nobody is as mysterious as they think they are

So the new neighbors upstairs moved in tonight. Yes, tonight. As in, it’s 12:30 in the morning and they are still moving stuff. Shouldn’t they have the common decency to wait until tomorrow to do this, at say, anytime after I’ve woken up? I mean, it’s not like they started at 2 this afternoon and just had to get it all moved in. They didn’t start until around 8 this evening.

There’s just something about neighbors, especially in apartment complexes, that gets me. Maybe it’s just because we’ve always had such interesting ones worthy of speculation and analyzing.

For instance, in the apartment complex we lived in prior to this one, we had a neighbor who smoked. Now, he didn’t just smoke. He smoked. One could (and would) find him out on his porch smoking at 2 pm, 4 am, or just about any other time one decided to check the porch. Not only did he smoke, but he coughed. You know, the cough of one who has smoked for years. The cough that sounds more like a hack. Now, as a side note, if you know me at all, then you know I tend to make up nicknames for people. People I know or don’t know generally have a nickname, and I often refer to them by their nicknames. This neighbor was affectionately called Hacking Man.

Hacking Man wasn’t really a neighbor, as in, a person who shares a wall with you. His building was directly next to ours, though, with just a sidewalk between. Out my bedroom window, I could see him, standing on his porch, Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Often he’d be talking to a friend on the phone (although most of the time, he merely spoke to himself or anyone else who happened to walk by). He’d talk about the weather or how annoyed he was that his wife “made him eat Pine-Sol again.” He would say this any time his wife mopped the kitchen and “stank up the apartment.” I honestly don’t know if he had a job. He would talk about work, but when could he have had time to be employed with all of his hacking and smoking and inhalation of Pine-Sol? I rarely had the occasion of walking by when he wasn’t on the porch. He often slept out there; I could hear him hack in his sleep through my window.

Then there was Suburban Man. He lived a few buildings down from the roommate and I. We used to sit on our porch quite a bit, and whenever he would drive by in his ugly, gold Suburban, he’d leer at us. This was the rubber-necking, can’t-see-where-you’re-going-because-your-head-is-behind-your-neck type of leering. It got to be annoying, but we never thought much of it. Until the day that we were watching tv in our living room, and he drove by. He actually stared into the apartment, as if looking for us. We noticed that he did this several times a day, and occasionally, he would drive around the complex several times, so as to pass by our apartment. It wasn’t scary, though, until we started seeing him at random places. Now, they were all legitimate places for him to be, but it was still creepy seeing that Suburban wherever we went. Luckily, he moved shortly after that, and we never heard from him again.