This week, with the weather being so delightfully cooperative, I’ve been able to use the outside time I’d normally be setting aside for urban Yeti stakeouts and running screaming from large aggresive bees to watch several interesting hipster couples that help populate my neighborhood.
If you know me – and by now I’ll assume you do- you understand my long standing fascination with the cast of characters that surround my house. Garage Roof Grill Guy, Naked Shower Man, Early Morning Asthetic Bin Arranger: they all make my life a rich a colorful tapestry. Lately though, I’ve noticed an influx of rather trendy looking young couples that defy description. Well, at least they defied description until I had a particularly eventful thinking session during the hair conditioning and leg shaving portion of my last long steaming shower. Now they have been reduced to simple and insulting stereotypes. Welcome to the neighborhood guys!
The first couple on my list flew across my radar late last summer. This happened for two reasons. One was the gutwrenching overwrought display the young hipster girl across the street put on when her live in boyfriend went up the street to get groceries and buy her flowers. I know this because I was sitting on my porch eavesdropping while he calmly explained he’d only be gone for 45 minutes or so and that she should probably find something productive to do. As soon as he’d managed to trot out of her line of vision the panic set in. At the ten minute mark she was darting in and out of her house like a deranged hummingbird, peering up the street . Twenty minutes passed and she was pacing up and down the sidewalk sighing loudly and checking her watch with such exaggerated animation that I thought she was being filmed for some sort of A & E special on anxious maniacs. Forty minutes down and she was losing her shit in the worst kind of way. Having gone to that special place where people become completely impervious to what others are thinking about them, she ran wildly from the house to the corner with her cell phone leaving message after frantic message for this guy, who incidentally STILL was not late. Normally, I’d have packed it in at that point and lost interest in this little domestic drama but then she did the second and most spectacular thing that put her in my sites for good. She spotted her returning love as he turned the corner and then clearly taking a page from the obsession and dependency handbook and unable to prevent herself from having a spectacular reaction,she launched into a full on Fatal Attraction screamfest. Berating her stunned flower baring boyfriend for “scaring her to death” claiming that he could have been “dead or missing” and then alternating in a bizarre cycle between hitting him with the bouquet of daisies and hugging him in exhausted relief.
Now he goes NOWHERE without her. If he’s skipping up the street, she’s right on his arm. At first I dubbed her “the barnacle” for the stubborn way she hung on the hull of his sinking ship but upon further examination of his pained and drawn face I have renamed her “the noose”.
Lucky couple number two, while far less explosive, has a sad, mean component to their relationship that’s sure to end in bloodshed. They use thinly veiled passive aggressive barbs that seem harmless on the surface but once delivered you can see the bubbling undercurrent of seething hate magma that threatens to crack the upper crust and spew all over the place. It’s usually something mundane and everyday about the division of labor while caring for the kids and a little remark will slip out about how the other one has “no idea” or remains clueless about some aspect of rearing this not yet speaking child who isn’t even mobile. I had a moment of brilliance where I contemplated letting the front door to my house swing open so they could see what actually awaited them no matter how many child rearing books they followed to the letter but then clarity returned and I let them go back to their eye rolling and snarfing at each other in abject irony. I have dubbed them “the wretched twosome”.
Here’s to another year of using my Nancy Drew skills to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong and solving numerous local mysteries!
