Neighbors

I live near some crazy people.

A few weeks ago, I had an encounter with an old man in my neighborhood. I was driving around and kind of swerving to avoid the various obstacles in the street (pedestrians, bikers, etc) when I saw this old man crossing the street 2 blocks ahead. In typical old man fashion, he was walking ... very........ slowly. However, he was a little more than halfway across the street, so I leaned my car to the left a bit to curve around him. Pretty standard.

So what does the old guy do? He STOPS in the middle of the street (now I will no longer be able to avoid him) forcing me to slam on my brakes to avoid killing him. Why did he stop, you ask? To lecture me on driving too fast!! He just stopped in the middle of the road (not a crosswalk, mind you) held his hands out and screamed "STOP! STOP!!" Then he proceeded to yell at me about "this is not a racetrack" "why do you have to drive so fast," etc etc. I was thinking, "sorry, pops... maybe they didn't go so fast back in your time, but I really wasn't driving all that fast!"

So I sat there for a second and contemplated screaming back at him for almost making me run him over, but decided that yelling at some old crazy man in the middle of the street just wasn't worth my time. Instead, I just lowered my passenger side window and said very calmly, "I wasn't going to hit you, you know." Then I slowly drove around him and went on my merry way, while the old man kept yelling "No! Wait! Listen!!" Stupid old man.

Then there are the crazy people across the street from me... My street is really narrow, so the building across the street is quite close, and I can see and hear most of what goes on in there all the time. For instance, the rather obese boy with the really large bay windows refuses to put up shades or blinds, and instead changes in plain view of everyone on my side of the street. It's really quite unappetizing.

Anyhow, about every two days, all I hear over there is screaming and yelling from both children and adults. And I mean, all manner of curses and swears emanate from their house. I met the woman of the house, this nice lady named Dolores, when I first moved in. She asked me if I had any kids... when I replied "no no... not yet, anyway," she said she had three and asked me if I wanted them. Looking back I wonder if she was serious :p

Ah, neighbors.

-e