I was carrying out my two bags of rancid garbage this afternoon when I noticed my peculiar neighbor, who arranges my supercans in size order, sitting dejectedly underneath his little porch.
Normally I like to hiss quietly at him from behind my clenched teeth but his demeanor was enough to stop me in my tracks and start me wondering what was amiss.
I looked at my bins and noticed they were crooked and falling over at odd angles, not at all like I had come to expect them to be after he made a point to sneak out every morning and obsessively roll them around until they were aligned and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
He must be dying, I thought to myself.
After waving and depositing my bags I ran off worried that something was really wrong.
While I sat around for long periods of time that would have been better spent cleaning or doing productive things for society, I noticed a wave of change happening across the alley that was like a sad tsunami. With all the destruction and death they leave in their wake I suppose there really isn’t any other kind of emotion you can attribute to a killer wall of water that annihilates everything in its path but I felt the need to qualify.
Two houses down from bin arranger we had a new neighbor.
And in the few short days he’d been there he had made a monstrous impact.
I now call him garage roof guy.
He has all but set up shop on the roof of his ramshackle backyard parking area making it a veritable Shangri-la of alfresco dining and all night wine sipping.
He begins grilling early in the evening, grumbling at anyone who dares to show up near his imaginary barrier whether it be the smoke from your steak on the barbecue flying into his sensitive eyes or your music that’s too loud for him to properly carry on his asshole conversation with his wispy wife, he’s going to give you the stink eye and make you wish you’d never stepped over the threshold dividing his world and yours.
Your world, in case you were unaware, is the we just got into this neighborhood by the skin of our teeth before the prices shot to the moon one. His world is the I didn’t pay a million fucking dollars to watch these Deliverance people gnaw on chicken bones and speak in a way that offends my sensitive ears one.
It struck me as the perfect foil. The two oddest people on the face of the earth coming together in a warm neighborly union that could straighten the riff raff right out of the lesser inhabitants waddling around here, but it had the opposite effect.
Bin man was sad, drooping, feeling he’d lost his place.
He was alone while garage top dweller hung over the rickety metal side of his world and glared down at the window where my husband sat working in his office apparently making too much racket for the rooftop meal to go off as planned.
Later on I intend to go out and arrange my garbage cans in an effort to lure bin man out of his funk.
