Yeah, I was too young to remember when they dropped their followup, Fear of a Black Planet. I bet you thought I was going to do something with that album title to reference the title of this blog, which in turn references the progenitor of today's subject, which I will get to in a minute. I'm not going to name any names other than Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. and Lawrenceville United, but only because I don't want these people to do a google search for their names and find my blog and realize that I, in fact, was the young man that sat down with them last winter in the offices of Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. to discuss my and my lawyer friend's acquisition of a building that the corp did not even own at the time.
Well, now that we know the particulars and the players, let's proceed.
So, you know how when I was younger, I wanted to run the Pittsburgh Steelers? Yeah, I had to give up real quick, cause them Rooneys have been running shit like cracking cast iron drain pipes since the mid-30s. There's no way I'm going to get my head, chest or foot in that door, although I can show up and watch the fans watching the game from outside the stadium with no problem.
When I found out I could never own, operate and control all operations for my favorite football team, I had to set my sights much lower: Mayor of The City of Pittsburgh!
But then I realized that my Dad was never running shit like, uh, modern waste removal pipes that superseded cast iron pipes in both residential and commercial use; that is, he was never district magistrate of the people in wards 26 and 27; and he didn't bestow upon me the surname of Ravenstahl, which combines the root word, stall, a place in which to shit, and Raven, which is a delicate and dominant songbird/scavenger rare to the East End of Pittsburgh. Our current mayor's fake ass Indian name, when he was attending sucker-ass North Catholic High School in Troy Hill, was "Singing in Bird Shit." Mine was Tommy Jarvis.
And so I lost out to Luke Ravenstahl in the November Election, and he had Snoop Dogg perform at his victory party.
So, when denied rule over the Steelers and the entire city, I remembered: Pittsburgh has 90 unique neighborhoods. With that many separate groups of needy people, and just as much opportunity for neighborhood (re-, un-, and exo-)development in each set, who could deny me my god-given right to rule over, influence, and make decisions for people I might someday meet, whose names I will immediately forget, and whose feelings I will never care about?
So, with goals large and unhinged, I moved to Lawrenceville to step up and take care of a people that needed guidance. I even met some of them at neighborhood meetings and street cleanups. Now, I admit that I didn't give most of them a fair chance, but they need my guidance nonetheless, no matter how little they matter to the future development of our species.
I went to my room and started mailing out packages; the return address read: Tommy Jarvis, King/Mayor/Lord of Lawrenceville. With a little bit of cooperation from the mail delivery folks, I succeeded in my dream of controlling and influencing people whose hands I would never shake. The power tasted great, tangy with a bit of satiating umami even, but I wanted more. When then Director of Lawrenceville United Toe-knee Choffee announced his bid for District Six Magistrate back in early 2009, I realized this was my chance: I could take control of the neighborhood and help scared black people leave Lawrenceville, just like my precursor.
But I couldn't run my election campaign on the same principles as my predecessor: Sure, most of the black people in Lawrenceville own guns and can fend for themselves, but so do most of the white people. And the black people with guns in the neighborhood are much younger than the white folks with guns, which means the guns owned by black folks are much more likely to hit their targets than those owned by older, shakier, weaker white folks, who are likely to choose the wrong targets.
Young black folks are the wrong targets in this neighborhood, I thought. We've got to get them out of here, for their own safety. But what about the old people who make snap judgments about those living in their communities; whose own physical handicaps will prevent them from reversing their age, bettering themselves and moving out of the ghetto? Shouldn't we be running after-nap programs to make sure these latchkey elders aren't causing trouble?
Apparently not. I lost the battle of Lawrenceville. On December 15, 2009, Choffee sent out an excited email about his real successor, whose name will not be mentioned in text, but rather in jpeg. format.
She sounds cool enough, eh? Grants, budgets and community programming? Sounds like she would be just as qualified to work at a little more fascist-leaning public broadcasting station, but I hear they're all on hiring freezes anyway.
It wasn't until I sat down to Poop after waking up New Year's day that I made the connection: This Community Development is A Family Affair.
In the new issue of The BGC's publication, The Bulletin, the family tree is drawn out, limb by xenophobic limb.
And there it is. Grand daughter moves in to take control of the neighborhood down the hill from her grandmother's neighborhood. As Director of Lawrenceville United, she will assume control over all new real estate development, the welcoming of new, young white people to the neighborhood, and all editorial content on the neighborhood's wikipedia page. Her grandmother was responsible for the last third of the job description, which allows all to follow these tenets to bring with them the pioneering ignorance of encyclopedic tone and tense, the irrelevance of objectivity and the understanding that just because you say you serve the community in an online encyclopedia means that it's yours to shape into what you think a neighborhood ought to be in real life. All because of who you know, or who knew your grandparents before you were born, or who you were fucking in a previous life.
"Here, son, why don't you run this Football team? I'll keep it warm for you."
"Here, son, why don't you run this city? I'll keep it hilly for you."
"Here, grand daughter, why don't you run this neighborhood? I've established a precedence in my neighborhood up the hill and think you'll do fine with a completely different gang set down by the river."
