South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch

Stories about the creation / evolution / demise of the South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch Facebook group.

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SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, everybody. Uh, my name is Matt, and uh welcome to the very, very first episode of my podcast, The Losing Ticket. Basically, what I'm gonna talk about in this episode and hopefully in future episodes are gonna be some stories, some observations, things that uh either myself, some of my close friends or personal acquaintances find uh funny in their uh day-to-day lives, and we're just gonna share them. And hopefully, if you're interested enough and you might chuckle, uh you might you might enjoy it. And if not, you know, maybe it's not your cup of tea, it's all it's all good. Really, this is just more or less like what this first with this first uh subject or the first um podcast is gonna be all about, which is a neighborhood watch group that I created on Facebook. Uh, that's what this podcast basically is. It's really not meant for everybody, it's meant for people that are a little bit more like-minded, which basically means immature and uh finds humor in almost everything around them. So, without that, I'm gonna start this podcast off. Uh, I think we're gonna do about 30 to 40 minutes per episode, and I'd like to get one out per week. We'll see. I'm gonna make a lot of mistakes along the way, which I know my friends will definitely point out, and I expect that. But that being said, we're gonna start off the very first podcast uh with the subject around something that was in my life a very hilarious uh point in my in time, um, became a little bit more volatile towards the end. But uh I'm gonna tell the story of the birth and the evolution and then the eventual demise of a Facebook group that I created. So this is going back uh a bunch of years. I don't even know when. It was after 20, but it was like maybe post just post-COVID, maybe? I'm not really sure. About around there. Um, I had Facebook, like most people do, and I was in a group called the South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch. But this this group was different in that they spelled the word neighborhood like the King's English or the Queen's English, however you want to refer to it as. So when they spelled the word neighbor, instead of it being N-E-I-G-H-B-O-R, like it is here in the good old United States of America, they spelled it N-E-I-G-H-B-O-U-R. Whatever. Maybe the guy was from England, who knows? I didn't care. So I joined it, and as I progressed through the days and weeks, I noticed that there was a lot of uh ladies, usually older ladies, or even some older dudes that were just so damn paranoid. They were uh, you know, they live in various streets around South Buffalo, and they would complain about the kids playing basketball or riding their bikes, or uh maybe some toys being left in front of the house. Just constant complaining. Yeah, I guess when I thought of a neighborhood watch group, it would be more or less of, you know, hey, this is going on in the neighborhood, or maybe there's some parents that wanted to get together at the park. Maybe they had a bunch of four-year-olds, three-year-olds, whatever, you know, or the summer, we're all going to the pool at Cash Park. You know, do we want to like meet up or something like that? Or, hey, you know, the garbage wasn't picked up. Does anybody else have that problem? Or my street wasn't plowed yet. How about you? Like, these are all valid reasons for a page to that effect. And that's not really what this page was. This page ended up being basically just like I said earlier, um, people complaining about teenagers or even kids in general. And it's not like teenagers are breaking into cars on Marymount Street. No, it was there's kids playing basketball in front of my house, and it's it's eight o'clock at night. Shouldn't they be in bed yet? It's just and it's the middle of the summer, mind you, right? So it was really just bullshit, and I got annoyed with it. And my sister-in-law was in there, and probably my wife, but she really doesn't participate in anything like that. My sister, my sister Ruth, she will, but um, you know, I decided I had enough and I was going to uh get booted out, but I didn't want to just leave the group, I wanted to go out with a bang, a matte, a mat bang. You know, something that I like to do, something something with some style or something that will will have a ripple effect or a discussion when I'm gone. So I enlisted the friend, uh a friend of mine who is also on Facebook. His name is Dan, and he joined the group just like oh yeah, I would like to join the group and uh see what this is all about. And so he does. And I said, Okay, Dan, I'm gonna start to uh plant a couple seeds. My friend Richie likes to use that term. I'll do it. We all kind of do it to a point. We plant a seed, we'll say something, even if it's an off-the-cusp remark. We'll we'll say something and let it be, let it grow, you know, and sometimes it evolves into something a lot bigger. Hopefully, obviously, especially if we're trying to manipulate somebody. But I would plant some seeds here