Dear Luv Doc,
My next door neighbors have about five (maybe six? who knows?) children who are always outside screaming and fighting – especially in the wee hours of the morning. Their mother is home all day but doesn’t watch them at all. I don’t know what she does inside all day, but the outside of their home is a disaster so they always end up playing in my yard. I have seen the inside if their house and it is even worse than their yard. They make an enormous amount of trash and their smelly trash bin always ends up in front of our house on collection day. How do I get the trash men to haul them away too?
– Tired of It
Dear Tired, It is customary to tip sanitation workers for really big jobs. My guess is that kidnapping an entire family would be a really big job – and if you’re talking about kidnapping and murder, well, in that case I believe it’s customary to take out a contract. I don’t know what the standard gratuity is for a murder contract, but if it were me, I would be extra generous. Judging from your epistle above, my guess is that you’re not an overly generous person, and even if you have really deep pockets, hiring people to kill people is a very ugly business. Don’t believe me? Ask the government.
Lucky for you it doesn’t sound like your neighbors are meth dealers. I lived next door to some of those back in the Eighties. The smell of cat piss alone is bad enough, but meth heads get really strident and animated when their dealer doesn’t answer the door after the first few knocks … and then there is the late-night gun play in the front yard and the glassy-eyed people with rotten teeth and scabs who sometimes forget which house they’re going to. The worst part of it all was that my Cocker Spaniel would just sit in the middle of the living room and stare intently at a blank spot in the wall for what seemed like hours. I don’t know if that was related to the meth heads, but that was some fucked up shit.
You, however, seem to be in a relatively safe neighborhood with regular garbage pick-up and no HOA restrictions. Yes, you have some first-world problems, but they’re not insurmountable. Let me summarize: 1) Your neighbor’s kids play in your yard. 2) They leave their trash cans in front of your house. 3) They’re not into lawn care. Sounds like to me you either need a tall privacy fence or to pull the bug out of your ass and get to know your neighbors. A good start would be to learn how many kids they have and what their names are. Then you can say, “Billy, get the fuck off my lawn and go mow your own or I am going to tell your mother.” Either that or you can start dealing meth. My bet is your neighbors will be out of that house before all your teeth fall out.
This article appears in March 13 • 2015.
