A new neighbor just moved in upstairs. She has a grouchy pit bull and works strange hours. When she comes home at 12:30 she walks her pit bull in front of the building and she lets it crap right in front of my bay window. Sweet. No, she doesn’t scoop it up, either. This really irritates my dog, and I think the sun comes up before he is calm enough to stop barking at every car, noise and person within a 50 mile radius. This time, though, I am trying to be nice about this.
You see, the first neighbors I ever had were a loud, obnoxious twenty-something couple with stringy hair and very bad taste in the very bad music they blasted until 1AM. The female half of the oafish duo was obviously a crackhead. It was evident because I might’ve been able to squeeze one leg into her freakishly tiny pants. My next neighbors were straight out of Mayberry, and the neighbors after that had a white fluffy dog named Angel that barked all the time. I called her the Devil Dog. Oh yes. I can’t forget the neighbors with the kids with very bad vision. They dented my car more than once when they miscalculated their ability to throw a football so it could actually be caught.
My last move left me with neighbors hosting a yappy dog and very poor parking courtesy. While lamenting my bad luck with a lifetime of bad neighbors, I realized something:
I was the crappy neighbor.
It’s true. There is no way 7 addresses yields 7 bad sets of neighbors. It is a statistical impossibility to strike out this many times. I am forced to look at the common denominator… which is me. Maybe my dog is just neurotic and some other dog’s poop on his turf is his problem, not the pit bull’s fault. And that poor parking courtesy? How many times did I help anyone out in that place? Once or twice, maybe. No one owed me a better parking spot. The crackhead might’ve been a vegetarian or had a lightning fast metabolism.
In any case, I am determined to break the cycle. I don’t want my son to pick up this nasty anti-neighbor vibe from me and to perpetuate it for another generation. The buck stops here. I will keep the curtain securely shut so my dog can’t be goaded by a little pit’s stop. And I can use the 12:30AM wake-up call to clean my place once every one is asleep. I won’t even make fun of her half-rotted tooth whenever anyone asks about the new tenant. It just wouldn’t be neighborly, would it?
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