Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 115: Joe

Prompt: "A song about revenge"

Selected by Joe

"Bust Your Windows"

Jazmine Sullivan

Fearless, 2008

I became aware of this song eventually. It was definitely after we covered Jazmine Sullivan in Record Club. I liked the album and I appreciated the opportunity to get loaded and ask some personal questions of some friends and post their confessions anonymously in an album review's postscript. All good fun. I miss being a heaux sometimes.

I don't think I really understood the breadth of Sullivan's discography at the time, though. A 2021 R&B album from a Philly artist is cool, but I really just had no fucking clue that this artist had a semi-big hit all the way back in 2008 as well. I didn't know until maybe six months later, when I was facilitating a parenting group. My co-facilitator was a sixty-something woman, Philly native, social work veteran, and just on the cusp of retirement. She has since retired, and I miss working with her. (She was another veteran that was in my unit when I first came into the department in 2014 and, like my other old friend from a previous YSC entry, I considered her a quasi-mentor because of that.)

Anyways, in this parenting group, during one of the parent's life stories, the parent mentioned something about her ex busting her windows or some shit, and my coworker was like "Oh damn! Just like the Jazmine Sullivan song!" and the parent knew exactly what she was talking about. I had no idea though. I did some research, and found "Bust Your Windows," a pretty middling song but definitely a popular one too. Peaked at #31 on the Hot 100. Nominated for a Grammy. Ubiquitous enough that it can be referenced when the window of a Philly car is busted by a vindictive ex.

It makes me think about how narrow my perspective is sometimes. I'm not comfortable not knowing, and I spend a lot of my life attempting to know more and understand from a wider perspective and expanding the scope of my appreciation of the world at large, but still, there's always work to be done. I wrote an album review having no clue how much of the story I was missing.

My parents' house was burglarized last week.

We were all hanging out around the dining room table down the shore, and my mom was fucking around with the security footage from the house's Ring cameras, mainly to show my kids a cat that was caught frolicking in the backyard that looked like our own cat, which my kids got a kick out of. But then my mom saw a video of someone knocking on the front door, posing a question out loud "I wonder what he was doing?" Thinking that he was just dropping off a pizza menu or some shit, I of course opened my big mouth and made a joke about the Wet Bandits.

But then she looks at another video from the backyard and shrieks "oh my god, they're in the backyard!" Which basically put everything at a standstill. Being pretty chill as far as moms go, my mom uses her Scared Voice very sparingly, and only for the really crazy sad or serious shit, and it really has a way of cutting through the bullshit and underlining the severity of the situation (and haunting me afterward, if I'm being honest). I last heard that voice when I told her that Pam had had a miscarriage. The time before that was when she told me that my cousin-once-removed was killed in a car accident. This is over the course of like the last seven years, so at this point, when he voice goes to that frantic pitch, everything stops dead. Yes, there was a man in her backyard. Yes, he was caught on camera, before he reached up and moved that camera to the side. Yes, the unknown male busted through a window and stole money from my parents' house.

I am acknowledging the seriousness of the situation. It's not really my story to tell, but because this is my blog post and I am writing it and I am trying to tie it in thematically with the overall point I'm attempting to make here (albeit poorly), I'm going to tell it anyway. But I'm acknowledging that my own feelings and emotions and takeaways are adjacent at best, and I am not the main character here. The main characters are my mom and dad, who are probably facing some trauma right now. A common reaction to your home being burglarized is to feel violated. This blog posts isn't about any of that. The social worker within me is reaching out and offering comfort as best I can. The blogger within me leans on the investigative aspects of the situation—investigating the crime, investigating myself.

As my pops talked with the chief of police over the phone 100 miles away from the scene of the crime, I thought about how much I have scoffed in the past at the idea of a Ring camera being necessary for a home in a safe suburban enclave such as theirs. It's always seemed like undue paranoia to me. It felt like maybe Mom and Dad were consuming too many news stories about crime on the ten o'clock local news. And yet here was evidence of their fears being justified. The cameras showed pretty clearly a criminal breaking into their home, just as they'd always suspected was inevitable.

And this is evidence that goes against my own worldview, right? That's what I'm really trying to get at here. I try so hard to view the world as relatively safe and crime to be unlikely to happen to you, and here's some fucking guy putting my parents in danger. So it would require me to adjust my worldview, maybe consider new evidence and reevaluate my beliefs.

The fucked up thing is this: there is also speculative evidence that it was not random, but in fact targeted, an inside job (which would support my worldview). This is all hearsay, but this is what I know. As we sat in Wildwood on Friday, a cop was doing a walk-through of the house, and beyond a slightly bent windowpane, saw no evidence of the burglar gaining entry to the home. Yet, when my parents got home on Saturday, they noticed that two containers of change, as in coins, were missing. Nothing else was disturbed. Just the missing money, as if the containers were known targets.

The guy notices the camera, and moves it. If it's some random guy, then he knows he was on camera, and assumes that he has limited time. If he instead already knows that the owners are not home and can't get home quickly, then he knows he has a little more time to work the windows and sneak out of another entry undetected. If it's some random guy who is going to grab as much shit as possible in the limited amount of time he believes he has, then the house is going to be in disarray—sock drawers overturned in search of cash, jewelry boxes spilled all over the floor in search of diamonds, that kind of thing. Smash the windows and grab everything you can. But the house wasn't like that. Nothing was touched, for the most part. Expensive electronics were left in place. Jewelry box wasn't even opened, even though it was chilling out there in plain view. Just two containers of coins, neither out in the open, each at opposite ends of the house.

And now consider that a few family members (who were mentioned but not named in the family tree blog post, and will not be identified here either, since this is all speculation at this point) lived at my parents' house at one point, and, according to my mom, had a history of stealing money out of these same money jars. And consider that Nana still has a relationship with these family members and admitted to telling one of them that they'd all be down the shore. And consider that the suspicious family member with the drug history and newborn child in his care and the still fresh bulletholes in his arm from a run-in in the depths of Kensington made it a point to specifically text Nana that he would be down the shore on Friday. Was the text to be friendly to the grandmom who is still paying his phone bill on the sly? Or was the text designed to establish an alibi?

I start thinking about this shit, start pretending that I'm some detective, or pretending that I know people on a deeper level and how they typically operate on a more intimate level than your average person, but we all know what's going on here. I'm clinging to my worldview. I'm subconsciously refusing to let go of the worldview that I've built up in my mind, and instead resorting to conspiracy theories to maintain the comfort of "knowing" how the world is. The scary part is the not knowing, ya know? Mysteries are scary. No wonder people are so willing to believe in conspiracies. No wonder people are more willing to be narrow-minded—it's easier, and safer, and provides a peace of mind that the scary, random world affords.

Bravery is facing the unknown, and finding a way to accept it. Grace is being open to evidence that refutes everything you think you know. Peace means knowing that you can't know everything. Revenge is a self-centered worldview that should be discarded.