Campfyre Stories

To quote Robert Frost, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

Have I blogged about my terrible neighbor?  I’m not sure if I have, but she’s AWFUL.  From the day she moved it, she’s been nothing but trouble for me.

The saga begins the day after my birthday, when she moved in.  Our first encounter was over my recycle bin.  The city gives you one for free if you call them, but I guess she was too lazy to do that.  When I leave my house on Wednesday mornings, I bring in the recycle bin and leave it in front of my door.  When I got home that first Wednesday evening, my recycle bin was FULL.  Not just full, but full of non-recyclable materials, like ceramics and cookware, and it was placed directly in front of my apartment door.

I rang the neighbor’s bell and explained that this was not okay and that she needed to get her own recycle bin.  "Oh, I thought we could SHARE," she said.  No, I explained, I need to keep the bin in the kitchen and could she please remove her (non-recyclable) items from my bin?  "Oh, it’s just until garbage night," she said.  Well, garbage night was LAST NIGHT.  "Oh, well, it’s just a week."

In a passive-aggressive retaliation, I moved the recycle bin in front of the stairs, blocking access to HER apartment, rather than to mine.

She bought some Rubbermaid tubs and decided to use them for her recycling.  As of a couple of days ago, she was complaining to the landlord that the recycling people were stealing her bins, despite the note written in masking tape on top of the lids to leave them.

She’s an idiot.  Not only are the recycling people NOT stealing her bins, they’re so lightweight that they blow down the street.  There’s no address written on them, so no one knows who they belong to.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to go chasing after gray Rubbermaid bins at 6:30 in the morning, in the opposite direction from my walk to the bus stop, but I’ve seen them down the street.

The landlord explained (as I had in the past), that she could call the city and they would BRING her a free recycling bin, but first he was subjected to her complaining about how I wouldn’t share mine with her.

But that’s a minor matter, for all the paragraphs it took up.  A larger matter is the fact that she is constantly yelling at black people.

I know, this sounds weird, and at first, I wasn’t entirely sure about it, but it’s true.  She yells at black people, exclusively and often.  I thought that she just yelled at her friends, who almost all happened to be black, but then I started noticing her yelling at the guy who offered to shovel our walk after a major snowstorm, the young man who wanted to get us to change utility companies and the elderly pastor who was soliciting donations for his church’s youth group.  She did NOT, however, yell at the white people who came to the door, or into the house, for any reason.

I kid you not when I tell you that her unnaturally high pitched voice causes the nearby dogs to howl whenever she yells, and she yells a lot!

And that’s not even the worst of it.  The worst part is the drama of the door.

We live in a two-family building, and have a shared front door.  My last neighbor and I noticed about 2 years ago that if the door isn’t securely shut, it opens, despite the lock on the doorknob.  The only way to make sure that the door is fully shut is to lock the bolt on the door, which my current neighbor REFUSES to do.

I’ve confronted her several times about not locking the door.  I’ve explained that if the door isn’t locked by the bolt, it sometimes comes open.  Living on the first floor, I consider this a safety issue, since, if someone were to come in our open door, they’d go for my apartment first.

She refuses to take me seriously on this matter.  Her reply has consistently been that she ALWAYS locks the door, unless she’s right in the vicinity.  If the door is unlocked, it must be Spawn…  "You know how irresponsible teenagers are."

Of course, this just riles me up.  There’s no response I can give her when she attacks my son for something SHE is doing wrong, so I have let it go for the moment, but about once a month, I bring up the issue again.  The last time we had it out over the lock, she claimed it was Spawn leaving it unlocked…  while he was out of town,  visiting his girlfriend.  That’s some feat, to unlock the door from out of town.

But last night it came to a head.  I got home from my regular movie night at 9pm to an OPEN door.  Now, I don’t mean slightly ajar, but the door was swinging in the breeze.  This is the third time in a week the door has been open, although the previous two times it was just ajar.  I lost it.

