Bone In The Throat

As I’ve mentioned, over time my neighborhood has become “interesting”.

When Jerry & I moved here we were the most “Interesting” feature.

My little mountain town was mostly Mormon, very conservative, and typically had less than 2000 full time people. 

We had a police substation, and the hardware store sold ammunition. There were antique stores, several good places to eat, and I think one bar, maybe two, While the Mormons didn’t drink, the Methodists, Catholics, and tourists did.

This was a sleepy little town most of the year unless there was snow. Then the place was hopping.

Jerry had lived for several years in a little one bedroom cabin closer to the main road when we met. When we decided to join our lives, we moved into the area that I now live.

Over time, people have come & gone. The town isn’t as conservative as it once was, the police substation is gone. We have more bars, more empty storefronts, the hardware store doesn’t sell ammunition anymore and where the town was once decidedly Republican, it’s now liberal Democrat.

In a way, this little town is a microcosm depicting the decline of small town America.

As the 2024 election season rolls around, there have already been incidents of vandalization regarding campaign signs. 

In 2020 Trump supporters couldn’t keep a Trump sign on their lawns. That was when I first noticed this other factor I’d never noticed before. That there were a bunch of busybodies who knew what was best of everyone. 

Oh, there have always been those kinds of people, but suddenly there were a lot more of them and as their numbers grew, so did their militant behavior. 

Jerry in his way, was able to ignore them. He deserves his wings in heaven. He would calm me when I encountered these people which happened more frequently as time progressed.

I think he understood the danger, and what was triggering me, but he chose to see the best in even the nastiest people. Someone had to really push, to ruffle Jerry’s feathers. I, on the other hand, often am the proverbial “Canary in a coal mine” 

In our end of town, the police, firemen, and military folks that lived in the houses around us, were replaced by liberal and frankly impractical folks.

As time went on, there were several years where Jerry & I in our late 50’s were the only people clearing the snow from our road.

Where once all the neighbors on our street would help each other, now it was just He & I. The other residents benefitted from our work but never thought to say “Thank You”, much less get off their asses to help.

Fortunately, we got another neighbor who understood that two old folks shoveling snow alone was inappropriate & he started helping. Then a dazzling urbanite who’d moved into a house at the end of the street sold and the new buyers were a young couple.

The man works for California Department of Forestry in their fire division. She works for the county in some capacity and they too are out with snow throwers and shovels in the Winter.

Since Jerry has gone, they’ve told me to not work so hard, so I take more frequent breaks. I have to race the young man to clear my driveway. The sneak will wait till I go inside for a cup of coffee or to use the restroom, and “Boom” he’s out there with his snow thrower clearing my driveway and just grinning. He and his wife are lovely wonderful people and I genuinely like them.

All of this is to say that not everything is bad, but everything has changed. That’s the nature of life and living.

About 1/2 block from my house the neighborhood changes dramatically. For years, there’s been a crazy lady and by crazy, I mean full goose bozo! If she’s off her meds you never know what you’re going to get and sometimes, her mood and behavior are like changing TV channels.

She lives with a boytoy who’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I honestly don’t know if they’re still screwing at this point. There’ve been a couple women that he appears to be dating. He’s not much to look at, or have a conversation with. I assume he has other “attributes”.

He’s also not got too many teeth in his head and reminds me of some of the folks of my youth who came from the deep hollers in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. 

In Virginia, West Virginia, or Kentucky, he’d be right at home and perhaps prize marrying material, or maybe just the Daddy-Uncle-Cousin of half the kids in the holler.

There’s another guy, who moved into a house formerly occupied by a cop and his lovely wife, then a guy who ended up going to work for one of the government agencies with 3 letters, a big budget, and a lot of “off the books projects”. At least that what he told me. Both of these households were neat folks and good neighbors.

The current occupant is someone that I’ve always been circumspect about. Jerry, on the other hand, liked everyone and it was through him that I ended up dealing with Pete. This guy has always been a little off and time hasn’t helped.

He’s also a major pot head which I now think has longer lasting and more serious effects than previously advertised. Just as Alcohol on a daily basis can have more far reaching effects than having a drink or two, once every couple of months.

This is the guy whose cat and home I got stuck looking after while he was recovering from his stroke. This is the guy whose home irritated my sinuses so bad that I literally couldn’t stay inside the place for too long without being dizzy.

This is the guy who I was ferrying to his doctors appointments for a while before Jerry died and then after Jerry died I still got to take him to the medical facility. Even though that was literally the last place on earth I wanted to be. I did it for Jerry’s sake.

I knew if I didn’t do it while Jerry was alive, Jerry would rework his schedule and take on this task too, out of the goodness of his heart. After Jerry died, There were commitments but after that… I stepped away.

Pete is not my kind of people. He never has been and I’ve thought on more than one occasion that he was a toxic individual.

