new_neighbours raze on both sides. one is a man with bats in the attic. he came over to introduce himself when he was moving in. seemed nice. the other is a woman who appears to be a single mother, who has yet to say hello but has no trouble letting her stooped father battle his open wound of a back injury while taking care of some work she needs done, who sends him over here to ask to borrow tools and lets her dog out to bark its head off at six in the morning. someday i will dig myself a giant hole in the ground, crawl in, and live there, where there are no neighbours but the worms and dirt-dwelling things. 130909 ... past i've become this. notably so in the neighbourhood apparently, as my roommates are both women. 130909 ... unhinged who stomp crash and slam things from 10pm to midnight every night me and my roommate have decided we will practice our violins as much as we can DURING THE DAY in retaliation look at pimp daddy past and his female roommates plural, or so all the neighbors probably whisper behind closed doors. (i love the way you lovable canadians add u's the the spelling of things) 130909 ... raze the man who had bats in the attic is gone. he was a history professor. stephanie lives in his house now. she seems nice from a distance. for months she's been doing work on a house that doesn't need any work, doing and undoing what's already been done, killing beautiful trees because it gives her something to do, making changes to a backyard that was already manicured to the point of absurdity. she has two little yappy dogs. she can only let them out for two minutes at a time, because all they do is bark. at everything. nonstop. the woman i thought was a single mother is gone too. she wasn't a mother. she was a drummer. she would open all her windows, move her drums into the kitchen, and play late at night so the whole block could hear her. she wasn't as good as she thought she was. when she was asked to stop leaving her dog outside for hours at a time after midnight, she said, "you don't understand. he won't come when i tell him to. what am i supposed to do, put him down?" dave and dwen moved in after she moved out to the county. she spent almost a hundred thousand dollars fixing up the house. dave spent the next few years destroying all that work and making his own improvements, which included: - movement-sensitive spotlights he mounted on the side of the house, i guess so anyone who tried to break in would be able to see what they were doing (those lights were so bright, they lit up the inside of our house at night; i had to tape towels to one of the windows upstairs so i could sleep) - taking two weeks to sand and stain his porch, only to learn he'd done it wrong, leaving it with the appearance of being permanently smudged (he sprayed it with a bunch of different chemicals thinking that would help, but it just made it worse) - ripping up his driveway so he could put in a different kind of gravel, and then ripping that up so he could replace the gravel with patio stones, and then jumping on the patio stones when they didn't sit the way he wanted them to, hoping he could hammer them into place with the weight of his body (he couldn't) - planting trees and flowers only to rip them up so he could plant different things in their place (and then doing it again, and again, and again) in the four years he lived next door, he never stopped working on the house. he never stopped making noise. he and his wife are gone. in their place are a different man and his wife. i don't know what she does. she smiled and waved at me once. he's a spoken word artist i've never heard speak. these people are little more than ideas to me. i'm content to let them stay that way. let them be benevolent-looking shapes i never get to see up close, and let them believe i'm a crotchety shut-in if it means i get to have relative peace in my home. 210927 what's it to you? who go blather from