Love Thy Neighbor

I'm going to try to keep this blog fair and mood-balanced if I can help it, but it's time for a balls-out rant. Here's my issue...

I hate my neighbors. And I am in no way being euphemistic. I unequivocally abhor, detest, loath and flat-out want to murder my neighbors. As you can undoubtedly deduce, I didn't quite ace the "Ten Commandments" quiz in my childhood Sunday school. It's not that I'm any more cantankerous, evil-tempered, or crotchety than the next person living within the poverty cutoff. These people are just...well, how do I put this nicely? OK, they're obnoxiously loud, utterly oblivious asshats that should be sterilized immediately.

It's technically too late for spaying and neutering already, as both sets of offending dwellers have already spawned. Their offspring have merged to form a cohesive racket-making unit whose skateboards, portable basketball hoop and sheer vocal firepower make up a small fraction of a quiet-killing arsenal used to drive me batshit. And of course, they come from the absolute finest in noisemaker stock.

One child, an almost certain future drill instructor who wears his hair in cornrows, lives directly across the street with his mother, father, and the rest of their aurally offensive brood. His accomplice, a tow-headed, blue-eyed shrieker from two doors down, never knew a sunrise that wasn't perfect for ceaselessly clanging a basketball off that rickety hoop. This winner lives with his parents and apparently popular teenage brother, who handles the night shift portion of their "so help me god" sworn duty to deprive me of sleep.

If it weren't enough that these spawn of the damned perform untimely yodels, launch sunrise-beating three-point shots, and have marijuana-fueled roundtable discussions by the pale moonlight-their parents all but encourage it.

Little Sergeant Shouter no doubt became library-ready on account of his mother's example, which by the way, leads me to believe she's legally deaf. As far as I'm concerned, this woman's "volume" knob has only two settings:

1. LOUD

and

2. JUST IN CASE THEY CAN'T HEAR ME IN TUNISIA

She yells when she's calling the Sarge in for the night. She screams her daughter's name out of the car window over-and-over (all the while honking the horn like a New York cabbie) when she's waiting to give her a ride. She echoes throughout the neighborhood at night when she comes home elated after doing whatever it is overweight, tonally-challenged black women do. I've dated every kind of woman under the sun except a shouter, and my mom never yells, so for lack of reference, I'll assume the night ruckus is just buffet afterglow.

Little Larry (Bird) and his pothead brother have a mother that is exactly the opposite-you never hear or see her. I swear I've seen this woman once the entire year I've lived here. And when I said "hi" she acted like she didn't hear me. No wonder this kid is out shooting hoops in the middle of the street at 4:30 a.m. - he's waiting for mom to return from the ear doctor. About 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, her older son and his esteemed associates gather in the family driveway to laugh like hyenas while pondering the mysteries of the universe. I'd give my left testicle for sniper skills and an up-to-date family tree.

Sigh...Maybe I've just forgotten what it was like to be young and carefree-without a worry in the world to temper life's excitement. Perhaps I'm just a cane-waving, rocking-chair-ridden cliché deep down in my admittedly cynical soul. But, I love an open-window breeze, and besides...if I'm the one that's so damned old, why the hell is everybody else doing all the yelling?