A Neighbor and Her Fucking Porch

After close to a month of looking for a new place to live, and with both of our leases either already expired or on the verge of expiring, Joe and I were running out of options to find our new residence. It was the middle of a record heat wave in Texas, and looking for apartments and houses ranked below drinking beer and reading and sleeping in between work. So we put off the search until the last minute, and surprisingly, there weren't as many options as we'd hoped. And when we finally did start looking extensively, we experienced the frustrations that accompanies house-hunting. A place looks great but it's too expensive, or the price is perfect but it's too far from your work and/or civilization. Or it's a great price, great location, but the person who lived there before you had cats and was a chain smoker. The stars need to align on price, location and the property itself. Towards the end of the month, I was beginning to doubt they ever would. 

Then one day Joe called me and told me about a place that had just been listed on craigslist. He asked if I could call the number and inquire [he was too busy with work, he told me. Typical older sibling]. I did call. The woman who answered told me that she was showing the house to people at three that afternoon. I told her that I could meet her there at two-thirty, and that so long as it wasn't crawling with roaches, I'd sign the papers then and there. 

The house looked nice and wasn't expensive, it was located near the important parts of Austin, and most importantly, was in a quiet and safe neighborhood. Papers were signed. Rooms were painted. House became a home. 

One thing the owners forgot to mention when they listed the place online is that this house seems to have a firm grasp of irony. This new, supposedly safe neighborhood was the location where my car window was smashed and my stereo was ripped out. And the supposedly quiet neighborhood full of old people; it now sounds more like Tokyo in the late 1940's, when Douglas MacArthur and the Allies were rebuilding the grand city that they had firebombed into rubble and ash. 

Our next door neighbor, who I've only met once, is a sweet old lady named Ruth. She is no longer our neighbor for the time being because her entire house is under construction, or to put it more aptly, expansion; after all, nobody can live in a place where there's drilling and sawing and hammering all the time. And Ruth, bless her fucking heart, was so thoughtful and considerate of her former neighbors, that she decided to wait until everyone was at work -- 9am -- before she'd have her workers start the drilling, sawing, hammering. And then, after a long day of work, she knew that none of her neighbors would want to be disturbed by her little construction project, so she has her workers stop each day somewhere between 4 to 5 pm. 

There's just one problem. Ruth didn't realize that her next-door neighbors, the people who are a mere ten feet from all this fucking construction, work in bars. So we're actually at home the entire time they're working, and we're at work the entire time they're resting. And so each morning, Brogan and I, after working until 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning, are woken at 8 or 9 am to the sound of construction. Actually, it's not "construction" that wakes us up. It's the whine of a buzzsaw, the incessant pounding of a hammer, the "thoop...thoop" of a nail-gun. Those jolt us awake, four hours into our sleep. 

This of course means that we wake up in terrible moods.

I can't tell you the number of times Brogan and I have spoken about burning that place to the ground, but we've decided against this because it would mean that: 

a) they might start the expansion all over again [though I've proposed to keep burning it down until Ruth's funds dry up]

and

b) since the drought has killed most of the grass and turned it tinder-dry, there's a good chance the fire would spread uncontrollably and possibly burn down our house [which at 9 am, when a hammer is banging five feet from your window, doesn't sound like a bad trade-off]. 

There is an unhealthy level of spite in the peaceful neighborhood, at least in this quiet little house. We talk about renting jackhammers and turning it on at 1 am -- when we're at work. We dream of renting a crane and wiping the piddly little fucking porch off the face of the earth, and then smiling and going back to sleep. We wonder why the fuck Ruth thinks she needs a bigger house than the one she's already got -- is she really so ignorant as to think that a new porch, a new room will bring her happiness? If she's unhappy, she should talk with her husband, or go see the Colosseum. In fact, we pity Ruth; just as she thinks that all people work from 9-5, she thinks that bigger houses bring a sense of happiness, when in fact, they usually give you more room to feel empty and alone. And even worse than pity, we label her a coward. She left the neighborhood behind with a mess she fucking made. And like a cowardly general, when the porch is completed and the neighborhood once again livable, she come back to the front-lines, smiling and talking about how much work it was and how nice it looks. 

And then we think about our landlords. Did they know about this ahead of time? Were they chuckling quietly to themselves as we signed the lease, because they knew that in a month's time, we'd be living next to a fucking Home Depot? Are they sitting there, cashing our check, laughing maniacally?

We don't have answers to the questions. We just sit in our house and occasionally peer through the window. 

Fuck our landlords if they knew and didn't tell us. Fuck Ruth. And fuck her porch.  

The new porch, as seen from my window.