and there about having problems on my street. Dan would reinforce that. So I'm talking on the you know, I'm posting on the group, and I'm talking about how this white truck parks on the street every day around the same time. And this guy comes out and he's kind of kind of scraggly, kind of creepy, and he just walks up and down the street. And I is he looking in windows? I don't know. Sometimes he goes in the driveway, sometimes he walks across people's grass. And I'm I'm creating this this vision, hopefully, and I am believe me, it was successful. I'm creating this vision for people that were overly paranoid, and they just went with it. And they kept talking about what street are you on, and all this other stuff. And Dan's like, yeah, he's on my street too. And then and then I think maybe my sister-in-law, maybe Ruthie, said, Hey, it's on my street as well. You know, I had I had some participants, and then I basically came out that it was the mailman, you know. I was complaining about the mailman being on my street that I didn't know who he was, and everything that I described him as would have pointed to be that being a mail truck and uh the mailman going from door to door and things like that. So I thought it was just a little funny uh, you know, story that got all the people that were always so damn paranoid, uh, up in arms, and they did not find that funny at all. So they booted me, which I wanted anyways. And then I started thinking to myself, hmm, they spell it South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch, B-O-U-R. Why don't I create a competing group called South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch? But I'll spell it the American English way, the N-E-I-G-H-B-O-R-O-H-O-O-D, which I did. It wasn't taken. Created it. I needed to get, I think, 10 signatures, and it was really just a couple of my friends and a couple friends of friends. I didn't I don't have that many people on there, and I must admit, I would say about 85% of the people I know are not as immature as I am, but but the ones that are are classic in their level of immaturity, and that is why we are such good friends. So I created this South Buffalo neighborhood watch. Like I said, it was post-COVID. Um Trump was still in office, maybe. No, Trump wasn't in office, though, but Joe Biden had to have been in office, and I think it was the whole um like all the protests and bullshit was going on. I don't know if George Floyd died yet. Unfortunately, he didn't die soon enough, but no, he he didn't die yet. But this group started with about 20 people, and it really was just meant for me and my friends. We were just gonna basically make fun of everything and everyone. And every once in a while we get a couple people that would would repost it, or we get a couple new people joined in, but we were still like under 30 people, and I found a picture of this boat, and it was like it looked worse than the Gilligan's Island boat, like it had a big crack in the hull, and it was decrepit, and it looked like it was like rotted all the way through. And I made a posting that this was going to be the South Buffalo um Buffalo River charter boat, and I was looking for employees. You know, I needed a cook, I needed a captain, I needed a this, I needed that, and and and some of the people that were added would would who were like-minded, mind you, um, would would add things to it. And then I would get people on there that really thought it was a real thing. They're like, is this gonna be like how much is it gonna cost? Is this free? Well, you let kids go on, what time of the day are the are the uh cruises gonna cruises gonna be? And I'm like, are these people fucking morons? So we started to become even more and more embellishing in our stories. Uh, I had a couple friends that joined, and I was the only idiot in this group who used my real name because at first I didn't think it was gonna get too crazy, but I had friends that joined that weren't really big um Facebook users, so their inside joke to everything was they were going to use serial killers uh as their aliases. So we had a Harry Shipman who was a doctor in England who murdered people that nobody knew. I mean, everybody knows like you know, Dahmer and and Gyne and you know, the real big, big, big ones, the superstars. But these guys were a little bit under the radar unless you really knew your serial killers. And I had another friend who did um Gary Ridgway, who was the Green River Killer, which was like out in I think Washington State, maybe. And then I had Dan, who used an alias, who ended up being a superstar, an absolute fucking superstar on the group. And we had a couple others join us, and though the two real main stars of the show were Harry Shipman, who is my friend Greg, and and this guy Bill Morrow. And Bill Morrow was this greasy looking fella who was about five foot tall, maybe five foot around, dark complexion, had like a uh a really seedy looking like suit coat and tie. Like he looked so like ugly, but it was perfect. And Bill would like have Valentine's Day parties or New Year's New Year's Eve parties or parties in general, and he would talk about how it only the girls could go, he didn't want any fellas to like get in his way, and he would just push the envelope so to