I am beginning to wonder about the house next door to mine. It sits at roughly a 100-degree angle to mine because I have the corner lot while this is the first house that’s actually facing front on the subdivision’s street. I think the house has a Weirdness Curse on it, because everybody that lives there has one or two of the oddest habits - not serial-killer odd, just logic-defying odd. [I don’t actually know my neighbors - never met them, have no desire to, because if I were to go over and say, “Welcome to the neighborhood! Let me know if you need anything!” they might actually let me know, which would be awful. I don’t want people coming over to borrow a cup of sugar or a ladder or some lawn chairs, or making me buy Little Susie's Girl Scout cookies or inviting me to Tupperware parties or asking me to water their plants. I want to wave at them when we pass on the road, have them wave back and nothing more. You might think I’m only marking time until I’m old enough to be, officially, one of those crazy old ladies that never leaves the house, which she shares with several dozen cats, and gets her kicks from spying on the neighbors. While this may be valid, it’s irrelevant to today’s tale. But I digress.]
When I first moved in an elderly couple lived there. Most of the time I never heard a peep out of them, with one exception. They had a normal old-people land tank of an automobile that they drove about town, but they also had a pickup truck which was parked in the drive, seldom used. Here is Weird Thing #1 about the elderly couple: periodically, Old Dude would get in the pickup and rev the motor. I figured, “Okay, maybe he wants to crank it from time to time, to keep the battery from dying”, but he wouldn’t just crank the truck up, or maybe run an errand or two with it. He’d sit there in the cab, revving the engine to red-line over and over - for an hour or more at a time. I’m not joking. I once timed him at one hour, ten minutes. RrrrrRRRRRRrrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRRR, over and over and over. Did he not know how bad this was for his engine? Did he desperately want to drive the truck but had forgotten where to find the gearshift? WTF???
In my defense as a spying-recluse-in-training, he would usually do this early of a Saturday morning, and since their driveway runs right beside the end of my house where my bedroom is located, it was kinda hard to miss. Weird Thing #2 is, well, not so much weird as annoying. They were elderly and retired, with nothing in particular to do all day. So what time does Old Truck-Revving Dude pick to mow his grass? Seven-thirty a.m. on Sundays, of course. Give it a rest, mister - some of us have hangovers, here!
After many years, during which he rarely missed a Pickup-Truck-Revving Saturday, the old couple moved out and Shouting Redneck Family moved in. Whatever the guy did for a living, he left for work very early in the morning, around 5:15 - 5:30. I’m not up at that hour, but I know when he left because he and his woman were affected by a strange, debilitating disease that rendered them unable to speak to one another when they were both inside the same house. No, they had to wait until he was outside in the driveway, about to get into his car (which he parked, like Old Truck-Revving Dude before him, on the drive just under my bedroom windows) and she was in the doorway leading to the carport thirty yards away. Each and every morning, the following conversation would ensue, at top volume (imagine seriously backwoods, Dukes-of-Hazzard-only-worse, slack-jawed yokel accents):
HER: DID YOU PACK YOU A LUUNNNCH?
HIM: NAW, I GOT ME SOME MUUUNNEY!
HER: I LUUUUUV YEW!
HIM: I LUUUUUV YEW, TOO!
Or sometimes it would vary ever-so-slightly, as:
HER: DID YOU GET YOU SOME MUUUNNEY?
HIM: NAW, I PACKED ME A LUUNNNCH!
HER: I LUUUUUV YEW!
HIM: I LUUUUUV YEW, TOO!
Note that he doesn’t pack a lunch, rather he packs HIM a lunch, and he doesn’t have some money, he has HIM some money. I think the inclusion of an unnecessary indirect object is compulsory in the Redneck Vernacular. Every morning, one of two variants of the exact same conversation woke me up far too early for me to just give in, get up and go to work, but not early enough so I could go back to sleep and cut some serious Zs. It got to the point where I wanted to pack his lunch myself so I could include cyanide-chip cookies. Why couldn’t they talk inside the house, when they were 5 feet apart? WHY???
This is getting long, so...tune in next time for the tale of the giant bonfire and abrupt departure of Shouting Redneck Family, and the arrival of the Door-Slammin’ Family from Outer Space.
MONTOYA DELENDA EST!
When I first moved in an elderly couple lived there. Most of the time I never heard a peep out of them, with one exception. They had a normal old-people land tank of an automobile that they drove about town, but they also had a pickup truck which was parked in the drive, seldom used. Here is Weird Thing #1 about the elderly couple: periodically, Old Dude would get in the pickup and rev the motor. I figured, “Okay, maybe he wants to crank it from time to time, to keep the battery from dying”, but he wouldn’t just crank the truck up, or maybe run an errand or two with it. He’d sit there in the cab, revving the engine to red-line over and over - for an hour or more at a time. I’m not joking. I once timed him at one hour, ten minutes. RrrrrRRRRRRrrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRRR, over and over and over. Did he not know how bad this was for his engine? Did he desperately want to drive the truck but had forgotten where to find the gearshift? WTF???
In my defense as a spying-recluse-in-training, he would usually do this early of a Saturday morning, and since their driveway runs right beside the end of my house where my bedroom is located, it was kinda hard to miss. Weird Thing #2 is, well, not so much weird as annoying. They were elderly and retired, with nothing in particular to do all day. So what time does Old Truck-Revving Dude pick to mow his grass? Seven-thirty a.m. on Sundays, of course. Give it a rest, mister - some of us have hangovers, here!
After many years, during which he rarely missed a Pickup-Truck-Revving Saturday, the old couple moved out and Shouting Redneck Family moved in. Whatever the guy did for a living, he left for work very early in the morning, around 5:15 - 5:30. I’m not up at that hour, but I know when he left because he and his woman were affected by a strange, debilitating disease that rendered them unable to speak to one another when they were both inside the same house. No, they had to wait until he was outside in the driveway, about to get into his car (which he parked, like Old Truck-Revving Dude before him, on the drive just under my bedroom windows) and she was in the doorway leading to the carport thirty yards away. Each and every morning, the following conversation would ensue, at top volume (imagine seriously backwoods, Dukes-of-Hazzard-only-worse, slack-jawed yokel accents):
HER: DID YOU PACK YOU A LUUNNNCH?
HIM: NAW, I GOT ME SOME MUUUNNEY!
HER: I LUUUUUV YEW!
HIM: I LUUUUUV YEW, TOO!
Or sometimes it would vary ever-so-slightly, as:
HER: DID YOU GET YOU SOME MUUUNNEY?
HIM: NAW, I PACKED ME A LUUNNNCH!
HER: I LUUUUUV YEW!
HIM: I LUUUUUV YEW, TOO!
Note that he doesn’t pack a lunch, rather he packs HIM a lunch, and he doesn’t have some money, he has HIM some money. I think the inclusion of an unnecessary indirect object is compulsory in the Redneck Vernacular. Every morning, one of two variants of the exact same conversation woke me up far too early for me to just give in, get up and go to work, but not early enough so I could go back to sleep and cut some serious Zs. It got to the point where I wanted to pack his lunch myself so I could include cyanide-chip cookies. Why couldn’t they talk inside the house, when they were 5 feet apart? WHY???
This is getting long, so...tune in next time for the tale of the giant bonfire and abrupt departure of Shouting Redneck Family, and the arrival of the Door-Slammin’ Family from Outer Space.
MONTOYA DELENDA EST!
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