The Fence, The Prequel

The fence project Ken & I started last weekend is moving along at a pace you could call admirable for a couple of older folks. I'm especially proud of my work and chalk it up to having the proper attire - tool belt, sports bra, leather gloves. I like to call it the Suburban Commando Butch look. Has a nice ring to it, doncha think?

We have successfully repaired the neighbor's drunken fence and was rewarded with a plate of ribs for our efforts, which I thought was nice and even told Ken I would take back some of the bad things I've said about the neighbor, but not all of them. You see, the fence was built a couple of summers ago after an incident I refer to as the Wagging PeePee Incident. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning in July 2003, and here I was, having a normal conversation over the then-cyclone fence with my alcoholic neighbor who had already been slamming back a few brewskis, when all of a sudden I realised he was flashing me. Flashing me. Right there as we were having our normal conversation about lawns and weed killer and the weather. Flashing. Me. At first I didn't want to believe it, but there it was. He was waving it at me, jiggling it up and down as if were saying "Hey, how ya doin'?" I have to say it's kind of hard to change gears mentally when something like this happens. I mean, you're having a normal day and then something happens that's definitely NOT NORMAL but your brain just doesn't want to deal with it or acknowledge it. So it took me a few seconds to react to the wagging penis, which I did by saying "Hey! Put that thing up, will ya?" I then turned in disgust and walked away. So he starts yelling "WELL YOU SURE SEEMED TO ENJOY YOURSELF. YOU DIDN'T EXACTLY STOP LOOKING. HEY WHERE'RE YOU GOIN'? HEY, COME BACK. HEY, hey, ..." and then he gave up and I assume he went back to swilling his Milwaukee's Best. I walked into the house, totally mortified, and didn't visit the back yard for pretty much the rest of the summer - feeling, irrationally, somehow responsible for his behavior, as women typically do. A few weeks later he began construction on what has now become known throughout the neighborhood as the Drunken Fence which started leaning into my yard only a few weeks after it was hastily built. I myself referred to it as The Guilt Fence.

I had the satisfaction of telling the neighbor off a few months after the Wagging Pee Pee Incident, when he called wanting to know if I was "ever going to talk to him again." I told him he was just no longer a person I considered a friend and that if he thought that shaking his dick at me was somehow appealing, he was sadly mistaken and perhaps delusional. Over the past 2 years, In a classic passive-aggressive fashion, I've told mostly everyone on the block about the Wagging PeePee Incident, so his reputation is pretty much shot and now people just look at him as a somewhat broken-down pathetic loser that you'd best keep your children and wife away from lest he shake his ugly ol' drunken penis at THEM. This gives me a teeny-tiny feeling of redemption. Oh, and now I've blogged it so technically the whole friggin' world knows. So there.

I suppose I should feel sorry for this person. He is, after all, an alcohol-addicted man, younger than myself, who is dying slowly of liver failure, who continues to drink every day. He has trouble editing his words and actions and has been abandoned by his family, friends, and now his neighbors. His once beautifully landscaped yard is slowly deteriorating into a weedy mess. The paint on his house is beginning to peel. He is unemployable. But do I feel pity? Not really, although I would probably have been a bit more generous with my sympathies had certain things not happened.

So what's the moral of this story, kiddies? Here's two for you: Good fences make good neighbors, but drunken fences just piss off the neighbors. And Beware of who you wag your pee-pee at - revenge is sweet, my friend.