Karl Klockars

If I get one thing for Christmas this year, let it be a beat-to-shit pickup truck.  With a whole lotta room in the bed.  If I get two things this Christmas, let it be the truck thing, followed up with an address to your nearest metal-and-plastic recyclery.  Because I want to make so much bank driving around picking up chairs and ironing boards and ruining “dibs” across the city.

I’ve said it before this year, but I think it bears repeating – I. Hate. Dibs. About a week or so ago, I was planning on putting together a little screedof writing about having pride in my neighborhood.  I hadn’t seen any dibs anywhere.  We had like 6 inches of snow fall overnight, and I saw nary a chair or a milk crate anywhere.

And then we got two more days of snow.  Then I spent a solid half-hour slaving away over a cold shovel digging out not one, not two, but four different spots on my street out of the goodness of my barren holiday heart.  I don’t ask for much.  And I didn’t get it.

Now we’re in a world full of dibs.

It would appear that the over/under for dibs-taking is about three days or 8 inches of snow. Everything was fine for that first major snowfall and I got my hopes up.  I thought maybe that I was surrounded by people with hearts that weren’t three sizes too small.  Maybe I had a bunch of neighbors that didn’t sweat small stuff like parking in the snow, in a neighborhood that doesn’t have much to worry about by way of parking spots.

Something like this would be cool.

But no.  The chairs are out, and they’re staying out til’ March at the earliest.  They’re there to strike pain into my heart every time I walk to the mailbox to drop off my Netflix envelopes and pick up a pizza at the local woodfired pizza place.  Dibs dibs dibs.  Die, dibs.

I’ve already discussed my plans for the Wikipedia Terror Squad – now I’d like to introduce my proposal for the Dibs Shocktroops.  A fleet of camouflaged pickup trucks, decked out like those beater rides that steal all the metal out of your dumpsters and tear the gutters off of unfinished construction sites when the sun goes down.

I’d like to build a small cadre of dedicated late night commandos, sweeping out across the north side of the city to scan the side streets of our city, looking for dibs, and then “removing” the offending items.  We will be neck-deep in patio chairs almost instantly, but we will soldier on.

The reason that the Dibs Shocktroops will be so successful is that we don’t fear to strike where other neighbors might fear to tread.  If we don’t fear the retribution of the Dibs-callers, we won’t have any qualms about removing the trash from our streets.

No one is going to throw a bucket of water over our truck.  If they do, I’ll take a blowtorch to it.  Who cares about the paint – the thing cost $500.  If anyone busts out our side window, I’m very handy with plastic sheeting and duct tape.  If anyone goes so far as to try to rush outside and slash our tires while we drive away, I tend to guess his wrist will hurt more than paying out $25 to Discount Tire to keep the Dibs Shocktroops on the road.

The trick is in the taking everything with us.  If someone pulls onto their street and sees someone parked in their “called” spot, then their ire is going to rise.  But if there’s nothing there to have dibs called with – that is, when we liberate the dibskeeping items themselves – there’s no real retaliation when your items are gone.  (Or, alternatively, the kind of dick that would call dibs is the same kind of dick that would bash your ride without wondering what happened to their old junk in the street.)  Maybe we need to look into leaving behind signs:  “You’ve been un-dibs’ed.  The Dibs Shocktroops were here.”

A subset of this involves planting Information Dibs Squads around dibs offenders.  Remove the dibs items and throw them onto the lawn.  Park a car there.  Wait for the dibs-caller to return home.  Videotape their successive freakout and hopefully induce some sort of violent revenge, wherein they beat the crap out of our barely-running 70′s sedan.  Then we call the cops.  Then we call the press.  Use the system to work with you, not against you.  Bring it on, dibs-callers.

Now, I’ve got Christmas day off for the first time in about three or four years.  So I’m not trying to bitch too much here.  And I’ll be away from the state for 4 days or so, so I’ll be removed from the whole situation for a while.  Annnnnnd it seems like the temperatures are going to go up and maybe there won’t be any snow when we get back into town on Sunday.  We can hope.  See me forcing myself into the holiday spirit?  Whee.  Ho ho ho.  Bear tidings of great joy.

But just so you all know, I do know how to drive stick shift, I can live without a working stereo, but please make sure that there’s cupholders.  I like to have a nice Hot Toddy or Buttered Rum next to me when I’m out protecting the neighborhoods of Chicago from those that would call dibs.