Not in my backyard
Special odd fallacies in the dim light of the morning, make me question the intentions of my neighbors. I rose exceptionally early yesterday, with a hangover and a desire to settle down with black coffee and a copy of Harper’s. Maybe I could repel the morning cold with the tight arguments of the decent gentry. I didn’t own the magazine so I needed to hunt one down. It’s not a far walk to the the local book and periodical pusher, so i decided to hoof it. I had barely breached the front door when I ran into that damn british kid, my neighbor, obnoxiously darting about on our lawn. He was wearing his usual uniform of a Union Jack Football (Soccer) jersey and soccer shorts. Shorts. God Damn Short! It’s 13 degrees outside, I got my thermals on and this joker is fusing about in shorts. People in Minnesota who defiantly wear shorts way too long into the autumn months are subject to be voted off my little island. It’s just foolish. There isn’t even a glimmer of hipness about this fashion blunder.

I thought he was practicing dirty soccer moves on the lawn but it turns out he’s having a Fire Sale. He had moved all his furniture and possessions onto the the street and had erected these flimsy yellow ‘For Sale’ signs that declared ‘everything must go’. Oh if only this means that he must go too. Could it be true? Has he been deported? Evicted? Both? I can only hope so. This is the same guy who leaves hateful kindergarten scratch notes around the apartment and turns the joint into an Israeli nightclub with the worst Jerusalem techno music I have ever heard. Did you know that there is an israeli music version of The Police? Well there is and they suck. And they suck 50% more when I am trying to sleep or cook or do anything in the quiet sanctity of my own dwelling.

So it was that I was giggling gleefully about the Soccer Brit leaving my dwelling when just up the street I noticed a most peculiar sight for eight o’clock Saturday morning. Two grown men, bundled up hovering over a Weber, grilling burgers, beers in hand. On their steps were four turned over empty cases of Budweiser and smattered around the yard were empty lawn chairs laid out in a stonehenge pattern. Everywhere empty cans. Clearly, something no good had occurred here. Was occurring here. What the hell? This was the kind of scene that one expects to find at the trailer park or outside the Metrodome before a Vikings game. But what the heck was it doing in this little neighborhood at eight in the morning? Did the neighbors have to put up with this all night. Scratching my head and continuing on my journey I thought that, it’s really moments like these that I can almost begin to relate to that Soundgarden line “feeling minnesota.”