Right now I'm listening to my neighbor across the hallway sing, very loudly and tunelessly, I might add, a song I have never heard before (or, if I had, I wouldn't be able to tell because she can't sing the tune).
My neighbor, I'm pretty sure, is an "independent liver," if you know what I mean. She's special. Not altogether there. Wears velcro sneakers. Get my drift?
Nothing wrong with that. I'm all for mainstreaming. It's just that she's weird and always will be weird because she just can't give a rat's tushy about what she's doing or its effect on other people.
She sings a lot. I have come home extremely late — sometimes 10:30 p.m. from city hall meetings on a weeknight, or 3 a.m. on a weekend, and there she is, in her apartment, singing about sweet potato pie. I have left my apartment at all kinds of weird hours — 5 a.m. to get on a fishing boat, 10 a.m. to go to work — and I have heard her singing. It isn't every time, but it's enough to get a sense that the pattern of singing is pretty random.
If this were my only weird neighbor it would be one thing. Instead, I have had a pretty constant string of weird neighbors ever since I left my childhood home. I'll skip college, because granted, people there are weird.
In Little Rock, I moved into an apartment building in Hillcrest. This is a decent place to live, but I was surrounded by freaks. To my right lived a 40s-ish red-haired, super-pale man with very few teeth. One day I came home to find him painting a card table with a kind of Yin-Yang thing. I was probably in my kung-fu get up, because I was taking that martial art at the time, and he started to talk to me about the power of aikido.
It turned out he used to live in a house in downtown that had been blowed up by a tornado (pron. "tor-NAY-der") and was living off disability or insurance or some such something (no jobby job). His only hobby was Aikido, which he spoke of lovingly and with maybe a little bit of cultishness. He was painting the card table — which had no legs — so he could hang it on his wall; the symbol was one he had concocted out of a mish-mash of Asianica — primarily Japanese — and thoughts that came to him from Aikido, which had inspired his personal philosophy. He was really, really into Aikido. He wanted to demonstrate some moves, but I stepped back and he had to hit the air and pretend he was taking down some imaginary person.
After each of these moves, he'd do that thing that people who are really into cults and conspiracies do with his neck and eyebrows — kind of poking his head at me with his pale red eyebrows cocked in a super self-satisfied way. "See?" he'd say.
It's so creepy; what is a girl supposed to do? I was probably 25 at the time and I knew this situation called for the appropriate mixture of interest and stand-offishness. If you who are reading this are really into anything and you are confronted with this attitude while you are trying to explain how great your a) religion, b) martial art or c) your collection of anything is then you need to check yourself and get back to what is called socially acceptable.
Dude was always, always, sitting on a chair in front of his door in his old sweatpants and tattered tanktop. Except when, on occasion, he wasn't.
Well, those are two of my wacky neighbors I have had. Next time: Were they my neighbors? Why so many gold fronts?
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