The Prince of Pettiness

 

There are some people on this planet who desperately need something. Something like their very own angry island in the middle of nowhere. That’s where they can be angry at everyone for anything, real or imagined, and live angrily ever after.

The bastid across the road is one of those people. When we first moved here, he was very friendly. Grumpy, but friendly. His daughter gave us her phone number, asking us to “keep an eye on him, and if we don’t see him for a few days,” to give her a call. She even gave him our phone number to call if he needed anything, or to let us know he was leaving for a few days and to “not worry.”

As if.

Fast forward through some seriously annoying and expensive shit, and some seriously false accusations, and other things, and voila, you have what we’re calling a pissing contest of pettiness. Tammie is the adult in this situation, because she’s not doing anything (as usual), but I have taken it upon myself to flip the bird whenever I drive past his house. I’m also the one who got sick and tired of his motion-sensing floodlight illuminating our house every time a deer or rabbit wandered through his yard, so when I went outside with the dogs (in our yard, mind you) and the light went off, I dropped trou and mooned it (did I mention, he also has cameras attached to those lights? Yeah. Big Bertha was shining bright that night on his video screen). He did change the angle on the lights and camera shortly after my one-woman show-it-all.

The most recent event in the contest is truly going to be difficult to top (although, I have several ideas). My daughter has moved in with us and parks her vehicle in our driveway. She backs in so she can park right next to the fence on the passenger side of her vehicle. In order to do that, she had to come “close” to his property line, which she did not cross.

So, he decided to park his truck at the very edge of the property (but only the part where she needed to safely maneuver her vehicle to make backing up easier). Then, because he decided that wasn’t quite tacky enough, he included an old patio table with something heavy on it, an old muffler tossed on the ground, and a “PRIVATE PROPERTY” sign taped to the table.

Seriously. How can anyone BE that petty?

When he was still talking to us, he told us that he’d caught certain neighbors in his house, taking his stuff and prowling around his garage. Now, he’s accusing US of doing that to the very same neighbor he told us had been doing that first. I’ve never even set foot on his property, much less been inside any buildings.

Methinks someone’s nut is a little loosed in the noggin. I have no desire to set foot on his property, much less inside any of his buildings. If he falls in his yard, and I see him, I’ll probably call 9-1-1, but I’m not going over there to assess him. Throw dirt on him? Sure! But not see if he’s ok.

So, yea, I guess I have joined the petty parade, but to be honest, it would be just like him to fake a fall to lure us onto his property, then accuse us of trespassing and press charges against us. I mean, this is a guy who dug a trench across someone’s driveway so she couldn’t get out to go to work; he took the door off some guy’s truck because he was parked on the “wrong” side of the road and left his vehicle door open. Mind you, the bastid actually had to cross to the other side of the road to take off the door, but that didn’t matter. To him, anyway.

All hail the prince of pettiness. We salute you by dropping trou and kissing our knees.