Instead of following my gut reaction and banging on her door, I called the landlord and told him the fullness of the saga.  That this had been going on *since she moved in* and that she was consistently blaming it on Spawn.  Spawn isn’t even with me on Tuesday nights, so I know that he didn’t leave the door fucking open.

The landlord promised to come over and talk to her about it, stressing the safety issue.  He also said that if she wouldn’t claim responsibility and tried to blame Spawn, yet again, that he would put an automatic lock on the door.  I think that won’t actually help, though, since you have to close the door SECURELY for a catch-lock to actually serve its purpose, but he also told me to call him whenever that door is open again.

I didn’t call this morning at 6:30am when, upon leaving the house, I discovered the door unlocked yet again.

But I overheard them talking last week.  It’s mid-month and rent is due on the 1st (but no later than the 5th).  He was asking her when she was going to pay her rent, and she said she didn’t know…  "Excuse, excuse, excuse, it’s someone else’s fault and, by the way, FyreGoddess is a terrible person who won’t share her recycle bin."  (Seriously, that was how she ended her "I can’t pay my rent" speech to him.)

I’ve been living here for two-and-a-half years and, while I’ve been late with the rent a couple of times, it’s only ever been a few days past the deadline (usually because I forgot to put the check in the mail).  I rarely complain unless there is a major problem and am friendly with the landlord.  She, on the other hand, is a terrible person, yells at black people, complains about things that are none of her business, is late with the rent with no ownership of responsibility  and refuses to follow the most elementary of inner-city living rules.

I think that I’m not the one who will be looking for a new place to live in 6 months.  If I am, it will be because I can’t handle a neighbor this awful.

I haven’t yet seen any of the actual signs (for me) of spring.  The little green shoots poking their heads out of the ground, the old guys from the barbershop bringing their chairs out onto the sidewalk are the proof I’m waiting for that spring has actually arrived.  Barring that, though, the air temp in the 50′s is a pretty good start.

We started the spring cleaning this weekend and I think that I’m significantly more motivated than Spawn is.  Chalk it up to him being 15.  This will probably take several rounds over the next month, but we’ll get there.  I think the most satisfying bit that was accomplished this weekend was getting the storm windows out of the way and actually opening the windows for the first time in MONTHS.  The cats were happy once they remembered how much the like sitting in the window.

So I’m waiting for the flowers to come up.  I’m waiting for the smell of freshly mown grass to come back.  I’m waiting for all the activities and festivals to start.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to bring my spring clothes down to the city at the end of the month and not have to worry about bundling up.

I know it won’t stay quite this nice – mid 50′s getting up to 60 (!) mid week.  Once we get that pampering 60 degrees, it’ll head back down into the mid-40′s, but I can handle that.  The snow is melted and as long as I don’t wind up regretting not having the storm windows, I’ll be satisfied.

Ok, it’s been years since I’ve been to a dentist.  I can give the explanation, which entails a lack of insurance in parts and a certain measure of laziness, but I know there’s no real excuse.  I realized that I needed to just get it out of the way, so I started asking around if anyone I knew could recommend a dentist.

And NO ONE I know could.  NO ONE actually has a good dentist in the area.  In fact, the reply I received from most of my friends was to let them know if wherever I went was a good place, because they needed to see a dentist, too.

So I was on my own.  I decided to go with a dentist that was on my bus route – close-ish to home and convenient to get to.

My first appointment was not promising.  After getting x-rays and something else, it was determined that I have 5 (FIVE!) cavities in three different quadrants of my mouth.  I also still have 7 wisdom teeth, which the dentist threatened to take if any decay shows up on any of them (which still hasn’t happened).

So I made three appointments.  One for a cleaning and a filling and two more for just fillings.

I went to my first appointment and saw a Greek (as in from Greece) dentist.  She did my filling, but I felt that it wasn’t quite right, even before I left the office.  The tooth that had been filled felt very deep, but it had been a while since I got a filling, so I wrote it off as simple paranoia.

Until there started to be pain.

A few days after my filling, that area of my mouth started to feel very sensitive to cold and a little bit painful.  I wasn’t sure why, but after another couple of days, when it didn’t go away, I called the dentist on my lunch break.

