Shouldn’t they be home in bed?

The new issue of Accent literary review is online. My contributions this month are reviews of Nick Mason’s Inside Out (a Pink Floyd “biography”), and novels by Stewart O’Nan (The Good Wife) and Lawrence Block (All the Flowers Are Dying).

Also in this issue is a review of The Road to the Dark Tower by Peter Blum.

Woke up this morning, spent my usual 90 minutes at the computer, then went downstairs and out into the driveway to pick up the morning newspaper. Noticed that my daughter’s car, which was parked on the side of the street, had a decided lean to it. Went to investigate, thinking she had a flat tire. Wrong. She had two flat tires, both on the driver’s side.

Looked across the street. Ditto for our neighbor’s SUV. In total, the vandals hit seven cars on our street, all of them parked on the street — none in driveways. Our next door neighbor got off with only one puncture–not sure if he was first or last on their rampage. The car two houses up was only parked on the street after 2 AM, so that narrows the incident down to 2-7 AM, roughly. Bastards. Something like this seems to happen every summer after school lets out. The cops came by and took statements, blah, blah, blah, but odds are nothing will ever come of it unless they catch them red-handed somewhere else. Two tires for my daughter’s car: about $150, but the SUV tires across the road are about $200 each. Not the kind of hit everyone wants to get first thing in the morning.

The cop said it would take him about an hour to file each incident when he got back to the office, so the little incident tied up two cops for a total of seven hours. Made me 30 minutes late for work and made me miss having breakfast with my wife.

Bastards.