Howdy Neighbor

Neighbors suck. Well, they don't ALL suck. But for the most part I think I can safely say that my neighbors, in general, suck.

I live in a house which includes seven rental units. In this day and age, if you even see your neighbors a couple times a month it's a rarity. Some neighbors I see far less than that. Included in San Francisco neighbor-dom are the people who live on either side of the house that's standing next to yours. So I have a neighbor on one side who's an opera singer, and one on the other side who's redoing his backyard. There was a time about two years ago when I would hear the opera singer belt one out, and I thought it was beautiful. Now I think she's showing off. And as for the guy with the backyard, he needs to get it done before the wind blows all his dirt away. The opera singer's friends routinely park in our driveway, despite the NO PARKING IN DRIVEWAY sign. And I routinely tell them, "Hey, it would be super cool if you guys could just put a note on your car saying which apartment to ring. K?" Why I oughta...

Those are small gripes compared to the ones I have toward the people living in the same building as me. They collectively do the absolute minimum it takes to keep the building in order. One of my neighbors (who I don't mind so much, but Lily does because he's nosy) called last week to gripe about the lack of participation by the rest of our building in taking the trash bins out for Thursday morning and taking them in that night. Nobody in my building takes out the trash bins nearly as often as I do. So obviously I was ready to hear him out.

He wanted us to leave the trash bins out after the collection and have somebody take them in, other than the three of us who regularly do it. Not a big deal, seeing as how I take them out when they're full (i.e. Heavy as hell), so taking them in when they're empty shouldn't be too difficult. But no, the bins sat there on the curb for days. Days after all our neighbors on the block had taken theirs in. After a while I began to feel childish about it, and that we were becoming the neighbors who suck by leaving them out there. I was just about to break and roll them inside when my neighbor who started this test told me that he saw Bob taking them in at about midnight the night before. Bob's one of the newest residents in the building. Bob had a little accident
when he moved in. When he was moving in at 3am a bunch of guys beat him up, and now his shoulder is messed up. He's probably pissed off at the people who left the bins out there for a man with a bum shoulder to take in. I better wrap this up. I forgot to take the trash bins out. Neighbors suck.