I’ve been watching my neighbors diagonally across the street try to build something for three days now. The weather is finally nice here and everyone is doing yard work. We need to get our grass cut. The next door neighbor cut it for us all last year after we moved in. I don’t know if he had some kind of ulterior motive for doing it, but he doesn’t live there anymore..and it shows. He told me his name but I don’t remember it. Before my roommate and I moved in here, the previous tenants would cut the grass. Our upstairs neighbors threw a mild hissy fit when we didn’t agree to be solely responsible for it this year. I’m sure they will throw another fit now that the snow is gone. That’s fine. I hate them and love drama and would gladly argue with them for literally any reason. I don’t like them, and haven’t since a few days after we moved in. It’s a boyfriend and girlfriend situation. The boyfriend never speaks, even when spoken to, which initially rubbed me the wrong way just on principle. I thought I would like them because my roommate told me they smoke weed and usually that’s enough for me to form some kind of initial bond with somebody. Not in this case. I don’t know if he has a job. He’s always home. It seems unfair to say that because I’m also always fuckin home but he’s annoying about it and I’m not. The girlfriend has a “body positive waxing business” and is gone most of the day, but even on the few instances I run into her, she’s annoying as hell. She once told me, unprompted, that I would look good with a face tattoo. I feel like she doesn’t know any black people. I get that vibe just based off the music I hear them play when they have their white friends over. Literally every song sounds like Rock Lobster. Sometimes they will play a 90s throwback hit and I’m into it for a second, but then I remember I can’t stand these people and I get annoyed all over again. I hate even hearing them walk around. All of their movements are heavy, like they’re completely unaware that people with lives and schedules live below them. I hate it. I’ve never lived under anyone before. I’ve never been an upstairs neighbor either, so I’m not speaking from a place of upstairs privilege. There’s just so much about these people that I don’t respect. I don’t even remember why I’m talking about them. Anyway, the people across the street. It’s an older husband and wife and the wife is struggling to build something, and has been for days. I can’t even tell what it is. I squint and just watch. I talk to my cat about it and sometimes he looks too. I asked him if he knows what they’re building. He said no.
The energy of these people is so weird. The wife is like stumbling around with the same demeanor of like..a teenager who just got told to clean their room. She looks at the planks of wood that are sitting in the grass, like she also has no fucking idea what she’s supposed to be doing with them. She just propped one up against the side of the house and walked to grab another plank and knocked the first plank over. Then she had to go back and pick it up and prop the other one up again. I feel like I’m watching a sitcom or something. This is where the laugh track would play. Every so often, the husband comes outside and watches her. She’s just like...aimlessly milling around. I have the window cracked for a breeze, but the street is busy enough that if they’re talking I can’t hear what they’re saying. But I don’t think they’re talking. Their house is bright white with loud, turquoise steps. It’s cute. I don’t think any other houses on the street have colored steps. I never really look. I honestly have no idea what a lot of the houses around here look like. My next door neighbor’s house (the house of the guy who cut our grass last summer) looks almost identical to ours though. Sometimes when I’m too stoned and I go to the store I walk up their driveway by mistake. Their house is a duplex like ours and has a porch on the top floor like ours. Sometimes I’m not even high and I’m like “Wait...is this my house??” And I’m halfway up the driveway before I realize No...it’s not. My roommate has the same problem. One time she pulled in the driveway and there were a bunch of people on the bottom porch and she thought I had people over. She said she paused and was confused because all of the people on the porch were white and she knew I’d never have that many white people at our house at a time. Then she realized it was the wrong house, backed out, and pulled into our driveway right next door. Everybody on the porch watched her.
The only neighbors I’ve ever paid attention to at length are the ones in the house directly across from ours. They’re dumb as fuck. They’re obviously republicans. I know this because one day I watched them struggle to hang an american flag from their front porch. It literally took three hours because the flag kept falling down. The girl was screaming at the guy trying to hang it. I think it was her brother or something. Maybe her boyfriend or just a friend. Who knows. All white people look related. At the end of the whole ordeal, they finally got the flag up. I walked away to make lunch and when I came back to sit down, the flag was gone. It wasn’t even laying on the ground or anything, it was just gone. They still haven’t put it back up. On St. Patrick’s Day there were a bunch of rowdy whites on the front lawn of that house. I opened all the windows and waited for them to get too loud because I obviously was going to call the cops. Calling the cops on white people is fine. It’s not illegal!! In fact, it’s perfectly legal!! I ended up cleaning out my bowl, smoking some weed, getting too high and falling asleep. So if they got too loud I have no idea. Now I have to wait until the next white people holiday (Memorial Day) for them to get loud so I can call the cops. It’s fine. I don’t have anything going on so it’s worth the wait for me. Should prisons be abolished? Sure. But until then, lock all the rowdy whites up. Every last one. I don’t give a shit.
The other weird thing about these flag lovers is that they park their car on the walkway leading to their front door. Yes, they have a driveway. No, the walkway is not an extension of their driveway. It’s insane because every trash day they bring bags and bags of trash around from the back of the house to the front. And they do it the morning trash gets picked up. It’s lawless. A few times I’ve watched the girl struggle, tripping over herself to bring the bags of trash out while the garbage truck crept up the street toward her house. Every time I watch with my mouth kinda hanging open, wondering if she’s gonna make it. She always does. Sometimes I want to open my window and yell PUT YOUR TRASH OUT THE NIGHT BEFORE!!! THEN YOU WOULDN’T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS!!! But I can’t help people who don’t help themselves. She invites this chaos into her life nearly every week and nearly every week I watch. Her house is a duplex too. I’ve never seen anybody go in or out of the other side but I know people live there. That’s the weird thing about this neighborhood. Like, yeah I’m talking about these different neighbors, but they’re the only ones I see. And, honestly, if I saw them in Walgreens or the health food store or wherever else, I wouldn’t recognize them. I have no idea what they look like up close. Kinda weird. This neighborhood is really odd. Something is off about it but I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s because it’s so quiet. I think it was New Year’s Day, I’m not sure, but there was some holiday I got high and walked to 7/11 for a slurpee and it was like..eerily dead on the street. It felt like that episode of the Twilight Zone..I think it’s the first episode..where the guy is just walking around the town and there’s nobody there? And It Felt Haunted? It was like that.
Sometimes this neighborhood feels frozen in time.