I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood, so I am sort of having to learn what it’s like to have passive-aggressive asshole neighbors. Unless, I guess, you count the year that someone poisoned all my parents’ dogs and most of them died. I guess that would qualify as passive-aggressive assholishness.
Anyway.
I got home tonight and the boyfriend showed me this note that had been stuck in the front door earlier that day.
I will transcribe, for the image impaired:
Hi Neighbor,
Just a friendly request asking you to PLEASE PARK YOUR CAR IN YOUR DRIVEWAY, NOT ON THE STREET. Lately, it has been noticed that your car has been parked on the street for an extended period of time. Although it is acceptable for cars to park on the street on a temporary basis, it is frowned upon to have one become a permanent fixture. Not only does it detract from the uniform tidiness of the rest of the block, but by standing out, it is an easy target for eventual vandalism and theft.
It is a well-known fact that “crack” houses, drug dealers, and drug addicts live on the blocks just to the west of us who have been dealt with by police many times over the years regarding theft in our neighborhood. On numerous occasions cars on the street have been broken into, resulting in broken windows, stolen car parts, and even car theft.
We take great pride our neighborhood [sic] and hope you will join us in our effort to uphold the safety and tidiness of our streets. By parking in your driveway, you’ll be doing your part to help keep our neighborhood looking great!
Thank you in advance for your kind co-operation.
Look. I don’t have a refined mouth but the things that came spewing out of my face when I read this letter upon returning home from my full-time, very professinal job at midnight were things that very few people in my life have ever heard come out of me. Because … WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.
I keep my property up. I love my house, inside and out. I feel stupid even saying that because it’s evident from the way I write about it. I take great pride in having a clean, nice-looking lot and exterior. I don’t get up at stupidly early hours and rev up a truck engine. I keep to myself. I don’t throw loud parties or play loud music at all hours. My boyfriend and I rarely fight. I don’t have annoying dogs that yip outside at all hours. I don’t light fireworks in the yard — front or back. I clean my gutters. I spend a lot of time and sweat in the spring, summer, and fall making my yard look beautiful, with life and color.
And then comes this chickenshit anonymous note, written in hackneyed passive voice with some obvious attempt at trying to sound authoritative and like a collective group that has given this Very Serious Issue some Very Serious Thought.
Dear anonymous neighbor with a printer and a half-cocked idea of how you want to run the neighborhood because you think it is your neighborhood to run: FUCK YOU.
This is a neighborhood. In a city, where there are lots and lots of people. And cars! More than one per household sometimes! We don’t live in quasi-rural McNeighborhood in Germantown, where each homeowner enjoys the spoils of a 300-yard-long driveway on which to park impossibly wide SUVs. I don’t have a garage. I don’t have a carport, even. I have a tiny driveway that I share with my neighbor. It fits one car per house comfortably. Which is why, now that my boyfriend lives here, he often parks on the street in front of the house. You know, so that when I get home from work at midnight and park in my own goddamned driveway, I am not placing my car right behind his car, which is going to need out of that tiny driveway early in the morning when it’s time for him to head to class. At school. Where he is getting a very important and not cheap education so that he can be a constructive member of society.
Otherwise — and we’ve done this, plenty — every morning entails me waking at 7ish (I go to bed between 3 and 4 a.m. usually) to move my car in a stupor so he can get out of the driveway to go to school, at which point I move my car back and stumble inside and try to go back to sleep, which never really works until about noon, at which point it’s time for me to get ready for work. Meaning that my day is completely fucked.
I’m sure, as someone who is most of all concerned with warding off “crack” heads and keeping the tidy uniformity of the neighborhood intact, this niggling detail of my quality of life is something you’d rather do without.
