The streets are lined with bullet holes, and lawn gnomes.

         One of the benefits to living in a part of town riddled with poverty is that there is no traffic at 9 am when I go to work.  On the other hand one of the downfalls of living in a poverty stricken town is that no one works at 9am and on my days off I am surrounded by crazy people.  I'm sitting in a coffee shop to get some piece of mind and sit in silence with a good book.  There is a obese black man who aside from smelling of owl pellets in a pressure cooker, also came here searching for the same thing.  There are approximately a billion other places to sit here but he decided to sit directly next to me and hold a very intense conversation with himself about computers bringing on the second coming of Christ.  Luckily I brought my head phones and have tuned him out via the lyrical stylings of Regina Spector.
        There is free entertainment around every corner in Westport.  The other night I watched from my porch, four black women take turns punching a highly opinionated withe girl in the mouth, oddly enough to no vial of shutting it.  With each pop in the face a slew of insults spewed from her bloody mouth, I don't think I've heard the word cunt so many times since I myself discovered the weight of that word when I was 18.  I was at a house party with my ex boyfriend, the average age of people there being in the upwards of 35 to 40 years old, and I decided to call this woman a cunt after I ran into her and caused her beer to spill on my face.  I think if I had chosen to call her anything but that, I wouldn't have been pushed backwards into a pile of tractor parts.  But the fact that it got such a big reaction only made me call her and her friends cunts all the more.  I was slapped around like one of those inflatable punching dolls for kids with anger issues.  Once pushed to the floor I popped back up with more insults.  This continued until my boyfriend of the time picked me up by the wrist and, like I was a four year old who just threw a temper tantrum in Wal-Mart, and dragged me kicking and screaming away from the party and into my car seat, where I was told to think about what I had done.  That incident was the beginning of me destroying that relationship with NyQuil and Vodka induced outbursts.          One of my favorite things I've seen from my porch was this woman who had commandeered a Sun Fresh Shopping cart and was using it as a stroller for her six year old daughter dressed in a hammy-down rag dress.  The woman was wearing running shorts and a walk-man and by the way she was furiously speed walking, she was on a mission of weight loss.  What cracks me up more than watching this woman push her toddler in a shopping cart while exercising was the fact that it was 28 degrees outside and snowing sheets of horizontal powder.    I made a back ground story for her instantly, one that I'm pretty sure was dead on.  Her name was Gabriel Mendez and her boyfriend and father of her six year old daughter, Sophia Mendez, had recently left her for someone who was able to loose the baby weight in more timely fashion.  The devastated and profoundly self conscious Gabriel had only 34 dollars left on her food stamps card and was in immediate need of a man to save her.  Given the reason her boyfriend left her, she needed to loose weight at any cost, even if it meant acquiring hypothermia, as she had heard that drastic weight loss was a side effect of the illness.   "Poor Gabriel," I thought to myself from the warmth of my porch window.
        Jen and I chose to live on the second floor because we figured the trajectory of most bullets wouldn't stray above 12 feet high.  When we moved into our current building the land lord comforted us by saying, "there has only been three murders this year on this block, and one of them didn't even happen on this street, it happened at the shell station." He pointed about a hundred yards away towards the Shell gas station.  Apparently some poor sap accidentally tapped his car into the car in front of his at the Shell station and was punished with a bullet to the head; which if you ask me takes the phrase, "an eye for an eye" to a whole new and unnecessary level.  What I do in those types of situations is far more civilized.  I don't like being honked at, cut off, yelled at, or given the finger, and when these things happen I admittedly might over react a little bit.  My car resembles a landfill so at any given point I can reach in any direction and grab a blunt object with no sentimental value.  So when one of the above happens to me, I grab something, usually a half empty water bottle, and throw it at the car who has offended me.  Sometimes I miss, but most of the time I do not.  At least it's better than shooting someone in the head, though I've cut back on these displays of anger given that I could be shot.  It doesn't take much to get shot around here. 
        I've never had a gun in my face but I have been chased with an army machete by my old roommates boyfriend who just so happened to have a severe case of post traumatic stress disorder after his two year stay in Iraq.  We were exceptionally drunk one evening about a year ago after a night in Westport.  When we suggested that he should not drive home and after we forced him to walk home, he decided that he didn't like being told what to do and stabbed Kayla in the arm.  He then chased me with a bloody knife while I screamed like a little girl and drunk dialing the police.  "There is a man chasing me with a knife and he's trying to break in to kill us, he already stabbed my roommate, please hurry," I cried into the phone.  I had grabbed two steak knives to protect myself when he broke in when the sirens were heard.  I was so relieved to see police that I ran outside, forgetting that I had two giant steak knives clinched in my fists.  I was promptly thrown to the ground face down and hand cuffed.  Turns out, it doesn't matter how reasonably you explain your situation to a police officer when you have two stainless steel knives waving around in their face. 
        Come to think of it, I've never had a genuinely pleasant experience here in Westport.  Instead I have a lifetime worth of stories to tell, some sad, some funny, some life threatening.  But among being narcissistic, I am also addicted to stories.  I will and have put myself in jeopardizing situations, thinking, "God this is going to be hilarious to tell."  I love places with danger and a hint of sadness, if only because it means I'm surrounded with people who have lived.  They are not people who have been raised in white suburbia and whose biggest life struggle was getting daddy to give them the car keys for the Saturday night school dance.   These are people who have lost, who have hurt, and who have done wrong.  And a beautiful thing happens, it is rare, but it does happen.   It is when someone who has gone down the beaten path, roller bladed down gravel roads, and been beaten down by life, they become lighter than most.  They are able to laugh at their struggles, give less of a shit to trivial and petty things, and find peace where most cannot.  That is the biggest bennifet to living where I live, I am not alone here, I am right at home.