The Neighbor from Hell, part II: The Beergoggles Connection

Well, I found out what’s wrong with the guy next door:  he’s a drunk.  When he was making the noise written up in my last blog, he was on the third day of a five-day binge.  I found this out from my landlord, who also told me about the Beergoggles connection.  It seems the guy had been sober for like seven years.  A local drunk and ne’er do well, Darryl by name, aka Beergoggles, evidently convinced the guy to take a drink, and he was off and running.

He has been too busy killing off brain cells to take care of his dog, so I called Animal Control, but the critter was nowhere around when the guy came by, and the dude was too drunk to answer his door.  I was advised to photograph the dog running loose as documentation before any further action can be taken.

The climax came last night.  Around nine, he made an appearence on his porch in his underwear, blinking stupidly, wandered back inside, and then and the theme from Star Wars started blasting out of his window.  Then stopped.  Then started again, a few minutes later.  The landlord had advised me, next time he started playing music or TV too loud, to just go in and unplug the thing, and and agreed that maybe I should beat up the guy in the process, but I was not real comfortable with that, so I called the police and requested that the troopers stop by and make a welfare check–that is, see if the dude is alive, or what–not give him a handout.  Anyway, the troopers get there, determine that he is in fact dangerously intoxicated, and called the EMTs.  Ambulance came, and carted his worthless ass off on a gurney.  Quiet reigned again.  A neighbor woman–nice enough, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer–volunteered to care for the dog.  This morning, it was still wandering around loose–the dog, not the woman.

Best of all–when the drunk gets out of hospital, he is going to jail. It seems that he had stolen some of the booze he had been drinking.

BTW–in case you are wondering about the “Beergoggles” thing–Kathy christened him thus last summer.  She was at my stand, and he came lurching over, so drunk he could barely stand upright, and started putting moves on her.  She was more amused than offended, I think, pointing out that she was old enough to be his mother, and that he was obviously looking at the world through beer goggles–hence the name.

Oh, and this morning the landlord told me that he has had enough of Beergoggles, and is going to get rid of him.

The Neighbor from Hell

Okay, I’m not totally divorced from reality.  (Legally separated, maybe;  but the divorce isn’t final.  But I digress.) I know, when you live in a place known as Felony Flats you can’t always expect to have  Ozzie and Harriet for neighbors.  My neighborhood has as bizarre a collection of misfits, drunks, dopers, whack jobs, convicted felons and unindicted co-conspirators (that’s me, folks!) as you are apt to find outside, say, a Spike Jonez movie.  But my latest neighbor just absolutely takes the cake.   I mean, talk about someone a sandwich short of a picnic; a can short of a six-pack; an entire Minor Arcana short of a Tarot deck (okay, that last one was reaching).

When he moved in, he seemed more or less normal.  Average height, white, no facial hair, short brown head hair going thin in front. Cabin number nine, his new domicile is 8×10 feet–hardly room enough to change your mind.  The mice in it are hunch-backed, the place is so small.  But since he had been living in a tent in the woods behind the local mall for three months, he was happy to have a roof, any roof, over his head.  That should have told me something–living in the woods does not socialize a person well.  Then he said he was living on SSI.  Since he looked physically healthy enough–he rides a bike everywhere–that should have told me something.  When he made a point of mentioning how quiet he was, that definitely should have told me something. But noooo.

He has this immense puppy, a chow/black lab mix.  Whenever he is gone, the dog howls and whines and cries for hours.  Not fun to listen to.  Then the guy blew a welfare check on a home theater system and a CD player.  (How he manages to fit a bed in that tiny cabin, I don’t know–maybe he sleeps upside-down from the ceiling, like a  bat.)  Anyway, he started to watch movies with the volume cranked up so loud you could hear it 100 feet away.  I’m next door.  And he likes action-adventure flicks with lots of sirens and gunshots and explosions.  It was like having World War Two re-enacted on my porch.  I asked him “Does that HAVE to be so loud?”  No response.  An hour later, I go on my porch, cup my hands and shout “Would you please turn that down, for God’s sake.”  No response.  More and more noise, off and on during the day.  At eleven o’clock that night, he gave the videos a rest.  Then the music started.  It got to sounding monotonous, and I checked my watch and timed it–he was playing the same 20 seconds of loud guitar music over and over and over again at five-second intervals.

