weird kid

we had us a little indian summer here today. after a week of brr brr brr, it was sunny and glorious.

to celebrate, i took the lappy out to the front patio and pretended to work.

i would like to tell you what i saw.

next door to us, on the right, we have the Odd People. on the left we have dorje and john and, yes, they're pretty odd too, but in a good way. on the right side, though, we have some sort or garbage mutants.

they have the most disheveled house on the block by a wide margin. their fence has more holes than posts. their yard looks like arkansas. once or twice i've seen into their place when they've left the front door ajar. i shit you not it was nothing but plastic bags stacked on every flat surface, including the floor, as if they had just come back from the grocery and bought enough food for pakistan and hadn't yet gotten around to putting it away. all down the hall and into the kitchen, plastic bags.

except it was probably not food. i can guess this because of the piles of crap on their porch. games that are missing 48% of their pieces. half a bicycle. furniture that is no longer sure if it's chair or bureau. a stack of empty tins.

once, a few months back, a couple of women from some local society came around to help the woman of the house try and get things into shape. they dragged endless crap out of the house, filled up a few dumpsters worth, and then gave up. as far as i can tell, there nothing changed. it must have been like shining a beacon into a black hole to try and liven the place up. when it was "big trash night" a bit ago, it was very tempting to just drag everything on their porch (and the porch itself) out onto the footpath so the nice men could cart it all away.

i didn't. idiot.

the woman talks endlessly once she gets your attention, so we pretend to receive mobile phone calls when we see her. the husband looks like a pair of curtains that have been hanging in a pub since the sixties and which have not been cleaned. the son...

the son, today, was also outside. i could tell from the noise. at first i thought it was a possum or something. it was this "skrtich-skritch-skritch" noise that wouldn't stop. i put down my lappy and took a peek. he was sitting on the edge of the porch doing something odd with one of his mother's precious empty tin cans. he had his phone bud in his ear and was presumably listening to the rock music. he also presumed to not notice me, which was okay fine.

skritch-skritch-skritch.

it was a big can. the kind Milo comes in. like a family-sized tin of cocoa, if you will.

skritch-skritch-skritch. ignore-ignore-ignore.

then, in a dramatic upgrading of entertainment possibilities, he walks out onto the footpath and surveys the land. he sets his be-skritched can down and rolls it. he walks backwards ahead of it, as if it is some toddler learning to walk or something. it rolls straight for a bit and then veers off to the left. he harrumphs. he tries it again in the street. i stand up, wondering what the fuck he's doing. he does not see me. he only has eyes for can.

skritch-skritch-skritch.

he tries it again, this time directly in front of our place (which, by the way, does not look like a near-condemned disaster area). this time the can rolls bit to the right. i give him the head-nod that means "hey, how ya goin'?" but he is distracted by something that is not quite exactly where i am so doesn't notice.

i wonder what he was up to. i wonder what the hell it must be like to live in a house where you can't see the floor because it's covered in bags full of crap. i wonder what it's like to have parents who must be the most embarrassing people on the face of the Earth when you're a sort of pudgy, disheveled, grey kid. i feel a bit bad for him in a Patricia Hearst sort of way.

if i woke up one day and the entire house next door had collapsed in on itself, i would not be surprised at all.