Wednesday, March 4

Why Married People Live Longer, Vol. 27

BIG Shirtless Roy, the lawn-care fanatic (void when it comes to raking his leaves before they blow into his neighbors' yards), middle-aged fireworks enthusiast, and amateur semi-nude model who lives catty-cornered from us was hauled off by the paramedics last night--pain and shortness of breath, but no heart attack, is the preliminary word--so that was our big excitement for the week.

Scary obsessives may remember Roy as the neighbor who dashed across our lawn one Yard Sale Saturday to berate an elderly couple who had parked with two wheels on the edge of his lawn (we have no curbs or sidewalks here in Brentwood Manor). Or as the guy who owns his own parking cones, lest he suffer any such indignity in the future, or as the guy whose party guests avail themselves of everyone else's lawn for their car-parking necessities, or as the guy whose obligatory, starts-at-10 PM Independence Day celebration features a couple hundred bucks worth of Communist-prisoner-made incendiaries lined up at the edge of that same front lawn so the refuse, embers, and flaming death wads wind up as someone else's lawn care predicament, and all of us can enjoy the sound rather than sleep. He owns dachshunds, too. In fact, a series of them, since they have the habit of dying of neurological disorders after a few years romping through whatever Fort Dietrick recyclables Chem-Lawn sprays on his grass each week.

So, y'know, we're not real big on pitch-ins with them. His wife is nice, though, so I quit giving the trash truck driver a sawbuck to let the right-side tires slip off the road over there after heavy rains. Especially once he started asking for $20.

But the arrival of paramedics is sobering, and last night's visit was the second in a row, though the first with the crash truck following and a gurney being wheeled in. And we're following all this through the window, intermittently, as neighbors will when there's nothing good on teevee. And it goes on for fifteen, twenty minutes maybe, which prompts me to say:

"Well, it doesn't seem like it's a heart attack, if they're taking this long."

and my Poor Wife to reply:

"My guess is an erection lasting more than four hours."

Thirty-two years, honey, and I love you more each day.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure we're not neighbors? You just described every one of the asshats that surround me here in East Bumblefuck, Misery.

Ivan G Shreve Jr said...

My God, that was hysterical. I will remember that line.

isabelita said...

Yuck, the guy is actually married?
We have self-centered, yet barbarian neighbors, too, and they have a dachshund which won't die, dammit; and a party girl daughter with a coterie of more than a dozen wannabe gangsta boys with whom she parties horrifically when mommy and daddy aren't around.
I wish a very small asteroid would hit their place...

Unknown said...

Well, although I consider myself equally as snarky as you, I don't have your courage; that is to say, 90% of the time, I never utter my snark. But, the moment I fell in love with my wife was, during an after-AIDS-walk lunch, when the dish originally set in front of her, the passing of which she initiated by virtue of its placement, returned to her after having been passed around, and whose original position on the table had been replaced by some other half-empty dish, said:

"Well, Nature abhors a vacuum."

ROTFLMAO.