Home Wreckers

Hot damn, two rants in one day. I'm a blazing ball of fury. What got my ire up so much that I felt the need to further spread my hate and discontent to you, the loyal reader?

My neighborhood.

I live in the heart of white, middle class suburbia. It only barely classifies as a "city" at all, what with the abundance of malls and shopping centers across from the chicken farms and cow pastures. Not the sort of city I would recommend for a visit, let alone setting down your roots. My subdivision itself is on the outskirts of this almost-city, close enough to not be in the posh areas, but far enough away that you'd never mistake us for the impovershed. Smack dab in middle class, that's us.

My street is pretty much made up of a long string of townhouses, six or seven houses per "block" line both sides of it. It's a quiet street. It's a dull street. It's a nosy street.

This may come as something of a shock, but I'm not exactly the social type. My neighbors? I'd prefer they either move away or leave me the hell alone. That includes the big-mouthed git next door who feels the need to ask me how I'm doing ("Fine, until you interfered with its progress. Look, you have another neighbor, go bug them and leave me alone.") Fortunately, we only have him to contend with immediately, as we're on the end of our block of houses (or beginning, depending upon your view). Unfortunately, this in no way seems to deter the rest of the people around us from butting in unsolicited.

We don't get along all that well, my neighbors and I. To start with, they don't like our trees. We have a multitude of bushes and trees that surround our house, particularly all down the "free" side. They were just planted there when we moved in around the end of 1984, and have enjoyed 15 years of undisturbed growth. They are home to many birds, which we happily provide a birdfeeder for, and perhaps even more than that, they block our windows so those nosy bastards can't look in. Said bastards don't like that, saying that our foliage is "unsightly" and clashes with the rest of the conforming neighborhood, who all seem to have just shoved a dying twig with a pasted leaf into their yard and dubbed it "tree". So they bug us to cut them down. We tell them to piss off.

Then there's the matter of some kind of "subdivision dues" they try to impose on us for things like having the grass mowed and taping the leaf back on the twigs. This was introduced about five years after we bought the house, and apparently voted on at one of the subdivision meetings we refuse to waste our time at. However, nobody asked us if we wanted to have our grass mowed by GED losers, so we tell the subdivision to stuff their dues. Of course, being people in the most unflattering sense of the word, our grass is still mowed, for fear that our black sheep home will stand out even more with a green shag rug out front.

Then there's the topping on this candy-coated habitual nightmare: The Woman Down The Road.

About four houses down from us lives this old woman, I'm guessing somewhere between 65 and 402 years of age. I have no idea how this happened, but the biddy managed to somehow latch onto my fiance, Mike. She knows him by name, and does little but harass him every time he is unlucky enough to not see her coming and run in the other direction. The examples I could list are many and varied, but I'll instead site the most recent one: The day after we returned back from London, we were running around, trying to fit three weeks of errands into 8 hours or so. One of these included an encounter with our mailperson. Much to our dismay, we realized too late that the hag was there as well. I was in the car and missed the exchange, but when Mike returned after a minute or two, he was only too happy to fill me in.

Somehow, despite the fact that Mike works nights and, like me, hates the neighborhood and is rarely seen out in it except under the most extreme of circumstances, she figured out that he wasn't around for a while. We're all still at a loss as to how this happened. My current theory is that she braved our protective flora and stared into the window for a few days and noticed that nobody was there. But anyway, the fact is she knew he wasn't home. She wanted to know where he'd been, to which he replied "Away."  "I checked the jail to see if you were there," she told him, which completely boggled us. Mike may be many things, but defintely not the sort to look like he's jail-bound at any point in his life. "I'm glad to know she thinks so highly of my character," he later mused. But the pondering on why the heck he'd be in jail aside, what the hell is it to you? Even if he was in jail, it couldn't possibly be this woman's business any less. To top it all off, she tried to make him go to the house of this other, seemingly unrelated woman we'd never heard of before in our lives. He didn't know why. He didn't bother to ask, he just expressed that we were extremely busy and dived back in the car.

But all of this is everyday stuff, nothing really warranting a rant. It needs a catalyst.

Yesterday, it happened - my mother got into a car accident. Briefly, some idiot ran a red light, totalled her car, and didn't even get a ticket for it, but that's not the point of this particular rant. What is important is that she wrecked the car. We had it towed back home, whereupon it was left in our freshly-shorn front lawn. The back carport is a pretty tight fit, and frankly, I don't want my car getting scratched up trying to shove this wreck into the space provided, so the front seemed the best option, not to mention making it easier for the insurance adjustor to find and take pictures of. The accident occurred at about 5:20, and was deposited in front of our house 3 hours or so later.

While the wrecker was dropping the car off, I noticed more than a few heads and staring eyes fixated on what was going on. Shouldn't you zombies be watching "Must See TV"? I pondered to myself. After the tower had gone, the git next door came over to chat to my mother about the wreck. I feigned a phone call to save her even more pain for the day. 15 minutes later, there was a knock at the door. The guy on the other side of us (over the blissful, tree-lined gap) was there.

"Hey. Can I look at the car? I do a lot of car work and stuff."
"I guess. Just don't touch anything."
"Wanna sell it?"