Everybody meet Mr. Me Too
I have had a run in with the retarded neighbor. For months I could hear an incomprehensible yelling while washing my face, and I had imagined that the neighbors were harboring some Goonies, Sloth-style monster in there, all barred and caged in their living room. One day, I had imagined, I would come home from work and a mad person would dash by me, followed by a throng of torch-wielding men (an illusion which may just be facilitated by the elephantine man I see stumbling up Washington by the university on my way home from work everyday, an experience which no passerby fully covets. His face appears caved and deformed as he shambles up the road like a drunk person. I have conferred with several other people, and it seems to be the general consensus that it is the most cage-rattling, horror inducing experience one can have, driving down the road in the midday, second only to roadside explosions and ten car pile-ups). My neighbor shows by far more innocuously, making his way up the pathway as I’m coming home one evening. I give him a general nod, never having seen him before. But palpable alarm bells of warning emerge when he sees me going down the alleyway which separates our houses, to retrieve the garbage. It is this solitary act which separates me from a random visitor he has never seen before to the more sketchy-seeming burglar that I appear to be—imagery provided by the emboldened notions of Good and Evil engrained somewhere along the way. “HEY!!” he says in audible arena rock concert volume, “WHO ARE YOU?? WHERE ARE YOU GOING??” I wonder momentarily what will happen if I’m unable to sufficiently explain, but the situation is quickly diffused when I tell him that I live here now, and then receive the spontaneous weather report at top volume. “AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR IT WAS SNOWING!!!” he says. “AND ON EASTER ONE TIME, TOO!!” Hmm, yes, I tell him: maybe it did snow on Easter one year. He’s into the weather. And so we have one thing in common, at least.

It’s all slate grey and snowing today, the way a bad day should be.