After half an hour of this, I called the police.  The dispatcher was polite and sympathetic.  After another forty-five minutes of the SAME 20 seconds of music, I lost it.  Stormed over to his place, pounded on the door until he answered, screamed “What the hell is wrong with you?  You are playing the same damn music over and over, it’s driving me crazy and I can’t stand any more.”  By now, I was screeching, gasping for breath, losing my voice from screaming so loud.  (Two days later, I still can’t talk right, my voice is all low and husky–sounds kinda cool, actually–my normal voice in pitch and timbre is closer to Pee Wee Herman than to John Carradine anyway.)  So he starts sort of groveling, saying “please forgive me, please forgive me.”  But he doesn’t turn down the damn music, just grovels and cowers in the face of my  terrible wrath.

Fifteen minutes later, I call the police again, they say someone will be out there as soon as they finish their current call.  Finally, at a quarter of two in the morning, the troopers show up, bang and bang on his door until he finally answers.  They were there so long, I hoped the dude was being arrested, but they left without him. It got quiet, and  I finally got to sleep.

Around seven the next morning, nut job is blasting his TV again.  And I am a tad cranky due to lack of sleep.  I knocked on his door.  No response.  I got a big cook pot, banged on the side of his cabin with all my might to get his attention, yelled as loud as I could under the circumstances “Would you please turn that shit down.”  No response.  So I call the police again.  Finally, just before nine, the noise stops.  A minute later, my cell phone rings.  It is the police, asking if the noise is still going on.  I say, No, thanks for checking.  The cop says to call back if the problem recurs.  I put his number in the speed dial.

Later that day, the guy comes out of his cabin and I confront him.  Since I can’t use volume, I tried reason, or something.  So I say “Why must you be such a terrible neighbor?  Why must you be so noisy and disturrbing?”  He got this dull, slack-jawed  stricken look and I proceeded to recap the previous day and night’s unpleasantness.  I ended with “Do you want me to call the police again?  Do you want to be arrested and taken away in handcuffs?  IT CAN BE ARRANGED.”  So he apologised a few times, and it was a bit quieter thereafter

I later found out that he had been causing problems at the local laundromat.  That is not my problem, however.  I just hate noise.  You wanna move in next door and worship Satan and smoke crack and rape babies and scam old folks out of their Social Security on the internet–that’s fine with me–just as long as you do it QUIETLY.

Flowers:  A Poem

 

There are no flowers growing here

Amid the  dust and stones.

There are some stunted children, though,

With bruises on their bones.

 

The most of them are dirty-faced,

Too thin or starchy-fat.

Their only toy, a battered bike;

Their only friend, a cat.

 

Their lives are empty as their eyes

That peer from hollow sockets.

And empty, too, their hopes and dreams,

As empty as their pockets.

 

The adults in their lives are lost

In crime or meth or beer.

The men are pedagogues of pain;

The women, schooled in fear.

 

Still some of them prevail somehow,

Some learn to love and trust.

Some little faces glow with joy,

These flowers in the dust.

 

 

Author’s notes:  This poem is respectfully dedicated to the children of Felony Flats.  Technically, the poem is interesting, I think–a simple rhyme scheme, abcb, but the lines are alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.

Dumpster Diving Redux

This blog was inspired by a recent query from AlfredNYC, along the lines of–”What were you doing in the dumpster?”  (Now THERE’S a straight line.)  The short answer is, saving money and recycling–retrieving useful items that would other wise have clogged the local landfill.  But the whole answer goes way farther than that.

Our income is below the federal poverty line–sometimes the donations that Kathy (SuSu) gets in the purple Paypal hat on her site mean the difference between paying a bill, or not paying a bill.  And we would not live nearly so well as we do were it not for the local dumpster–and the help of the Dumpster Deva (the guardian angel, so to speak, of dumpsters and those who dive therein).

