Bad Religion Had It Right

Sometimes you can't make this stuff up. Well you can, but it wouldn't be as good.

I keep repeating my mantra that my living arrangements are temporary every time I walk down the hall to my apartment. For the most part it's a serviceable place to live, relatively clean, decent location, no packs of wild monkeys roaming the halls. Most of the people are nice -- there are the families with young children, the young couples without children, the divorced parents with children, the divorced men without children who can be seen on Sunday nights standing in the lobby, waving at their kids as their mother drives off with them back to custodial rights land. Even a few senior citizens who obviously made some poor life choices to be spending their dwindling years renting rather than owning a condo in Florida.

And then there is my neighbour.

My wife and I haven't had much luck with neighbours. Years ago when we lived in downtown TO and rented a condo from a friend, the couple across the hall would make us up early on a Saturday morning by blasting East Coast fiddle music or the Flight of the Valkyries. Other times it would be in the evening and you could hear voices raise and maybe a door slam and on would come the fiddle music. Their thinking must have been 'the neighbours can't hear us fighting, they'll think that are chinks in our otherwise highly-polished armour that is our relationship! I'll fool them by playing the chopper sequence from Apocalypse Now so loud the neighbours at the other end of the building can make out the words! That way they'll still think we are the perfect couple... who are suffering from Vietnam flashbacks!'. This couple would also step on the elevator in mid-conversation, usually about a new book or a pseudo-intellectual trend backed up by a lame joke that would make a undergraduate Western civilization class professor smile ever so briefly. Since these conversations were at the most interesting part as they walked in the elevator, I could only conclude that they timed them out, counting the steps from the elevator to their apartment door, perhaps doing a few practice runs late at night when everyone else was asleep.

In Japan we had a corner apartment and the neighbours next door were quiet but the ones above apparently had children who were training to run the Tokyo marathon. All day long you could hear their feet run across the floor, back and forth, back and forth. Some times the older kid must have hit the younger one on the head and dragged his body around. Also the husband would come home late at night and you could hear him taking possibly the longest piss ever recorded, which is not something you want to be woken up by at 3 am.

Since our current apartment is on top floor (called the penthouse, though probably in jest) and a corner apartment, I thought that we would only have to worry about the neighbour next to us. How bad could they be? (insert shaking of fists at heavens here)

When I first met our neighbour, she seemed nice enough, if a bit loud. She said sorry for the noise, her family is loud, and her daughter of six was "a little retarded" (her words, not mine). As we were talking outsider her apartment door, someone made a noise from inside her apartment. She opened the door and shouted "shut up! I'm talking to our new neighbour, Greg!" then went back to speaking to me as if nothing had happened.

Over the last few weeks we've heard her screaming threats at her kids, laced with curses and expletives. My personal favourite was "Stop being so f*cking rude or I will smack your ass!", screamed to her kids one afternoon. I heard that in the hall, walking past the door.

I've also taken her parenting advice with polite good humour. My daughter can't stand her and will run back inside our apartment if she sees her in the hall. Admittedly, my daughter is very shy and doesn't like strangers, but I can tell she really, really, really doesn't like this woman. It might be the fact that the neighbour's regular speaking voice is a dull roar, and that she constantly yells at my daughter 'There she is! There's the shy little cutie!' as if my daughter was hard of hearing.

The other night I was taking the laundry down and there was the usual yelling from the neighbour's apartment and the husband emerged, slamming the door behind him. I've only seen him a few times (and have rarely heard him) but he nodded hello. We get on the elevator and a few floors down a woman and her daughter gets on. Then a teenage girl gets on and at the second floor a teenage boy gets on. They know each other and they start talking and the boy displays his mastery of the f-word, using it as noun, verb and adjective, all in answer to the question "How are you?".

The neighbour's husband, whose wife constantly screams expletives at her own children, speaks up and says "There are children present. Watch your language".

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