But you know what? I feel like I cannot express this point strongly enough: FUCK YOU. I know you are flying solo on this suburban jihad, I know no one else on this street gives more than a passing fuck about where my boyfriend parks his car from day to day as long as it’s not in their yards or in the middle of the goddamned street, and I wish you would get some help for yourself. Because your neighborhood power play is just sad and silly and belies your own neurotic need for control. Also, your “there are dark-skinned people I will euphemistically refer to as ‘crack’ addicts living west of us, which means you should keep your car in your driveway or else you will be inviting mischief into our pristine neighborhood” thing is just … ridiculous. No neighborhood is ever crime free, but you are creating drama where none needed to occur. Sure, boyfriend’s car has sat two, even three days (!!!) in the same spot on the curb (those times when we go out of town … which happens twice a fucking year), but just you wait until school starts back up! You’ll be so bewildered when you try to spend your day gazing our your venetian blinds, biting your nails and having a hernia/coronary over where our vehicles end up resting in and around my driveway. You will be SO RELIEVED when our cars move more regularly and you will be able to get back to the business of … whatever the fuck it is you do besides compose letters in the royal “we.”
There’s always gotta be one asshole who shits in the punchbowl, you know? I love my neighborhood and my house and this is the kind of thing that can turn a good thing sour.
The only good thing I can think is this: If the person who left this note is the person I think it is, I can at least rest somewhat easy because it’s the person I was warned about the first week I moved in. “She’s a busybody,” I was told. She will try to start shit. Dios mio, ain’t it the truth.
A car parked on the curb is not a fucking crisis. In fact, it happens at several addresses on this street, several times a week. Grow the fuck up and mind your own business until I give you something to fucking worry about.
Dude… she is something. I too have had my share of this crap to deal with. (See http://pinstripe.me/?p=497)Get a life morons!
Unfortunately, I think she is getting at the portion of the city code that doesn’t “allow” cars parked on the street. ( See http://www.cityofmemphis.org/framework.aspx?page=319 – 48-211 & 212).
This is seldom enforced, but she can make your life a hell with this crap. ( http://www.cityofmemphis.org/HCDWeb/content/reportcomplaint.aspx)
I find it amazing though that (in her sole discretion) she feels that your car was somehow “abandoned.” She has some nerve to write that on behalf the collective “we” and then not leave her name. Crazy cat lady!
Best of luck!
Susie
Laugh it off if you can. A note like this is a rite of passage into adulthood and homeownership. This surely had to be on your bucket list for this year! By damn, I wouldn’t move the car though. Let the note writer be consumed with stress over this non-issue and not you. That’s how the terrorists win. ;)
Look at it this way – at least you have neighbors that care. That’s a good thing.
Be nice to the busybody – she may keep your lawnmower from getting jacked one day.
I’m reminded of a passage from J. P. Donleavy’s “The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners” in which he discusses what to do when you’ve ticked off your neighbors. He says you should put a very large sign in your front yard, lit up at night, which says in gigantic letters:
FORGIVE ME
And below that, in very tiny letters that people have to come up close to read, it says:
you fuckers
Ugh, it sounds like this concerned neighbor needs to move somewhere that has a homeowners’ association, become the president, and patrol the shit out of it. Otherwise, she needs to leave you alone. Parking in the street is what people *do* in neighborhoods, for chrissakes. (And for what it’s worth, I grew up three houses away from an actual crackhouse and the only car that got broken into regularly was a cop’s patrol car. AND HE PARKED IN HIS DRIVEWAY.)
I wouldn’t move it out of spite. But also because getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to move cars in the freezing cold sucks ass.
Oh wow, really? When I lived in High Point Terrace, it was just a thing–everyone had a one-car driveway so everyone had a second car on the street. I was one of the few single people in the neighborhood.
I had a busybody neighbor, too but she was quite nice. Even when she would call me and ask me about my new boyfriend every few months. Ahem.
lol Your response made me laugh out loud, and I appreciate you bringing a smile to my day.
When I read the busybody’s note, though, I read it as a threat: “move your car or bad things will happen to it.” Ugly piece of work.
This is why PassiveAggressiveNotes.com is a thing.
Hahahaha, your response is priceless.
you kind of sound like a d**ch. When I returned home from my “very professional job”? Really? You think an admin assistant is professional?
Your sense of entitlement comes through loud and clear. You chose to live somewhere with a small driveway and tight parking so why is it your neighbours’ problem or responsibility to adjust to you because you’re too special to move your car so your bf can leave in the morning? Or maybe he could take a few extra minutes and move it?? Theoretically you’re a grown-up so figure it out.