For instance, this morning I had Quaker oatmeal that I got out of the dumpster–jazzed it up with a handful of out-dated trail mix I got at the local discount center.  As I write, I am wearing a hat, Jockey shorts, jeans, and a watch (from the SpongeBob Squarepants collection, it features a watch part that revolves–one side has a digital face, the other side has a picture of Squidward)-all of which came from the dumpster.  Kathy could breathe better for months thanks to a bunch of out-dated asthma medecine I found in the dumpster.  In the winter, I sleep warm between flannel sheets I got out of the dumpster.  I share my 10×12 cabin (Kathy and I maintain separate households) with four cats, who use a covered  litter box I got out of the dumpster.  I listen to music on cassette tapes and CDs that I got out of the dumpster.  At her place, Kathy listens to NPR on a Sony boombox that I got out of the dumpster. She makes calls on a cordless phone I got from the dumpster.

But wait, there’s more!  One day, I found a wadded up $5 bill in the pocket of a pair of jeans I got out of the dumpster.  More recently, I found a trove of coins–including a 1917 large Canadian cent, an 1887 Mexican peson, and two Kennedy halves–in a Zip-loc that was in a beat-up old tackle box–from the dumpster.  Just yesterday, I fished out three boxes of Christmas stuff–garlands, little table-top size artifical trees–some slightly used, some in the original wrapper.  Pretty much worthless now, but I should be able to sell it at the local holiday bazaar come this November.  The stream of stuff is endless, but the most spectacular find was from a small shop that went out of business–I once got about 50 pairs of vintage 1950 earrings–I have been getting between $10 and $20 a pair for them.  Kathy will probably recall a bunch of other good stuff.

I have a three-pronged garden tool that I use to fish stuff out of the dumpster with, as well as one of those grabber thingies that store clerks use.  Sometimes, I do actually climb inside the thing, but usually don’t–it is not necessary, and it is often hazardous. And I am limited by my physical disabilities–I am sometimes tempted to try to salvage a  big color TV, but my hernia (among other things) makes that too risky. 

When I remember, I slip on a pair of vinyl gloves–which (you guessed it!)–I got out of the dumpster.

My luck comes through again

When we first met, Kathy did my natal chart and said it included a yod, an astrological thingie also known as the hand of God, which involves, I think, three planets, a tricycle, and a ball-peen hammer.  Something like that.  Anyway, somehow I got the idea that it meant that I was born lucky.  No competant astrologer would agree–I do psychic and shamanic work that varies from adequate to astonishing, but I am probably the world’s most inept astrologer.  But I digress.

The mere fact that I survived drug addiction and alcohol abuse that started on New Year’s Eve of 1952 and continued until the year before last has to mean something luck-wise.  But other stuff just keeps happening.  Like when I slow down and hesitate at a green light for no apparent reason, just in time to see some nitwit running the red–who would have t-boned me to hell and gone had I just proceeded through my green.  Or like when I pick out a pair of stupid-looking pants  at a thrift-shop, stick my hand in the pocket, and come up with two $20 bills.  I could go on in this vein for a while, but I want to jump ahead to the most recent instance–it was a pip.

On Sunday, I am shopping at one of the local big box stores, when all of sudden, my right leg goes numb from the knee to the hip and I almost keel over.  Luckily, I had already learned from Kathy how to use  a shopping cart as a walker, so I just sort of stumbled.  It got worse, however, and by the time my next shopping stop was over, I was dragging the leg and limping and gimping with my knee locked.  This was a tad worrisome, so I decided to make an appointment with the clinic we go to.

I do not do this lightly, since it means I have to miss a day of work and drive 120 miles.  But it seems I had two other problems which had been hanging on for months and years–a vision problem which started last winter when I stupidly got a ride to an NA meeting with a member  who is still actively addicted to nicotine.  He couldn’t wait till he got home to feed his filthy habit and  lit up in the car, so I stuck my head out the window to get away from his foul toxins.  Bad idea–it was 25 degrees outside and the cold and wind screwed up my eye somehow–I have had blurred vision and pain and tearing ever since.  (One day I am going to confront the asshole, but that is another story.)  Anyway–and this was the third thing–for years I have been developing these little spots on my hands which sorta come and go, and I got to wondering if they were just age spots, melanomas, or what.

