Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Wandering Eye

My neighbor across the courtyard has a funky mattress. It's not so fragrant that anyone can smell it, but we call all most definitely see it, and it's annoying. It's just sitting there, or rather standing there, leaning up against the red brick wall. Sort of like James Dean in that still shot from Giant. Except it's not James Dean, it's a fucking nasty, wet, semen and piss stained mattress. Perhaps I could put a cowboy hat on it.

Rich people call such things "eyesores." Normally I care not about this sort of problem. If you want to store an old television set next to your stoop, or let your kids write things on the sidewalk in chalk like, "The guy at 104 has man BOOOOOOOBS," who am I to stop you. Living in a free society requires tolerance of your neighbor's ugly yard, ugly kids, ugly politics, second hand trampoline or overly-enthusiastic patriotic comment via a humongous, sheet-sized American flag. And I am tolerant. I understand that life is messy, and that parents don't have the time to pick up all the toys outside. Living in close quarters with others requires understanding.

That said, the fucking mattress has got to go.

Your eye moves from the new buds on the maple tree to the blue jay resting and peeping on one of the branches. From there, your eye picks up the red brick, the green copper on the connected townhouse roof, and then perhaps to one of the better looking residents. Not that guy, not her, either...yeah, her. The green grass is poking through the dark soil and daffodils threaten to bloom soon. But like a fart in a bakery, the visual stench of that fucking mattress ruins an otherwise pleasant experience. It has to go, and I'm going to show it the door.

We move after dark. I shall drag it to the apartment building nearby where there is a dumpster. I shall keep you, dear readers, posted.

2 comments:

GamerCow said...

bah, just set the mattress on fire. They're actually hoping someone will take the mattress to the dumpster for them. Don't give them the satisfaction.

Living in an apartment gives you a very interesting viewpoint vis a vis your fellow human being. Some things I've learned when I lived in an apartment:

1)Retards love those inflatable pools. I lived next to a house with a mentally retarded kid, he was 12 or so, and he ALWAYS put a smile on my face. He loved everything, and had the best outlook on life I've ever seen. But he loved his inflatable pool the most. On more than one occasion, his mom would go outside and start to fill up the pool with the hose, and he'd be out there literally doing laps of joy around the back yard, whooping and hollering and jumping with such profound happiness, it made whatever I was doing seem better.

2)People are different when they have sex. In EVERY apartment I lived in, I heard my neighbors having sex. In Radnor House, my next door neighbor was a crier, and would sound like she was bawling her eyes out, which made me almost call the cops, but she would also proclaim how good her man's cock felt in her ass, so I didn't. In Newton, I lived beneath a couple that were both elementary school teachers, and she was miserable by day, but a howling screech monkey of an animal by night. My old roommate and I would have discussions about how their kids were either a)traumatized by it, or b)given traquilizers at 8 PM. Because she would yell and scream so loud, it would wake both of us a floor below, out of sound sleep. Watertown brought the guy who sounded like a moose when he came, and Belmont gave us the guy who would last 2 minutes then spend 40 in the bathroom. And yes, it was the guy who went to the bathroom, I knew his footsteps. I only heard the people in my second Belmont apartment once, and their sex sounded as whitebread as they were. But thats okay.

3)People will pick up absolutely anything if you put a free sign on it. That, or our curb was a magical portal to another dimension.

mel said...

Wear plastic so you don't get cooties!