lord speaks.
Ciao tutti from a jet-lagged (but oh so happy) guy in Italy. Even my luggage arrived! Got to our Monferratto HQ in time for some unpacking, a shower and a wonderful piemontese dinner – mixed antipasto plate with vitello tonnato, carpaccio “Ariotto”, robiola cheese, lingua con salsa verde (sliced beef tongue in a parsley/garlic/anchovy sauce), pollo in aspic and some zucchini in carpione (pickled zucchini strips) before a first plate of agnolotti with a bolognese sauce and a second plate of brasato al barolo (beef braised in wine) with a heavenly contorno of zucchini cooked in butter and sage. A light but tasty cake with whipped cream icing topped it off and it was washed down with a Barbera Monferrato Superiore by Gaudio. The boss arrives tomorrow from hobknobbing with her fellow philosophical wizards in Greece and the following day we’re off to see l’Eroica, the old bike rally over the dirt roads of Tuscany. It’s a tough life, but I had to get away from the Repuglican primary insanity in Iowa — at least here I can ignore the Berlusconi follies for the most part! Regarding crime — here the locals still often leave the keys in their cars – don’t know whether the crime is nonexistent or just organized, but we don’t see much evidence of the sort Patrick’s been reporting on.