Going Ronnie

I have decided that from now on, when people flip their wigs, they will not go postal, they will go Ronnie, after our dear-but-misguided neighbor up the street. I was in the Safeway tonight (when am I not in the Safeway?) and noticed a photocopied, hand-written (cursive) missive posted to the bulletin board, complete with a color picture of a car parked at Safeway at the bottom.

In a hurry to get home, I declined to read it, as the pure length of it made War and Peace seem a less-daunting task. But then I noticed another one tapped to a lightpole on the way home. And one taped to the side of Ronnie's end-of-row home.

Surely this is of grave concern, I decided and began to read the one posted on Ronnie's brick wall.

The title read "Inconveniences I Have to Live With Because of Safeway," followed by a numbered list, a paragraph, and a lovely color picture of a Cavalier or something.

Surely someone had too much time on their hands at Kinko's, to have put up this free-form poem, I mused. It must be some sort of street art from the Creative Alliance.

First the inconvenices: trash pickup in the middle of the night, cracked foundation in the basement from the eighteen wheelers pummeling through our alleyway at all hours, and an infestation of mice and rats because of their dumpster (which we can certainly relate to).

Then, a long rant about how, coming home late at night with nowhere to park, our hero decided to park ILLEGALLY in Safeway's fire lane so that she could see her car from her house. The next morning, surprise, the car was impounded, costing the owner $200. However, not only had Safeway forced entry into the car, but two tires were flat. Safeway is clearly evil.

Okay, the inconveniences I can relate to; those, and the steady stream of drunks leaving bars at all hours every day of the week, are some of the downsides of living in the only semi-safe neighborhood left in Baltimore City. But the illegal parking bit, hello? YOU ILLEGALLY PARKED YOUR CAR IN THE FIRE LANE. WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

And the color picture of the automobile. Clearly this missive not only needed a picture of the car (which was taken before the incident and, therefore, completely inadmissable as evidence), but a COLOR one, because you can't appreciate the hardship of our poor hero until you can see the early-model gold American wonder again ILLEGALLY PARKED in the firelane.

Clearly this person is a lunatic, I concluded. To write the list, to draw attention to an illegal activitiy that she rightly got punished for (you and A-ROD both), and to make several COLOR copies and post them all over the neighbhorhood in CLEAR PLASTIC COVERS so the rain won't fade them clearly seemed to the work of someone dangerously out of control. What will this person do next? I wondered. Picket the Safeway because they towed her illegally parked car? Lie in the middle of the alley and force the eighteen wheelers to go another route?

Well, at least this crazed lunatic didn't identify themself. Alas, I spoke too soon. At the bottom were Ronnie's name, her adddress, and her age. (At least now I know what a 62-year-old woman looks like.)

It's funny how Ronnie didn't mention that she walks her dog, Coco, over to the Safeway lot every day, lets her poop in the grass, and doesn't clean it up. In fact, I had to throw my tennis shoes in the washer the other day because I stepped in Coco's poop on the way to the store and, when I tried to hose it off, poopy water seeped into the upper of my shoe, making it stinky. I think she should have mentioned that in her screed.

I think she should have also mentioned that, before I read this protest, this rant, this...whatever, I ran into someone entering Safeway as I was leaving? Yep, you guessed it. Apparently she doesn't hate Safeway enough to stop shopping there. Or maybe she was going to distribute her flyers to the shoppers. After all, what's a little manufactured outrage in this country? Maybe if more people started going Ronnie, well, I guess Kinkos would double, perhaps triple their business. And four-color street art would be all the rage.