Into The Parking Lot Of Death Walked The Hungry

The post I wrote about a fantasy-inspiring neighborhood street led me to thinking about another thing of asphalt which provokes strong thoughts and feelings. This one is not as positive, but it's very close geographically to the other. When I'm at home, want something to eat and there's nothing good in the kitchen, there are a few realistic options. I like the deli sandwiches they have at the grocery store, which is half a mile away. That closes at midnight. The food at the fast food restaurant out on the corner is passable at best, and that closes even a bit earlier. Often my preference, day or night, is the third possibility: the convenience store, which has tasty and cheap hot dogs.

There are some hurdles involved. The staff is often uncommunicative, unhelpful and surly. I generally don't go unless I have cash since an incident with their card machine. Cash has its own pitfalls, as evidenced by an incident with a twenty dollar bill that I thought was a one. The most consistent obstacle is the parking lot  there. The convenience store is just a few hundred yards away, most of it through an expansive parking lot that serves the aforementioned store, a restaurant that is now out of business, and residents of an adjacent apartment building (that last perhaps not legally). I sure wouldn't leave a car there, but others do. It serves others, does that lot.

Naturally, the walk is worst late at night- the very time that provokes such whimsy on the street of yesterday. The moment you cross the street, you see the signs of it. I don't know quite how many transients live there, but suffice it to say that even one is more than I would care to see. They are not the industrious sort of homeless that went to the trouble of erecting tin shacks in the Depression. Thanks to the ever-pleasant weather, they feel quite at home just to stretch out under one of the trees lining the cinder block wall demarcating the western edge of the lot. Junk represents the best of their possessions, with trash comprised largely of discarded food being the worst of it.

I don't often get scared by the neighborhoods I find myself in, and the very one I live in is one of the grittier. That lot is probably the worst part of the area I live in, with the strip clubs not even in contention and the area north of my building where gang violence is concentrated coming in a clear second. If there's any positive in it, it's that I don't have to spend much time there, and can spend about a minute and a half "slumming", as was the fashion once upon a time back east. "There but for the grace of God go I", I have said many times which hurrying home and clutching a chili cheese dog with chips.