This bastard has been single-handedly fucking over the young, culturally underrepresented people of my neighborhood for years. Not to mention all the people with lots cats and places to rent and so on. He is a strident and thoroughly reviled example of a neighborhood pole scraper. An ex-Marine if I heard correctly. He lives on 19th Street at Lapidge. I've watched him with his carpet knife out there in the immediate area of my house tearing down anything affixed to a public structure. He slashes through band flyers with his knife and rips furiously at the packing tape with his gloved hand. He has scraped off more than a few (somewhat artfully applied, if I must say) Primco stickers.

See him now, standing proudly, defiantly even, in front of a clean telephone pole. But look closer and you can see thousands of rusted staples in that telephone pole: clear evidence of the cities long history of public flyering. He can do nothing to erase that tradition but he has made it futile to attempt to continue it within a couple blocks of his house. He is a menace to society. Do not tolerate the pole scraper. He cannot claim moral superiority.

He obviously has a vigilante complex, (and, no doubt, some deep feelings of pain and inadequacy) and thus has inflicted some sort of militarily-instilled sense of order and cleanliness on the area around Lapidge street. Those of us who would rely on haphazard postings of underground cultural happenings find our most important line of communication routinely hacked down by this scoundrel. These events, (of which there are several and for which many of us have decided to move to this area, and in which, many locate this neighborhood's greatest strength) and the minor urban blight that accompanies the flyering for these events have been deemed unjustifiable by this man. Who is he to unilaterally make this decision?

Now I must admit that I would appreciate an occasional, purely maintenance-oriented periodic cleaning of the poles to remove the detritus of underground advertising -- if only to make newer and more relevant postings easier to spot. But this man tenaciously destroys any new flyer immediately after it is taped or stapled up. Who benefits when this week's Alcoholocaust punk show goes by unnoticed by kids who instead end up spending the night sitting on the couch pulling mad bong rips and watching TV?

It's bullshit but I have no answer to this problem. How to stop him? Do we just wait for him to die? Believe me, I have numerous fantasies about how to return the destruction he wreaks on our neighborhood (what pain can be visited upon human flesh with a putty knife!) but I do not believe in returning violence with violence. I'm calling for anyone with a solution to help us in our struggle.