Apparently, blogging is like religion: it comes to you easily in times of difficulty.
This is a time of difficulty for us, my roommate and I. We have an unbalanced woman living below us (whose identity should not be a surprise to anyone who has read this site before) - her subsanitatious state imposed by inhaled drug intake of the non-
C. sativa type and an abusive boyfriend who plays soft and should be put out of our collective misery by a kind divinity - and when trouble heads her way she redirects it at us.
Awakened on the first day at 0400 by she and the man and some other random white man, I called the management company. [Hey,] I said,
[your voicemail tells you what time this message was recorded. Four thirty. That woman is doing it - woke me from a sound sleep and I am not an easy person to awaken, already it's been half an hour and they will not likely stop soon. Why are they moving large quantities of new furniture in and out of her garage from four a.m.? Why are they fighting with each other in the alley? I have not been calling every time this happens because you said she was to be evicted. I didn't want to bother you. But she's
not being evicted so you need to understand the kind of problems she is causing and hear about them
when they happen. That way it will be clear: I am awakened now and you have the evidence for the time in your own system.]
It wasn't the end of things. I went out of the house later that morning to get away from them all and when I came back home was literally nearly run down by a patrol car. My neighbours were running into the street and shouting at each other. The abusive boyfriend tore away in the other direction in his disgusting old American sedan, baby-shit yellow. My roommate appeared in the alley, talking on the phone and following in his direction.
Before I could figure out what was going on, four police cruisers screeched to a halt, two on each side of the alley, boxing all of us in. There must have been two dozen of us in the alley: uniformed officers, confused-looking neighbours, some half-naked; one entire family I didn't know was there, and several of the men were in disarray.
When I unentangled the situation, the result was this: the family, who are black, are moving in. Two Mexican boys popped the lock on their car when they were moving stuff and snatched a wallet. Three men ran them down, catching the boy with the wallet (containing significant cash and credit cards) and proceeding to beat the crap out of him behind a car visible from my roommate's window. My roommate could not see anything but men fighting and called the police; he ran out to follow the guy who got away.
The thieves were snagged two blocks away, the wallet recovered on the scene by the pugilants - and my kind neighbour discovered an unknown party had placed an unfamiliar lock on his garage.
[I bet a hundred US that the lock belongs to her,] I said to him, pointing at the difficult neighbour. [She woke me at four this morning and kept me up an hour moving crap in and out of her garage with that man who comes around and some other guy. They were arguing and clearly chemically impaired. She probably didn't lock her garage but rather yours because she was high.]
I was right, of course.
That's not the end of it, either. Now on the second day, we are disturbed in the morning rituals about ten because the man and the disturbed woman are screaming at the top of their lungs. They do this, but today it is really, really over-the-top and we are already on short fuses from learning she's not leaving - we were able to put up with her presence because soon it would all be over. Just breathe deep and wait. Now that's not happening, and on top of it my headache and earache are enjoying the pleasant, pre-breakfast, pre-caffeine joy of screeching, howling banshee bitch and That Fuck grunting piglike back as they beat the fuck out of each other with frypans.
No kidding. There is a veritable symphony: the crash of breaking dishes, the twangy metallic staccato of hurled handfuls of cutlery & the distinctive bonging explosion of a cookpot tossed headwards. It's absolutely intolerable. It's a fucking caracature of a
Lifetime film brought to the Big Screen.
Oh, and do I call the property management? Yes; yes indeed. Second day is when the offices open so they are in office. I ask have they heard my voicemail and they claim they cannot retrieve the the messages right now. Fine, let's stick to the moment:
[My neighbour and her troublemaking boyfriend are having a domestic dispute. She was screaming he stole her money and she wants it back and then they beat the shit out of each other with frying pans.]
Management, who are all female, responds with apparent surprise. [Really? Are you serious?]
I'm unclear as to if they are speaking ironically. After all, these are the Wonder Twins who
stole my roommate's car until we forcibly removed it from their possession. This is the same set of geniuses who left a crack pipe with contents remaining in plain sight in the same car - on the dash between the seats. This is a woman who has a very bad man living in her house against the terms of her lease and who was supposed to be evicted because she didn't pay her rent in months and because we called the police on her multiple times for domestic disturbance and other offences. Are they really shocked?
[Yes. I am serious,] I reply, having decided to play it straight.
Right then she says she's gonna get the neighbour on the line. She leaves us on hold. After a minute, we hang up because there is another call.
The phone rings again: it's the neighbour. My roommate says he does not wish to speak with her and she should please cease bothering us. The phone rings again and I answer this time: she is calling again and asks to speak to him. I pass the phone over.
[She wants to sue us,] he tells me when he gets off the phone. [As if. I should get a judgment against
her for theft and destruction of my car.] We are both livid at this point; roomie decides to go have a fag and is confronted by a screaming neighbour. He yells she needs to leave us alone and stop harassing us and just then the phone rings.
I answer. It's management. [She says you are harassing her,] she says, [and screaming at her.]
[That is ludicrous. We have not spoken to her in two months because she was being evicted and we were biting our tongues. She has called us several times since you called her and now she's screaming at my roommate while he is trying to smoke a butt on our porch.]
She says she cannot use the business phone to manage disputes. I tell her that I am coming down.
At the office, he and I explain what she is doing. In the end, she sets up an appointment for mediation with the head of management for when she returns from vacation.
It didn't even end there. When we came back, she confronted my roommate again and legally committed assault according to the statutes of California by threatening him and by invading his personal space by coming within three inches of his face and stabbing her finger at him. We walked away. As we always do. But this time we did what the housing office told us to do: call the police.
Tomorrow morning we're going for a restraining order. There will be no meeting: there is nothing to discuss because it's her and only her and her thug excon drug-selling friends harassing us, and more importantly there will be a restraining order out against her.
Fuck that bitch. I hope she dies of an overdose and her fifteen cats eat her before anyone notices the smell. She has been nothing but a clusterfuck of trouble ever since she moved in and one way or another this will be settled
very, very soon.
In unrelated news, I fucking hate the holidays, so shove it up your xm-ass. You want midwinter joy? Let's go see Bill Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night on said eve and not be forced to buy gifts and suffer through unpleasance and see commercials
demanding you prove your manhood and vitality by purchasing a diamond bracelet worth more than a year's income for me (yes, there is a commercial and yes, it lists the prices) or, for fuck's sake, an SUV on xmas morning with a goddamn bow on top of it. WWJD? Puke, then have a coronary, then go burn shit, then go get drunk and have sex with his apostles and his beloved, Mary Magdalene.
So, then:
Twelfth Night? Any takers?
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I am currently listening to: Johnny Cash, "The Streets of Laredo",
American IV: The Man Comes Home
I am currently reading: Johanna Nichols, The First American Languages & D. Andrew Merriwether, A Mitochondrial Perspective on the Peopling of the New World, both in Jablonski Nina G. ed. April 2002:
The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonisation of the New World, Wattis Symposium Series in Anthropology, Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences 27, California Academy of Sciences: San Francisco
