"...And they'll say, Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..."

"...and they'll say, Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..."

I think even if I didn't have a family my neighbour that lives two doors down from me would still give me the heebie-jeebies. Creepy little fucker makes my Spidey-senses start jingling and jangling like a coked-up monkey on a snare drum. He lives with his mother. She takes the garbage out. She mows the lawn, she's probably seventy and he is at least in his mid 40's. I am pretty certain he's going to murder her someday, because this cat is socially retarded. He has no job to my knowledge. Sometimes I see him walking to the bus stop in sweat pants, wing tips, a sports coat wearing a baseball cap and a glistening leather Samsonite briefcase. He looks like a bus station pervert.

If a car drives down the street he thinks is "speeding", he'll run to the curb like an angry cop and scream profanities at the driver. He speaks to his dog, a Border Collie, like it communicates English a la David Berkowitz. He also kicks the dog and works it over when it doesn't respond back in English which pisses me off, he's just a loser. Sometimes if I sit on my porch he'll stare at me from his driveway for about three minutes before saying "Hi!" without moving a muscle. He's like one of the fucking aliens from Signs. My kid gets shoved in the house if I sense he's outside, I tell you that. He's going to be eventually wearing a mask that was formerly his mother's face, I feel it in my bones. It has gotten to a point where I'm "ready" for him whenever my family goes to the car. I want this freak off my street.

Focus:Of your current neighbours, which one gets under your skin or disagrees with you the most? What are their sins of your space? Have you had to go face-to-face mode (or worse)? Do your fellow neighbours have an issue too or are YOU the asshole?

Alt-Focus: Who is your current favourite neighbor and why?

 

Bump.

 

Focus: I don't really have a least favorite neighbor; pretty much everyone keeps to themselves. I do hate the assholes who litter on my lawn though.

Alt Focus: I guess my favorite neighbor would be my next door neighbor. She's an elderly lady who has a very hot granddaughter that comes over and does her yardwork for her.

 

My neighbor who annoys me the most is a hardcore alcoholic with a cocaine problem and is obese and lacks really any sense of morality. She once taught a 4 year old to say fuck you and then the kid went and said it to her parents and my neighbor audibly laughed. She also cranks the base when she listens to music which just pisses me off. She clearly has brain damage from her drinking and really is pretty soulless. You'll look at her and her eyes are just blank, there's nothing there.
She is simply the most fucked up person I've met, and that includes the borderline schizophrenic guy I know who carries a gun.

 

We just moved, and there is a crazy woman in the complex. She has a mustache, and she goes around asking people if the have a krona (about 15 cents). I think it is the stache that makes her extra crazy to me.

 

Focus: My most annoying neighbors are the ones that live right next to me. Their dog barks all the damn time. I can't go out and throw a steak on the grill without it barking its balls off the whole time. The neighbors themselves are alright. They just have that fucking dog and a shit load of cats that roam about and often congregate in my driveway. I keep waiting to feel a little "speed bump" as I back out one morning. There is a crazy Russian dude that stood on the street corner and smoked. He would always run over to chat any time I pulled into the driveway. There is also a weird asian guy that lives down the street. He wakes up at the crack of dawn and does jumping jacks and other weird shit in his yard every morning.

Alt. Focus My favorite neighbors live across the street. The kids are super nice and wave each time I see them. Their father is generally a friendly guy and I will occassionally have a conversation with him.

 

None of our neighbour are really that interesting. Across the street was a herion addict, next to him was an oxy dealer, two door away was a crack shack. They all kept to them selves, everyone except the crack shack kept the house/yard in a decent state. About 6 doors down in the other direction on the same side is me, the house looks like it is going to fall down, they got a junker truck in the yard, but it is normally kept not to bad. Couple house from that is a party pad/drug den for 18-22 year olds.

