Tresspassing.

Anyone who has been to visit me at my apartment has read the note taped to my front door: "Please do not leave flyers or coupons on my door. Thank you!" It's on a pink background with flowers, an entirely polite way to ask people to stop wasting paper (and their business's resources) on me and my front door. For the most part, being polite has worked and people have respected my wishes. However, compliance has certainly not been uniform.

One local restaurant, who just opened a location a little ways away (it's not quite in my neighborhood, it's in Allandale and not Hyde Park), left me a menu. "Well," I thought. "This isn't a flyer OR a coupon. It's a menu. And I don't have anything about menus on my door!" I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt, dropped the menu in my recycle bin, and taped an addendum to my door: "OR MENUS."

Now, I know that this warning is completely comprehendable, because one morning (okay, it was a really afternoon) Corey and I had a pizza delivered. The driver scoffed at my door, "Did someone really leave you menus after you put that first part of the note up?" he shook his head.

I've lived on in relative peace since then, my door generally unmolested (someone did leave a voter registration form on my door, and although I'm registered, it wasn't a commercial endeavor so I didn't really mind). But yesterday, returning from 8 hours on campus, disgruntled and tired, I came home to find a brochure for a chicken wings "restaurant" on my door.

That was it. I was mad. MAD. I am a VEGETARIAN and I don't eat chicken, and even when I did eat meat, I didn't eat CHICKEN WINGS. I find it incredibly disrepectful for someone to ignore the explicit desire that I've spelled out on my door, as if it's either a joke, or as if their chicken wing product is above all the other products I receive flyers for.

This set me off on a vicious Googling binge for information about whether or not it was legal for companies to place flyers where they were expressly asked not to. While I discovered that lots and lots of people have the same problem as I do (a number of people with mail slots reported a much more intrustive problem of opening their front doors to find their foyers filled with this swill), I found out that there really isn't much you can do about it.

Leaving flyers isn't considered a form of solicitation, so you can't actually prosecute people who flyer you even with a sign up. A Google search of the terms "door" and "flyer" on the City of Austin website (http://www.ci.austin.tx.us) gave me nothing relevant, but brought up some examples where the city had even sponsored door flyers. This was lame.

The only thing I found that you can get people in trouble for is tresspassing. This is different for me than most people, because they have some type of front yard or the like that a flyer-person has to cross in order to leave flyers on the front door. Additionally, the outside of the door where I live isn't really "mine" since I live in a condo complex, and the outside of the doors are all, techinically I believe, the cohesive property of all the unit owners (and I am not a unit owner, by any stretch of the imagination). So I'm in a sort of legal quandry in regards to the flyering of my door. I'm thinking about putting up a sign that says something along the lines of, "This door is private property, and leaving flyers of any type on it will be considered trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." Unfortunately, I don't own the door, and, if I did, there seems to be very little I could actually get out of prosecuting someone. It'd'be a scare tactic, really.

My mom proposed a much simpler solution that could have more of an effect: posting my sign in Spanish.

In the meantime, I've been progressing (in tiny, tiny steps taken very, very slowly) on my thesis. What I think I really want to write about right now is the San Antonio heavy metal scene and why it has been largely ignored, and how this is because it clashes with the image that the city wants to maintain for itself, which is largely one of iconic Texas history (the Alamo) and authentic Hispanic culture. In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne got drunk, put on one of Sharon's green gowns, and peed on the Alamo. Urban legend states that a faint 666 is visible where his urine came in contact with the wall, the mark of the devil left by the Prince of Darkness. The way he tells the story, he needed to take a piss, found a wall, and found out it was the Alamo when he got arrested; not a story of rebellion, but a story of drunken and accidental confusion. To sum up the story, he was banned from the city of San Antonio (by the governor!) for ten years, until he donated $10,000 to the Alamo in 1991. This is more or less a metaphor for what I want to write about.

Now, I'm no Ozzy expert, but like most people, I knew he'd bitten the head off of a live bat at one of his shows. As I watched youtube interview footage yesterday (the Letterman/Ozzy interview from 1982 was priceless), I learned the whole story. Ozzy had habitually bitten the heads off of bats at his concerts in the past--rubber bats. When a bat appeared on-stage that fateful night, he rationally assumed it was of the rubber variety. Unfortunately, it was a live, stunned bat, but Ozzy didn't realize that until too late. The best part about this story is that Ozzy had to receive a series of rabies shots, and even the Price of Darkness bitches about how much they hurt.



But what I didn't know--and I think, what most people don't actually know, if that Ozzy Osbourne did intentionally bite the head off of a dove, and he did it in a way that was a million times more bad ass than if he was onstage performing. After being kicked out of Black Sabbath and after a period of depression and self-destructive behavior (more so than usual), Sharon got Ozzy back on his feet, getting him signed with Epic to release a solo album and restart his musical career. As a part off this, she arranged a meeting with the Epic bigwigs, so that they could all see each other and Ozzy could reassure them, perhaps of his reliability, perhaps of his normality. I'm not sure. As a part of this meeting, however, Sharon and Ozzy decided to bring doves and rlease them in the meeting, both as a symbol of peacefulness and to get the executives to notice him. However, as with many things Ozzy, this didn't go quite according to plan.

Forgiving the fact that releasing doves in a meeting room has to be a horrible idea no matter who you are (bird shit, come on), things went horribly wrong. No one seemed to be noticing Ozzy, and he found this unacceptable. He sat down on the lap of one of the women there, I believe she was an advertising executive. In no terms did she want Ozzy on her lap, and this is plainly obvious in photos taken of the moment where she is leaning as far away from Mr. Osbourne as possible. As he was perched there, one of the doves landed in his lap. Wanting even more attention, he casually picked up the dove... and bit its head off.

While he talked about how awesome he thought the moment was in the interviews, talking about the blood and puke and feathers that the room quickly was covered in, Sharon was less enthusiastic and admitted she peed herself when he did it. But the point is this: They didn't drop his record, they didn't decide not to release it, they didn't penalize him. They banned him from the building.


It all comes back to tresspassing.