💾 Archived View for gemini.sensorstation.co › ~winduptoy › journal.neighborhood.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:16:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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2023-12-20
Guys I'm gonna do it. Today is the day. I'm gonna try to break the sound barrier on this residential street in my 2005 Chevy Monte Carlo SS (Supercharged).
—Fuckers in this neighborhood
We bought our first house in an "affordable" neighborhood four years ago. The house is great, the neighborhood not so much. We're realizing that everyone around us operates on a completely different level, and this feeling has been ramping up the longer we live here. I'm trying not to simply complain about a lower-income slice of society, but the culmination of these events that I've witnessed are so wild for a dead-end street in a supposedly civilized society that I feel the urge to record them.
I'll start with the simple stuff. People pride themselves in the art of revving their obnoxiously tuned cars and motorcycles between 10pm and 4am. There is generally trash everywhere, and more is always appearing. The storm drains lead to a nearby creek, which has a miniature version of the great Pacific garbage patch: styrofoam, bottles, and cans of all kinds float at the dam. The other day I found a condom wrapper and a full set of clothes in the road while walking our dog. There is a family with dogs that regularly escape, and howl at all hours when they're not escaping. New wrecked cars are always appearing, never to get fixed or go anywhere. Multiple families have cars that last six to twelve months and then they get dumped in the back yard to sit forever. One neighbor at an intersection skinned a deer and left the head in a tree in the front yard for six months to decompose. One neighbor has a memorial to Dale Earnhardt in his front yard with requisite chrome-plated naked lady silhouettes on his garage door and other tastefully selected decor.
Trash is collected weekly. The vast majority of the trash cans set out on the curb are overflowing, with a few extra bags set out to the side because they wouldn't fit in the cans. Our city provides two cans, one for trash and a blue one for recycling. The number of people who treat both cans as trash is staggering. Just to be clear, I don't sift through other people's trash; the cans are always overflowing and everything is on display! One neighbor died and her house sat empty for a few months, so the family beside her took her cans to use for themselves. One family using two trash cans and two recycling (but of course they used them like four for trash), reliably packing all four to the brim every single week. I took special note of this phenomenon on one particularly bad trash day recently: boxes and furniture were piled by the curb in both directions. One washer, one dryer, and one oven were at the curb. A dirty diaper had blown into our yard.
The neighbors across the street have been making very quick transactions with unknown cars on a regular basis. I know this because sometimes they honk until someone comes out of the house. The people living in this house rotates every few months, seemingly multiple families sometimes. These people wear shorts and sandals in the winter and a hoodie and beanie in the summer. One time they sent their kids over to our house so that they could try to sell us milk and frozen pizza (???). The quantity of bizarre traffic that comes and goes from this house is staggering.
There is another house we call "the compound" because an uncountable number of families all live in the single house. It has visible entrances where we have witnessed squirrels entering to live in the walls. There is a shed behind the house which most certainly has people living in it. A tree is growing right up against the wall of the shed, maybe six inches away. When they put a new roof on the shed (new shingles, like a normal house), they built them AROUND the trunk of the tree: the gutter and overhang have a literal semicircle cut out of them. The compound lights up at exactly 5pm every day during the summer, enveloping the entire neighborhood in weed smoke. Any mail that these people do not want, they simply throw in the road. Of course they throw lots of junk mail and credit card offers in the road, but I have seen at least two property tax bills.
As a software developer who works from home, I will often receive checks in the mail from clients. One time the mailman accidentally placed an envelope addressed to my business in the neighbor's mailbox. Rather than dropping it back in my mailbox, the neighbor opened it and cashed the check made out to my business. I don't know what kind of joke of a banking system we have that allowed that to happen. After some tedious accounting detective work I had a very awkward confrontation with this neighbor who claimed to know nothing about the situation.
The next door neighbor on the other side has a new unknown car or truck pull into his driveway almost every night. These aren't sleek new trucks, they're big dirty trucks; think 2nd-gen Cummins, spray-painted, and with actual ram horns in place of the Ram logo on the grille. They arrive at 10pm or later and leave between midnight and 6am. We can only assume that this person is a "client" because there is bright pink light coming from the bedroom window, but only when one of these unknown vehicles are present.
My brother stayed with us for a weekend and, being unfamiliar with the neighborhood, went down to the dead end and pulled into someone's driveway to turn around. This old hag who lives there ran to her car, hopped in, and chased him while laying on her horn as he left. Thinking something serious was wrong, he stopped. She jumped out of her car and ran to his window to chew him out for daring to trespass on the first five feet of her driveway. Another old hag honked her horn at me because she didn't like my dog walking in her grass. Not pooping, just walking in the six inches of grass up against the concrete curb.
One time we were walking the dog around the block and witnessed a neighbor, one who has three small children, drift to a stop and quickly get out of his truck. He reached behind his seat and pulled out a bulletproof vest, put it on, and sped away.
I have personally witnessed six mailboxes getting deomolished by a speeding or intoxicated driver. My own mailbox was scraped by a side mirror but remains upright (for now).
A house down the road has a sign titled "Paradise," which is hardly an accurate description. A derelict camper with a gratuitous amount of duct tape on the exterior and accompanying spray-paint Cummins filled to the brim with junk has recently been parked out front. One day there was a bunch of smoke coming from this house, so a neighbor and I ran down check if the house was burning. Nope, the house was fine. It was just a toothless dude burning wires in a hole about five feet behind the house. The neighborhood was engulfed in the acrid, toxic smell of burning plastic and rubber. I should have called 911 so that he had to deal with the shit of explaining himself to the city. I can't imagine getting more than $20 for some measly copper. This crusty shithole of a house was recently listed for sale, so we checked out Zillow to see photos of the interior. It looks exactly how you would expect for a house where someone burns wires out back. It sold for $300,000.
I'll conclude with this beautiful interaction that I witnessed recently:
WOMAN: Dad, how old was Doreen when she died?
...
WOMAN: Dad.
...
WOMAN: DAD!
MAN: QUIT FUCKIN' YELLING AT ME!
WOMAN: Well you don't answer me, now how old was Doreen when she died?
MAN: I DON'T GIVE A SHIT!
I know there are terrible places to live in the world, many much worse than this, and I am grateful that I rarely have to worry about my physical safety. I am fully aware that some people rightfully fear being shot or attacked at home, and I mostly do not. My concern is with the insane spiritual and mental level at which my small pocket of society is operating; it's depressing for people like us who want to farm, practice permaculture, and beautify our local community. I absolutely hate the idea of an HOA, but this place makes a damn good case for them. Today my friend from the other side of town showed me a video of a crackhead punching his car, so I guess things aren't all that bad in my neighborhood.
Update: 2024-03-19
Found our first needle in the road today.