 

Living in a high rise the last two years, you don't really have annoying neighbors. My walls are pretty thick so I don't hear banging, though I'm pretty sure the neighbor above me last year had a dog cause I'd always hear things rolling randomly around on the hardwood floors above me. The worst is just people like the girl who lived on my floor I'd see 3-4 times a week or ride the elevator with and she'd never say a word and never respond when I said "good morning" or "have a nice night". She was either deaf or a bitch, likely the latter.

Prior to that I lived in a walk-up townhouse in this development of townhouses that surrounded a circular drive/courtyard sort of thing. It was 95% families so as 4 guys in our mid 20s, we stood out a bit demographically. However, we were all employed with good jobs, took care of the place, and were super respectful and cautious when we had parties (at least outwardly). Most of our neighbors were pleasant and really friendly, including the guy down the street who stopped a break-in to our place when he noticed that something was amiss and the divorcee next door who used to go on baking sprees with her daughter and give us the results.

More to the focus, we had two neighbors that were awful, uptight fuckfaces. One repeatedly tried to call the police on my roommate for "driving through the courtyard at reckless speeds". Mind you to enter the courtyard, you had to make a hard right from the street, drive about 100 feet and make another hard left and we were about 5 garages in. Besides the fact that there were children EVERYWHERE when it was nice and I was terrified about one jumping in front on my car like a deer, you couldn't have gotten above 10 miles an hour if you tried without missing our garage. This same neighbor came outside WITH A LAWN CHAIR to supervise us moving out and analyze the amount of garbage we were putting in the dumpster and then when pulling out, we accidentally ran the Uhaul over a 3 foot by 4 foot section of grass, he FLIPPED out, said he was going to work on claiming our entire security deposit for damages, and then sped off and bought fucking grass seed which was sprinkling over as we locked up. There was also the couple down the street who always glared at us whenever we walked or drove by, presumably for ruining their bucolic community with our filthy bachelorhood, who parked a vegan/idealistic bumper sticker covered Chevy Volt behind their unit. One of my roommates was driving one day and slammed on his brakes/swerved to avoid one of the dumbass children running around and nicked the front bumper. The wife came out and was flying off the handle and claimed the bumper was close to falling off. After using a Magic Eraser, one could scarcely see the scrape/scratch. They got a repair quote for $650 fucking dollars. My roommate asked if they could get a second quote at his Chevy mechanic (as he drove a Trailblazer)...that quote was $150. Needless to say they were assholes.

It was a great apartment. 4 bedrooms, 2 floors plus a finished basement, a sizeable rooftop deck and THICK walls and noiseproofing so we could have 40 people over and you wouldn't know it outside...that being said, I don't miss dealing with the shit we dealt with from neighbors in addition to our landlord being one of the most excessively unpleasant people I've ever encountered. But that's a whole different story.

 

My neighbors across the hall like meth but have been no problem since I called the cops on them a couple of years ago. They were fighting, she was shrieking for him to stop hurting her, I can't ignore that shit.

The neighbor I truly dislike is this asshat who doesn't walk his dog, just turns it out. He doesn't pick up the dog shit, which is awesome because the dog likes to shit on the sidewalk. The dog also likes to run at my kids barking. Last week I wrote him a rude note saying that since he apparently doesn't know there are leash laws, I would warn him. Next time I see the dog running around unleashed, I would call Animal Control. There has been no shit on the sidewalk since, so hopefully that becomes normal. He also parks in the fire lane on a regular basis. He just seems incredibly lazy.

I don't really know many neighbors, I am nice to the ones I see, though. A lot of people don't seem to stay long or they really keep to themselves.

 

Focus: None of my current neighbors have posed any problems. One guy across the street goes on the occasional yelling spree but it's not bad.

The absolute worst was a neighbor across the street from my previous house, which was in a neighborhood near the U of M campus. She owned some rental properties on the block for college students and when the house was up for sale a year before we moved in, she made an offer and didn't get it. She didn't like that. I had five other roommates and we were quiet, clean, and respectful of the neighborhood but she would always scowl at us if she ever acknowledged us.

