My Driver's Education

When I was a kid I can remember watching the cartoons on the Disney Channel (mind you this was back when they showed Disney Cartoons-you know Mickey, Donald and Goofy not Miley, Lindsey or (insert name of latest "tween" sweetheart to foster the image of a rebellious harlot to get back at Disney for forcing childhood innocence upon them into their teen years). One of my favorite cartoons was the one about Goofy becoming a different person behind the wheel of a car. I remember distinctly how he was very calm and polite and would go out of his way to avoid even stepping on a bug and then he would get behind the wheel and transform into a Mr. Hyde- type character. This once caring and concerned citizen became a tyrannical despot who felt that all others should yield to him and allow him the right of way. He didn't just feel that way, he considered it his right and demanded others' observance of it.

I only bring this up because I have been contemplating my own driving skills and feel that I also make a sort of Hyde-esque transformation when driving a vehicle. Before you get on your high horse and "tsk-tsk" me, just seriously consider your own driving habits. It amazes me (as I think from the safety of a desk and not behind a wheel) how I almost always assume the other guy is at fault (although, in my defense that is usually the case). I am not so level headed behind the wheel and it is at those times that I "know" the other guy is to blame-not me!

Case in point: Near my home there is a shopping center on either side of the street and an island in the middle of the road almost completely blocking access to the other shopping center depending on which side of the street you're on. The only way to turn left out of the strip mall on the east side is to turn right and pull a U-turn from a turn lane which serves as the only access to the strip mall on the west side of the street (still with me?). The point is the other day I found myself needing to turn left out of the east side of the street so I pulled into the turn lane and waited for traffic to clear so that I could make my safe and legal u-turn. The problem was that while I was waiting for traffic to clear, a car prepared to make a right hand turn out of the west side shopping center. This woman pulled up to her stop sign (I had no such posting impeding my progress) but only looked back at the traffic coming at her and failed to even look at the lane in which I was patiently waiting to make my turn. Now the sensible and kindly thing to have done would be to wait for her to proceed knowing that she hadn't seen me. However, the Hyde-ian part of my brain was triggered and instead of ensuring safety, I felt it was necessary to assert my personal rights-specifically that right to proceed first when I don't have to stop and the other person does. As you may have guessed, I pulled out, she did too and was completely shocked and awed that there was now a silver mini-van where she expected only black top. What happened next is what baffles me and is really the point of my rambling today. She began to lay on the horn and yell all manner of cursing and insinuations about me and various farm animals. I did not appreciate this! My window happened to be down at the time so that my ears received the full brunt of her slander and calumny. My window being down also afforded me the opportunity to defend myself from this salacious speech. In a calm rational voice (that never exceeded a decibel above a normal talking voice), I stated that I didn't have a stop sign and that she would do well to heed the advice of my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Saul and, "look both ways next time!" Except you know from the tenor of my introduction that this is not how it went down at all. No, I yelled at her that I didn't have a stop sign and went on to imply that she was a woman of low moral character. I am not saying this was right. But when she began to yell at me because I was adhering to the rules of the road it was just like Goofy! I became a different person entirely.

For the most part, I am an exceptional driver, especially with passengers. If I, in a moment of clarity, realize I am the one at fault in a near miss, I have no trouble waving or admitting in some way that I am at fault. But if I am not-LOOK OUT!

That is why I feel that there should be some kind of class or test that one should have to pass before they are allowed to get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. Hey, November's just around the corner, maybe we can get it on the ballot this year!

My Neighborhood-No More

For the past six years we have lived in the same place. That is something of a record for us. From the time we got married (July, 2000) to the time we moved into our current abode (July, 2004), my beautiful bride and I had moved no less than seven times. That may not sound like much to you, but is about six more times than I would have preferred (and the last time I checked this blog was called, “Jared-muses” not “some insignificant chirp who feels the need to one-up everyone’s story no matter how outlandish they are forced to exaggerate-muses”). Anyway, I love my little condo, I really do. It is almost perfect. I say almost because there is one drawback to living here (other than the ridiculous HOA fees charged to me by the neo-facist, communistic property management which I refer to as the Fourth Reich). That major hurdle to perfection is the menagerie of tenants who dwell around me.

