Neighbors From Hell

In addition to stupid people, one of the things that gets my dander up (as my old Grandpa used to say) is obnoxious, inconsiderate, rude, freakish neighbors. And it's just my luck that I've got 'em, in spades.

But today there's one that I'm really aching to have it out with. Unfortunately, given that this neighbor is way under-medicated for various psychotic conditions, I'll probably never get to do it.

Unnamed neighbor first suffers from paranoia. Additionally this neighbor, or "N" as I'll call it, is also of a mind that no one except itself has any right to do anything that might ever, concievably, be an annoyance to anyone else. Like, oh, say, dogs barking (1 night of a dog barking got the cops called to complain about me and mine....but N's bark incessantly, day, night, morning - whenever N has vacated the premises! And N is well aware of this. It is a testament to N's scarey-ness that no one has dared call on N. Because we're all afraid of N's retaliations. They are ugly.

Like, parking cars on the street - NEVER in front of N's house or the police will be called (never mind that it is a public street with permitted parking).

NEVER inidcate a friendly attitude toward anyone that N does not like. This will more than likely result in the town being called with a false and scurrilous complaint about something. The irony is that whatever the supposed infraction is, is more than likeliy one committed with aplomb by N itself.

N is suspicious of everyone and notes that another neighbor (who shall be called The Wing Nut) is always spying on it's neighbors. But the reason N knows this is that N always has it's snout pressed against the window - you guessed it - spying on its neighbors!

N causes trouble for everyone in shouting distance. N is frightening in it's retaliatory capabilities. So I'm staying out of N's path. Even today when N swept and raked all the leaves and debris from its yard and swept them - across the street into mine!

Me? I'm a firm believer in karma. And given the years of bad behavior, N's due for a major dose.

One can only hope.

I Do Not Suffer Fools Gladly

OK, this is the first time, but it by Goddess won't be the last time, you see me write this: I hate stupid people. I mean the willfully ignorant. The people who are dumb and proud of it. Those folks who sneer at people carrying books or people who have a reading level higher than the average US newspaper (average newspaper grade reading level - 8th). Anyone who avoids knowledge or learning like the plague (FYI, I'm talking bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, the Black Death here) and then goes out and blithely passes on their ignorance like a mental STD, making life for the rest of us that much more annoying.

What do I mean by stupid? In short, people who have an opinion about everything, but know nothing. Sharing, ad nauseam, oodles of information that is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And then cheer and encourage as all the other stupid people pick up on it and believe it and spread it around like herpes.

Let me state for the record, for example: Just because you read something in a book or a newspaper or the National Enquirer, doesn't make it so. Period. Writers make mistakes just like, say, politicians (don't worry, they'll get their own Rant). Sometimes they even, GASP, LIE outright. You might have to read a few of them (horrors!) in order to get the full poop. You might have to reason. Deliberate. Weigh the information. Certainly it could be tough, but the grey matter between your ears (I'm being generous and assuming you have some) will atrophy if you don't give it a workout. But in point of fact books can be a really big help in learning stuff. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, stuff like that. (For example, you might learn the difference between lying prostrate on the floor and your prostate lying on the floor. Ouch!)

But if you have no desire to learn, no willingness to clutter up your consciousness with intelligence and knowledge (versus the names of every season's winner of Survivor or American Idol), please, do me a favor. Zip it. Don't share your ignorance with me, or with the dozens of cerebral sponges in my immediate vicinity. Particularly because several of them will be just like you and they'll take what you say as the gospel and then they'll repeat it to ten of their dumb ass friends and so on and so on. Before you know it we're awash in a sea of idiocy and given the cumulative national IQ probably in a rowboat with only one oar. (Average US IQ is 98, giving the country a ranking of 46th in the world. Source - IQ and the Wealth of Nations,Lynn/Vanhanen 2002)

You can help stamp out stupidity. Consider it like a charity that doesn't cost you anything. If someone asks you a question, say, does the planet Earth revolve around the sun or vice versa? You don't know, but figure, hey, I've got a 50-50 shot of being right, right? DON'T ANSWER. Just change the conversation. Say something like, "Hey how about those Yankees?" or "Did you hear what Imus said this morning?" But if, when confronted with this question, you suddenly find yourself overwhelmed with curiousity, why not stop by your local public library - I'm sure they love to see mental virgins, I mean, the intellectually pure, wander in - and look it the fuck up. Don't just cruelly vomit out your ignorance, awing those poor tabula rasa masses with your blatantly false "knowledge". (According to Ben Smith's Politico blog, 18 % of Americans do, in fact, think that the big old yellow blob revolves around us.)

I value knowledge. I like people who like to learn new things. I take nothing away from someone who tries to improve themselves. That very desire is what separates the merely untutored from the massively stupid.

So the next time you are thinking of holding forth on how the internal combustion engine works, or the chemical makeup of plutonium, or the complexity of the symbolism in Dante's Inferno, do the world a favor. Stop. Stifle that impulse. Even be courageous and admit you don't know. And then pick up a book, go to the library, watch the Discovery channel. Learn something. Learn anything. Who knows, you may find out you really like knowing stuff.

