It seems everyone has updated their blog today but I. Similarly, I have tweeted only twice since I started blogging which is ironic as I used to tweet about how infrequently I would probably find myself blogging.... Tweeting and blogging and trying so hard to reply to my many text messages and IM's and online forum subscriptions and there's books to read and maybe to write, there's drinking and there's impulse purchases... Let me tell you something on this finest of early mornings, children; timekeeping is absolute hell! Hell, I tell you! HELL!!
I feel terrible, really, about abandoning my Unrealistic Dream Of The Day series so if anyone is reading this, we have a new schedule! It is now Unrealistic Dream Of The Undefined Time Span (did that make sense? I'm not sure, I'm very tired!) but rest assure oh my many imaginary readers, there will be plenty of unrealistic dreams to come!
Now, moving onto today's nonsensical drivel. This is a list of the families who live on my street:
Walsh(1)
Walsh(2)
Murray
O' Neill
Rowe
Walsh(3) *This is me!
[Vacant] Formerly Sheehan
Lennon
(I don't know their name, I call them the Newbs)
So, Walshs 1 are fine, nice folks really. Massive number of grown-up children, most of whom no longer live there, and a widow. Fine! Walshs 2 consists of one of the grown-up children, her own 3 children and possibly a man. She is a terribly nosey gossipy, and scummy woman but there's always one so I can get over that.
Now we come to the Murrays, a slow woman who talks unbelievably fast and frequently to absolutely everyone but in her defence, she genuinely is slow so we can move past that also, her husband is harmless also, and is not technically slow but is a tad creepy. We could describe the Murrays as being "lower lower class" folks and their decor can only be described as tacky. But again, we can forgive this.
Next is Mr. O Neill. He killed his wife. Yes, he killed his wife. He threw her down the stairs, everyone knows it, it is a common fact. He now lives with his sister and only leaves the house to go to meetings at the local Kingdom Hall (that's a Jehovah's Witness church/place to pray) and once brought some oddly large bones and asked me to feed them to my dog. I don't suspect they were the bones of his wife who he got away with throwing down the stairs, but they were indeed very large bones.. Almost like those of a large dog, I think. One of which he did used to have and the dog has not been seen for almost a year so it is possible that they were the bones of his dog though it's best not to jump to conclusions. I explained to him that my dog has a rare condition in her jaw and is not allowed to chew on bones because they will probably make her head break in half. He requested I prove this with a report from a qualified veterinarian. I requested he get away from my front door, or at least wait until my father came home and speak with him instead because my father is quite a large man and Mr. O Neill has the cold, dead eyes of a rapist.
The Rowes have 3 grown up children. The eldest is a very nice man, who recently turned 30. The middle child is an attractive and very talented artist of around 27-28 who has been a hermit for quite a number of years, roughly since puberty. Their daughter is 25. None of the children ever moved out of home, even for a day. Their mother is genuinely very kind and had breast cancer. She collects cats and keeps roughly 12 or so in her house, which smells faintly of urine. Their father is a raging alcoholic who wanders the streets of our town from 7am until around midnight, greeting young women... Creepy, huh?
Then there's my family. We fight a lot, my sister and I are frequently seen falling up the front garden blind drunk at the weekends, our music is generally too loud and we don't speak to any of the neighbors aside from Mrs. Rowe. but on the whole we aren't terrible, I suppose.
The Lennons are a single mother who is very frequently seen drinking cans of low grade larger and smoking marijuana (ha listen to me referring to drugs by their botanical names!) in the garden with her EXTREMELY low class sisters, her son is a nice boy who plays sports. Again, they aren't awful though I do try to avoid them because their pets are often neglected or dead and to me, that is not a sign of a good household.
The Newbs are terrible! They fight with their young son a lot and raise him with almost militarily standard discipline. His bedroom window is next to mine and he can often be heard crying on a clear night but I don't think there's anything amiss there aside from overly strict rules. They are, however, rude people. One day when out playing with my dog, I accidentally tossed a rugby ball over the wall into their garden and they refused to give it back, claiming I needed to "learn to take care of my things". To this I shamelessly replied "Go fuck yourself and keep my fucking ball if you really need your little victory!" because I will not be told to learn anything by an overweight middle-aged housewife, much less an overweight middle-ages housewife who listens to Shania Twain loudly in the garden while I sit above her garden in my second story bedroom window trying to write songs of my own. I mean REALLY? Shania Twain?
The point is that my neighbors are mostly townscum and wife-killers. Which is to be expected because we did move to this street before my mother had ever had a job and were thusly quite poor when doing so. Nonetheless, I hear these expressions about keeping up with the neighbours and it sickens me to imagine myself wearing, as most of the neighbouring women do, far-too-revealing clothes that are invariably a size or two too small. Terrible neighbours! Awful awful awful neighbours!