So I get to see the doc, turned out the leg thing is nothing.  We figured out that a week or so previously, when I cleverly bashed my knee into a car door, the trauma induced some swelling, which pinched a nerve.  That problem will go away by itself.  She examined the eye, after dropping in some orange dye stuff which made me look like an extra in a cheesy horror movie, which was kinda cool.  Turns out there is no serious damage to the eye, I just need to use special eye drops.  Bear with me, the punchline is coming up.

She checks out my hand–it seems that the spots WERE just age spots–except for two of the little buggers, which were in fact pre-cancerous.  They were easily removed before they got malignant.

And if it hadn’t been for the leg thing, I may well have put off seeing a doctor until AFTER the cancer developed.

Oh, and this afternoon–I found a cool watch in the dumpster, which I am wearing now. 

The watch, not the dumpster.

That would be silly.

And to hell with you, too, Life magazine

Life Magazine used to be something special, a bastion of excellant photojournalism, and a place of employment for photographers not sufficiently intrepid to climb mountains and stuff for National Geographic.  Then it died and was reincarnated in a pathetic, downsized version they give away with the Friday edition of my daily paper.  I guess it’s free, which means it is worth what I pay for it.  Mostly, the best I can say is that it is inoffensive–it has little celebrity blurbs, ads for new movies disguised as reviews, that sort of stuff.  But now they have gone too far, and I could cheerfully strangle one Audrey Lee, an ink-stained wretch who perpetrated a little thing called “Flea Markets Made Easy.”  Um, as if going to a flea market is difficult?

Anyway, some of her advice is sound, if simple-minded. Like get there early.  And bring a flashlight if you’re going to be shopping before dawn. (Duh!)  But what has drawn my ire is the following advice — “Ask ‘What’s your best price?’  Then counter by knocking 25 to 30 percent off the quoted amount.”  What’s wrong with this picture?  For one thing, any schmuck who pulls this is basically calling the dealer a liar.  At best, this is grossly disingenuous.  Someone asks my best price, they get my BEST price.  Anyone who pulled this shitty tactic with me would (at best) get a really cold look, glare or stare, along with “What part of BEST PRICE did you fail to comprehend?”

Good grief, as if running a little flea market stand isn’t hard enough, I have some  nitwit in a national publication telling people how to make my business life harder.  And  Audrey–stay the hell away from my stand.

Three Alaska Mysteries

 

Case the first:  At 3:10 am Saturday, Nicolette L. Anderson, 21, is stopped for erratic driving and busted for driving drunk.  The troopers put her in the back seat of their cruiser, whereupon she expresses her displeasure by kicking out the rear window.  Feisty little lady, that.  The shower of glass sent one trooper to Valley Hospital for some Band-Aids and a lollipop.  Little Nicky was charged with resisting arrest, assault, and criminal mischief in addition to the DUI.

The mystery:  What the hell was she thinking?

 

Case the second:  Early Saturday afternoon, Matthew Haar, 17, is driving along eastbound on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway with a couch in the bed of his Chevy Avalanche.  The couch makea a desperate attempt to escape, ends up in westbound traffic.  Thump.

John Hunter, 53, slams on the brakes of his Avalanche to avoid hitting the couch (screech!), gets rear-ended by Allison Barkhurst, 40, who is driving a Chevy utility truck. (crash! tinkle, tinkle)

Then Vincent Cramer, 29, slams into the back of Barkhurst’s truck (another crash, etc), and spins her around and she ends up off the highway altogether.

Haar was busted for having an unsecured load, Barkhurst was taken to Valley Hospital, and the couch refused to comment.

Mystery:  What was the couch doing in the Avalanche in the first place?  Was Haaar moving?  Did he have a hot date that night and couldn’t afford a motel?  Did he just feel sorry for the couch, maybe thought it was getting cabin fever, needed some air?  Had he stolen the couch?  We may never know.

