Wild Kingdom

I was trying to sleep in today, the first of a five-day-off-work schedule, but instead had to deal with a doorbell defect — specifically my front doorbell had accumulated a neighbor which was attached to it, causing it to ring sporadically. The Beneficiary finally got out of bed and disappeared toward the livingroom, I presumed to answer the door and/or disconnect the bell, so I went back to sleep. Shortly she came back in and shook me awake.

"The neighbor says he needs you to come shoot a skunk," she said.

"OK," I replied and staggered out of bed. 

I wasn't awake, mind you, but am totally accustomed to some weirdness happening that requires me to get out of bed and go handle something that won't wait. These usually involve going to some dumbassery that people have inflicted on one another, and it is not uncommon for me to be halfway down the road to some shithole neighborhood before I wake up enough to be arsed to find out what it is I'm going to.

But something was weird about this one that I'd missed, and as I pulled on pants and a tshirt and stepped into tennis shoes, I mentally reran the morning so far and — ah, there it is.

"The neighbor wants WHAT?"

"They've got a skunk in their back yard that's acting weird, and they said it's not responding to being prodded along with a pellet gun. They want you to come shoot it."

Now, these particular neighbors live several houses away, up on the corner, and I literally doubt that the Beneficiary or I either have spoken a combined 20 sentences to/with them in 20 years. I'm not exactly a social butterfly. For my purposes, it's sufficient in most cases for the neighbors to just know that I'm utterly harmless as long as me, my family, and my property are not fucked with at which point I become unpredictable, and that I have a bent toward immediate and frequently permanent solutions to problems in those areas instead of negotiation.

This black and white, short-paragraph entry in their "Who's Who In The Neighborhood" database is more than enough for all of us to get along just fine, which, at the end of the day, is pretty much all I need from them.

I once tried to explain this to the guy who used to live across the street. I was standing in his livingroom telling him to get a handle on his dirtbag kid, who was a pretty heavyweight partier when mom and dad weren't paying attention, which was mostly.

The reason I was bothering with it was that I was tired of beer cans and tire tracks on my front lawn where the drunken little turd and his buds couldn't figure out how to back out of their driveway without crossing clear over into my barrow ditch. 

At any rate, the hairball's daddy told me I couldn't tell him how to raise his kid, and I told him I didn't give a shit how he raised his kid, or for that matter much of anything else about him.

"Let me be clear," I said, "I don't give a rat's ass what happens on your property. Y'all can get together for your weekend White Trash Yahoo Beer Drinkin' Jamboree and Road Kill Barbecue all-nighter, as long as it's on your property. Your kid can party and smoke dope  till he dies, for all I care, as long as it's on your property. You and your old lady and the whole fucking clan can get greased up and crawl into a big ol' stinking nekkid pile on your front lawn. Don't care. Your goddam dogs can roam the neighborhood eating random kids. That's THEIR family's lookout. I don't give a shit as long as they don't cross my property line. In fact, here's the headline: KEEP IT OFF MY PROPERTY. It ain't brain surgery."

This was generally effective, but there were a couple of minor boundary-pushing incidents after that which mostly involved their habit of just chucking their large dogs out of the house to roam around the neighborhood, which dogs tended to wander over to my back yard to hunt kittens.

After the first dog disappeared one night, never to be seen again ("coyotes" I opined when asked whether I'd seen it, which opinion was roundly derided as the dog was half-again the size of the rangy coyotes we have around here -- "aliens" was my second guess, after which they went away, and many suspicious glances were cast), the other was kept closer to home for quite awhile. But eventually they got sloppy.

The Beneficiary heard a caterwauling one afternoon and looked out in the back yard and saw an enormous dog appear out of our shed crushing a squalling kitten in its jaws while a momma cat yowled and circled trying to figure out what to do about it. The Beneficiary knew exactly what to do about it. She stepped out on the back porch with her 9MM pistol and blew the dog's brains out, then yelled at the kid across the street who was fixing his car to come get his fucking dog off our lawn.

The neighborhood's been pretty quiet since then. The across-the-street clan finally figured out they were not responsible dog owners and didn't bother to accumulate any more. Eventually the head honcho over there got tagged doing some totally unrelated stupid shit and is even now doing a really long stretch in the byzantine maze of the Texas prison system. The kid got older, got married, and moved away to be a turd somewhere else, and the matriarch, who continues to despise us, finally woke up and smelled the coffee ^[Footnote] and dumped her felonious husband. She eventually married a Deputy, of all things, with whom we get along famously even in the face of his wife's ongoing (but blissfully silent) annoyance with us.

All of which leads up to this morning. Apparently during our decades here, the neighborhood has figured out that we're (a) not bashful about killing dangerous and/or annoying stuff on our property, and (b) are armed to the teeth pretty much 24/7. So, for the second time in the last few years, a random neighbor has appeared at the door asking me to tag a weird-acting skunk. I've noticed no one else in the neighborhood gets these little visits.

So, I did. I do try to be neighborly when I can.

The skunk in fact looked and acted sick, which around here means a near 100% diagnosis of rabies. I waited for it to waddle out toward the fence line, as far from people and property as I could let it go without losing it, then shot it twice, once to knock it down, and the second to finish it off. He gave a half-assed squirt of skunk-scent and shuffled off to his next turn on the wheel without further incident. The neighbor shook my hand and thanked me and said he'd take care of the carcass, which dovetailed nicely with the fact that I wasn't going to.

The Beneficiary and the neighbor's wife, in the meantime, got to talking gardens, and The Beneficiary wandered off with her to look at hers which is now, two hours on, still in progress. I came back here to drink coffee and write this, since obviously the "sleeping in" plan is now in the shitter, and I figured I'd as well get some writing in.

There's probably some lesson buried in here somewhere. Damned if I can find it, though. We'll just call it a writing exercise, a "vignette" of questionable reliability and move along, shall we?

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^{[Footnote] "Wake Up And Smell The Coffee": For further on this concept, see every single "Dear Abby" column written between 1956 and 2000.↩(Back To Text)}

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In Our Next Episode:    SLM Protesters Aggravate Me At A Restaraunt For Not De-Escalating The Skunk Situation Before Resorting To Deadly Force And Find I Don't Give A Shit About Their Opinions, Either