Describe a situation that forced you to confront a neighbor
Oh this is a good one Mama Kat!
I can’t decide which one is best, they all terrorised me equally so prepare to meet my multiple bad neighbours;
1. When Bush and I lived in Tortilla Flats in Encinitas we had a small 1 bedroom apartment. Yes, you did the math right, 2 girls, one bedroom. We didn’t have a bed so get your mind out of the gutter, we both had our own little pile of cushions and blankets that we slept on and we took turns sleeping on the mini-futon. We lived next door to a Mexican family with approximately 11 sons, all between the ages of 18-24. They were pretty fascinated by their new neighbours and would spend most of their time smoking cigarettes and staring in our windows. Blatantly staring. We didn’t have curtains so that was quickly rectified by some sarongs that we kept up for the entirety of our tenancy. It got so bad we were forced to learn some quick spanglish and found ourselves constantly yelling “NO MIRA ME! NO MIRA ME!”. Apparently the general context of what we were saying sunk in I guess, because our bikinis drying on the clothes line quickly ceased being the local water cooler.
2. The first apartment Dave and I rented by ourselves was in a sweet 5 apartment complex so close to the beach in San Diego you could hear the waves at night. We were super happy there, or at least Dave and Ethan were. I was to discover that apartment living is really not for me. Poor Dave, I was constantly dispatching him to ask John & Rion the single surfers upstairs to turn their TV down, the lesbians living above me would stomp around at all hours and their loud toilet flushing would just about put me over the edge. The thing that drove me the most crazy was their roommates habit of clipping his nails on the shared outdoor steps. He left the clippings on the steps people! It wasn’t just the nastiness of leaving his nails all lying around but for me it was the whole ritual that grossed me out – the very sound of the clippers would make me run for my ipod to drown out the noise. It was akin to water boarding for me, in fact I think I would actually give that a whirl rather than sit through the sound of Miguel ever trimming his nails again.
3. Same complex. New Years Eve. Neighbour on top floor is a semi-retired early fifties divorcee. He loses the plot on New Years somehow gets a hold of a massive amount of cocaine, snorts himself silly then goes on a 48 hour prostitute bender. Once the working girls stopped coming over he made do with porn. Problem was he turned it up so loud that the entire alley 3 floors down was awash with the various soundtracks on New Years Day. Yeah, I did some serious yelling that day.
4. Home in NZ this time. Our first sweet little flat here was next door to a small, old and quite lovely graveyard – nothing spooky about it at all. It has a bench at the top that must be one of the best places to sit and relax on a sunny day – problem was, every sunny day the drunk frenchman would park himself up there with his 4 pack of large bourbon and colas and get hammered. First three were pretty quiet, but he would then totter back to the local liquor store and grab his second 4 pack and then he was ON. Louder and louder, more cuss words by the minute. This guy would get so lost in his own conversation with himself he wouldn’t even see you coming. I lost count of the number of times I called the cops and would peek through my fence as they came and took him away. Mean I know, but I just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t keep his boozing at home like us normal people do.
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