An Open Letter to my Downstairs Neighbors

Dear patio vomiters,

It's been an exciting year between our two camps. So much has transpired between us in these 365 days. It seems as if it was just yesterday when the young Eastern European starlet moved out from downstairs, moved into her hazy and troubled future of continued verbal abuse at the hands of her equally intoxicated brother, and you took your cue as the successor in the role of our downstairs neighbors.

The moment we knew something special was happening downstairs came within days of your arrival. Who could forget the day C headed out the front door only to find that one of your minions had decided that smoking cigarettes in the hallway was not only an acceptable idea, but also followed it up by putting your butts out directly into the carpeting itself. Kudos on that move, gents! It showed great initiative on your part, without doubt, but it also foretold a coming year of wonder far beyond the mere damping of a filthy, burning tube of paper and tobacco.

And before long we were treated to the thunderous pounding of your all-night Halo sessions. Yes, while you were obliviously slaughtering other emotionally stunted half-wits in your darkened lair, our children were attempting to steal a few precious hours of slumber in their bedroom placed almost directly above your game/living room.

But all of this paled in comparison to the behaviors you adopted in response to the acquisition of your new dog. To celebrate this you brought your degeneracy to a new level. As spring hurled violently and without mercy into summer we discovered that your way of handling the canine-which-transfers-meals-into-fecal-and-urinary-bodily-waste was to open the patio door, and let the dog out, whereupon he dutifully shat and pissed his life away onto the summer-heated cement.

And then you simply left it there.

In the moist, sweltering Houston summer air.

The effect up here on our balcony, in our stairwell, was beyond visceral. It was practically criminal. The intense odor of drying waste coated our lungs and kept us holding our breath whenever we left the apartment.

And so we complained to the landlord. Repeatedly. And eventually you went out, and bought a hose. With your hose you sprayed it all into the garden beds just beyond your fence. And that was all you did. Just sprayed it away as though this somehow erased any sign of the offending waste.

So the smell persisted. Persists today.

And then you came up with your coup-de-grace.

As young, lost men you worked hard to develop a drinking problem. It was so easy for you. Perhaps it ran in your backwoods families.

And with this newfound skill you came up with a most devious plan. Sure you had a toilet in your home, sure there were a number of sinks. But what if you were to take your excessive drinking outside, to the patio, and what if you were to expunge the signs of your acute alcohol poisoning directly onto the patio, thus upping your douchebag ante so far into the stratosphere, no one would ever again question the depths to which you would stoop in your quest to be crowned the kings of idiotic, neighborly nastiness?

And god knows you had serious competition in the complex. Who could forget the exploits of the drunken, fighting lesbian women well beyond the ability to control their screaming and overly-excessive emotional outbursts?

Or what about the demonic children a few doors down who never seem to sleep (even on school nights), appear to have no guardian, and throw rocks on the sidewalk right next to our cars?

All a pain in the ass, but none a match for your asshole mastery.

And today, it all came to a final, glorious end.

Your coterie of depraved, dishonorable and utterly pathetic wastes of life (except for the poor, neglected dog - merely a casualty in this war), moved out today. Gone. Done. At last.

I watched as you carried your bedframe to the car, hauled your bile-soaked pink couch into the truck, and drove off into the sunset.

It's been a hard year for many reasons. Won't be the last. Could have been much, much worse. But after all was said and done, your presence below us, below our little family that could, beneath this home of people trying valiantly to carve a tiny niche of sanity in a sea of madness, has made it all that much less pleasant, that much more disappointing, demoralizing, and depressing.

So here's to you, total loser ex-neighbors. May your move back up north of town, to your backwoods keg parties, to your futures ripe with failures compounded upon failures, to your photoshopped fantasies, your You Tubed escapades, and your half-baked vanity plates, make you as happy as you can possibly be.

Just knowing you are gone has granted me a modicum of joy, for now.

But then again, I wonder who will take your place?