The climax was her reporting our house to the city (because it was over-occupied as zoned) in an attempt to get us evicted. Shortly after we moved in, a roommate and I were getting ready for work one morning when we noticed her writing down the names we put on the mailbox. When she saw us, she ran across the street. A city inspector then visited and slapped an eviction notice on the door. We were one inspection away from having to find a new place but moved three roommates' belongings out of the house and onto a flatbed truck for a day to pass the inspection.

Alt-focus: Both of our next door neighbors are great but one lady in particular is awesome. She loves my dog and always asks if she can give him treats and shares baked goods with us too. Because of her multiple sclerosis she is around home most of the time and watches our place when we are gone. Pretty much the exact opposite of the bitch I used to live across the street from.

 

Focus: One of the houses bordering the backyard is run down with an empty (of water) pool that has mud and trash in it. The people had their four dogs, that slip out through their broken down fence, removed before and now have new dogs. They have a ton of kids, or maybe just have a bunch of friends over, and offer them very little supervision. I think, I don't snoop on them, two women live there with their kids. They are loud but not obnoxiously so, just the dogs barking when left outside. I feel like they've trashed their house beyond repair and some of the other neighbors have noticed this as well.

Alt focus: The older couple beside me. Great people. They are friendly and helpful all the time. I talk to them whenever I see them outside. They bring stuff over from their garden and make trail mix for the holidays. Nearly perfect neighbors.

 

I had a really bad string of awful musician neighbors for a while there. I've lived under a straight edge screamo band, across from a metal band, and above a dubstup DJ. (Also next to a few acoustic guitar players, which was usually not terrible, and in the same building as a saxophonist, which was actually really nice.)

Before my current place, I lived in Bedstuy in the middle of a triangle of infamous projects. We lived next to a house that was falling apart and the old, crazy lady that lived there never left. She'd sit on her front stoop and yell awful things to my apparently everyone on our block except for me as they passed by. I'm not sure why I was on her good side. We didn't see her for a long time and thought she maybe died in there, but thankfully just when we were going to report the possibility to the cops she randomly appeared again. There was also a crazy junkie, whose most famous moments included responding to my roommate with "Shoot me, just shoot me in the fucking heart" when she said hello, wandering into the laundromat and whispering to me that "If I really wanted to, I could kill everyone in here right now," and me coming across him beating another guy with a folding chair. Plus a whole other assortment of your typical motley crew of characters in that kind of neighborhood.

I really like my current building because none of our walls are shared with the other apartment on our floor, so I don't know a ton about my neighbors. It's a building full of other young people living with roommates and we all pretty much keep to ourselves unless we happen to be on the roof at the same time and then will hang out. The other apartment on my floor has a Prince Charles Spaniel that they let me pet when we run into each other, so I like them. My upstairs neighbor has a squeaky bed and horrible sex rhythm, so I don't really like them. There's a group of West Indian guys that like to hang out on our front patio when it's warm and we'll talk about drinking, so I like them. I also really like a lot of the people in my neighborhood that I've come to know. It's lovely.

 

Since I live in the country, I don't really have any neighbors. However, Li'l Bandit and my ex-mother in law do, so I'll write about them.

They live in an unincorporated neighborhood just North of the city (this is important). The neighbors they used to have were wonderful (I'll talk about them in a minute), but they came into some money and moved away. Since then, there have been several sets of neighbors from hell.
The first set were some drug dealing gang bangers; they pretty much kept to themselves, but their presence brought around all kinds of sketchy individuals, like people coming up to my mom-in laws house at 3am looking to score, but they were so drunk/high that they didn't realize they were at the wrong house.
After those guys left (I assumed they got busted), some more sketchy types moved in, and they were running a dog fighting ring. You would hear all kinds of blood-chilling growling and yowling coming from there at all times. My ex-wife called the cops to file charges of animal cruelty, BUUUT:
-because they weren't officially part of the city, the cops were powerless, making it a county issue, and the county didn't give a shit because:
-Texas has no statewide animal cruelty laws; that's up to the cities, and only a few of the larger cities in Texas have such laws.
My pitbull Dixie is a puppy from one of the dogs that escaped those assholes.
A few months later they left, presumably for some criminal reason.

