The Joads hit the road

Hello, seekers:

Those of you who have been around a while - all five or six of you, the ones who somehow managed to generate thousands and thousands of hits on my prior site - may remember me giving a little insight into the people who live across the street from me.

Well, make that lived across the street from me, for they have finally vamoosed, and in grand fashion.

These were the people who tormented me with with a 10-foot inflatable asshole of a Santa Claus, backlit and everything, and who had six cars and no driveway and thus had to park at least one of their rustbucket pieces of shit in front of my house every day, and forced me to move my mailbox into someone else's yard because the mailman refused to deliver my mail while some coughing, sputtering, choking, oil-spewing rolling turd blocked him from leaning out and putting the mail in my mailbox. He claimed that "rules" prohibit him from dismounting, which I assume means getting out of his little square mailmobile, and I guess that is cool.

And that is not to mention that the neighbor and all three of his kids smoked cigarettes and took great pains when either working on the car right in front of my house or even just parking it to toss butts hither and yon in my front yard. Great!

These people weren't all bad, even though their house looks like the Addams Family house after about 75 really bad winters. They did have a beautiful daughter, whom I mentioned in a prior blog, but of course she got knocked up by some schmuck who immediately vanished or went to jail or something, so she moved out on her own. Also, the neighbor is a nice guy, though I wished he would wear a goddamned belt while he was gardening, because gardener's crack is far worse than plumber's crack because the plumber probably isn't at your house every day when the weather is decent.

But a couple weeks ago, a sheriff's deputy pulled up to their house and I saw them having a really animated discussion in the front yard. I could not hear what they were saying because this hovel rests on a really steep incline - you need to go up about 30 horribly broken-down, sinking concrete steps to get up there - and it was just out of my earshot.

However, I had a feeling I knew what the deputy was there for, and I was right. A day or two later the members of the household started parading down the steps and loading anything that was worth anything, not that any of it was worth much, into a pickup truck. Even the daughter, with her kid slung into a papoose-type affair on her back, was pressed into this duty, though it seemed she mainly carried silverware a piece or two at a time.

So they are gone now. For good. I think they moved to the other side of town, which means no more parking in front of my house and no more Camels in my front yard. No more kids playing rap music in their car in front of my house, or changing their oil and dropping their transmission 16 feet from my bedchamber at 7 a.m.

But best of all: no more inflatable Santa this year. But Christ himself only knows what the next batch of people will display during the holiday season. You would have to be nuts to buy that house, and that fact does not augur well for the days to come.
I don't hold a lot of hope for much in the neighbor department, but four or five fewer shit cars and a lack of inflatable holiday lawn treasures would be an improvement.