If it wasn’t for the fact that I have more rolls than COSTCO has in it’s bakery I would currently be running up and down our street naked wearing nothing but a smile and Elvis style sunglasses flailing my arms wildly above my head yelling, “Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!” Why you ask? Well, no reason really. I just have the urge every now and then to spice up the night in our neighbourhood. It’s not like we don’t have enough to discuss around here, I just think it might be fun to have something else to discuss with a friend/neighbour while hiding behind a tree on another neighbours lawn, whispering about and observing some poor unfortunate soul down the block while sipping away at our morning coffee. Trust me, that really did happen. The cops were involved, like they usually are on our block, and we had a right as citizens in this community to know what was going on. So as not to disturb the busy police officers or distract the individuals involved, we’re a thoughtful group, we remained out of sight while collecting factual data on the situation so that we could relay this all important accurate information to our other neighbours in our effort to help curb nasty gossip. That is, until the neighbour whose tree we were, um, admiring, yah, that’s it, came home and didn’t appear to approve of us making this our media zone, so we had to bolt! Do you know to spot a truly skilled housewife? A woman running, weaving, tucking and rolling through adjacent yards in her slippers, sharing a recipe with her fellow investigator while holding a half full mug of coffee and not spilling a single drop. That’s what I call talent baby.
Our neighbourhood, where shall I start? Across the street and down a few houses new people moved into a duplex awhile back. We started to notice that people were coming and going, frequently, parking an odd distance away, staying to visit for only a few minutes. Sometimes their really good friends would visit a couple of times in one day, mostly on weekends, in the evening. We later surmised they had some kind of a restaurant where you had to practically inhale as much of your meal as possible before getting shooed out with leftovers because people would go in empty handed but would come out with a little package in their hands. They weren’t very creative restaurant owners though because I never saw someone with a nice swan shaped tinfoil creation in their possession, just small little ones they could easily palm. Why bother taking that much food home? We happened to notice that a vehicle from a local business was stopping by very regularly. I was starting to worry that this young man may have developed an eating disorder and thought his boss may be concerned for his employee and how the community would view him if it was known he let his employees drive around in company vehicles over eating. Now, I know it was the same young man because with my handy dandy binoculars I could verify his identity time and time again and happened to take note of his license plate number. I did what any other concerned citizen would do. I called the company owner and expressed my concern for this young man’s well being and the reputation of the business. I’m assuming the boss was just as concerned as I was and must have put this young man in a group home for people needing help with food issues because he never returned to the restaurant. FYI, the restaurant owners moved a couple of months ago and the new owners don’t appear to have taken over the business.
Who next ………. Rumour has it, I mean, the facts tell us that a guy on our block (I won’t say where exactly he lives so as to protect the innocent) is now a bachelor in a fair sized house because his wife got bored one day and started making friends on the internet. One day he came home from work to find her gone. Poor bugger had no idea this was coming. Off to Australia she went to shack up with some dude! I’m thinking that in order to just up and leave a good man to go across the world for someone she’s never actually “met” he must have lured her by promising her he had the biggest “croc down under” or something like that. On the upside for this fellow, a lady that lives a block and a half away was able to help him with his grief as she too had gone through the same heartbreak. Aaaaaawwwwwww ………….. It’s so nice when neighbours can offer support to each other. After telling each other their stories it turns out they could really help each other and share the leg work in tracking down their missing spouses for their divorces as both of them had fled to Australia. What a coincidence! What the rest of us find to be an interesting coffee break conversation is that they both seem to have traveled down under in the hopes of being the croc handler of the very same reptile! This Australian appears to think he needs a lot of handling, or, there really is a croc involved. A big old crock of shit! Now, how did that wife not know that her husband preferred handling crocks over petting Koalas?
Another poor soul on the block has had issues with his wife but in a different way. He could only be so lucky as to have his wife leave in the middle of the night in search of so called greener pastures. Those of us who are “in the know” are on good authority when we discuss the fact that she gambled away their house and racked up a neighbour’s phone bill (on the sly) calling a Psychic Hotline trying to find out if she would hit it big any time soon. Tsk tsk tsk. Such a shame. Somehow the husband has managed to keep the house but wants to sell it to clear up some bills. He has posted a ‘For Sale’ sign only to have her take it down when he’s at work. He puts it back up and she takes it back down. We like to have fun social events on the block and we get a real blast out of betting on whether or not the sign will be up or down on the last day of the month. To mix up the odds a bit we also bet on whether or not the sign will be changed during the course of the day and if it does switch, at what time. That takes a whole big graph to keep the bets straight, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Sometimes she’ll forget to snatch it back off the lawn when she’s been down the block having her “early morning coffee” with a male friend, so the early risers have a good idea whether or not they’ll win the pool. We can’t understand why this man friend would want to grind her beans and perk her because she’s not exactly in the running for ‘Babe of the Block 2009’ if you know what I mean. She’s definitely not Starbuck’s quality, she’s more like the cheap no-name brand, shit coffee you grab from the dollar store that leaves a nasty after taste in your mouth. Then I saw the man friend one day and everything was clear to me. Let’s just say that he ain’t exactly the fancy shmancy Espresso machine from Starbucks, he’s more like the vending machine that spits out raw sewage for coffee in a cheap two bit motel that rents rooms by the hour. Speaking of which, it would be nice if the two of them would use a cheap motel for their early morning “coffee socials” so we wouldn’t have to see her car parked in front of his place early in the morning. When I drive past people’s houses I like to imagine what their stuff looks like, what they look like, what they’re doing, and so on. When I drive past the male friend’s house and see her car there my imagination betrays me every time and I picture the two of them thrashing around wildly like a couple of loose beans in a coffee grinder with dull blades. Trust me, it’s not a pretty image. The milk from my coffee curdles in my stomach every time. Not nice people, not nice. When us neighbours get together and discuss politics and world issues we very rarely get side tracked, but when we have on occasion we’ve wondered why this nice, hard working man (the husband, not the male friend) doesn’t kick her nasty ass to the curb? Is it black mail? Is he still madly in love with her? Does he not know about the coffee breaks down the block?
Sheesh, I haven’t even touched on the house across the street that has had constant action with the owners, then their renters, then again when the owners moved back in and their one remaining renter started boffing their teenage daughter. Did he not see that eviction coming??? And of course, there’s the “freak” who lives across the street and down a couple houses who has the entire neighbourhood talking constantly about what we can only assume are actions brought on by wicked acid flash backs from the 70’s and his mother drinking profusely while pregnant with him. That little group of people have kept the police more than busy in the nine years since we’ve lived on this block. The latest coffee talk is that they have a special tactical team specially assigned to our block. That wouldn’t surprise me one bit. And no, contrary to popular belief they do not have my picture posted in their squad cars for fast identification.
Recently:
- Under The Influence Of Underwear
- Passion For Pens
- The Plots Thicken
- Condoning Cloning
- Nacho Neurosis
- BEAVERS
- I Don’t Live On Sesame Street People!!
- Being Thrifty Is Bad For My Health!!
- Neurotic Beer
- We’re Not AB-Normal!!
