Get out of my yard, you whippersnappers!

I have to say this story is actually about what happened this morning, but I'm a sucker for back story so I am assuming those of you who regularly read my posts also have a fondness for random details.

I once had a neighbor who was a dumbass. (This should not be a surprise.) This particular neighbor had a bad habit of having himself thrown in jail. We will call him Method Man.

During his time living in my quaint tin neighborhood, Method Man spent a lot of time hanging out with Drug Dealing Neighbor. It was a nice relationship for them. I must add that like I have known Drug Dealing Neighbor for many years, I have known this particular fellow since grade school. I know his cousins. They all rode my bus at some point or other.

Also, Method Man and I are distantly related on my mother's side, through my grandfather's people. Not close enough to attend the same family reunions, but related enough to be able to count back to the connecting ancestor. However, I would still prefer to call him a former neighbor rather than a distant cousin. If I chose otherwise, I'd have to recognize my distant kinship to a large percentage of this county.  As it is, one of my uncles has recently begun dating Drug Dealing Neighbor's mother. So things are starting to look funny around here especially considering a neighbor I do like had married the former husband of my boys' great aunt so she started showing up to some of those family functions.

Now that I've vaguely outlined the familial issues abounding here, I'll move on to today's long-winded tale. Many moons ago, this former neighbor spent some time manufacturing meth as his income source. (Get it? Meth/Method Man? I crack myself up.) The situation was more than a bit disturbing. How is it that backwoods mother fuckers who never finished the eighth grade suddenly consider themselves chemists?

Apparently, Method Man became very paranoid about his illicit activities. Instead of forgoing production of a lye-filled drug that was very likely to blow up the entire neighborhood, he called the state Bureau of Investigation.

He turned himself in, you ask? Why no! He called and told the investigators that Drug Dealing Neighbor was manufacturing methamphetamines. Now, why you may ask yourself, would a man call law enforcement officials on a person he considered to be a good friend? Because that shit fucks you up.

Within a day or two of having narced out Drug Dealing Neighbor as a meth maker (though he wasn't) Method Man went to Drug Dealing Neighbor's house and confessed. According to all reports, he provided detailed information about the conversation and begged forgiveness from Drug Dealing Neighbor. Method Man cried profusely.

Now, I don't know about you, but if  a friend tried to sic the po-lice on me for something I wasn't actually doing, but was trying to cover his own ass, I'd be one pissed off bitch. Seriously, seriously pissed off. I don't think I'd ever speak to that person again and I may stick a potato in their tail pipe, because no matter how good a person I try to be, I can be a vindictive bitch at times.

Don't get me wrong, Drug Dealing Neighbor was upset. Agitated. Aggrieved. And yet, Method Man still continued to come over to his house and hang out. It's really sort of odd to see some sort of Christian forgiveness going on betwixt two drug addicts, but that's more or less what it was. One would expect a fist fight at the very least and maybe a shoot out for large scale anger displays. Drug Dealing Neighbor is just a good guy for all his stupid, illicit activities.

Sometimes shortly after this, Method Man was in a rolling meth lab explosion. (A rolling meth lab is simply a fancy name they give to labs set up in vehicles.)  The other two guys were blown to jelly bits, but Method Man survived with burns to his eyes from which he has largely recovered.

Method Man went to prison for a while after the explosion. I don't know why. He'd always seemed to be a bit of institutionalized sort of person. Needless to say, we went some years without seeing MM until I randomly saw him at a local church fall festival two or three years ago. (I haven't renounced my heathen ways, I just don't have an insane vendetta against churches or god.) It seems that Method Man finally found God in prison and it seemed to have stuck. He settled down, had a baby with a former girlfriend (I am unclear as to whether they married or not) and for the most part, gave up his indulgences. This meant that we went a number of years without seeing him in the hood.

Until this week when he began rolling up and down the driveway to Drug Dealing Neighbor's house on a four wheeler. "Ah shit," I thought to myself. "My peace and quiet is about to be fuckered five ways to Sunday." For the past week, there has been a lot of four wheeler riding up and down my driveway, but no spectacular displays of fuckwittery. Until today.

As I sat at my desk this morning eating popcorn for breakfast and working on my "novel" I heard a strange, high pitched "WHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRR!" emanating from somewhere near my house. My first thought was that it sounded like an electric screwdriver.

"Shit, is someone stealing the siding off my house while I'm in it?"

 My home is made of aluminum or tin or whatever and a person can get a decent bit of money at the salvage yard if they chose to steal my fucking siding.

I sat there another moment waiting to hear other possible siding stealing activities. Finally I decided maybe I was being paranoid because the economy is causing some unwarranted theft issues around here and went back to my business of writing offal.

In another minute or so there was a knock at my door. I gave up on the shitty novel and peeked out the spy glass. It was Method Man. What the hell?

Curiosity slays me so I answered it.

"Uh. I was driving through your back yard and there was this hole . . . "

Apparently, Method Man was going to utilize my backyard as an exit point to visit some friends behind the park or some such shit. There is an area in my back yard where the the little pretend fence has been for a number of years and their are no trees. Instead, it's just a bit of undergrowth thin enough a truck or SUV could drive over it with no problem.

What Method Man did not realize in the years that he has been gone is that my heathen boys have been busy examining careers in archeology and engineering through hands on training in the back yard. So that stupid dipshit, instead of knocking on my door to ask me if he could drive through my yard took it upon himself to do a general visual sweep of the area (with one functional eye) and deem it passable.

Had he knocked on the door, I would have said, "Yeah, sure. Whatever. But look, there's this big ass hole right in front of the area you want to drive through so you might want to be careful about it."

But he didn't. Subsequently, his friend's SUV ended up stuck in a hole about two or three feet deep so I carried him down to his mommy's house so he could have her pull it out with her truck. They spent a good 30 minutes or so tearing up the grass in my back yard and burning the rubber on his mother's tires to pull this automobile out of my children's excavation site.

(I don't really care about the grass. My neighbor's lawn mower seems to be nonfunctional at the moment so I can't cut it until I can find another one to borrow somewhere. I finally get a moment to cut the damned grass and I can't find a stupid ass lawn mower.)

I have to say it's the best belly laugh I've had in days. There is nothing like looking out one's living room window and spying a car jammed into a hole in one's back yard. I'm a horrible person and found myself very entertained by Method Man's description about how life was going along just fine and suddenly he found himself tipped over so far that he could see very clearly that I truly need to cut my grass.

Without further ado, here is a picture of the . . . accident. Once again, excuse the shitty fuzziness that is my camera phone.

(Also, that big pile of shit to the right of the car is not my yard. That is apparently the defining barrier between my yard and Drug Dealing Neighbor's yard. DDN has lived here 11 or 12 years now. I saw him cut grass once. It was an amazing moment.)