2 Apr 2006

I now officially boast the dubious honour of having the Neighbours From Hell.

Let me clarify that. The middle-aged gentleman and his decades-younger second wife, they’re a pretty respectable bunch, they really ain’t so bad. Our neighbour’s son on the other hand… I now officially amend my dubious honour to having the Neighbour’s Son-From-His-First-Marriage From Hell and, by extension, the Neighbour’s Son-From-His-First-Marriage’s Friends From Hell.

Okay. So maybe he’s that particular breed of disillusioned, twenty-something middle-class white boy who feels that he somehow deserves to rise above the drudgery of suburban life, and thus proceeds to start a band with other like-minded privileged souls to cope with this sudden bout of existential crisis. And, in the face of all the lovely instruments out there that actually produce music as opposed to sound, he chooses to take up the drums. Which he plays (using ‘plays’ in the loosest possible sense of the word) extremely inexpertly and uncreatively (his entire repertoire appears to consist of a drum roll across every single surface of his drum kit followed by an insistent boom-cha boom-boom-cha that peters out after about fifteen seconds because he’s lost the beat) in his garage with the door open for the sole purpose of, in my growing suspicion, pissing me off as much as humanly possible. And he has the absolute greatest timing for someone with no sense of rhythm – not when he’s actually playing the drums naturally, but he always manages to start practising just as I am about to begin my maths homework.

But okay. I can deal with that. I can deal with his toxic green hair fashioned in some kind of not-altogether-sane homage to the glories of the punk era. I can deal with his homeless person-chic clothing, his moth-eaten fuchsia socks and the track pants that appear to have never been washed since their purchase the week that Kurt Cobain picked up his first guitar. I’ve even learnt to tolerate his perpetual grumpy face and refusal to acknowledge a friendly neighbour lest – god forbid! – somebody he knows sees him smile in public. But as I’ve said, that’s cool. I can roll with it. But guess what came flying over the backyard fence one balmy evening last week?

A hacksaw.

That’s right. Your eyes, they do not deceive – a HACKSAW. Mother Dearest and I stared incredulously, at a loss for several minutes. The hacksaw lay, looking deceivingly innocuous, smack-bang in the middle of the garden path. Not too long after that a ladder slid up from the other side of the fence, followed closely by a stoned guy with greasy hair whom I had never seen before in my life. He toppled over the fence, retrieved the hacksaw, waved dazedly in our general direction, attempted to leave through the garage, couldn’t find the light switch, gave up and stumbled back into the neighbours’ place the way he’d come. How…? What…? HUH?

The retrieval of the hacksaw was followed almost immediately by a phone call from the older gentleman neighbour, profuse with apology in a nervous, Please Don’t Litigate kind of way. Don’t mind them, they’re just mucking around, I promise it’ll never happen again… WHAT THE HELL??? What kind of twisted psycho ‘mucks around’ with hacksaws??? YOU ARE TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD! If you’re old enough that the hacksaw doesn’t need to be double-bolted in a metal box on a shelf above your reach, shouldn’t it follow logically that you’re old enough to know not to play catch with it?

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that holey fuchsia socks make you retarded.


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