In my thirty plus years on the planet, I have lived in six or seven different places. In every one of those places, I or a member of my family have experienced a random act of unkindness. When I was a kid in deepest, darkest suburbia, we got our mailbox smashed so often (more industrious hooligans once stole it entirely and threw it in a neighbor’s pickup truck) that my parents eventually replaced it with this brick monolith that looked like the tower of London with a little red flag.

One time, somebody scrawled honest-to-Himmler swastikas all over our front door. Though annoying, this vandalism didn’t exactly send us packing in terror because

1. the swastikas were drawn with Sharpie markers and looked like they were done by Hitler’s fourth grade art class
2. the swastikas were backwards, and any self-respecting skinhead would have shown more attention to detail
3. Nazis never start with the Catholics

A year or so before my parents moved out of that house, my sister’s car even got broken into, and by “broken into” I mean “ransacked because nobody locked their doors in the suburbs.” And that was really the paradoxical root of all our problems: because it was a 95% middle class white neighborhood in the ‘burbs surrounded by strip malls and box stores, nobody thought anything bad could happen, so nobody knew their neighbors (or which suspicious characters weren’t their neighbors), so my idyllic childhood home was actually the most f***ed-with place I ever lived. It was a neighborhood so nice, so quiet and peaceful, that you could be completely fearless walking the streets at night to paint a goddamn swastika on someone’s front door.

Then I went to college in reputedly dangerous midtown, where the only bad thing that ever happened to me was when I left my dorm door unlocked and a friend of mine came in and rearranged all our stuff to teach me a lesson. (Lesson: my friends are a-holes.)

Well, I suppose there was that one time at the Walgreens up the street when the guy got shot in the face in broad daylight, and then the students asked what the authorities were doing to keep kids safe, and the head of campus security said, “Telling them not to go to that Walgreens.” And the time at Del Taco when the guy got in his car to go home and backed up over what turned out to be the body of a guy that had “taken it outside” with another patron earlier in the evening. But other than that, nothing happened.

My post-college apartments have been marked by one odd event after another, and industrious searchers for my original online journals would be treated with many tales of cops called and lunacy witnessed, from Volkswagen Driver to the Gay Dude Gang to the guy who once camped out outside my door because he was convinced my apartment was full of promiscuous teenage girls. All of this weirdness took place in the ‘burbs, in The County, in neighborhoods full of nice houses where women walked their dogs alone at 11:00 at night. The day I moved into the “best” neighborhood where I have ever dwelled, the police were searching the dumpsters for a little girl’s body.As these things were happening, I was very open about them. I told these stories to people eagerly, hyperbolically. None of them ever caused anyone to think ill of my neighborhood; it was in The County, after all. Nobody was ever afraid to park their car when they visited. People thought the stories were a riot.

Now, though, I don’t live in The County. I live in the Big, Bad City, with the poor people. I live in a house where all my neighbors know me and are friendly, on a street that is in some ways even quieter than the one I grew up on, and when I tell people about it they ask, “How… how is that? What have you seen so far? What have you seen, you know, ‘going down’?”

“Well, the other night I saw a 70-year-old white woman alone on the corner with her poodle, smoking a cigarette while the dog peed, suggesting that even a little old lady is not as much of a racist wuss as you are.”

Some time not too long ago, a friend of mine said to me about the fact that I live in my house, “I really respect what you guys are doing. Settling down there, trying to improve things.” My hand to God. Like I’m in my f***ing Conestoga, bringing Christ to the savages on the Oregon Trail. I wanted to dispense some frontier justice all over his face. It’s a townhome.

Because… you know who doesn’t need to hear shit like that?: my wife. My sweet, nervous wife, who moved to the city from a town with a slightly larger population than my college. My wife, who has been told all her life that getting knifed is a “New York Handshake.” My wife, who is petrified by a ringing doorbell no matter where she lives because, I don’t know, apparently murderers ring the doorbell. I am very protective of my wife, and I want her to be happy, and she does not need stupid things to be afraid of. She already goes, “WHAT WAS THAT?” every time pedestrians on the sidewalk outside talk to each other. So we’re all stocked up on that nonsense.

For this reason, I was very much against getting an alarm installed when we built our house. You might find this counterintuitive– surely an alarm system gives you more peace of mind, right?– but I stand by my gut feeling. Alarms have one effect: they plant and foster the idea that alarms are necessary. From the minute someone says, “And of course it comes with an alarm system” for as long as you have one, on some level you are thinking, whether you set it or not, “Somebody is coming to steal my shit.” This feeling is multiplied tenfold every time the alarm goes off accidentally, shrieking needlessly into the night, so much so that your subconscious never stops to think, “Hey, you notice how this thing only ever goes off accidentally?”

• In ten months, number of times our alarm has gone off: 7,349,642
• Number of times the glass breakage detector has sounded at 1:00 a.m. because I opened a soda can, waking the neighbors and propelling my wife out of bed and into the ceiling fan: 1
• Number of times it has been set off by a toddler putting a glass on a table, causing the toddler to think she’d ended the world and cry in terror: 1
• Number of times in the last month my wife has rushed home midday from work to investigate an alarm set off by, I don’t know, a spider scaring the house or something: 2
• Number of times the alarm has gone off for a legitimate, alarming reason: 0, 0, 0, 0

I am now in a position where, due to the number of false alarms, I must set the alarm before leaving each morning (killers and pirates and bears!) but I must first enter in a bypass code to deactivate part of the alarm so it doesn’t work too well. These are the things we do to make ourselves feel better because people who don’t live here think we ought to. All we can do is settle down here and try to improve things. We really are like some kind of heroes.