My Facebook Proclamation On Smoke Alarms In General

So, right now, taking first place in the category of "blessings in disguise" that have been spawned by the social climate we are now in; I imagine that our smoke detectors have been designated as being racist due to it almost always being a person of color who passes out on vodka and leaves a pan of sausages on the stove... 

Of course if you knocked on doors at random in Sacred Heart Apartments, it would almost always be a person of color come to da doh, you heard me? 

Hopefully, that will remain beside the point and we will no longer be oppressed by a system that is going to send a fireman to your apartment -with the combination of realizing that your whole place is in a cloud of smoke, combined with them beating their ax blades on the door, being enough to traumatize (the firemen enter some apartments and use the same blades to bust out one or more windows; -emergency ventilation measure; in case the occupant was literally down to his last few gasps of oxygen and they would be saving him. (the windows are sealed shut here, to prevent unauthorized entry). 

Of course ushering him quickly out into the fresh air of the hallway would accomplish the same thing; leaving one to wonder if they don't bust the windows out so that the bill for their replacement would be sent out to somewhere which would somehow have emergency ventilation funds on hand, but I digress....

Sunday I, once again just missed the street car that would have given me a chance to get on a #62 bus that would arrive at the plasma place before 3 pm. I realized the error I had made upon getting to where the #62 stops and that I had just missed the 1:40 pm. departure. So, I took a short walk to the Quarter, knowing that the transfer I had, was an "outgoing" one, and that the driver might not let me ride back home on it, and that it was almost 100 degrees out, but having decided to take advantage of being that close to the Quarter; by conducting a scavenge for weed, tobacco and, that was about it; I wasn't looking for any alcoholic drinks; although, as I persist in advertising; one can just walk around the French Quarter getting drunk for free off super strong drinks that people couldn't finish a round number of and so, left the remainder atop a newspaper kiosk, with all the others. A very humane treatment of drinkers less fortunate than thou, if you ask me. So, indigent alcoholics, come one, come all...
Any way, the point of this photo caption is that, as soon as I crossed to the sidewalk made of marble, because it's in front of a hotel, and had just said, half aloud: Maybe I'll have some luck over here, I espied an object that looked like a dead Palmetto bug that had perhaps been crushed under a shoe, but was, in fact, the first of a series of fat cigar sized roaches all along the sidewalks, After making one circuit of the block of Bourbon and Royal Streets that The Unique Grocery sits on, I gathered up the amount of bud seen in the photo atop the book I was going to read while donating plasma...("falling leaves," I'll say!)
The street car guy let me ride, so I returned home, thinking I would at least have weed and Youtube...

 

It used to be, that I would have to be careful when even lighting a piece of paper off the stove to use to light a cigarette (when my lighter is dead, type of thing)...for fear of setting the darned thing off. Now, you can literally fall asleep with the pan of sausage on "5" on the stove; and when the smoke gets thick enough to wake you up; you wake up, utter a mild oath, then get your damned pan off the stove and under some water; and you live and learn, without having to involve the New Orleans Fire Department. 

In my particular case, I would have to personally pay for the windows being busted out, and, so I've been fortunate (and maybe privileged) in that they've never busted any during their 3 or 4 visits to A 110.

In my encounters with them; they have just met me at the door; after having knocked with only fists, whereupon I had filled them in -the visage of an angel in a cloud- about the water steaming out of the rice, and how I got to it before more than a few wisps of smoke had escaped.

I would always direct the conversation towards what a shame it is they have to work so hard because of these ridiculously sensitive smoke alarms; and would propose that, should our alarm go off and we are to avert "burning the whole place down"-like, by getting to the pan before it bursts into a big orange ball of flame and starts the ceiling on fire type of thing -we could notify the security lady up front that, yeah it was my alarm but it's under control, "And then she could call you guy's off and you could keep playing poker at the station, or whatever, instead of coming out here"

I don't know how many of my windows I have saved that way...

Anyways I don't want to walk a half mile in the 105 degree heat to get a lighter, when I've got a stove and now that those devices of systemic oppression have been disentangled from the tentacles of The State and now that, what we burn in the privacy of our own homes, shall be our own darned business's!