Jul 11 2005
Mom is still in the hospital, but it seems that the current crisis is past. My teeny, tiny reserves of niceness had long been exhausted, and my pitiful pleas for a niceness transplant were unsuccessful, so I decided I had done all I could do up there (mostly all I did was the least possible, and then complained about it so much that it seemed like I was doing a lot. This technique works quite well in most office settings, too.).
The relief of getting home didn’t last long. I made the unwelcome discovery that in my absence, a guy moved in upstairs who plays bad electric guitar very loudly for hours at a time, and moves furniture very incompetently, testing the laws of gravity to their limits at 2 am. All that’s missing is a colicky baby. I miss the pot-growing jazz bassist who used to live upstairs. True, his grow room did leak into the living room occasionally, and he sometimes wandered around in the courtyard late at night talking to himself with great animation, but never kept me up at night or inconvenienced me in any way, which is really all I require of neighbors.
I tend to be pro-dog, but the ones that belong to Upstairs Guy are, not surprisingly, as unlikeable as he is. They bark at all hours, and one of them howls at the top of his voice like a wolf baying at the moon. Creepy and annoying and apparently there’s an endless supply of howling and barking. I’m beginning to think that Jed, my brother’s Wonder Dog, my friend Phil’s dog Rita, the sassy Kelly’s charming Jazz & Ocho (bonus: they’re a barkless breed!), and the fabulous Candi’s outrageously charismatic Cheeto are the only non-annoying dogs on the planet.