Found My Open Response to Our Neighbor in my Drafts

Dear Neighbor:

I’m not new to SoCal - and thank you for abbreviating Southern California to keep your letter quick and painless - but I am new to living near you, and I just want to say…FUCK YOU. I’m sorry for typing my actual feelings instead of typing one thing and feeling another, but I guess if everyone had your grace and politeness, you wouldn’t have been forced to write your fucking letter.

I wish I could address my response to every member of your confederacy of “natives,” which I assume consists largely of stray cats and/or whoever delivers your groceries. Unfortunately, you forgot to include your names. I guess you didn’t want anyone to mistake your motivations. You’re not in this for the admiration of your peers, you just want the neighborhood to be perfect, like it was before everyone that now lives here lived here.

You say you’ve noticed some disturbing new trends. Faster cars, sloppier parking, hotter fireworks…I suppose this could be due to all the horrible new yuppies moving into these fixer uppers on this shitty one lane street for which they don’t have enough appreciation. OR, here’s an alternate theory: over the last thirty years, although staying in the same geographic location (congratulations!!!!!!) you’ve changed. You’ve become gradually less focused on the world beyond your street. Perhaps a lifetime of battles out there in SoCal has given you perspective regarding the breadth of your domain. Perhaps you’ve come to find, much as a young rich girl finds an eating disorder, that your only genuine path to a feeling of control is to “act locally,” sneering at careless drivers and picking up cigarette butts while you “patrol” this precious, shitty, hazardous one-lane street for human error. If that’s the case, more power to you. Spend the twilight of your life empowering yourself, not enough people do that.

But understand that nobody else is required to feel the way you feel. You’re entitled to nothing beyond the end of your driveway. Of course, you know that, which is why you’re trying to add legitimacy to your Scrooge-esque demands of the strangers around you by invoking local legislation and public safety. The “scary reality,” however, is that the government doesn’t give a fuck about our lives, they give a fuck about our money, and the reason we live on a shitty, dangerous, winding, clogged, broken down death trap of a street is because this neighborhood doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to merit improvement to its infrastructure. If you want “more sidewalks,” write a letter to someone that can provide them. If you want safer streets, ask your beloved masters, the creators of the faded, life-saving no parking signs, to add new signs or speed bumps or to widen the streets or remove some of the visual obstructions that make every turn a head-on-collision-in-the-making.

If, by some crazy chance, your letters to your Best Friend the Government don’t create results, try writing a letter to your therapist, or to yourself. I think the advice you’ll inevitably get is to focus your need for control on the things you can control - things that YOU do.

I was distressed to hear that in the event of a natural disaster, you might let me suffocate slowly under the rubble of my own home, as the ultimate “toldyaso.” Then I was told that our house is probably the most earthquake-proof on the entire block, because it’s obnoxiously modern and expensive, and that if anyone would be strolling up and down the street whistling with a shovel after the big one, it would probably me. Ol’ Parties Too Much. The good news being, I don’t regard natural disasters as an opportunity to settle personal scores, because it’s not 1989 and this is not a direct-to-video kickboxing movie, this is a real life we all share together. The bad news being, I don’t own a shovel. I’m also very busy, and will probably be sleeping on my sofa at work when you die. God knows I’ll be sleeping there when I die, too. Still. Have you seen Community on Thursdays at 8/7c? It rules.