Finally, the darkest hour of the pandemic hath arrived. I had to talk to TWO neighbors IN THE SAME WEEK. TWO! God give me strength.
To give you a background, I have not necessarily had the best neighbor history around. I had a sex offender and a drug dealer (two neighbors, not the same person) once at an old place and yet the sex offender managed to call the cops on me playing poker at 8:30 on a Friday. That neighbor was jobless, by the way. Once they got into it and the creep chased the dealer with a bat and I’ve never rooted so hard for two people to take each other out. It would be like watching Thanos fight Skip Bayless.
I have had pretty good luck here – my one neighbor is pretty cool and likes good bourbon (yay!) and Spanish rap (not yay!) and we get along. My other neighbor is an 88 year old lady that mows her own grass and pushes her trash out. I like her because she refuses to let anyone help her and when we took her cookies, she brought me back coffee cake and I could eat coffee cake with toenail clippings in it. Coffee cake is the best.
All that said, my first reaction when one of my neighbors tries to speak to me is to scream and throw holy water on them. About once a year, like a reverse purge, I try to be nice. I waved at the immigrant family across the street about six times when we moved in and they just stared me down. My brother in law visited once and the grandma talked to him for ten minutes. I just have that “don’t make eye contact with this psycho” look and I am completely fine with that.
My wife texted me “Call the neighbor quick, she tried me twice in a row.” She’s almost 90, so I’m thinking the worst. I called and she had an excruciating conversation with me about whether the trash was picked up that probably lasted three minutes, but should have lasted 14 seconds. Two days later, another neighbor, who has talked to me once about keeping my pit bull out of her yard, was waving me down with a flashlight. 1) I have no pit bull. 2) I have a fence that no dog on earth can jump over. This time, yard lady was yelling “What was that horrible screaming?” I was thinking “Probably you talking to yourself?” I then had to spend precious time out of my day telling her that cats fight. She’s at least 60 and I had to go in to onerous detail and then she was grilling me on if it was my cat. I almost wanted to tell her, “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, THEY’RE COMING! OH GOD!” then drag myself in the house dramatically, but she probably would have started a whole new inquiry. Now I know why Daniel Boone once said, “If I can see chimney smoke, it’s time to move.”