 

Case the third:  Near mnidnight on Thursday, Palmer police showed up at a disturbance–Kevin M. Stock, 46, had beaten the snot out of someone, striking him repeatedly with  a “metal and plastic boot cast.”  He really whaled on the vic– who sustained two serious head lacerations, plus numerous cuts, abrasions, and bruises to his upper body.  Not to mention the sheer humiliation.  Stock was arrested for assault and also busted on an old outstanding DUI charge (no surprise there).

Mystery:  So was Stock wearing the cast or what? Did he sort of knock down the vic and stomp him, or did he wield the cast like some clumsy club?   And why did he not use a more efficient weapon? Oh well. . . .when casts are outlawed, only outlaws will have casts. . . . .

Stay tuned for more tales from the Land of the Midnight Sun.

Curse the Vermin!

And not little pissy Anglo-Saxon oaths, either.  I want big fat nasty Gypsy curses, curses to bring on mysterious illnesses and devastating financial losses, eye of newt and tongue of frog and hair of dog curses, curses  that would last down the generations, curses that would  detroy their estates utterly, and sow salt among the ashes.  There!  I feel better already.  What has me in such a royal snit, you might ask?  I am incensed because some heinous perpetrators poisoned my sweety, that’s why.  I would call them fucking morons, but to do so would insult fucking and morons alike.  But I digress.

I had a frustrating day yesterday–business had been rained out all weekend, but the comp weather said “zero percent” chance of precipitation.  Well, I had zero precipitattion all over my van and my tables and knives and stuff yesterday, so I was miffed.  Not homicidally so, but fairly pissed off nonetheless, and I was hoping that Kathy had had a better day.  Things often seem to work that way with us.  Sort of part of the Alaska boom and bust syndrome, partly because of the way our natal charts resonate.  Anyway, I called her last night and heard the news.  It was bad.

There has been a bit of a mosquito epidemic up the valley of late.  This is annoying, but hardly life-threatening–it’s not like they carry malaria or anything, and the effects of  their bites (unlike those of the really awful East Coast US salt marsh skeeters, which can last a day or more) subside in a few minutes.  Kathy had been looking forward rather keenly to the first hatch of the dragonflies, oneof the main skeeter predators.  Besides, it is a lot of fun to watch them.  (Yeah, we watch bugs.  You don’t have cable, you do shit like that.)

Anyway, yesterday afternnon, Kathy is minding her own business, and suddenly she smells this awful chemical odor.  Then her sense of smell shut down.  Then she started showing other neurological symptoms–muscle tremors, weakness, sudden-onset visual problems.  Turns out that some ignorant human vermin sprayed some sort of chemical poison all over the neighborhood in an effort to reduce the mosquito population.  This is stupid for so many reasons it seems pointless to list them all, but. . . .One, the effect doesn’t last very long anyway.  Two, it just improves the breed, tends to make future generations of mosquitoes more poison-resistant.  Three, it fucks up the environment, kills off beneficial bugs and birds and all.  Four, it poisons PEOPLE.

Shortly after the spraying, things got real quiet outside.  Before that, there was a lot of critter-noise–frogs doing froggie noises, birds chirping, other bugs buzzing.  But  then it got, well, deathly quiet.  The critters that had not been killed outright fled the scene.  Kathy had to stay and ingest the toxin, however.  That was when she started crying, realizing that so many critters had been killed or at least traumatized.  And when we spoke about it last night , I made the mistake of mentioning that it probably killed the dragonfly larvae that would have hatched soon.  Then she started  crying again.

I would love to have some quality  time alone with the perps.  I would show them the error of their ways.  I would use reason, logic, and a blackjack..  They would probably  never poison the environment again.  At any rate, they would never WALK again.

A KittenTale: Not for the Squeamish

 

Of late, I have been getting little wiffs and wafts of litterbox smell when I’m in bed at night in bed–not unusual, being that the litter box is like three feet away from my bed.  Heck, in my 10×12 cabin, almost everything is three feet away.  Anyway, the scent seemed to be getting more pervasive and intrusive, so this morning, fortified by two cups of MJB European Roast, I decided to investigate.  I was planning on getting a showe later today anyway.

