encounter with the police today
today the police came to my house. apparently multiple neighbours had reported a disturbance, something about someone throwing bricks onto my roof or something. i thanked them for their concern, but i said not to worry. it really didnt matter in the grand scheme of things, besides, i'd already had all the windows repaired from where the bricks had missed; my uncle the glassier had come straight away and gave me a good deal too. it was all no worries. i smiled and waved at the cops as they drove away. what i hadn't bothered to tell them was that the brick thrower was me.
i left out this detail because it would have only complicated things, it would have taken a while to explain and i wanted them to spend their resources chasing down real crimes. and surely it is not a crime to throw bricks at your own house, especially when youre the only one who lives there. also, its not like i was doing it for antisocial reasons, i was doing it to do a good deed. what i was trying to do was to get the bricks to land on the roof in a specific pattern, a pattern of three words: STOP THE WAR. i'm sick of war. i live right near the university engineering department where they get 3rd year students to help manufacture new drones which are sent to israel to help the neighbouring countries. the engineering students dont know what their drones are being used for and probably dont care. they are having the time of their lives sleeping in beanbags and drinking coca cola and racing their drones around the neighbourhood, competing for the fastest time. each day their drones are getting faster and faster and noiser and noiser and im so sick of it. im so sick of war. STOP THE WAR.
i thought i could help by putting up a poster. then i realised that i needed something that the drone cameras could see from up high. i borrowed my brothers ute, went down to bunnings and grabbed a slab of 100 bricks. in the yard i spent a few hours measuring and mapping out the contours of the letters, realising i could spell the three words legibly in 95 bricks. the 5 spares i could use as an exclamation mark.
historically i am very uncoordinated but last winter my life coach showed me some new basketball tricks. my life coach was once an olympic player and now i was getting the ball into the net a good portion of the time and feeling confident about my ability to throw things: intention, belief and mindfulness, thats all you need.
the only thing was that my roof was higher than i remembered. standing on the lawn, i could barely see the top of it. still, i could always go up after id thrown everything and tidy up the words.. so i spent the morning throwing the bricks onto the roof one by one, trying to get them into the right spots. i was doing pretty well - i only missed twice. one brick went through the bedroom window and one into the lounge room. then i realised i was out of roof space. i had been keeping track of the pattern by counting each throw and checking my notebook, but i had forgotten about the size of my canvas. on my roof i had only been able to spell STOP THE.
i decided to spell the last word on the roof of my next door neighbour. big tom was up in the pilbarra, working fifo, and wouldnt be back til next week. i managed to land all 31 of my bricks on his house, hopefully in the shape of WAR. now i would get the ladder and fine tune the details.
but when i got up to the top, i saw that my bricks were illegible. some had cracked the terracotta tiles, snapped an aerial and had made a dent in my rooftop unit. i had also overshot the roof several times, and would have to retrieve at least six from the bottom of my other neighbour's pool. the situation on my roof next-door was even worse. i had forgotten about his solar panels which were now all shattered.
sometimes when you try to do the right thing, it turns out to be the wrong thing to have done. i had tried to stop the war and had only recreated its conditions. i heard the drones acoming on their daily time-trial and i scrambled down the ladder, hiding beneath my bed.