Which brings us to neighbors number 3. This guy is a trucker, so he's gone for long stretches of time. The problem is his dogs: He never takes care of them. He'll leave them chained up with no shelter, no food, and no water. My ex-wife would go over there every day to feed and water them. Despite that, eventually the dogs die from disease or exposure. She's had numerous arguements with him over this, but he pretty much just tells her to fuck off and mind her own business. (Despite all of my ex-wife's bad qualities, she's an animal lover)
Why the fuck does he get dogs just to let them die? Does he get some kind of sick pleasure from it?
Anyway...

Alt. Focus: The neighbors she used to have were awesome; a contractor and his wife. Their kids were already grown and out on their own, and they were all around good people. His wife babysat my ex-wife and her sisters when they were growing up, and she did the same for Li'l Bandit when he was a baby.

 

I feel bad not having more interesting neighbours... or maybe I should be happy I don't live in fucking crack dens like half you people.

My next door neighbour is a pain. He's a 55 year old recreational pothead with a penchant to fix up his house bright and early on Saturday mornings. Incessant hammering and nailing, and he'd love nothing more than to talk about how "we" should do repairs. "We" should repave the joint driveway. "We" should replace the fence. None of these things need to be done, he just likes the idea of spending someone else's money. But I suspect these chats might have come to a temporary end. He just lost his job. For getting high at work. 55 years old, fired for being high. Reach for the stars, kids.

Down the street is Crazy Eddie. He's the old man who has the "NO TRESPASSING" sign on his lawn and who puts poison in dishes of meat around his property in case stray animals find their way onto his turf. He takes photos of every car on the street, calls the police at least three times a week to complain about noises that no one else hears, and (I shit you not) has lined the toque he wears year-round with tin foil. Why the fuck he hasn't been institutionalized, I don't know.

 

I am the quiet neighbor that doesn't want to talk to or meet any of his neighbors. The way I see it, I am a perfect neighbor. We keep to ourselves, we're never loud or obnoxious, and I keep my lawn mowed and my place looking good.

That said, we have a neighbor across the street that is OCD (at the least). A few details:

1) He will mow his lawn no less than six times a week. A few times he has mowed his lawn multiple times in a given day. It is essentially dirt at this point, but he'll be out there mowing anyway. His wife will then SCREAM at him from their window to "put that fucking lawn mower away already!" This happens once a week or so, as well.

2) When not mowing his grass? He'll mow his driveway. No shit, he'll mow the little patches of grass that are growing in the cracks of his driveway. The ones that most normal people just spray with weed killer to get rid of. He'll mow that shit.

3) He will mow his neighbor's lawns, with or without them asking or their knowledge. He pulled this shit with me a couple of times before I told him to back off, because again, he mows down to the dirt and it looks like shit. He has had both his neighbors call the police on him for trespassing for mowing their lawns.

4) He'll mow what I call his "passive aggressive" strip. He'll walk down the entire block, both sides of the road, and just mow a one-inch sliver of every single yard, as if to say "This is how low you should be cutting your grass!" He'll do it to my yard, but then deny it. I never catch him because he knows when I'm not home.

5) He never goes in his house. He sits in his garage, where he has a TV and an office chair set up, and he sits out there. I guess he just really hates his wife (who, by the way, is the only person that works). We'll also catch him staring at our house creepily, to the point where we don't open our front curtains very often anymore. I also think he has memorized the comings and goings of his neighbors so he knows when it is safe to mow their lawns or run his passive aggressive run.

6) They've had the police at their house 5 times in the past two years. Those two aforementioned trespassing calls, and for screaming his head off at his wife and kid.

I can't wait til they move.