THEN speak up. You'll make the world a smarter place.

Yes, I'm A Tree hugger and Proud of It

I love trees. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but especially in suburbia (or, as I like to call my little town, "mall land") they serve several other purposes. First, the offer shade and cooling during hot summers, which cuts down on the need for AC, thus saving electricity, which saves money, which also eases the burden on that old grid thing that crashed in 2003, and it saves on pollution because I'm not shooting whatever it is that AC machines shoot into the air which destroys the ozone and lets the sun in and destroys the planet. You know, the one we ALL LIVE ON? Then, trees also buffer the noise, which, at my particular abode, consists of screaming mutant children, loud parties, domestic disputes, and the unceasing roar of Old Country Road (all the folk unlike myself who pride themselves on their ability to visit every shopping mall within a 250 mile radius of their homes drive by MY HOUSE every weekend).

I have lots of trees. They provide food and shelter for wildlife. Bees and butterflies, squirrels and birds and the odd raccoon that hangs around in the Bradford Pear outside my window, sending my kitty cat into a paroxysm of agitation. I love to sit under them and read. Or write. Or just cogitate.

Life would be perfect in my green yard, filled with gardens and shade and the life that springs from roots.

But then there are my neighbors.

Apparently they stem from a line of humans who are out to decimate, destroy, and delight in the death of every living thing, but trees are their first target.

The presence of dead leaves on their lawns necessitates actual physical labor to remove them. And since that is so onerous (heaven forbid they move their lard-asses off their sofas and away from their wide-screen TVs to put their flabby bodies into some semblance of MOTION) they have taken on Mother Nature and simply hired obscenely expensive tree services to chop those suckers down. Oaks. Maples. Sycamores. Pines. Beech. Sweetgum. You name it, it's been chopped, shredded and mulched somewhere in sight of my house.

I've retaliated by planting a new tree, or allowing a sapling that has planted itself to flourish. It's beginning to look a tad like the forest primeval around my property, but that's going to be that.

Then along come some new neighbors. They swore they liked green. The loved the healthy hedge. But of course they LIED like the rat bastards they apparently are (a dysfunctional family with homicidal children lived there before they were foreclosed on - apparently something in the house draws miserable human beings to live there). They chopped down the hedges. A couple of small maple trees. But they left the grand old sycamore, a twin to the one in my yard, whose branches overhang more of my property than their's.

BUT. They decided a lovely circular brick design thingamabob would look GREAT circling the tree. SO they hired some little immigrant laborers to dig down 10 inches. That was bad enough, they damaged and exposed the roots of the tree. But then I come home and what have they done?

CHOPPED ALL THE ROOTS LOOSE AND CUT THEM OFF!!!!! The tree is now ROOTLESS in a 360 degree circle around its base.

What does this mean for the tree?

Why, DEATH, of course.

Fuckers.

Ever have one of those days?

Yeah, me too. Like today, for instance. My rant du jour is going to come down square on the LIRR. The Long Island Rail Road. Or, as we commuters like to say, "Like It Really Runs". And today, boy, did it SO NOT RUN.

2 hours for a 40 minute trip? Yeah, why not. Not like I had anything else to do - like get to work on time to make the bosses happy. Or go to the BATHROOM. Get coffee. You know - the simple things in life that keep us all copacetic.

But what is worse? WORSE than sitting on a train for 2 hours? Being told repeatedly by the disembodied voice of the conductor - who was, incidentally, hiding like the pussy that he was in his little booth, refusing to come out and answer questions or take his punishment from a few hundred irate customers like a MAN - telling us, "blah blah police action" "blah blah 30-40 minute delays" (even when it was an hour, an hour ten, and so on and so forth). And then he kept saying, "we're waiting our turn for track space." So, what, those 22 TRAINS THAT PASSED US WHILE WE WERE WAITING HAD SPECIAL DISPENSATION???!?!?

Anyway. Sure. We got there. In the end. It could have been worse. I could have had an hour plus delays last week, too, OH, wait, I DID.

So, today I got to spend my third hour of "make up time" at my office. You know what that is. The FREE TIME I had to dedicate at my office, continuing my little rat-like scurrying around simply because the LIRR did what it does best.

NOT RUN.

So, Gee, you Union dudes - the folks who brought us a 98% "disability" rating among your retired employees - thanks.

P.S.

What could be worse, you say?

I'll tell you what could be worse - the news fast on the heels of the "investigation" that showed "human error" at fault for 2 TRAINS COLLIDING IN THE STATION (ya think? Maybe it would be a good idea to take the iPods away from those guys at the wheel) - but, come on, think hard, what might really be the icing on the proverbial shit cake?

A 25-30% FARE HIKE!

So, for the vastly overpriced fare of a mere monthly cost of $275 I can, that's right, STAND STILL ON A STINKY TRAIN WITH A COWARDLY CONDUCTOR HIDING IN HIS HOLE AND A BUNCH OF COMMUTERS BLABBING ON THEIR CELL PHONES.

Ain't life grand?