Like a Good Neighbor

As I stood at my front window this morning watching sheriff's deputies and police officers wearing bulletproof vests and surrounding the house of my white-trash neighbors across the street, I was reminded of the anonymous letters I would like to send to each of my crappy neighbors.

They’re not all crappy, just a few. I live in an old neighborhood, and that’s why I love it. It’s comfortable, diverse, the houses are creaky with hardwood floors and unique features, and it’s generally a convenient area in which to live. Most of the people keep their houses and yards well maintained. There are, however, some rental properties. You can always tell which ones they are; neither the residents nor the owners take care of the property, and the residents tend to be on the trashy side.

Here are some of the letters I would send to my neighbors who suck.

Dear Neighbors Behind Me,
I hate your huge, ugly, bright-blue aboveground pool. It completely ruins the view of my yard, in which I’ve toiled to make a beautiful retreat. I also hate your little brats, who are in the pool all summer and are the loudest kids in the entire neighborhood. All of the neighbors can hear them all day long. And when you have all your friends and their brats over and blast the ’80s radio station all weekend, I think about putting the contents of my cats’ litter-boxes in your pool late some night while you’re asleep. I also wonder how long a drill bit I’d need to drill through that stupid pool and cause permanent, irreparable damage to it. Furthermore, when you let your brats play in the pool unsupervised, I neither want to listen to them fight nor listen to you come outside and scream at them to stop fighting. When they’re fighting and you tell them “one more time and you’re coming inside!” I wish you’d keep that promise.

P.S. The castor bean plants I planted to somewhat block the view of your ugly-ass pool are highly poisonous. I hope your brats eat part of them.

Dear Asshole Who Owns the House Next Door,
Guess what, slumlord? If you would mow your lawn more than twice a year, I wouldn’t call the city on your overgrown weed jungle, which causes excessive weeds in my yard. You might be pissed off that I called the city, but it’s evidence to what a redneck hillbilly pig-fucker you are that you used grass killer to write “cunt” in six-foot letters across my front lawn. You’ve put that house up for sale six times in the last four years, and the reason you can’t sell it is because you paid $58,000 for it and you keep listing it for $100,000. The reason you can’t rent it out to decent people is because you let trash crash there for a few months and destroy it, and when you can’t find any losers to live there, the house is empty for eight months. Some of your winning tenants: The woman who lived there with her kids and let her two dogs use the screened-in front porch for a bathroom. The dog-shit smell was horrible all the way over at my front porch. Probably because your entire porch was covered in dog shit. And I watched the little boy tiptoe to find the rare clean spots when he went to feed those noisy dogs. Or the hippie guy who crashed there for a few months and sold pot out of the house. (Better pot than meth, I guess.) Or the teenager who made sure to disassemble the air conditioner and steal the copper from it before he moved out. The two times you had quality potential buyers, you reneged on parts of the contract, so they backed out of the deals. Please list that house for what it’s worth so someone will buy it and I can be rid of you and your lousy tenants.

Dear Neighbor No. 1 Across the Street,
You’re nice and friendly enough, but you seriously need to do some repairs on your house. I realize your mother owns the house, but you rent it from her and you should take some pride in it. With the roof practically falling off, the paint peeling and chipping, the front gutters hanging off, and that cheap hollow-wood front door, your house sticks out in the neighborhood because it looks so much worse than the others. Your kids are quiet and well-behaved, though, so at least you have that going for you. (Update 9.26.2007 — I exaggerate not, dear readers. I came home tonight and this house had a sign in the front door that it is condemned by the city and unfit for human inhabitance.)

Dear Neighbor No. 2 Across the Street,
I haven’t met you, but you seem normal enough and like a good renter. I just don’t understand why you need to sit on your motorcycle in your driveway and rev the engine so hard it sounds like it will blow up. You sit there for 10 minutes just revving the hell out of that thing. Then you ride the motorcycle around the block — making sure to rev that engine as loudly as possible — and come back, sit in your driveway and rev the engine some more. One day when I was working in the yard, you repeated this four times. What the fuck?

