Part 1 is available here.

Landscape Lady: “Well, the rules can’t be too harsh. All of our houses look like crap.”

During one of our board meetings, this incredibly accurate statement came from the cool landscape lady that lives in the park. The board is always trying to put in rules about fences and road-facing sides of structures. This never gets anywhere, as all our houses actually do look like crap. The landscape lady has a dope yard, though, and we definitely vibe. She’s honest, plain, and in this case, correct about the condition of our homes.

She is currently feuding with a guy that has been known to do some seriously dark shit, who lives a few houses down. She did something to catch his ire and now he points cameras and spotlights at her house. He has also built a fence out of legitimate refuse. Just broken boards, sticks, wire, whatever he could get. Rumors are that he works out buck ass naked on his back deck staring off. Into the distance. While I cannot confirm this, I have walked by with my dogs at like 10:30-11 p.m. and he had weird music on so loud that I could hear it from the top of the hill. It was like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or something.

When he lived in a trailer closer to my house, he did pump iron in his driveway at 11:30 at night while making direct eye contact with anybody driving by, but he wore pants then. That is no longer the case, allegedly.

This is fine, as HIS next-door neighbor, one of two scrappers in the neighborhood, also showed his dick to a guy that mooned him. Our poor mail lady was caught in the crossfire, and got the whole twig-and-berries experience. This became a big deal. Blue lights flashing and all that. At least we keep these guys all in one area. They’re quarantined to their side street.

This level of unpredictability is what makes this place breathe. It is what gives this place life. You never know what could happen at any moment. A cat could mysteriously disappear, leading to being mocked by the guy with the palisade. You could see an ass, a dick, a fistfight, all sorts of shit. I even had a dude walk into my house without knocking, blasted out of his mind. He wet himself in a chair in my living room.

As for the creepy cat burglar, his house near me is literally a bunch of sheet metal, so it was condemned. He was thankfully forced to move to the bottom of the hill, far away from our spot.

We have a lot of condemned or abandoned houses here. Within my eyesight are four condemned houses, one with a telephone pole laying on top of it, along with multiple lots where the structures were hastily torn down, leaving a bunch of sharp and dangerous trash piles behind. I live on the top of a hill, mind you. I only have eyes on like ten lots, and four of them are condemned. The whole park looks like this. There is a very stereotypical white trash feeling to the whole place, for sure. We have houses missing roofs, houses missing walls, houses missing windows, and more. Broken-down fences line much of the road as well.

We also get squatters periodically, although they seem to get rounded up and tossed out every once in a while. Honestly, some of them were very nice. There was this young couple that quietly read under the street lights at night due to not having power. I jumped the first time I walked by them at night. They just quietly minded their own business. They didn’t ask for or expect anything. They just existed within our ecosystem.

Speaking of the ecosystem, living here does have a natural beauty to it. I am surrounded by pine trees that go hundreds of feet into the air on three sides. This place has excellent bird watching, probably because of the many old, giant trees. We have mighty oaks and majestic maples. There is a brook that runs behind us, and some people have decks with direct access. This is a brook that is large enough at points that people tube down it. While only a few feet deep, it is awesomely wide. My own yard has a magnolia tree, five forsythias for privacy, a pair of young maple trees, and a rose garden. One of my trees is in the far back corner of my property, and it blocks the sun from that part of the yard for most of the day. The tree is along a fence covered in trumpet flowers and grapes.

Sitting under it takes me places that I never thought I would go. Good places.

I love it here,

JTC