Our neighbors have been irritating me. Our bedroom is adjacent to their back yard. In their back yard, not far from our bedroom window, is their fire pit. Now, the parents aren’t the problem. It’s their adult children who annoy me. One of them is notorious in our town as a drug dealer, drug user, burglar and town menace. The other(s) (I’m never really sure how many adult children live there because there are always people coming and going) are not criminal, just trashy. The last couple weeks, the weather has been very nice here. Every night from Thursday through Sunday, they have been having fires in the back yard with all their trashy friends, drinking, playing loud music, and just being loud and raunchy. Did I mention that it’s right outside of my bedroom? And that it’s been nice, so I like to have the windows open so that it doesn’t get to hot in our room? I don’t think that they have jobs. Their parents don’t seem to mind their noise. I think it’s because their bedroom is on the opposite side of the house so that they can’t hear them as easily as I can.
Saturday night, or rather Sunday at 3 am, I considered bringing a 6 pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade over there and saying, “You can have this if you just quiet down so I can get some sleep.” But, truth be told, I’m kind of afraid of them and I’m not much of a confrontationalist. It seemed to non-emergent to call the cops and besides, they would know it was me and I’m afraid of retribution. So far, we are the only ones with in a 4-5 house radius who hasn’t been burglarized by them and I think it’s because a) our proximity to them and b) because Jason is a cop and they know that. However, I don’t want to tempt them.
Yesterday, Jason was getting the garbage and recycling ready for the garbage pick up. I heard him dump the recycling from our can near the house into the recycling can by the garage and I yelled out at him from our bedroom window, “Hey! Quiet down out there!” just to be funny. Joke was on me. The neighbor yelled back, “Hey, how are you doing?” I choked out, “Oh, I thought that was my husband making all that noise.” Then I collapsed on my bedroom floor, laughing my ass off. Jason never even heard me yell out. When I told him and the kids, they all laughed at me. If you knew the tension that was between us and those adult children that live next door, you would have been right on the floor laughing with me.
Hopefully I won’t find a burning bag of shit on my doorstep in the near future.
Incidents like that are why I usually keep my mouth shut. It happens to me too often!
.-= Finn´s last blog ..Diptych Fifteen: Spring =-.
I wish you didn’t feel scared. I would encourage you to go over and build a bond with them so they would listen to your request to quiet down, but you said the drug word so I don’t recommend it.
Finn–Yeah, I need to practice that a little more.
Poppy–We have a detective’s phone number that he gave us in case we see anything suspicious going on. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), we haven’t.