Grievance

Dear Jackass Who Lives Behind Me,

I'm sorry we ruined your lives by moving five years ago. I'm sorry you feel like you can't come to us if you have a problem. I'm sorry you called the city and told them our door was out barking, "through the night" despite the fact that he is rarely ever in the year past ten p.m. In fact, I'm sorry you've made us so paranoid about the dog thing that we are afraid to allow him to spend the afternoon in our fenced back yard.

I'm sorry we aren't excellent grounds keepers. We can't afford help right now and neither of us is retired, like you, and therefore we can't dedicate five to six full days a week to yard maintenance.

I'm sorry you've never once acknowledged our presence, even when we try to say hello to you. That especially pisses me off. Because of the phone calls about the city to the dog and the never talking to us, I now feel basically threatened and intimidated by you. Congratulations, you jerk, you have made my mild-mannered husband stay awake some nights trying to think of legal ways to annoy you. Maybe the reason we aren't trimming that tree now is because it has become sport to piss you off.

Honestly, if our house were burning, and you were the only people home on the block, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't come to ask to use your phone to call the fire department.

The thing that bothers me the most is that your actions have made me feel entirely un-neighborly to you, so much so that I am shaking thinking about your latest stunt, and I am really not the type of person to get worked up about much.

Apparently you reached over the fence and trimmed some bushes off of a tree in our yard. An "improvement" that resulted in an electric or cable line which is now sagging into the yard and across the patio. From our back room I heard wife fretting to you about this action, to which you responded, "Well then they should have taken care of it themselves."

Um, seriously, if you don't let us know it's a problem for you, how can we take care of it.

Now that your children (including the youngest slutty one who threw parties and left empty beer containers and condoms in our bushes) are all "out of the house" maybe you should just move your hoity-toity asses to some kind of retirement community so we won't bother you any more.

Having you living behind us makes me wish we'd never moved here.

You suck.

Your neighbor,
Constance