Dear Neighbor

Do you know you drive me crazy?


I regularly wake to the startled yelps and pleas of your two dachshunds that sit like a mismatched pair of accidentally dropped clown shoes. Heel to heel with mouthy toes in the air, they face the world.  Without any sound, they could be cute.


Big Older Shoe then Little Skinnier Shoe crying out at every single passerby or neighbor's arrival, departure or mere visit to their own yard.  Walkers.  Cyclists.  Drivers.

"Hey! What's that?" 

"Hey! Wa-wa-what!"

"Hey! What? Who's that?"

"Hey! Wa-wa-what?"

When I take a cup of coffee to the porch, they nag.  If I check my mail, they bitch.  Even when I'm driven indoors and they can't see me, they see or hear someone and incessantly bark and complain.  At least a block's worth of dogs follow their lead in a panic: a shepherd at the corner, the pair of boxers at the other corner, the hound to my other side with his big old raspy Labrador buddy, plus the entire freaking menagerie of ankle-biters across the street.  Those are just the voices that I can identify.

I don't blame the tattered fuzzy slippers that have been left sitting in the yard so much, pathetically lost in the place they are supposed to belong.  

When the neighbor guy rolls out of his car at the end of a workday, the racket sounds and he loudly, emphatically claims, "Damn. You. Fucking ass-hole."  

He is talking to YOU. And I have to agree.