Ground Zero MicroHood Report
(Neighbors • Media)
After years serving as a local reporter within my little Texas county, I have finally seen the light of journalistic evolution, thanks to an enduring news fashion trend known as “hyperlocal” reporting.
Hyperlocal aficionados have declared that it’s not sufficient merely to provide coverage of the main tax-money spenders in a particular county government, or the criminal offenses and court escapades of local scofflaws, the eruption of new business ventures, or the doings of councils in a county’s largest cities. What about school board budget committees? What about parent-teacher organizations? What about village councils? What about church festivals? How about the municipal utility district? What about the Rosedale Chamber of Commerce’s downtown beautification committee? Isn’t this where decisions are made that truly effect people’s lives?
Convinced by such logic, every gathering at any population center important enough to boast of a post office now has its own resident hyperblogger, swigging coffee, laptop a-quiver, waiting for the session to end so he can ask the chairman what exactly just happened? I find myself living for the meaningful hyperpublic discourse that soon follows.
But can it be enough? If hyperlocal represents a fuller public service than local, imagine the fullness of a service fueled by cheap Internet bandwidth and earnest reporting on a microlocal scale. All it requires is a few dedicated souls willing to take responsibility for their microscopic corners of America.
Which brings me to Mitchell and the midsection of Sunny Slope, the forgotten Richmond, Texas river-bottom community that serves as my MicroHood.
Mitchell
It’s probably none of our business, but that hasn’t prevented Mitchell from serving as lead story around here most of the time, really for the past three months now, ever since Helen kind of wigged out and took off to live in a series of motel rooms.
Mitchell can be such an asshole that at first we all figured he’d done or said something abusive, or that maybe Helen just got sick of the cumulative effects of living with an unshaven contrarian backyard mechanic and the rusty cast-off vehicles representing his failed resurrectional talents.
Conceivably that was part of it, however, evidence now suggests that Helen has slid into some manic mental state due to some health problems from which she suffers and for which she’s apparently required to be occasionally treated. Only somewhere around the time she took off, she also lost her computer programming job and the health insurance that went with it. According to semi-reliable sources (which is the best you’re going to get in Sunny Slope) she required some complex $10,000 blood work every month or two, which among other things helped her maintain a level of mental stability that isn’t at present being maintained.
Keep in mind that none of this represents Helen’s side of the story, but as Helen is on the lam and unavailable for comment, we’re having to rely on other sources.
Which is to say, mostly, Hayden – the big motorhead across the street whose affinity for monster trucks and motorcycles has drawn him close to Mitchell over the years. Thus, while Mitchell might be too reserved to speak frankly of his personal travails to the likes of This Reporter, fearing (with good reason) that his MicroLife might be laid bare in these very digital pages, he has no such qualms about opening up to his buddy Hayden. Thankfully, Hayden recognizes his MicroResponsibility to the public and thus is usually willing to spill.
So we learn that Helen also took off with Mitchell’s Visa card. For the first six weeks or so, she kept moving around, living a few days at this motel, then moving somewhere else. No one could find her, even after she started buying a series of expensive electronic console games and other gizmos which she lavished upon herself for completely unknown reasons.
We all figured Mitchell would hire a lawyer or a detective and get a protective order or start divorce proceedings. But the whole episode seems to have left him stunned and unsure what to do next. Thankfully, has his feud with the Tard Brothers to keep his mind occupied.
The Tard Brothers
The Tard Brothers actually are two cousins, but they look so much alike, and they take action with such enthusiastic abandon, that Mitchell christened them the Tard Brothers one day and the name just kind of clicked with everyone else who’d ever run up against them.
One of the Tard Brothers lives in a forlorn, nondescript 1970s-era box house next to Mitchell’s, along with his father, his huge wife, their tiny toddler son and two dogs who spend much of the day sleeping stretched out in the middle of the street. The other Tard Brother, who is really a cousin, doesn’t reside there but is ever present nonetheless.
The feud started last summer, when the Tard Brothers bought themselves a little flat-bottom boat and trailer and started driving it through their back yard, across the back portion of Mitchell’s property, then through the back of Mark and Mary’s place, Peggy’s acreage and on to the tiny strip of land I own that runs down to the Brazos River.
Keep in mind that every yard through which the Tard Brothers drove, including their own, backs up to the river, too. But I’m the only person in the neighborhood who bothers to weed-eat his portion of the riverbank, so I can get down there and fish without stepping on a snake in three feet of grass. Apparently the Tard Brothers took this as an implicit invitation to create a boat launch.
The first time I spotted them, they’d backed up their trailer and were preparing to haul the boat down the bank – my bank – on a rope. I hustled down there and, in what I felt was very plain language, told them to get out.
By the time I spotted them the second time, a couple of days later, they’d already been out sweating in their little boat and pretending to fish (in the middle of a 100-degree summer day) for probably five hours, and they were pulling the boat back up my little strip of weed-eaten riverbank, cutting deep notches through the Bermuda grass and into the sand, where the next good rain would form a nice gully and basically ruin the manicured ambiance of my fish camp. This time I used exceedingly plain language, suggesting they take their boat and shove it down the bank behind their own house, instead of driving over to my tiny strip of land.
They got the message the second time, but instead of making a boat launch on their own property, they sneaked over to Peggy’s yard one day with a can of Round-Up and defoliated a 15-foot-wide section of her riverbank, which they then turned into their personal boat ramp for the next three months until Mitchell got sick of them making ruts through his property and told them to stay the hell out.
Two weeks later, they drove their father/uncle’s new pickup out back of their place and got it stuck in the mud. They revved it up good until, between the ruts and the hill running down to the river back there, the only way to get it out was to turn it and drive parallel to the slope, through Mitchell’s yard and up into his back driveway. The Tard Brothers asked Mitchell for permission and he told them to go fuck themselves.
After that, the Tard Brothers strung a big cable between two cottonwood trees on roughly the border between their property and Mitchell’s, with a big “No Trespassing” sign hung in the middle, which was pretty funny considering trespassing was almost a daily pastime for them.
Mitchell showed the sign to Hayden one Saturday right after Hayden had purchased a Ruger LCP .380 pistol whose accuracy he was interested in testing. So they shot the Tard Brothers’ “No Trespassing” sign full of holes.
That really pissed off the Tard Brothers for some reason, and thus was the feud cemented.
Mostly it manifests itself like this: Mitchell drinks a six-pack of Bud Light, which puts him in the mood to play his electric guitar badly. He sees that the Tard Brothers are home, so he turns up the amplifier a little.
The one Tard Brother tells his wife to call the police, so she complains about the noise. Hayden’s police woman friend Brenda calls Hayden to tell him that the Tard Brother’s wife just called the cops on Mitchell. So Hayden calls Mitchell and tells him to cut off the amplifier because the cops are coming. The police pull into Mitchell’s driveway and find him leaning on the fence drinking a beer and listening to the crickets. The Tard Brothers’ angry eyes peer through the curtains in the house on the other side of the driveway.
Foiled again.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 28, 2009, 05 40 am
Bob, I like the concept of microjournalism, and it makes some interesting reading, way better than your run of the papermill newspaper stuff.
But I gotta tell ya, you know when you get THAT micro, you are right next of gossip. And easily knowable, findable, and vulnerable to them as which you is doin’ the gossipin’ on.
I am not all that likely to run up to Austin and put an ass-whuppin’ on some reporter, no more likely than such a reporter is to actually report on my doings. But when you reach down to the micro level – who knows?
Just be careful, you know?
jd
— jdallen Sep 28, 05:30 pm #
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