Neighbors...a parable (and a true story)

Yeah, gather round the water and let the kid start passing out the loaves and fishes (not that I have a God complex or anything).

I have a neighbor who is an ass. He lives directly across the street from me and he's the sort who will be bothered by something and instead of telling you, or asking that you not do it again, he finds some method of retaliation.

We have a dog (a little pomeranian, but that doesn't matter much in the story). When the dog was a puppy, his wife was playing with it on their porch and the dog pee'd. She cleaned it up and said "no big deal" but apparently it bothered him, because the next morning, there was a huge pile of dog shit (yes, they have a much larger dog than ours) in my front yard. He, of course, never said a word, and it had never happened before or since, so I assume he led his dog to my yard and didn't clean up afterwards.

The people who live next to him had a party one night. We walked across a corner of his property to get to the party. I'm not sure why it bothered him. It might be that we walked across the corner of his property on his grass, or it might be that he wasn't invited, but for whatever reason, he was upset. I don't know this because he said "John, please stay off my grass" or anything like that. In fact, the few times he has addressed me it's been with non-descript names like "Hey bud, what's up?" or just 'Hi". He never uses my name. The only time he would ever even acknowlege me was when he and I are the only ones around and I force the issue by going up to him and saying "Hi Rob, how are you?", but back to the point. The next morning (a Saturday) I was sitting on the back porch reading the paper and having coffee. We have a nice view of a pond behind our house and woods behind that Egrets fly around back there. We get an occasional deer. Ducks swim in the pond despite the rumor that an alligator shares the pond with them. The ass was pacing back and forth across the back of my yard talking on his cell phone. I didn't know why. I was (in one of the last of many efforts to make friends) ready to ask him if he wanted coffee, but he kept talking on his phone, ignored me and walked back to his house, still talking after a while. Later I walked out to the street where he and a few other neighbors were talking and he made comments like, "Nice view you have back there. I think I'll get my chair and a big smelly cigar and go back there and rest." I didn't know what to make of it, but I found out afterward, from his wife, that he had nobody on the phone. He was pretending to talk to someone while walking across the back of my yard. He did all that just to show me what it's like to have one of my neighbors in my yard without my permission, and to see how I liked it. I didn't much care, but whatever. If that gets his rocks off, he can pace the back of my yard pretending like he has a friend on his cell phone any time. Of course, he never said anything to me. He just sends his sneaky regards in his own stupid way, and we're all supposed to figure it out.

It wasn't long after that I stopped trying, because nothing I did was going to appease him, so now I ignore him. I don't antagonize, I don't talk to him. I just pretend he doesn't exist. He talks to some people that live on our street, and complains about his neighbors (us and a few others) but I don't care. I assume everyone else takes him with a grain of salt, and if they don't, that's their problem, not mine. His opinions and his life are his and they don't really affect me...and so we co-exist. We don't like each other. We'll never sit down for a beer and have a few laughs, but he does his thing and I do mine, and we just stay out of each other's way....and I keep my sanity.

End of parable.