Winter. Crisp, clean air; starry nights where the icicle-hung trees sparkle like a crystalline fairy-land; air so still that you can hear a WRRRNGGGGNGGGGGNGGGGGGG… What’s that, you ask? Oh, yes – that would be my neighbors’ generator. No, the power’s not out. My neighbors have gone “off the grid.” In the middle of the city. It’s the last straw.
The inside of their house is like something you read about in the paper where a crazy recluse is found trapped under a pile of rubbish and it turns out they’ve thrown nothing away in thirty years. It’s by far the nicest home on the street, easily twelve or fourteen rooms… But one room is furnished with five unplugged refrigerators and stacks of magazines, while another has canned goods, garbage bags full of who-knows-what stacked hip high, and so forth.
Now, I grew up in a rural area and have a pretty live-and-let-live attitude about what folks do on their own property. When the neighbors decided to blacktop their whole backyard and surround it with a mongel fence assembled from three or four different types of pre-assembled fencing? Not my personal landscaping choice, but hey, it’s their yard.
Last summer, when they moved random household furnishings into the front yard (assorted plastic and upholstered chairs; a mattress that started out disreputably-stained and quickly progressed to Really Disgusting as every stray dog and cat for blocks around peed on it; and, oddly, an exercycle) I looked out the window in the evening at the family members variously seated, sprawled, or pedalling away while watching a vintage 70’s console TV in the front yard and I admired the whimsical “who cares what people think, we like watching CSI by starlight” independence of the whole thing.
When, in addition to the vicious dawg who lives in the paved backyard and numberless ill-fed, basically feral cats, they acquired — at one fell swoop — NINE more dawgs (a mother and eight puppies, all of which they are apparently keeping; the mother dog quickly went into heat and the backyard dog spent two weeks flinging himself at the fence in a frenzy of unrequited lust while his ladylove keened in the house) I tried to be charitable. It was well-intentioned of them to try to give all of these poor stray dogs a home and shelter of sorts, right?
The family’s irrepressible love of fireworks and their disdain for effete urban niceties like pooper-scooper laws? Just part of their special charm. Their insistance on their native right to burn leaves and yard waste instead of paying for collection like everyone else? Well, it’s against the law, but I actually like the smell of burning leaves. The political canvassing for peculiar causes like their rabid opposition to sales tax being used for city sewer and road improvements? Weird, but at least they care about something.
The generator, though… it’s driving me nuts. It’s not a temporary we-forgot-to-pay-the-electric-bill thing either; it’s been running 20 hours a day for weeks. The thing is so loud that I can hear it even inside my house with the windows up and the TV on. I don’t know why no one’s called the city yet, but I’ll be on the phone tomorrow.
Crazy neighbors, if you want to live in a self-sufficient family compound, please go do it in rural Idaho with the other weirdos, OK? Not in the city.
