prev go away next
2002-05-22 | 2:38 p.m.

Some people have moved in next door. I can't quite figure it out--I think it may be a board-and-care or group home situation. There is a man sitting on the side porch, in his red plaid pajamas, listening to some kind of easy-listening R&B music. Unfortunately, that porch is just about twenty feet away from where I sit, and though I have closed windows and doors all over the house, I can still hear it quite well.

I tried drowning it out with music of my own, but it sounded just like that. I don't even like to listen to one kind of music when I'm writing, much less two.

No offense, but I don't want to hear your music, dude. It's not that bad, but I still don't want to listen to it. Can't you listen to it on the other side of the house?

And part of me can't help but think, snobbishly, that this neighborhood ought to have priced out the board-and-care homes. And then I look at him and think, Geez, he doesn't look too good. And he's been sitting out there for over an hour. Maybe he's not merely unemployed or developmentally stunted, but dying of cancer or something. Do I really want to go marching over there and make a fuss over his R&B?

Well, yeah, part of me DOES want to. But there's no way I will, unfortunately, until he's done it maybe four or five times, and I know he's never going to stop doing it unless I kick up a fuss. I hate to kick up a fuss--I hate to take other people's pleasures away from them or, worse, have them get all snarly with me and refuse. But damn I don't want to listen to it.

Yesterday some other guy in that house was taken away in an ambulance.

I blame the guy who bought the house in the first place. He's trying to sell it for way too much money, so in the meantime he rents it out to whoever he can get. A young couple lived there for a while and then they realized that it wasn't going to turn into Lesser Loserville and left. This is Greater Loserville, people! Butt of jokes; bastion of petty crime and mental illness! Homicide capital of the North Bay! Nobody is all that friendly and some of us are pretty darn weird and there is no Trader Joe's!

And now this amorphous group has moved into this too-small house, and there is a man in plaid pajamas playing music on the porch in the middle of the day. This is not fucking New Orleans, okay? Go away.

I know it is irrational but stuff like this makes me want to move. Maybe it's time to move to the country? If I had two acres, wouldn't that be enough? Or would it take more?

prev archive next
0 comments