I must pause here to say that for the most part, we have been uniquely blessed to not be surrounded by only terrible neighbors. In six years, our most directly connected neighbors have been mostly tolerable. There is the single, school teacher who lives directly across from us (and happens to be the only other original tenant in the 36 units that surround our immediate area). Other than the Macaw and a penchant for playing his guitar and singing loudly, he has been a very pleasant neighbor (and at least he sings well). Also, there are the “Extremes”. I called them that (until I learned their names) because he is a moto-cross rider (as attested to by the fact that he has a couple of bikes and walks around in a full back and neck brace after a crash, which happens with uncanny frequency-I didn’t say he was good) and because he has the word “extreme” tattooed across his back in eight inch gothic letters (which are often visible because he never wears a shirt when he’s not wearing the back brace). They are a nice couple and we always got along swimmingly. But that pretty much wraps it up on the good neighbor side of things. One unit, the one with which we share a wall, has been particularly productive in the bad neighbor department. The original tenants smoked like they were in their own personal episode of MadMen and still believed all of the phony doctors who recommended smoking as a stress reliever (although, I don’t suppose dead people have too much stress, so in a way, they were right). The bigger problem was that they would leave their cigarette butts all over the place-at least until my wife swept them all up one day and piled them up at their front door.
The next set of tenants was a family-Mom, Dad and teenage daughter and son-typical American family, right? A little too typical if you ask me. My wife said that they weren’t terrorists, but he always walked around with a “Die, American Pig” scowl on his face and the family seemed to get along more as co-workers than as relatives. A couple of calls to Homeland Security and they moved away a short time later (Ok, I admit that I was also consuming several seasons of 24 while they lived next door and that may have contributed slightly to my assumptions).
The most recent set of “winners” to play musical renters was a young couple with an infant daughter who lived there for a month. They moved in week one, the cops came to visit week two, he moved out week three and she moved out week four. In the past month or so, there has been an influx of renters moving into the vacant condos surrounding us. The most ridiculous of the new tenants are the ones who moved in directly above us. I am not sure what they are doing but it sounds like they are moving stuff across the floor continually. I don’t believe it could be furniture- who moves furniture that much? I think it might be dead bodies. Maybe they start to stink a little bit so you move them over to the window. But you don’t want the neighbors to see you airing out your dead bodies so you got to hide them back in the closet again. I am willing to hold my tongue and not turn them in if they would please, for the love of everything sacred and holy, stop moving the bodies around! If it persists, I believe the FBI has an organized crime division who will be getting a call.

What was once a pleasant little condo has been turned into a glorified apartment complex which I feel shall be featured on COPS very soon. The nefarious conduct has escalated. The other day I walked through the courtyard to our garage and was almost knocked over by the smell of mary-jane (and I don’t mean the perfume worn by Spiderman’s on again, off again love interest). However, the majority of criminal activity has been limited to the building across the parking lot from us. This is where the stabbing occurred. It seems that some guy didn’t like that his girlfriend broke up with him and moved out. So he found her new place (across from us) and paid her a visit one night. He bullied his way into the house and an argument broke out (which usually happens when one party infringes upon another). Long story short: he stabbed her; she played dead; cops were called; paramedics arrived; he was arrested, she moved away; the neighborhood was peaceful again…but for how long?

The winner of "Neighbor of the Decade" though goes to one particularly strung out single mom. I shall, for the sake of brevity, refer to her as, “the woman”, in lieu of the other name I have for her, "Crazy, Paranoid, Insomniatic, Crack Whore, the first”. If I may, I will share with you this particular story in better detail than the previous ones I have related.

