Neighborhood watch

Ever wonder why man decided that living with other humans in a social community was a good idea? Because he took this decision when technology was not advanced enough to allow his noisy neighbors to play techno music at 3 in the morning!

When your friendly neighborhood Neanderthal decided that having his best bud share a cave next to his sounded like a good idea he failed to fully and completely comprehend the repercussions of his actions. Yes, they could now go dinosaur hunting whenever they wanted, or just chill out by the swamp at any time, and there was always someone to come over and play “Whack your wife on the head with this club”, but not in his wildest dreams (and they were pretty WILD back then …remember…we were still quite low on the food chain!) could he predict the outcome of his actions.

Ten thousand years down the line man has built skyscrapers that sore into the smog filled skies, converted alligator infested swamp land into sprawling gated communities (with a few gators still hanging around for aesthetic purposes! Getting your leg bitten-off is a selling point for apartment complexes nowadays!), and has even figured ways to make $600,000 for 1000sqft sound reasonable. Yet, the one thing he hangs his head in shame and cries quietly about at night, away from the pointing fingers and mocking laughter of society, is a way to get his neighbor to turn the volume DOWN on his stereo system to a level where a lobotomy without anesthesia causes less pain. Thumping bass from a stereo system and a good night’s sleep were never meant to exist in the same universe! The laws of physics need to be re-written and Einstein discredited for his theories before we can start to make sense of this equation. If the entire hullabaloo behind parallel universes is true then somebody got it all wrong when they relegated these two to the same one.

For millennia, humankind has trudged across barren, inhospitable land, journeyed across mind numbingly vast oceans, endured the searing heat of the deserts and the bone-chilling cold of the poles, cowered under the constant fear of death at the hands of strange tribal headhunters (looking to add to their collection), suffered from diseases that debilitated the strongest humans and left them at the mercy of the elements, ate the grass on the ground, drank water from stagnant pools, bit and crawled and scratched and clawed their way across innumerable odds, all in search of new, un- chartered territory, providing un-seen vistas and spectacular sceneries, to see the world as god meant it to be seen; in all its splendor and glory!.

Wrong!!

All he was looking for was about 100sqft of land where his annoying neighbor would not drop in un-announced on a so-far wonderful Sunday morning and start to bring him up-to-date on the problems he has with his bowel movements (with sound effects too…oh! how difficult it would be for you to imagine his pain without the sound effects! God forbid that he be so rude as to make you stretch your imagination that much!). No wonder explorers like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Neil Armstrong decided that decades at sea, away from loved ones and life as they knew it, or risking life and limb riding in a giant bomb transporting you across the infinite expanse of space, were far better than enduring another story involving the neighbor’s travails in the bathroom!!! I am also quite sure that most major discoveries of the past millennia were instigated by an annoying neighbor who drove someone to such desperation that cooped up in a dark, dank and sunless lab for months at an end, trying to determine the size of an atom using nothing more than a broken magnifying glass and imagination, was far less painful than having to put up with the idiot next door!

But wait a minute, it almost seems like there is a positive side to the existence of neighbors! Do we dare say that the life we lead today, filled with the technology, gadgets and modern conveniences, from microwave ovens to hot tubs, computers to digital camera’s, electronic alarm systems (which, by the way does not keep any of your neighbors out!) to electron microscopes, have come about by this deep seated need in an individual to hide his mortal soul from a fate worse than death we call neighbors! This thought almost blows me away. Repugnant as it may seem, maybe those nasty creatures actually do serve a purpose! Could it be true that every living being that the good Lord placed on this earth (including that freak-show-reject neighbor of mine), has a significant part to play on this planet? The months I spent justifying my neighbor’s existence as the price I pay for the sins of mankind, were they all in vain? Am I wrong, so completely wrong?

Hold on…hold on…wait…yeah…I take it all back…no doubts, no second guessing, no uncertainty there…I was right…I was right all along…

Its 3 in the morning and my neighbor just turned the music on again