2001-03-22 - 11:59 p.m.

Horny People

Okay, I've had it. Over this next week I'm going to get caught up here, OR BUST!

No, this entry isn't about what you think it's about.

I have talked about the house next door to me, now today I'm going to talk about the houses across the street from the Hamster Palace.

As I might have mentioned before, my house is on a corner lot, on a fairly busy street on the north side of Frown Town. Across the main street is a vacuum cleaner store, and across the side street that runs perpendicular to the main street are two houses. Both of them have their stories. The current chapter in both these houses lives is an annoying one for me.

On the corner opposite mine is a big duplex - it's a house with two flats - one upstairs and one downstairs. There are dozens of houses like this up and down the street. When I first opened my store 19 years ago there was a bar on the ground floor of that house. It wasn't a nice bar either - drunk people were constantly wandering over wanting to use the phone or wanting me to break large bills for them. No thanks.

The bar eventually closed and the ground floor was turned into an apartment. That must be weird - living in a former bar. I can't remember most of the tenants there, but I do remember the last ones - the TV-loving hillbillies.

There was this family that lived there that looked rather inbred, and not very bright. They seemed to have an obsession with collecting the big console TVs that people put on the curb for the garbage men to take away. I'm sure they thought: "Hellfire! This stuff is too nice to throw out! These city folks are crazy!" Console TVs are not just TVs, they're furniture!

However, once they started collecting them, they discovered the reason that people threw them out: they didn't work! Most of them had blown picture tubes, or other expensive problems and nobody wanted to pay them any kind of decent money for them, even for parts. But still they kept collecting them and their basement filled up with broken TVs and their wooden shells. As they were getting ready to move out they finally faced facts: they really were garbage. Every week they put out three or four of them for the garbage men to take away. Sometimes the garbage men took them, other times they didn't.

I also an recollect an incident where one of the older members of the family got led away in handcuffs by the police - he apparently had a big pile of guns in his car trunk.

So I wasn't too unhappy when these people moved out.

The house stayed empty for a while after that. It plainly wasn't in good repair. I heard a rumor that the house has some serious structural problems - even with a casual glance you could tell that something was wrong with the roof of the house.

The worst thing about it was that it's aluminum siding was (and is) peeling badly. Little flakes of white plastic paint litter the neighborhood. It looks awful, and what’s the worst thing is that it's the main thing you see when you look out any of the windows on the southern side of my house, which is most of them. Every morning I eat my breakfast at the kitchen table while looking out the window, thinking: "That is one damn ugly house."

The house stayed empty for a while, and occasionally I had to chase away kids who were throwing rocks at the house, trying to break a window. "What does it matter? Nobody lives there anyway!" one of the little urchins complained as I shooed him away.

Looking in the front window of the house I saw a notice taped to it that indicated the house belonged to some real estate holding company. Wonderful. Something even worse than an absentee landlord.

However a few months ago work crews started appearing at the house. They drove blue trucks with a corporate logo on the side. After a few weeks people started moving in - it was the first time the house had been fully occupied in recent memory.

I have to break in here - see how I go off on tangents? I gave you the history of the house next door, because I wanted to make a point about the people living there now. Is this germane to the subject, or am I just padding the story? Is this my "style" or does it just make my entries hard to read?

Anyway, here's another tangent.

The house immediately next door to the one I've just been talking about has a different story. It's a small one-bedroom house, what one would call a starter home. It's had several people in it over my twenty years here. I remember having some problems with some kids who lived there, maybe eight or ten years ago.

More recently it was the home of an elderly couple. When I say elderly I mean really, really old, like in their nineties. I'd see them staggering out and climbing into their car - they looked about as old as the moon.

However, shortly after I moved in here, there were repeated ambulance visits to the little house. One time I saw the old man taken out on a gurney, and a few weeks later, the old lady left the same way. The house was vacant for a while, and then a "For Sale" sign appeared on the front lawn.

In this neighborhood, sometime houses stay on sale for a while, and this house was empty for over a year. The realtor or someone put this lame light timer on on of the lamps so the lights would go on every day and the house wouldn't look empty. Of course in the winter time when the snow is piled up on the front steps for weeks on end with no footprints, the lights going on and off really wouldn't convince anyone that there is really someone in the house. If I had a more practical sense of humor I would have broken into the house and stolen the timer, and left everything else.

New people moved into this little house just before the tenants filled up the big eyesore house.

Okay, enough backstory. My main reason for mentioning the people across the street is that they are loud. Loud in a very specific way. People are all the time stopping by in there cars and blowing their damn horns. I've always considered that very rude, and mainly a sign that you are too lazy to get out of your car and ring the doorbell.

There are two cars that are the primary horn honkers, and both of them are what I would call "Sorry About Your Small Penis" cars. They are the sort of cars that guys buy to impress chicks, but if you are looking for the kind of woman who'll be impressed by a car like that, good luck.

There is a dark green convertible that stops in front of the little house frequently, horn a-honking. Frequently the guy driving the car goes inside the house, but leaves his car on the street, motor running. Not only is the engine very loud, but he usually has his sound system turned up so loud that I can practically see the car vibrate. I can hear parts of the car shaking as the bass thunders. Sometimes the car will be sitting on the street for an hour or more, emitting white noise.

And usually when he leaves, he peels out with tires squealing.

What a man! I get all moist just thinking about him!

The car that parks next to the eyesore house isn't so heavy on the bass, but he is all about honking the horn. One time he parked in front of the house for half an jour, blowing his damn horn, waiting for his mate to come out. Dude, just get out of your car!

This car is maroon, and it has a spoiler on the back. A spoiler is a little metal shelf that is supposed to help the car with wind resistance, like on the NASCAR cars. Although why you'd put it on a car that goes less than 150 miles an hour is a puzzle.

Actually once upon a time I wanted a car like that myself. Then I turned twelve and outgrew my love of Hot Wheels.

Another feature of this car is that on its back window it has a huge mirrored decal of the Nike logo. I'm trying to imagine someone who is so much of a tool for corporate America that he'll willingly turn his vehicle into a free advertisement for a shoe company.

I know, I know, I'm being a crab. It's better for the houses across the street to be filled with noisy, obnoxious, teeming humanity than to be derelict and empty. I have no problems with these people - until they startle me out of a sound sleep on a Sunday morning with their infernal honking.