One night, about 10:00 pm my wife and I decided to call it a night and head to bed (this is not married code, we really are so boring sometimes that we actually go to bed that early). We had been asleep for roughly three hours when we were startled awake by knocking on our door. I sleepily stumbled to the door and peered through the lookout hole and saw the woman. She was standing there in a bathrobe with hair disheveled and a wild paranoid look in her eye. I generally sleep without a shirt (this is not said to gross you out but to explain my next move) so I called through the door, rather than opening it, in order to ascertain what she could possibly want. She began to ramble on about us shining lights into her house doing so with a vocabulary that Andrew Dice Clay would have envied. I realized I was dealing with a different kind of crazy than the garden variety crazy we normally see, so I went back to the bedroom to get dressed. When I returned to the door she was nowhere to be seen. By this time my wife is up, robed and wondering at the commotion. I stepped back inside and closed the door. I then proceeded to the other side of the house (which was like three steps) and went out onto our patio. The woman was making her way back across the parking lot from her condo and beginning anew with baseless accusations of us keeping her awake by shining lights in her windows and keeping her from some obviously much needed sleep. I tried to explain to her that despite the fact that our personal hobby is staying up late and clandestinely shining laser lights into our neighbors’ window, we had actually been in bed for three hours. That little revelation took her to a dark place because she unleashed a torrent of profanity that would have been worthy of an HBO special. She then added a little wrinkle to her story. Apparently she is also a photographer, because she explained that she was in her dark room with the door closed and she could still see us shining lights into her windows. Putting aside the need of x-ray vision to see us shining lights in her windows through the closed door of her dark room, I am intimately aware of the confines of these little condos and there is no place to even set up a dark room. If she has a dark room then I’m Abraham Lincoln and I have neither the height nor the capacity to grow a beard like our sixteenth president.
At this point my wife transforms from the mild mannered housewife that you all know and love into the proverbial momma bear who’s cubs are about to be awakened by this crazy, delusional, paranoid, insomniatic, crack whore (the first). I am now forced to place myself in between momma bear and the woman who keeps poking her. This is not a place I want to be. On one side I have the aforementioned harlot and on the other I have my beautiful wife turned angry mom transitioning from defense to offense. One ear is being filled with every foul word (and maybe a few she made up) known to man and the other a series of quick retorts that made me flush with pride. Eventually this woman needed to return to her crack den (with a dark room) and refuel because she stormed off angry. My wife and I returned to our bedroom and tried to go to sleep.
The next morning we called the police just to get on record that we had a crazy neighbor (it came as no surprise to the cops), lest we find our tires slashed or a horse head in our bed. However, later that day as I returned home from work I found a note stuck to our door. I fully expected it to be a ransom note for our cats or the plants on our porch (she was that unstable), for which I was not willing to pay a red cent. Instead, it was an apology note stating a list of reasons why we should forgive her behavior, although not once did she mention withdrawal or acid trip (two of my prime suspects in the case of the crazy, paranoid, crack whore the first). She basically listed everything that went wrong in her life and said that those things were to blame. I wanted to assure her that I know we all have struggles the rest of us just choose to deal with them in a more dignified less psychotic manner. My wife was largely unimpressed with this apology and figured that if she can wake us up and cuss us out in person than she should have the decency to apologize in person. I tried to explain the disconnect between decency and crazy but she was still in momma bear mode and would not be dissuaded. From then on, every time I saw the woman, I was as pleasant to her as possible. I am not sure if crazy people can be killed with kindness but I felt it didn’t hurt to try.

That is why we are pulling up stakes and moving out. Between the photographic crack den next door and the Sopranos up stairs, we have had our fill of condo life. We are looking for a nice little house with a back yard and no adjacent buildings. There’s a nice one we’re looking at on Elm Street. After the neighbors we’ve put up with we feel that even Freddy would be an upgrade.