such a high level, and then like my niece was in there, and and some of my sister-in-law's friends, and they're like, Oh, I'll go. I'll I'd like and people were like warning them not to like meet this guy because he definitely came off as like a sexual predator slash pervert, which was hilarious because even like I said, my my nieces or my friends and my sister-in-law knew who this guy was, or they knew it was all shtick, but getting the whole group, or there's this group grew, getting these people that weren't part of the the the gag to react was hilarious. Harry Shipman would take like a picture of like a rundown shack, and he would say, Go to Matt for his your lawn care needs. And I'm not I never did lawn care by any means, but he'd be like, Go to Matt Stolman if you want to get your grass and your bushes trimmed, and then he would do a before-after picture, and it would be like like a little shanty somewhere, like just in the middle of nowhere. And next thing you knew, I had like palm trees and like a freaking waterfall behind the house. It was like this beautiful as a you know Hawaiian resort, and it was just and again, people would be like, That's not even the right house, that's not even the same house. This can't be real. People get asked that all the freaking time. This can't be real. This is a joke. Um, so that kept going on, and it it it got I got some like traction. And then we had another woman in this group, her name was Ann, and I did not know who she was, and we're gonna talk about Ann at um at the end of this episode. Well, end it with Ann. But Anne was just some random that joined the group, and she was like one of the boys without us knowing who she was, like she got it, so she always would it almost gave us the feminine um vote of approval on things, you know what I'm saying? So it would it would allow us to push the the envelope a little bit, and then it was always a female there who would say, Oh, yeah, that's that makes sense, even though all the other women would be going ape shit, batshit crazy. And then there was another woman, Ann Marie, who unfortunately has passed away, and she was a sweet older lady, she might have been a little slow, a little on the slow side, but she was a sweetheart, and I could tell, we could tell she just really didn't have a lot going on. She would post um prayers and recipes non-stop, and people would like go off on her because this again, this is like during all the the protests, and I don't think Floyd was dead yet, but all the liberal this is not oh, just you know, if you're a liberal, you might as well you can stay if you want, I don't give a fuck. But if you're a liberal, you can go fuck yourself. Far one of these far lefters. Um you're a fucking nutcase. I'll say that right now. And we saw a lot of these nutcases in this group, and so they're going at uh bad shit crazy because she heaven forbid she put a prayer on on this group. This shouldn't there shouldn't be any prayers. Now, granted, I was the creator, I what do they call those people? The administrator, right? So I Anne Marie comes to me, you know, she sends me like one of these messages. She's like, Matt, they're real mean to me. And and uh and I told them that you said it was okay because I told them it was okay. I didn't give a shit. It's all it's just for fun. So I said, Yes, Anne Marie, you are okay, you can do whatever you want, you get full auth authority, not only that, and then I made her an administrator so that and I said, just don't kick anybody out because I kind of wanted the left-leaning assholes. They were they made it fun, they made it enjoyable. But I go, Anne Marie, you could do what you want, and uh just know that you're in control, you know, you're you're you're one of the bosses. So she kept doing it, and my god, the amount of people that would become up in arms, like they would they were like threatening her, they were wishing death on her. It really was stupid. It really and she was she never attacked anybody, she never like called anybody, not like me. I was an asshole. I know I was I know I was an asshole, but I wanted to be the asshole, and I was happy I was, and I would do it again. I just wouldn't probably use my whole name on there, but um, so they're attacking her, and uh I had kind of enough of that bullshit, so then I kind of got a little darker in in the room. I definitely was I'm not really a I'm not uh I'm not really I'm not a Republican, I'm technically an independent, but I I have some some things on the on the left side of the aisle I agree with, and some things on the right side of the aisle I agree with. But I definitely side with law enforcement, I definitely side with law and order, I definitely side with being respectful to people. And and when the liberals came out with you know, now it's just crazy. What is this 26 now? I mean now it's just it's it's comical, and I actually think it's gonna it's gonna come back to haunt them. I think it's jump the shark, as my friend Richie would like to say. I think it's jumping the shark right now, but um, but but at the time it was like uh still on the up up up upswing, you know. And um, so I would push the envelope a lot, and and so did Bill Morrow, so did Gary Bridgway, and Harry Shipman always tended to be cool. So