wish you were here

Today is a much better day today, that is for sure. My run this morning was just perfection. And I got about 7-800 words in the novel last night, so today’s been sliding along quite nicely. I did some actual journaling last night, which I haven’t done in ages, and it was nice to see it out there in ink as opposed to a screen.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about my neighbor, Tom.

I just met Tom about a week and a half ago. Mind you, this is after living next to each other for the better part of a year. Because this is how Vegas works: your doors are closed, and you’re pretty much silent to your neighbors, because A) you don’t trust them and/or because of B) they’re usually transient folks.

Now, most of the residents in my little complex are a little bit older. I’d say the average age on my street has to be about 45-50. There are a couple of familes, a few solitary older folks, and only one black family on my street, who live next to Tom. They have kids who are sometimes loud, but they’re kids. I let that stuff go, because I was a kid once.

Now, Tom introduced himself to me as I was parking my car in my garage, which is already an awkward place anyway, because how do you escape from that conversation, close the garage door? He asked me if I was “the poet.” I assumed he learned this from my brother, who I asked to help me do painting on Tom’s wall while I was in San Diego.

(Quick backstory to that: when I bought the house, I’d bid just under the guys who own almost every house on my part of the block. Almost every house but mine. They weren’t happy about it. I’d gotten some construction done to make the walls higher, and for some reason, they wanted Tom’s side of the wall painted [doesn't matter what mine looks like]. I couldn’t do it because I was leaving for SD, so my brother and his girlfriend kindly painted it while I was gone.)

So yeah, I guess my brother referred to me as a poet, and that I was in SD for a writing thing. It was a little weird hearing that from a guy that I didn’t know, but I figured hey, he’s my neighbor, I should at least get to know him a little just in case. You never know.

Tom’s a pretty unassuming guy. He has a punching bag stored in his garage. He was wearing those bodybuilding kind of pants. God bless him. You know the kind:

Obviously, he’d just gotten done working out. I mean, not to bash on the guy. I really don’t care what I look like when I’m at the gym.But I was trying to figure out what he looked like, and it suddenly occurred to me: he looks almost exactly like Fred Goldman. No joke, people. Mustache and all. Made me kinda wished I looked like a famous person, but alas. Never to be.

Anyway, we talked a little about Sciffy, and astronomy, and I talked about Pittsburgh a little bit. The best part of our conversation was about how he used to live in this part of Arkansas that’s right near the Missouri border. Here’s how the conversation went:

Tom
They’re citizens of the great state of Arkansas, not citizens of the United States Government.

Me
Really?

Tom
Yeah, they still refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.”

Me
Wow. I’m way to Northern to get that.

Which made me rethink the idea that I really want to go to the Deep South. I’d have to keep my little Picksbugh accent under strict control. That, and, you know, not wanting to punch blantant racists in the face.