They asked me to hold, which I did for 10 minutes, and then they routed me to an answering machine.  OH HELLS NO.  So I called back.  I explained my problem to them and they said they could see me if I came in *right then*.  "I’m an hour and a half away.  I can’t get in immediately," I explained.  This wouldn’t work, so they suggested that I come in first thing in the morning.  "Well, unless you open at 6am, your idea of first thing in the morning is vastly different than mine."

They hemmed and hawed until I pretty much lost it.  "Look, this is a problem that YOU caused.  You are GOING to see me, and see me TODAY.  This is a problem and it’s causing me pain.  You need to fix it."  They told me if I could get there no later than 5pm, I could be seen, but I might have to wait a while.

I left work early so that I could make it, and I did make it, with time to spare.  I didn’t have to wait nearly as long as they had implied and the dentist came to see me.  We looked at my x-rays from before my filling and he explained that he thought the filling went quite far down in my tooth and that the filling itself was rubbing against the nerve.  That means a root canal.

OH HELLS NO.  Not again…  that’s a lot of appointments.

But, not to rush to judgment, they took another x-ray just of that tooth.  Again, it looked like we were looking at a root canal, right up until he checked the filling itself.

As I suspected, some of the filling was missing.  "Fell out", he said, but I know that it happened while I was in the chair.  The depth of the tooth is the same as it was when I left.  Bottom line?  The Greek dentist fucked that shit up.

They couldn’t fill it right then, though.  They’ll have to do it at my next (already scheduled) appointment.  Which probably means that 3 appointments turn into 4 and it’ll be an extra week of waiting to get everything fixed.  *sigh*

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for my appointments and hoping that I get a better dentist than the one who did the half-assed job.  You can bet that I told them what had happened and that it was half-assed before I even left the practice.  They did not charge me for the visit.  I think it would have gone badly if they had.

The moral of this story?  Don’t wait 6 years between your dental appointments.  Also, beware of Greeks bearing dental instruments.

Let me just start by saying, I am DONE with the whole "IMAX Experience".  Frankly, I don’t need to pay an extra $4 for my ears to bleed and my heart to vibrate in my chest.  The bigger screen isn’t worth the trade-off.  From now on, I’ll stick to the digital theater in the other (smaller, better) mall.

The show we saw was sold out in advance.  No big surprise.  We got there an hour and a half before the screening to wait in line.  Our group was 8 people – 4 of whom were there before 5 (for a 7pm showing) and the rest showed up well before 5:30.  When the second half of our group got there, there were 2 people in line in front of us and 3 or 4 behind us.  As it got closer to 6:30 (when they let us in), the people immediately behind us had already started bitching about how 4 people had "cut in line".

Here’s the thing, though, in an IMAX theater, there are no "best seats".  There’s no one fighting for the front row with the ledge that you can put your feet up on.  There are so many seats and everyone has their own idea of what the "best seats" are that the first 50 people, at least, aren’t going to have seats that are better or worse than anyone else.  The only reason our 4 addition people "cut in line" were so that we could keep each other company in line.  I’m still not sure why this was even a concern, let alone worthy of snark and complaint.

But enough about the pre-show, how was the movie?

Well…  I was disappointed.

You have to understand, that I went in with no real expectations.  I hated the way V for Vendetta turned out and I never read the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  I also didn’t read 300 or Sin City, but saw the movies and really liked them, but after having seen Sin City, I was unable to read the graphic novel because it was *too* similar to the movie.

Watchmen is among my absolute favorite graphic novels.  Hell, it’s among my favorite books ever – period.  I had more than my share of reservations about the adaptation and I wasn’t wrong in bringing those with me.

