Pretty much every storage space in The Crumbling Manse™ is packed out, and accordingly useless, with most of the spaces’ contents being functionally inaccessible. The fact that this stuff has been buried for years suggests that much of it carries little or no benefit to our quality of life, and the spousette and I have reached an agreement in principle that we will shed much of it in the coming months. We concluded that a staging ground was desirable, somewhere in which to stash such chattel as we are not resolved immediately to discard so that we may excavate those spaces here that presently resist investigation. To this end we have rented a storage cubicle in a basement facility a few blocks away, and Sunday we brought over our first load.

As we were unloading L’s van, a character rode up on his, or I should perhaps say on a bicycle, and appeared to us to be rather conspicuously loitering nearby, raising concerns that either he had designs on our swag, or hoped to hitch a ride inside on our passcode. This proved not to be the case. As we filled up the freight elevator in the vestibule, he used his own passcode to gain entry, and walked his bicycle down the stairs.

The layout at the facility is labyrinthine—a trail of breadcrumbs would have proved useful—and on my second trip back to our compartment I took a wrong turn, and by-and-by found myself in a corridor blocked by our friend from upstairs and two or three other vaguely unsavory-looking individuals and about half a dozen bicycles. I said “Geez, it’s a goddamn maze in here,” glanced up long enough to note the number of the space, and retreated back to the last intersection.

As we drove away twenty minutes later, we observed the man we’d seen outside leave the building, now without the bicycle he’d carried downstairs.

It does not seem altogether unreasonable to surmise that the space is possibly being employed as a repository of stolen property, and after pondering the matter for a day and a half I emailed the Oakland Police Department with the substance of my observations, having first attempted to reach them by phone (the “non-emergency” number gets you a recorded message in four languages informing you that all the dispatchers are busy—five minutes of that was all I could stand), and await their response, although I’m not, as they say, holding my breath. In fairness, the proles’ general mayhem keeps the OPD pretty busy, so they may not have the resources to deploy, but I kinda hate to see this sort of thing going on.

Given that the cubicles are all open on top (a 4" x 4" grid of wire between the top of the steel enclosures and the basement ceiling), it seems to me that a mirror on a telescoping rod could give investigators an idea of the contents. But again, this sort of thing might not interest the Department.

cordially,