Well, it happened.
The huddled masses, yearning to be free, have prevailed upon me to continue my blog. Fifty percent of my avowed followers, plus two more people who I believe have actually read my previous posts, have checked in. And the question on all their minds is the same... in unison, they've asked the question on everyone elses' lips: "Why'd ya quit already?"
Of course, my well-reasoned response was, to quote the philosopher Jeff Spicoli, famed alumnus of Ridgemont High School class of 1980, was: "I dunno..."
So I'm having another whack at it. Today's topic: My neighbor. The dick.
The guy who bought the house across the street from me is trying to set some kind of record for the combination event of Trying to Be White Trash While Proving a Stereotype About Pollock Contractors With Drunk-ass Wives Who Can't Drive For Shit.
If he ain't leading the event, he's gotta be up in the top 5 across the US, let me tell you.
This guy is a piece of work. He bought a $450,000 house, and immediately set about remodeling it. Two years in the making, so far, with no end in sight. He's a contractor who uses white slavery -- check that -- immigrant tradesmen from eastern Europe. If they have drivers' licenses, they got them before the crackdown, because they've been off the road with the company dump truck at least four times in the last year. The road is only 33 feet wide, so I cut them some slack.
His wife, however, isn't driving a dump truck. She's driving an Audi SUV, which she got stuck in their yard -- off the driveway -- so many times they have the local wrecker service on their speed dial. Initially we thought it was because of the snow, and their serpentine driveway. But then she buried it past the axles on a clear day with no snow cover.
Following the vehicle's recovery, their drive was covered in mud for a month. Which made it easy to follow her tracks when she left their driveway -- off the road into the grass into my yard, the neighbor's yard, the guy down the street's yard, etc. She's a mobile Grim Reaper for Kentucky Bluegrass.
Another neighbor of mine -- let's call her Betsy (her real name is Pam) -- was friends with them for a while -- their kids are in the same class at school. But they quit hanging out this summer -- Betsy can't drink straight vodka at 10 a.m. more than once in a while, and she and her husband felt like lightweights hanging around the "garage."
That's right -- the garage. When the Party Lamp is lit, they hang out in the garage, on plastic lawn chairs, whooping it up from a.m. to whenever, from March to January, looking out on their spread. Enjoying the view of their unmowed lawn, their garbage cans sitting in the street for days and days after the garbage pick-up. (Their 7-year-old twin girls are "lazy," they told me, and refuse to bring the cans up on Monday after school. So they leave them up there until the girls get the idea.)
Besides, the cans are full -- apparently they haven't paid their garbage bill lately.
Anyway, the drinking explains the driving. I know from experience, having left the roadway on occasion in the past. Shit, I even ran over a Stop sign on a snowmobile trail once. (At least that's what my buds told me the next day when I was trying to figure out the bruises on my leg and the red paint on my sled, but they could have been bullshitting me.)
But that's no excuse, and that's all in the past, anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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The rambling musings of a 50ish construction superintendent. Schooled in the Midwest as a journalist, consigned to a career in construction by personal circumstances, our hero has a novel inside of him -- which is where it should stay. In its stead, he offers this blog to the thronging masses, both washed and unwashed.
