What Is Noise

After arriving home I realized that I needed/wanted a USB keyboard for a computer that I had been given recently. I walked to Radioshack and Best Buy to find that everything was by far excessively overpriced. I will walk to Microcenter instead tomorrow to get one for $3.99. I will not type on it often.

However on walking home from this, I saw police cars and an ambulance racing down the street. Being the curious individual that I am, I started running. It was already dark and the skies where additionally grey from the rain clouds overhead that had yet to open again. As I got closer I knew something was very wrong.

At least five Boston police officers were standing around, seeming to not know what to do. Several other passerbyers and neighbors stood around. One man in particular seemed genuniely confused. There are several assisted living and other elderly housing nearby so my initial assumption was that someone elderly had collaspsed.

I stood for a few minutes, try to figure out what was happening and I think to talk away. I actually do walk probably 50 feet away thinking to distance myself from whatever is happening and not be in the way or a gawker. Yet I walk back and ask the man who seemed particularly troubled what happened. This many was in his mid 30th, and had taken off his shirt for whatever reason. He told me, “That’s fucked up, he just collapsed, I tried to help him, but that’s fucked up, he’s dead man, they’ve been pumping away on him for 10 minutes.” Each of us of course wanting for that to not be the truth, we stand. The police mill around, wishing they could help as the ambulance crew make their best efforts.

The man standing next to me tells me of the other man who I never see, “He wasn’t ugly or anything, he wasn’t old… probably 30. That’s fucked up man. I gotta live with that.” Apparently he had caught the man when he was falling, or had came to him right after he had apparently suffered a stroke or heart attack.

After a few minutes, I see they are still working on him but the police are packing up shop. I very slowly walk away, looking back and hoping for the best. I twitter a few times to perhaps gain words of encouragement for the man from afar. I doubt that they will do any good however and that the man is likely already gone. As if to signify something, the skies open up and the rain and thunder roll in.

My only hope is for him is once I am nearly home I see the same pack of ambuluances and police speed away from the scene and turn to the hospital. I think, and hope, that the would not likely do so if all they were carrying was a dead man.