The casting was meh.  Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson were absolutely brilliant as (respectively) Rorschach, the Comedian and Nite Owl II, but Malin Ackerman‘s Laurie I felt was rather devoid of personality (thought she sure did LOOK the part) and Billy Crudup‘s Dr. Manhattan felt far too compassionate for an aloof, cold, removed higher being.  The rest of the casting was fine…  nothing really excellent, but nothing really bad, I thought, with one major exception.  Robert Wisden was the worst screen Nixon that I have ever seen.  He didn’t look, act or feel the part.  I was probably most disappointed with the casting of Nixon, though he was a bit player in the story, especially since Frank Langella has shown that you don’t need to LOOK the part to embody the character.

But there was so much of the story that was lost.  I think that was what bothered me more than anything.  I hear so many people talking about the rich, vivid backgrounds and the little things that you might catch on repeated viewings, but it doesn’t compensant for the story elements that were, necessarily, left behind.

The backstories and subplots of Watchmen, the graphic novel, are amazingly rich and add to the overall alternative history world of 1985/86 US, but most of that was cast aside.  The minor stories of people on the streets of New York couldn’t have been included in the already 160 minute movie, but I missed the story of the lesbian cab driver, the interaction and relationship development between the newsstand owner and the comic reading boy, the way the psychiatrist is affected by his interaction with Rorschach and how that affects his family life.  None of that was touched upon.  It couldn’t have been.

But people were giddy when the newsstand was shown with the boy reading the comic…  people who had read Watchmen recognized the lack of story surrounding the psychiatrist.  We knew what we were missing and, I think that most of us also knew the necessity of it being left behind, but it left the overall story lacking.

There were no real surprises for those of us who had read the book, and the pieces that should have been powerful, simply fell flat.  When Laurie has her major revelation on Mars with Dr. Manhattan, there’s no real punch to it.  Her character hadn’t been given the right investment for it to matter.  Not only had her hatred not been fostered in her screen character development, but all the trials and tribulations that she had experienced up to that moment had been minimized. 

Many things that were minor but important were minimized.  While Hollis Mason was in the movie, his role was diminished almost to the point of him not even really being in it.  I read an article where Snyder was talking about how the studio wanted him to cut the shot of the sign in front of Hollis’ place, but he wanted to keep it, it was important.  To me, though, what is much more important is the timing and method of Hollis’ death, which was completely cut from the movie.  Snyder says, "Actually, taking it out was easy without destroying the movie."  Well, maybe there’s truth to that.  It didn’t destroy the movie, but it diminished the storyline, like so many edits and omissions.  Frankly, I think there would have been less damage done to the movie had the sex scene between Nite Owl II and Laurie Jupiter been trimmed significantly.  What value was there in having a graphic and extended sex scene that doesn’t even serve to further the plot?  Especially considering that the murder of one of the original Minutemen and the method of his murder helped to solidify the tension and atmosphere of the entire story?

It’s just too big.  It’s too much.  The only way that this could have truly worked as a movie would be if it were released in installments, like a serial or a miniseries.  There was just too much that didn’t make it in and the whole thing suffered.  I feel bad for all the people who are watching this movie and haven’t read the graphic novel because not only do they not know what they’re missing, I fear that many will be so confused, let down or simply dissatisfied that they won’t think to pick it up and try reading it in the medium in which it was meant to be enjoyed.

I was invested in the graphic novel.  I AM invested in the novel every time I reread it.  Certain phrases or moments impact me or touch a nerve, but the movie didn’t engage me to the same extent.  I didn’t care about the characters and I didn’t really care about the situation.

But for everything that was good, or at least enjoyable, there were several things that were annoying or even maddening.  Overall, the movie just fell flat for me.  I don’t expect that my concerns will be fi
xed with the extra 40 minutes of footage that will appear on the DVD and, frankly, I’d rather just read the book again.  And again.  And again.

This round, once again, goes to Alan Moore.  At this point, I really think they should just stop trying to make his work into movies.  There needs to be another way to validate comic books as quality literature and a standalone art form.  Live action really isn’t necessary.

As I stood outside in the gently gamboling snow, watching it settle into white fluffy piles, I couldn’t help but wonder (again), how, exactly, is this like a lion?

Don’t lions live on the savannah?  And laze about in the heat?

Am I missing something here?