I was going through some health issues at the time. I'll give you another story about Harry's Shipman here, and that's really what this is gonna be. I'm gonna talk about some of the stories of of the Shot Buffalo Neighborhood Watch. That's what this episode's about. So I'm I'm at the hospital. I think I'm getting like an x-ray on my foot or something, and I'm in the room. I think I'm like getting my sneakers on because they put took an x-ray on my shoe for my foot, and this nurse comes in, soft buffalo mercy mind you. This nurse comes in and she goes, Are you the match? And I go, Yeah, that's me. Um, like she's like, she goes, she puts her head out the door, she goes, It's him, and like immediately three nurses come walking in, and they're like, Is Harry Shipman real? Is this guy real? Is this guy real? Because some of them understood that there was like some bullshit going on. Not everybody understood that. I would say, and and and this is funny, we grew to like 10.5,000 people in this group at one point. We at our highest, we were 10.5,000 people, like 10,500 and change, and not all of them were morons, but there were enough morons in that group that were very active that made it so fun. So the nurses came in and they were talking about how they loved Harry Shipman. They didn't know who Harry Shipman was, not mind you, they just thought he was like a made-up name. Nobody knew, maybe people that were really into serial killers knew who he was, but nobody knew who Harry Shipman was, nobody knew who Gary Ridgway was. Harry was the superstar, mind you. Bill Morrow was was right up there with him, but I think Harry had him beat. And so I go to my friend who's Harry Shipman, and I go, guess what? The nurses absolutely love you. So I told them that he would do a shout out. Could you do something for the girls at Supple for Mercy? So he was so creative, but it was so clearly obvious. So he had like a picture of a guy who's in a in a gurney, like he's in the hospital on a bed, and he's got like a cast on his right arm and his left arm, and they're like up in a sling, and like a cast, I think, on one of his legs, and that's up in a sling. And then he like photoshopped two um really old school uh roller skates on his feet, and then he photoshopped Harry Shipman's face onto this body that was not Harry Shipman. Like Harry Shipman was like this old guy, and this is like a relatively younger guy. Like, it it would take an absolute moron to not realize that this was this was a Photoshop photo, and that's basically what Harry did. Harry, all of Harry's shit was clearly evident of it being fake. He just never would acknowledge it being fake, and people would just go batshit are crazy. So he goes, I just want to I just want to have a shout out to the fine nurses at South Buffalo, uh, South Buffalo Mercy who took care of me after my unfortunate roller skating incident. And it was just like it was things like that, and and nobody in the entire group other than those girls would have found that hilarious. Well, and us, but like that was like it was a way to acknowledge that they were fans, you know what I'm saying? And speaking of fans, like we had we had um Barstool Sports did a piece on our group about some guy, I guess, goes when he travels around the country, he goes to various neighborhood watches, watch groups, and he goes, Some of them are are like straight up real and some of them are absolute horse shit. He goes, he goes, South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch is the craziest and most dysfunctional neighborhood watch group I've ever seen. And I took that as a you know as a compliment personally, you know, and I posted it on the group and everything. And then like it was so crazy that uh the local ABC channel WKBW actually used our our group, which doesn't even make sense. But at South Park High School, there was a big bed bug infestation. And somebody obviously we had 10,000 people over 10,000 people in our group. So we had people that were parents of South Park kids. And so they were talking about the bed bugs and talked about what the principal released. So someone said, Yeah, Principal Shuda, I think it was at the time. She said blah blah blah blah blah and all this was going on. What does freaking WKB do KBW do? They freaking actually take a screenshot of that post from the South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch, which they in fact, which they in fact referenced in the corner of the of the of the picture, you know, their source of where they got that from. And I'm thinking to myself, they're freaking using us as a source. And we're basically trying to be like the Saturday night live of Facebook groups, of of neighborhood watch groups. So it was hilarious. Like we were like being legitimized, even though we didn't want to be legitimized. I would go into Dollar General and I would go into Wegmans and be at like the the um you know the the the cash cash, you know, cashing out, and you would hear people talking about the group. I actually heard my name being mentioned. Oh yeah, that that administrator is a real asshole. And I'm like smirking because I'm like right next to them as they're talking about it. Obviously, they have blue hair and green hair and orange hair and red hair and