Dear White Trash Neighbors Across the Street,
You are bad neighbors. From the loudmouth always-drunk guy who lived with you when you first moved in to your loud mouths yelling “FUCK!” all the time outside — in the presence of your 1- or 2-year-old kid, as well as the neighborhood kids. Bet I can guess what the kid’s first word was. Do you always have to fight and yell outside? Can’t you do it inside the house? And lady, your husband is an ass — for more reasons than he makes you mow the lawn while he relaxes inside. By the way, the giant American flag you have hanging on your front porch is backwards, hillbillies. I’m just wondering why all the police and sheriff's deputies surrounded your house this morning.

Global Warming — So What?

I realize that this might piss off many people: I don’t really care about global warming.

I know. I’m a horrible person. I should be calculating my carbon and water usage footprints and how much I contribute to pollution. I should be recycling everything, and I should feel guilty about my part in destroying the earth.

I gave up nonsensical guilt when I gave up Catholocism 20 years ago. Global warming is merely the hot topic right now, and Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth helped bump the topic up a few notches. Everyone’s supposed to be concerned, and if you aren’t you’re an irresponsible glutton. So everyone says they care about global warming because it’s chic and they want to seem like they care about humanity.

I don’t believe all the global warming hype for the same reason I don’t believe in a “God”; I believe in science — cold, hard facts that can be proven and hypotheses with evidence to support them. And the scientific fact of global warming is that it can’t be scientifically proven. Even the scientists say so.

I understand how humans might be responsible for global warming. However, I also understand that this planet has undergone ice ages, droughts, meteors, asteroids and more. At one point all seven continents were connected in a super-continent called Pangaea. Who’s to say that the minute amount the earth’s temperature has risen isn’t just part of the planet’s evolution? We act as though it would be the end of the world if we were all wiped off the planet, but historically, that’s pretty normal. Remember the dinosaurs?

If “global warming” is indeed part of the planet’s evolution, then there’s nothing we can do about it. You can refrain from flushing your toilets (“if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down”), you can carpool, you can recycle every single thing you use — it’s all for naught and your toilet will be gross.

By the time global warming has a devastating effect on the earth, we and our children will all be long gone. Sure, that sounds self-centered, and many readers care about furthering humanity and all that stuff. But an evolutional phase is beyond our control. I’m sure the dinosaurs would have liked to continue their lives, but alas, they didn’t really have a choice.

If global melting continues, the glaciers will melt and sea level will rise, putting some low-altitude areas underwater. This wouldn’t be the first time such an event happened in the earth’s history. Those who are genuinely concerned might consider leaving places like parts of Florida (if you’re stupid enough to still live there after all the hurricanes) and California. But I don’t see those people flocking to good ol’ Nebraska, safely in the middle of the country, so that makes me think they don’t really take global warming seriously after all.

Really, what’s the point of putting forth all these efforts to stop global warming when the only way they will make a difference is if the entire world actually made the same efforts? A small group of people making all this effort is nice, but it’s not effective.

I do what I can to be kind to the earth. I recycle plastic, food and drink cans, and paper. I donate things to Goodwill rather than throw them in the garbage. If I lived in a city with good public transportation, I would never drive a car. The car I do drive is small and gets great gas mileage. I don’t run my heat or air conditioning unless the weather demands it. Oh, yeah, and I don’t have any kids adding to the overpopulation of the planet, which should be considered as much of a problem as global warming. But we don’t want to infringe on peoples’ right to breed, do we?

If people love the earth and humanity so much, then there are issues that they can improve in the here and now. Like deforestation. We’re ridding the earth of its forests so we can build more condos. Maybe that act is disrupting the planet’s balance and contributing to global warming. World hunger is still an imminent problem globally, but it’s not the chic topic of the day, so we don’t really care about all those starving people any more. As I mentioned before, overpopulation is also a global problem. Maybe all those extra bodies are generating the amount of heat equal to the one degree the earth’s temperature has increased in the last 70 years.

If people care so much about the death of humanity, then why aren’t they doing more to support HIV/AIDS research, testing and education? AIDS is a global killer, present in every country. The number of HIV transmissions has only increased year on year. Oh, but it’s just Africans and fags with AIDS, so no one cares. Actually, chances are good that someone you know has HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, 25 percent of Americans with HIV don’t even know they have the virus — and these are straight, white people, too, folks. Takes the fun out of one-night stands, doesn’t it?

