It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood...

I am a living conundrum, a study in opposites. I'm one of the most open men you'll ever meet--there's no detail, no matter how personal, I'm not prepared to reveal to you, Dear Reader. Only two things stop me from spilling every brain-bean I have out on to your screens. One is the ironclad knowledge that there are things, many things, about me to which you would rather not be privy. (That my mind often resembles a privy is merely the most obvious of them.)
The other is my wife, Eva, or rather the suffusion of Eva that exists in my cells after five years of marriage. If the beans involve her in any way, I must check with her before they're spilled. It's not that I'm whipped. Even though she's at least as open as I am, it's that I value her privacy.
As, despite my own openness, I value mine: very highly. While I will open up right quickly to anyone with whom I feel comfortable, people shouldn't assume I feel comfortable with them and proceed to ask me nosy questions: depending on my mood, they'll get silence or more nosy questions in return.
I am not, to put it mildly, "neighbourly". I spend a great deal of my time indoors, behind locked doors and drawn shades. It's not that I have anything to hide...in fact, back in my nudist phase, I was apt to forget to close the curtains, on the grounds that anybody curious enough to peer into my window deserved whatever they saw. (Oh, wait...was that one of the things you'd rather not know? Sorry about that.)
No, I have nothing to hide. I have mild to moderate photosensitivity, therefore I am not a big fan of sunlight. The way I look at it, the sun is very much "outside" and it should stay there. Possibly related is a case of reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder--is that real? You bet...Eva and I are both afflicted. Only on cloudy, grey days are we fully ourselves. And yes, our curtains open up then, to let the soft and dusky daylight fall where it will.
At any rate, my desire not to upset anyone's private applecarts is doing battle with my un-neighbourly aspect right now. Having recently read Magazine Man's blog entry about his Crazy Neighbour gives me the determination to write about my own Really Annoying one.
He's not the first, not by a long shot. Back in the 70s, we were fully engaged in a Stereo War with the People On The Other Side Of The Wall (it was a war of attrition: we outlasted them).
The first place I officially lived with Eva saw crazies boxing our compass. Patrick upstairs was in the habit of letting his homeless friends crash at his place. An act of kindness? Perhaps. One of them took a prodigious dump and clogged Patrick's toilet. Rather than--oh, I don't know--plunge, or at least call a plumber, he proceeded to lay toilet paper down (TOILET PAPER!) across the lip of the bowl and close the lid. He then passed out on the living room couch. Oddly enough, the toilet paper had zero effect, and a bunch of shitty water ended up coursing down through our ceiling and pooling on our kitchen floor. Shortly thereafter, Patrick was found wandering around downtown Kitchener, stark naked.
Downstairs, a man who was maybe not crazy, but certainly annoying. He called the police over every little noise and we learned never to ask him a question unless we had a spare week to stand there and listen to his ranting answer.
Our next building brought, after a time, Waterboy. This fine specimen was in the habit of running his bathtub full blast for five hours straight--say, from nine at night until two in the morning. Anybody who's lived in an apartment complex can recall the way running water seems to amplify itself and boom through every wall. One night, after an endless, unrelenting cascade, I called the superintendent. "Listen", I said. "I'm sorry to wake you--I know it's two a.m.--there's a guy in an apartment that's got to be adjacent to ours. His bathtub's been running nonstop for four hours now. I'm afraid he maybe left the plug in and right now you've got an apartment maybe flooded waist deep.
Together, we walked around the building, trying to isolate the noise that sounded, from within our master bedroom, like it was six inches away. The echoes made it hard to determine, but we eventually tracked the sound down to the apartment next to ours. The super pounded on his door and after a time he came to answer it: a tall, reedy guy who nevertheless, in the manner of Crazies everywhere, filled me with fear. "What's going on?", said the super, drawing herself up to her full four foot three.
"I'm cleaning," said Waterboy.
"For four hours?"
"Yeah."
"Could you turn your water off, please? People are trying to sleep and you can hear the noise all through the building."
Waterboy regarded her, and me next to her. I could feel him marking me. Some night soon, that gaze said, I'm going to break into your apartment, turn on your bathtub, and start cleaning. Come morning, I'll drag your waterlogged corpse out to the Dumpster and there'll be one less nosy neighbour in the world.
Thereafter, I tried to avoid leaving my apartment during nocturnal hours if I could help it. Waterboy kept up his cleaning, usually once a week or so, but never again for five hours straight. More like two.
We lit out soon after for drier climes: our own house. We once again share a wall. At first, it was with a couple of terms of university students; despite my well-publicized fears, they were relatively friendly, the noise was kept to a minimum and largely, they kept to themselves. Perfect neighbours. Then that side of the house spent eight months with a "For Sale" sign posted prominently on its front lawn. Eight months, man. In the prevailing market, that equated to approximately seventeen point six eternities. We got to wondering what horrors lurked just beyond the concrete wall that separated us. Maybe everything was painted black in there. Maybe there were pentagrams on the floor.
Then again, maybe they were simply asking too much.
Eight months gave us plenty of time to wonder who was going to buy the place. We hoped for a young family--at the time, we thought we were months away from being a young family ourselves. More students would work in a pinch: any really bad lot would likely be replaced within four months. On the other hand, a couple of nasties might be lasties.
The man who eventually bought the place is single and in his twenties. He's also a handyman nonpareil: within a month of moving in, he had

• made a doorway from his kitchenette out to the backyard
• built a deck, so there was some reason to use the doorway
• put a hot tub off his deck
• built a little shack to enclose his hot tub
• put a gas furnace in from the ground up, ductwork and all

He did all this largely by himself, with occasional help from an older man I assume is his dad. And this is just the stuff we know about. For all we know, he's also put in three levels of sub-basement and an indoor pool.

Eva and I were fairly emerald with envy--the door out to the backyard alone is something we would really like--and something we'll have to enlist professionals to build for us. That in turn requires money, something we won't have in sufficient quantities for at least another year.

Occasionally his stereo is a tad loud, and he has execrable taste in music. But that's nothing we can't ignore.

He has two dogs, Tora and Titan. They're both purebred Dobermans, with docked tails. (I know perfectly well that show Dobermans are expected to have their tails cut off--but damnit, I still think that's barbaric.)

Never mind that, though. The thing that really riles us is that we're not entirely sure why this guy has dogs at all. They're certainly not pets. He hardly talks to them, certainly never plays with them. He hasn't bothered to housetrain them, or at least he's done a (pardon the expression) piss-poor job of it. And when Tora pisses in the house, he becomes enraged, yelling and screaming and hitting the dog with something or other, then throwing him outside.

This kind of behaviour is senseless and stupid. As I thought anybody who's ever trained a dog knows, you've got to catch them in the act for punishment to have any effect at all. Yelling and beating a dog because he pissed somewhere five hours (or even five minutes) ago will only confuse the dog. Eventually, he'll turn on you or someone like you. And a turned Doberman is not a thing to be taken lightly.

I've thought about calling the Humane Society. The coward in me (he's quite prominent) has so far dissuaded me. At some point, though, the dog-lover in me will take over and Tora and Titan will have new homes, damn the consequences. My neighbour's right to privacy doesn't extend to cover cruelty to animals.