 

Although not a current neighbor, she is my most memorable. We built our old house and they were a married older couple, each on their second marriage. They seemed normal at first, but as time went on we realized that wasn't the case. Some of (mostly) her craziness:

1. Per our contracts with the builder, they were putting in trees for nice tree-lined streets. She decided she didn't want that, so the very night they put in her two trees, she went out and cut them about 5 ft up, then pushed over the top, so they were just hanging there. The look on the builder's face the next morning as he is driving by and seeing these damaged trees and you can tell he is wondering what happened to them, never thinking the homeowner took a hacksaw to them.
2. We had open space behind us and we were not allowed to cut down any trees on it. She cut down every single one of the trees and didn't understand why the township fined her about it.
3. We must have done something to upset her because we walked out one day and on our property line she put up one of those black construction fences that are about a foot high and used to contain debris with No Trespassing signs on them.
4. Her and her husband would have drunken fights out in their driveway where she would eventually leave and he would then drunkenly sway as he tried to walk up his driveway where he would take one step forward and about three steps back.
5. This is kind of funny. They put a pool in and they would invite all of the construction workers over during their lunch break. They would all be drinking and the husband would pass out. I look out there one day and he is just passed out on his side. I called my husband and told him if the guy didn't move in the next 15 minutes I was going over to make sure he wasn't dead. He wasn't, but when I saw him the next day he was all burned on only one side of his body.
6. Their relationship had a sad ending. He was actually an okay guy, just unhappy, so he would drink (story was he never got over his first wife who died of brain cancer). He eventually moved out and he got arrested after leading local police on a slow speed chase through town. It was Christmas Eve so his family didn't want him to spend that time in jail, so they bailed him out. Where he then proceeded to go to the bar, get drunk, drive, and die in a car accident.

She eventually moved and one of our happiest memories was looking out and seeing a guy signing the contract on the hood of his realtor's car.

 

I think I could be the subject of a bad/crazy neighbor thread.

A few examples:

In Mississippi, I was down on my back 40 and noticed my neighbor had strategically placed "No Trespassing" signs aimed at my property. I had never stepped foot on my neighbor's property. Until that moment. I crossed over the barbed wire separating our properties, tore down every one of his stupid signs, ripped them into tiny pieces and left them in a pile. Fuck you and your stupid signs dip shit.

Another neighbor called me at 9 PM after I had an impromptu shooting session off my front porch. "We're trying to sleep over here." I told him I saw a bobcat in my yard (I hadn't, I just felt the need to shoot the fuck out of my burn barrel with a .12 gauge.)

The same neighbor (I actually got along great with him) and I were talking one day and somehow the conversation turned to guns. He mentioned that I scared the shit out of his wife every time I started shooting. This left me confused because he spent as much time shooting in his yard as I did. He answered "I'm shooting .22's, you sound like you're firing off a cannon. Don't you own any small caliber guns?"

As far as me having a bad neighbor, when I was 22 or 23 I rented an apartment in Spokane, Washington. Every night my neighbor would come home at 2AM and turn on his stereo at a very loud volume. I found this highly distressing and annoying, but I put up with it for about a week.

One night I waited till he turned off his stereo and after half an hour when he was presumably in bed, I acted. I had a 250 Watt Marshall stack and a Les Paul. I started playing. Horribly. I would play 10-12 correct notes in a row and then hit very foul, off key, cringe worthy notes. I probably disturbed the entire apartment complex, which once again makes me the bad neighbor.

But that fucker never again woke me up again with his stereo.

 

My neighbors at my last complex were fucking awesome. We'd regularly go out and party together, or just stay in the complex and get shitty on the patio. We went to casinos, we had bi-weekly cookouts, I slept with more than one of their sisters... And this wasn't a uniform group of young professional types. This group included a 21 year old model, a couple in their mid 20s, a guy my age (32), a guy a decade older than me, a former IRS agent who runs his own CPA firm in his late forties, and a pair of mexican sisters in their 60s, plus others occasionally moving in and out of the complex.