Now that Jerry is gone, there’s not much reason for me to keep this toxic person in my life and his behavior over the past 2 months has been ample reason for me to dump him.

He’s a very unhappy man. He’s a control freak, and the world itself doesn’t spin according to his whim. (I thought I was bad…)

People can’t have their exterior lights on in the early evening because it disturbs his sleep. Dogs can’t bark, people can’t use their gas leaf blowers. Automated phone systems don’t work for him, so he screams almost daily about the machines not working. (Okay, I’ll give him that one!) Literally nothing makes this guy happy except fussing and cussing about what’s wrong with everything.

I don’t want to be this guy! I choose another path, a path of lightness and happiness.

This guy is the ultimate Karen!!!

a.k.a. The ultimate Democrat. I know that sounds bad, and looks like I did this long lead in just to bash Democrats but I really didn’t. 

Bear with me.

This person actually believes that dogs barking a) can be silenced by him shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs, from the safety of his living room at the neighborhood. b) the dogs barking are some kind of sadistic plot directed against him. c) the dogs owners will hear him screaming about their dogs barking while they are at work. d) that all dogs barking within 1/2 mile are the same dog.

Any intrusion of reality into this delusion results in threats of calling animal control and the dog owners being called whores, fascists, & motherfuckers. 

He refuses to understand how dogs react to a voice they’ve never heard, right?

They stop barking, listen, decide you’re not their person, or a person they know, and start barking again. The cycle is repetitive, and Pete feeds it! By the time 5 or 6 hours of this has passed, well, it’s pretty exhausting. The escalating screaming, threats, and promises of violence are very disruptive and disturbing. Can you see where this is going?

It’s an endless insane cycle, human versus K9 and the whole dang neighborhood has to put up with it. In this guy’s reality, he’s making progress.

He texted me asking if He was the only person this bothered. I told him, “Yes”.

I explained that the most annoying dogs in the neighborhood were the chihuahuas right next door to him. I also expressed my concern that his swearing coupled with “bad dog” was terrifying Jesse and that it needed to stop.

He replied that he wasn’t yelling at Jesse. I told him, “Jesse doesn’t know that! All Jesse understands is that a human is cussing and saying bad dog.”

I explained further that I didn’t appreciate finding Jesse curled up at the furthest place away from the source of the screaming shaking like a leaf.

Not that any of that caused a change in the behavior.

The conversation devolved when Pete asked, “How we’d come to have this happening in the neighborhood.”

My response was a waste of time and electrons.

I tried to explain using examples that we’d been too lenient and in our kindness we’d communicated that we were easy “marks”.

That led to certain elements in the neighborhood continuing to expand their abuses. Trash, vehicles, trailer, stacks of junk, 6 or 8 yapping chihuahuas who start barking as a leaf being blown across the yard.

However, Pete chose to fixate on the specifics of the examples I used.  Then he started to tear apart the example I used, instead of picking up on the overarching point I was trying to make.

That ended when I realized there was no reasoning with him. That he was willfully missing the point, and when he said that Jerry had not seen what Jerry had in fact seen and that I too had seen, regarding a video recording showing a neighbor taking things without asking from another neighbor’s home.

Then after Pete said Jerry was essentially an idiot, and that the neighbors who had been stolen from were pigs… For calling the police? For demanding that the thief neighbor remove a dead vehicle from their property? 

So they were the bad guys… WTF?

He then told me that I wasn’t allowed to speak “Incorrect” things about what’s going on in the neighborhood and then leave the conversation.

Excuse me? Supposedly I was obliged to be corrected by his (questionable) wisdom. I’m not allowed to choose what is of value to me? Which conversations I choose to engage in? Uhhh nope!

I don’t exist for you to use me as a punching bag!

Then I realized a few things. 

1) It was pointless to continue the conversation

2) This was indicative of previous conversations over the past 8 – 10 months. 

3) Every conversation devolved into a verbal knife fight and none of those conversations were worth the effort.

I was reading his demanding message on my phone and thought, “You know what? I’m just sociopathic enough that it’s really for me to sever connections. Family, friends, enemies, you name it. “

My response was, “Oh… I’m not interested in this conversation anymore. So please just stop.”

He chose that moment to try to bully me more. Reiterating that I couldn’t just say something he disagreed with and then leave the conversation. 

I said, “Really? Watch this!” I added his number to my “BLOCKED” list.

The moral of the story is this.

Toxic people take more energy to deal with than nontoxic people. Toxic folks, don’t deserve the ability to force you to live their misery with them. They’ve created their misery and they, as divas, try to suck others into that misery for the sake of getting attention.

Make your life better by Jettisoning the chronically toxic, people who are using you because they cause you harm. None of us have any obligation to coddle these folks.

Spend that energy on good folks who are kind and lovable. The return is that you’ll be treated kindly and loved in return. 

You’ll be happier.