So I get down on hands and knees and check things out. Preliminary results are encouraging–I find 83 cents in cash–American, no less– and my good tweezers.  This is  kind of a big deal–I don’t own a razor of any sort and am not much good with scissors, so I use a pair of tweezers to for facial foliage maintenance.  When a beard hair gets out of line, I say “Pluck it!”, and I do.  But I digress.

Digging farther under the bed, I made a horrifying discovery.  I had this flat full of really primo pyrite crystal clusters, maybe $200-300 worth.  The kittens had been using it for alitter box.  Okay, fine–who could blame’em?  It LOOKS like a litter box. . . .

So I continue and drag out a big box full of hematite necklaces and carnelian pendants.  It was shitty, too.  Went still farther back, pulled out a box full of mostly NA literature, topped with a ream or so of printer paper.  You guessed it–more poopo del kitteno.  Rats!  Going farther back, I found a loose rock, a really nice bit of silver-rich chalcopyrite.  This was not good–why wasn’t it in the box, with the selenite crystal clusters and the peridot crystal clusters?  Well, because the little darlings had shredded the damn box and used IT for their powder room, too.  At this point, I was waxing wroth.

Not wishing to actually squirm all the way  under the bed, I got my trusty dumpster-diving aid, a home-made three-pronged garden implement maybe three feet long. Reached under the bed, pulled out a knife catalog replete with various feline gore–evidently, Frankie had given birth on it–near it, anyway.  Pulled out my camo t-shirt–whew, just kitten hair on it. Pulled out my really neat 1995 Iditarod t-shirt–it was clean.   Then I fished out one of my faves, a souvenir t-shirt from the Quiet Riot 1991 Alaska tour–it was shitty.  The shirt, not the tour.  Okay, out on the porch to air and dry it went –along with the shittiest boxes of rocks. Finally, out came another shirt, a long-sleeved Eddie Bauer number that was thoroughly urine-soaked–out it goes to dry, maybe out in the trash.  I’ll triage  this stuff later.  But the end is in sight.

I got the broom and dustpan off the porch, swept up the stuff and bagged it up, where it joined the other two bags of nasty trash that are destined for the dumpster.

Then I taped up the remaining boxes and sprayed them with cat-be-gone, this bitter apple essence that sort of repels them, and shoved them back under the bed.

Finally, I sternly lectured the two miscreants–Ginger and Peachy–and reminded them that the under-bed storage area is not, repeat not, a litter box, and that any further infractions will be dealt with sternly.  Like  as in turning them into little orange hats.  Or tiny orange mittens.

They seemed suitably impressed if unrepentant.  Time will tell.

Stay tuned.

                                                                                                                                                       

News From Catland

Recently I was watching TV and this orange furry sausage came wobbling out from under the bed; then it was joined by another one–Frankie’s kittens are now ambulatory.  She had them on the floor ‘way under the bed, and now that they are getting around, I think Frankie and I will both rest easier if they sort of stay put.  So I moved two boxes of knives from under the white table to get to the box I had previously fitted out with some old t-shirts as a nest for them, moved two boxes of Narcotics Anonymous literature from under the bed to make room for the new box, and dumped (gently, gently!) the kittens into it.  All three of the felines involved seem to be okay with the new arrangement.

And in other news briefly, I decided to let all three of the guys stay in the cabin with me last night.  When I do, they usually greet me with purrs and headbutts in the morning, and respect my wishes when I wnat to get some extra shut-eye.  Well, I got  hoist on my own  petard this morning.  They decided to do battle at the foot of my bed around six o’clock this morning.  Did you ever try to sleep with two kittens play-fighting on your legs?  I sure can’t do it.  I put them on the floor and admonished them to fight down there, not on the bed.  The little buggers totally ignored me, jumped back up on the bed and I, and commenced to re-enact the Battle of Badon again.

So I finally gave up and got up, ‘way earlier than I really wanted to.  And this was gonna be a late night anyway, what with the NA meeting tonight.  Oh well. . . . Thank God for black coffee!