Rather than worry about something that may or may not be happening and which we may or may not be contributing to, people should be worrying about immediate threats to humanity, problems they can actually do something to help.

Maybe none of it matters anyway. According to NASA, there’s a decent chance the asteroid Apophis will smash into the earth in 2036, releasing more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. It could take decades to develop the technology necessary to deflect the 390-meter-wide asteroid, and scientists only have 29 years to go.

The Real Issue in the Craig Case

Ever since the story broke in late August about Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, the media seems to be focusing on the wrong crime.

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about the status of Craig’s sexual orientation. Is he gay? Is he straight? How would the Republicans react if he were gay? They can’t support a gay senator!

The issue, however, is not whether Craig is gay. Who cares if he’s gay. Whether he’s gay or not does not impact his ability to be a fine, upstanding representative for his state. What does, however, pose an impact is whether he’s cruising, or cottaging, for sex in public restrooms. Whether he’s cruising for sex from men or women makes no difference.

Nevertheless, the cruising part of his crime has been overshadowed by the part that he might be gay. And we all know that, at least for Republicans, being gay is a worse crime than trawling for sex (as long as the sex is with a woman).

Well, folks, Craig can be as gay as gay can be and that’s actually not illegal. However, Craig keeps adamantly denying that he’s gay, playing down the cottaging for sex. Frankly, I’d much rather he be gay than trying to get blown in a public restroom at an airport.

In a press conference on Aug. 28, Craig said, “I am not gay. I never have been gay. ... In June, I overreacted and made a poor decision. I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in hopes of making it go away. ... I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport. I did nothing wrong, and I regret the decision to plead guilty and the sadness that decision has brought on my wife, on my family, friends, staff and fellow Idahoans.”

Now in his statement, he twice denies being gay, and although he denies any wrongdoing at the airport, he doesn’t come right out and say, “I in no way committed a lewd crime or made a sexual proposition to the man in the stall next to me.” His denial of “wrongdoing” could be subjective: Maybe he doesn’t consider trawling for cock wrong.

Craig was arrested for lewd conduct and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a lesser charge. Later, though, he said he didn’t mean it. He claims that he only pleaded guilty to be done with the situation. However, he signed and mailed the plea petition. Furthermore, Craig’s claim of innocence holds no water.

First, if you’re accused of a crime that you truly didn’t commit, then why the hell would you ever say you did it? Particularly if you were falsely accused of a charge that was going to publicly embarrass you if you pled guilty. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense. Second, Craig was arrested on June 11. His plea petition was dated Aug. 1. That gave him just shy of two months to change his plea. But he didn’t. This does not sound like an innocent man.

Furthermore, Craig’s claims that his foot hit the officer’s because he “has a wide stance” in the loo sounds almost as infantile as his claim that the sweep of his hand was actually his effort to pick up a piece of paper (which the police officer has testified did not exist). What is he, 5? In fact, I think 5-year-olds can come up with better, certainly more creative, excuses. Never mind that Craig was performing the exact signs as those used for cottaging. It must have been a coincidence that he tapped his foot several times, each time moving it closer to the officer’s foot, then, according to the police officer, swept his hand palm up beneath the stall divider.

I don’t buy it. Consider, too, that this is not the first homosexual incident to which Craig’s name has been linked. On Aug. 28, the Idaho Statesman reported that three other men claim Craig made sexual advances toward them: The first stated that when he was pledging to Craig’s fraternity in 1967, Craig took him to his room and “made what the man said he took to be an invitation to sex.” The second man claimed that Craig cruised him in a store in 1994, following him for a half-hour. The third claim was from a 40-year-old man with ties to Republican officials, who reported that he had oral sex with Craig at Washington’s Union Station around 2004.

I think Craig got busted looking for some booty in the loo and now he’s — rightfully — humiliated. I don’t care whether he’s gay, bi or just likes a man once in a while. I do, however, care that trawling for and possibly having sex in a public bathroom is disgusting behavior and just as dangerous as the bathhouses in the 1980s, which largely contributed to the spread of HIV and other STDs. As a political figure, Craig should uphold higher standards of behavior.