Episode 49: How to Be the Craziest Person in the Neighborhood

I admit that I do not have the absolute craziest neighbors in the world. Some of them are odd in that way neighbors are always odd, like the lady who keeps asking me what church I go to (exactly how she keeps forgetting my NO COMMENT reply I have no idea) or the guy who has a twenty-foot-long yacht in his yard just sitting on its keel. It's been there for ten years without moving but this is the same guy who's always trying to start petitions about cleaning up the neighborhood and I never sign them because I think he should look in a mirror just ONE TIME. I also think he's the one that put all the anti-John Kerry stuff in my mailbox, but that's a different story for another time. And I have a nearby house or two where there might be a chicken...or at my hopeful best, a goose. And we did have a guy for a while who had a wooden cut-out of Santa holding an AK-47, which he put up the Christmas after 9/11 and sort of misses the idea of Christmas in almost every way but whatever, I guess.

But I am jealous of people who have a true nutcase or two next door. My parents did when they lived in California; they would just turn out the lights and stand in their darkened kitchen and watch the shenanigans next door, where it was like Cops or Jerry Springer every night. Hours and hours of entertainment, seriously, that would go on until the lady couldn't get another cork out of a bottle and would literally fall down for the night after banging into the side of the refrigerator one too many times. They finally moved away to Southern California, where all the crazy people end up anyway.

I do hold out hope for my new back-diagonal neighbors, though. They're circus-folk! Or carnys or something. There's a tightrope in their front yard, about five feet off the ground, and they have people over all the time, odd-looking but interesting (but not midgety or inappropritely-bearded or anything) who all jump up on the wire and start doing stuff. Jumping and looping and hopping and falling off and making jazz hands. They also have a bicycle built for three, which is just enough to start edging into crazy, if you ask me. I sort of want to befriend them because I do have a thing about circus people but I'm afraid if I do, other neighbors will see me and think I'm the craziest person in the neighborhood. Which might be what all this is about, now that I think about it.