and hooks in their nose and bullshit like that. So I knew the kind of people that they were, and it really didn't bother me at all. I actually, again, I was very, very happy about it. But that's like some of the shit that would go on. We had uh there was a pizzeria, it's it's changed its name. I don't even know what it's called now. We have a pizzeria that was on Seneca Street. My friend Jerry knows it because I asked him if it still exists, and he said it's something else. But at one point, it's this is like a little shanty of a pizzeria, it's right across from Cazanovia Park, in a way, and it was called Extreme Pizza, and it was, I guess the guy was like the rudest fucking owner in the world. Like people would get pizza and it would be like undercooked or half cooked or like it'd be like sloppy, or the guy was just real rude when he went in and kept pack cash out and shit like that. I'd never been there, I was never at extreme. I I'm if you're a South Buffalo person, listen to this. I guess my favorite is probably South. Um, well, my favorite pizza is Lovejoy Pizza, which isn't South Buffalo. But if I would my go-to would always be Minions. I like Imperial, but Imperial is overpriced and they're not consistent enough, at least in my book. I know I'm in the minority, but I didn't badmouth them or nothing. It's just uh that's it's just not my thing. And um so I would sit there and talk about how Extreme Pizza was like the best pizzeria in Buffalo, and I would like I again the group's big, but like I'm not advertising this guy, but I talked about him at least once a week. That if he I mean he went out of business, but like, because he really was probably a bad owner, and maybe the pizza was shit, I don't know. But but like, man, you got so much talk up, both positive and negative, that I'm assuming people had to at least try it on their own. Like, there's what emergency pizza on Seneca, there's carbones, you know, I don't know what else is uh there used to be Leo's, now he's gone, right? But like there's there was like all these pizzeria's in sub-uff. I like subbuffal pizza, there's so many. Um, but it's like uh how do you not survive with all that advertisement? I don't know, but he's out, but it but it would rile these people up. They were just so upset, they were so pissed off that like they couldn't comprehend the fact that I was supporting them, and I really wasn't supporting the company as much as I was just going against what these people were saying because I didn't give a fuck. I wanted a rile, I wanted to stir the pot. I've been doing that forever, like my sister-in-law, my sister in law, I've been making fun of my sister-in-law for over 35 years. I she's gotten a little wiser, she's gotten like she doesn't, I can't manipulate her like I I used to be able to. But for like from like the the first five years that I knew her, she was like putty in my hand, and it was great. I had her believing I won the lottery, I had her believing my airplane was taken over by an Islamic terrorist. This is before 9-11, mind you. I mean, I had all this shit, and she was all wholeheartedly believed me. But what my new thing was, especially on this group, was I would find like a picture of a couple crackheads, and I would be like, I would like to root these at it with and and I've gosh darn it, I forgot her name, but her real good friend. And I would say, Oh, they're on the prowl again. I've seen them looking at porches, they're they were stealing plants off, like it would be a picture of like two basically degenerates, and they got like a plant in their one hand, and another woman had like a big gulp in her hand, and they're like missing teeth and they're dirty, and they're just yeah, right. And I'd be like, Oh, Ruthie and whatever is on the prowl again. I see that they're stealing plants off people's porches. And Ruthie's response would be, like, I would ever drink a big gulp. Like, she doesn't defend the fact that I just called her like a hobo stealing plants off of people's porches. And I guess the girl, the woman that I tagged with Ruthie, like her other friends who didn't know that um that I was doing this, is going to her going, hey man, some some dude's bad mouthing you and saying that you're this person on Facebook. It was hilarious, and I did it all the time. Man, it's been so long I forgot her name. As soon as Ruthie says her name, I'll remember, but I wouldn't use her last name anyways, but but um oh, I did it nonstop to her, nonstop to Ruth. But then what ended up happening, sadly, is that um oh, before even before that, so then George Floyd uh happened. What was that? Like May of I don't even know, and I don't even give a fuck. But George Floyd happened, and people went batshit crazy, and people are protesting, and every cop is now a criminal, and all this other shit. So I would I switched, I used to have like one of the circles in South Buffalo has like a stone sign that says welcome to South Buffalo. So that was like the sign for like the banner for the page, something generic. I mean, it is what it is. And um I changed it to the thin blue line, the police the police flag, you know, with the white the blue line, and I would have these motherfuckers e uh messaging me saying, Could you take that picture off? My