Yesterday was quieter than it’s been in months. Not a peep from next door or the dog.

I’m working on my story now before it gets noisy with the barking. The weekend’s over, so it’s company time. I’ll blast off and do some singing just as soon as I hear from the dog. The first time should be around 8:00 or 9:00. I know it was out for an hour and a half yesterday morning, but I never heard it. She doesn’t do company on weekends, though. If it isn’t the cats, it’s the company that stirs the fucking thing up. Just another few weeks and we can swap it in for car doors and whatever else may be waiting for us down there. The question is how many turnovers will we have to deal with while we’re there? I’m not going to like them coming up to the house to get their mail either. Yet we’ve got to be the ones to deal with it because the mail carrier’s too lazy to put their box on their own house and walk the few extra steps to get to it. I just hope they don’t make a big production out of getting their mail! It’s just that most people are so damn rude and inconsiderate.

God, if you’re not going to give us decent neighbors, can’t you at least give me a drug-free, good-looking gay neighbor to play with? Can’t I at least have that if I can’t have peace?

If I wanted to feel like God listens to me, all I’d have to do would be to get down on my knees and say, “God, please make sure we have one noisy neighbor after another, and please make sure his mother never gives a damn about us again, and please make sure we always struggle amid poverty, etc.”

That’d be a done deal!

Later…

The dog went off right when I knew it would, so the split, sick bitch got to deal with me for a while. Too bad she doesn’t have another puzzle to throw over here (assuming she did that due to getting fed up with the two-way noise thing we’ve got going and sick of the competition. You know how most people are; it’s ok for them to be noisy, but not anyone else). I later heard it bark inside its place. Meanwhile, the red pickup was here for nearly two hours, and now she’s doing the sun tea thing. Not for entertaining any wild, out-of-control company, I hope, but if she must do so, she’ll have to do it to the beat of my music. I just hope the animals leave before he gets in since the loud music bothers him at times. We’ll see. She’s proven she can make sun tea just for herself, so we’ll just have to wait and see if anyone arrives. Well, I don’t always have to see. I can hear. I’m amazed she doesn’t hang clothes out there every other day. What I don’t get is why the dog needs to be let out every goddamn hour. Does it really need to piss and shit that much? Probably so, cuz she’s probably stuffing it as much as she’s stuffing herself. What much can they do with themselves anyway but eat and watch TV? Food, TV and visitors are obviously their whole lives.

If I don’t get a win notification by the 1st, I’m gonna believe the last win was just to tease me into thinking I could win every month or two, and I’ll begin to wonder just how long it’ll be before I win again.

A few more hours and Tom will be seeing our new source of noise. If it’s any consolation to myself it’s in knowing that all neighbors, both semi-bad and very bad, are only temporary. We’ll keep moving, they’ll keep moving, and nothing will be forever. Meanwhile, all I can do is hope we get more semi-bad neighbors than very bad neighbors since we can’t get anything else. He may not hear anything while he’s there, though, and things may start off quiet if we do move in there like I vibe we will. That’s how it seems to work anyway when we move or someone moves in next to us. Things start off relatively peaceful. Then just when I go to breathe a sigh of relief and wonder if I’ve lucked out for once, trouble starts.

Coming to the realization of this lifelong sentence of noise/poverty has been really hard for me. I mean, I figured as much years ago, but there’s knowing something and then there’s knowing something. It’s like losing a loved one. You accept it from the get-go, but it’s hard at first when the final realization sinks in that hey, this is the way it’s always going to be and nothing I do can change it. I hope it’ll gradually get easier to live with in time.