yellow tape and disbelief.

Last night I was in bed when I heard a series of loud noises that I thought may have been our hurricane shutters falling down. Then I speculated that it was definitely just fireworks, and cursed my neighbors for being loud at 1 in the morning. Then I thought to myself, "I hope that didn't wake Auden up, because I'm really friggen tired." After 5 minutes of silence I was relieved to know that he slept through it. My relief was short lived, though. I heard a helicopter outside my window... it was obviously making rounds in vicinity.

I went to the sliding deck doors and looked out our vertical blinds. There were a few police cars, small crowds of people, and a fire truck pulling in. The entire parking lot outside our apartment was taped off with yellow caution tape. There was one officer who was laying little orange bowls on the ground [obviously marking where bullets were found]. We checked the news, internet, etc, but couldn't find any information.

This morning I went to my car which was parked around the corner. As I got closer, I noticed two pieces of white tape on my rear bumper... one running horizontally and one running vertically [both meeting on the left and top respectively]. I popped a squat and looked closely at a bullet hole in my rear bumper... I couldn't believe it. A fucking hole in my bumper. I'm yet to find out if my insurance will cover it... I'm assuming that it won't, but seriously... a hole in my bumper.

This is the third gun incident that I've been 'too closely' associated with in my life. My first was in college. I was an RA and there had been an altercation in the alley between two residence halls. A gun was pulled, no shots fired, but the gun was tossed onto the roof of one of the residence halls. This meant that for the better part of 3 hours 5 of us searched the roof of the residence hall in the dark with flash lights to try and find the missing weapon... we never found it.

My second was while I was living in Cincinnati. We woke up on Saturday morning to find the entire block in front of our apartment complex blocked off with police caution tape and two detectives standing at both ends of our hallway. We found out later that day that a man [drug dealer] had been shot in his Suburban that was parked on the street. He had been bound and gagged [along with 5 of his cohorts] in the 'meat packing' district. He was submerged in water until he gave the culprits the address of the apartment two doors down and across the hall from us. They then threw him in the back seat of his Suburban and drove him to our apartment complex where they proceeded to break into the apartment two doors down and across the hall from us, tie up the girl who lived there, ransacked her place, then ran down the stairs out the front door to the parked Suburban and shot the victim two times in the head and escaped on foot... really fucked up.

We've never lived in a bad part of town... our apartments and neighbors have always been decent... am I crazy for thinking that we've had too many encounters with guns in the past three years?... in my lifetime?