husband has PTSD, or he I'm afraid of the police, or don't you realize the brutality that police cause us? And I'm like, I don't give a fuck. I was then like I wasn't just giving them this stuff, I was a little bit more aggressive, was probably what I I went a little maybe too much, but I was just calling these people out, and it evolved into a part where like I would hold on a somewhat daily, a daily, um uh daily occurrence, uh South Buffalo watch People's Court, and I would do like the hear ye, hear ye. And I it would be somebody who posted something stupid. It was always anti-like Christian, anti-white, anti-republican or conservative. I guess I'm more conservative, but I'm not Republican, but I'm I'm more conservative. But I have some liberal leaning, so don't mind. It's not all one, I'm not one sided only. I'm middle, I'm probably more moderate, but my more passionate. I my my right sticks out more because there's so many fucking idiots on the left. Anyway. Um, so I'm I find some idiot that said something stupid, and I put their like passage in there. And I I had some people feeding me ones, like Ann Marie would would send me some every once in a while, or Harry Shipman, or or Bill Marl, Gary Ridgway. Some of these are my sister-in-law, even sometimes. They would hey, you might want to put this person up on uh on uh in the court, and I would do like this whole spiel and how they're you know crimes against humanity, and then I would ban them for like 30 days. Not ban them from Facebook, but like ban them from the group, and all their friends would get so fucking riled up, and they're all like fuck you, and this and that, and they're like, You don't give a shit about the plight of the the black man or the uh colored man, and I'm like, fuck you, you don't know who the fuck I am, you don't know where the fuck I went to school, and and my experiences and shit like that. I go, I don't give a shit what color you are, you're a piece of shit, you're a piece of shit. I'll call you a piece of shit, and that's where George Floyd is a piece of shit. I'm like, of all the fucking people you're gonna put on a fucking cross, you're gonna put that scumbag. Anyway, so I was just bad mouthing them, I badmouthing him, bad mouthing that was just and it evolved to a point where then my son is texting me telling me that I need to stop because on very liberal groups around on other liberal groups, they were trying to find me. They're trying to find my address, they're gonna protest in front of my house, they were gonna go to my where I worked, which I don't have to worry about, all that shit. So it's like you can go fuck yourself on that. But like they they were they were trying, you know, and then then they were going after like is this your dad or is this your husband? So like my whole family had to change their fucking last names on the group because I felt bad because I was an idiot and I used my fucking name. I couldn't be like all these other schmoes and just use somebody else's, and I still have that fucking group, but um, but yeah, so then I ended up getting rid of the group. I actually gave it to my buddy Dan, and then he cleaned it up, and now it's really nothing. I don't even think I don't even know if it's a thing. If it's a thing, it ain't nothing, it ain't funny anymore. But like it was just like a perfect moment in time, like the left was just starting to to really gain that crazy, and they were as dumb as they really are, so so easy to manipulate them. My friends and I have just such a warped sense of humor, and of all the things, and I'm coming up on like what 33 35 minutes now. I'm gonna keep it around here, I'm gonna end it soon. But the best thing that came out of that group, other than the fact that it was fun, was the fact that Anne, that woman that I was talking about earlier, who kind of got her humor, she wasn't aggressive, like she wasn't calling anybody out like we were, she was just kind of like behind the scenes, giving a nudge here and there. But she would never attack anybody like I did, or I think I was really the only one who attacked people. Even Harry Shipman didn't attack, but um, I just couldn't take it anymore. I became more of a chore. But the best thing that came out of that group was the fact that Harry Shipman and Anne ended up meeting in real life, and now they're together. And they are basically soulmates right now, and it is the most perfect ending to a very unfortunate, well, fortunate, then unfortunate story. So to this day, I'm very happy that I did it. Kind of upset that I used my real name, but I wouldn't can't change the bast, right? And uh who knows what tomorrow will bring, right? But South Buffalo Neighborhood Watch was probably in power for about two or three years, maybe two years. It got really, really big, got really, really fun and rowdy, but again, it started as a little uh like a lark, a little joke, and just uh became its own beast and evolved into its own uh its own thing, and and that was its demise. The liberals got their hooks in it, and it became uh it became the end of something that was good at one point. All right, so this is the me signing off. Again, my name is Matt. You're listening to the losing ticket, and hopefully I'll have another one in about a week. Thank you.