Now, sadly kids are more content to walk around with guns and a crack pipe, stealing my thrice-purchased Neil Diamond Greatest Hits CD from my hifi stereo in my car. While the most complex situation I would have encountered would be sourcing the house of the house I was rolling and judging the risk of using it to soak the paper to stick to the limb and leaves, these kids nowadays have just plain buggered up there head with worries more adult than my own.

Why just last week I saw two boys, each walking a pit bull on a chain leash in one hand and with the other holding up their saggy pants. I thought to myself, “Mr. Peepers, this is disaster just waiting to rear it’s head at any moment.” If one of these mean dogs were to get loose, which do you suppose the boy would reach for first the leash or their waistband?

Man, I will tell you when I was a boy I did not sit around wondering how I was going to kill someone for making fun of me. I went right up to the person and popped him in the nose. Blood spewed, we wrestled around a bit. But at the end of the tussle we both went home and ate dinner with our respective parental units.

You know another thing that get me angrier than a mule eating briars, is how all of these vagrant individuals are walking around asking for money. When I was a boy you would never see these sad sacks moping around. Heck no! They would take a mindless mill job and make enough cash to buy themselves several bottles of Heaven Hill Bourbon and retire for the next few weeks underneath the county bridge to savor their honestly earned gains. In a few weeks they would be back in that mill sweeping up the floors after the third shift. That’s right! An honest day’s drunk for an honest day’s work.

No I cannot even read a periodical in the park without some disheveled miscreant asking me for money to buy themselves a good meal. Well we all know what that money is for. Don’t we? They are not going to buy themselves a good, nourishing meal. They’re going to blow their pittance on some unhealthy snack like a Mr. Pibb and a hot dog.

I could go on and on about how things are so different nowadays with all of this depraved violence, thievery and using of the drugs. It is sad that these people cannot do something as wholesome as rolling a yard or popping some blowhard in the yap when they deserve it, or finding some menial job like working as a TSA screener to earn some money. People just have their notions of modern living and so on, but I say “hooey!” to all of them.

Leave those guns, drugs and bad-fitting clothes at home and get a job picking up nails at a construction site. Buy yourself a sixteen pack and come over to my house at 84 Northyards Blvd., Suite 600, and give my old weeping willow something to cry about. You will be glad you did and walk away with you head held high that you did something good.

If Atlanta is making progress, I would hate to see the alternative. My wife heard three gunshots outside the building last night.

I can’t park outside and leave ANYTHING in view of the crackheads.

Break-ins occure 24 hours a day.

The local security squad is offering a course in “How To Use Pepper Spray” to the neighborhood residents next Monday night.

A local cop told a victim of “aggressive panhandling” (ie mugging) that if he was going to walk down Pnce near the Krispy Kreme he “should get a gun”.

Four residents at the boarding house two doors down were robbed at gunpoint last week by two hoods.

Glad I am renting and didn’t buy.