Mr Immaculate Driveway

One of the things that I like about living here, is the lack of neighbours. There are only four houses on our street. That and a really big field. I pretty much went off neighbours the past year before I moved here. There were very spesific reasons for this.

For example, there was the Big Orange. For those of you who are new around here, the Big Orange was my landlord who had some… issues. To put it gently. After I pretty much escaped from my apartment (due to Big Orange being crazy and all), I ended up living across the street from Mr Immaculate Driveway.

Just like Big Orange needed his lawn mowed at the exact same time every Wednesday, Mr Immaculate Driveway needed his driveway CLEAN. Every single morning, afternoon and evening he would hose it down thoroughly. This would take from 20 minutes up to an hour and gawd only knows how much water. The black concrete would glisten. He also wanted to have walls of pretty masonry lining it. This is why he decided to hire a small army of pollacks to make his dream come true. That’s what people do in the ol’ country when they want carpeting or such done cheaply; they hire pollacks. Summer is high season for these things. Usually they get what they pay for.

The Pollack army arrived at the same time as summer vacation. I don’t think there’s anything quite as grinding as the sound of masonry. After a while, those buzz-saws start to feel as if they’re physically cutting into your brain. It certainly took all the fun out of sitting out in the sun. The enormous cloud of dust that they generated also did it’s part to spoil the mood. For the first couple of weeks, they would start working at 8am and keep going until 9pm, Monday through Saturday.

At some point during the hiring process, Mr Immaculate Driveway should have asked his new staff a question along the lines of: “would any of you happen to be masons?”

The answer would have been: “Not so much.”

Mistakes were made. Lots of them. That lead to the workers to keep working until past ten in the evening. This lasted for five weeks. I’m amazed that nobody tried to kill the guy. He would have come second to Hitler in a popularity contest.

Mr Immaculate Driveway had bigger concerns. His property was covered in stone dust. His beloved driveway rapidly turned a dirty sort of grey, despite a vigorous hosing routine. At first he tried to hose it down regularly, while the pollacks were working. That didn’t work, so as soon as the lads knocked off for the evening, he resorted to giving it a cleaning unlike anything it had ever seen before. He would put the hose away once it started to get dark.

The only time during those five weeks that we had a quiet day (other than Sunday), was that Saturday when it rained. I stood in the window, hugging my cup of coffee, watching Mr I.D. He was out in the rain with an enormous red and yellow umbrella, hosing down the driveway.

Can’t say I miss him.

Picture: "hosing down" by Ellabll for deviantart.

Ho, ho, frikkin ho!

’Tis the season to be… well… running around like a frenzied chicken while you try to figure out who you still need to buy presents for and what the hell you should get those people. Not to mention wrapping the things and shipping them off while there’s still a snowballs chance in hell that they’ll get to where they’re going in time. I think that date passed sometime last week.

All this you have to do accompanied by the sound of cheery Christmas music and cheery Christmas lights and santas of all shapes and sizes yelling “ho, ho, ho” at you. This is the only time of the year when a man can get away with shouting that after a gal without getting pummelled by either her handbag or her boyfriend. You also have to tolerate the presence of screaming two-year, who are all out in force during the holiday season.

There was an interview in the paper the other day with a reverend something-or-other who was upset that the purpose of Christmas had gotten lost somewhere along the way. Most likely, somewhere along the way to the mall. Santa, he said, was clearly a false idol and he wanted everyone to explain to their children that Santa was a false god who made people sick and broke apart happy homes. That’s what he taught his own children when they were growing up.

I’m sure his kids could throw a tantrum to dwarf all other tantrums in the history of tantrums, both past and future, whenever you took them to the mall with all its Christmassy decorations. A few years back, my mum decided she was a lesbian and so my parents got divorced. We had several cardboard boxes of decorations.

Anyways, I’m going away. See you all next year.

Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve been tagged. I now have to pick up the book I’m currently reading, go to page 56 and jot down the fifth line. Iiiits… *drumroll*… “It wasn’t nearly as easy to dance with Charlie.”

Fascinating.

ARGH!

Today I have been lucky enough to spend loads of time with someone who makes me want to commit murder. The kind involving axes and/or bathtubs filled with toasters.

Murder is the slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of murder: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether they fell by one kind or another – the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers. If I kill this person, I’m sure it’ll be either excusable or justifiable. If someone else does it for me, it’ll be praiseworthy. It will be to me, anyways. There’s a hint in there somewhere, you know.

I’d even get you a lawyer. One skilled in circumvention of the law.