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The three or four people I converse with on occasion know that I've moved about a year ago. From a small apartment of 8 or so years to a house..again. Next door is a duplex, as I'm typing the two small yappy dogs are once again suspended outside the sliding door by a small length of leash. No one ever walks them. Sometimes I see a woman, she comes out, sits down with a tablet, smokes a cigarette. Goes back inside. I've seen her on occasion, sitting in the van parked on the drive. It's not running. Just sitting, staring. The dogs..they are so tiny, surely it would be no effort to walk them. There's a baby in there, I never hear it.

During the spring, a teenager was outdoors. He lifts a large rock, or sometimes a slab of masonry over his head, throws it into the side of their only tree. He does this everyday for a few days. In one instance it looks as though he is trying to toss the rocks up into the tree. Is this a new workout? Some kind of tree-vandalism? What does he hope to accomplish? I find this person's activities very distracting. I know you can't be well-off, your family doesn't own this property..why are you destroying this perfectly healthy tree? Bark keeps disease and parasites away. You idiot.

At night, I contemplate going over there and taking the rocks and masonry from their little pile at the corner of the house and hiding them in my garage. One or two trips, I could do it. He would wake up, do god-knows-what before preparations for his daily battle, and find his implements missing. That would end this charade pretty quick.

The other day, two men were chatting it up in the backyard. There's a small cover of greenery blocking most of the view, and a rickety wire fence that connects to my garage, which was obviously built several years after house. Now I see them often, they go into the duplex's garage..the car is still always parked in the drive. The door is open, once again I never hear anything. Only at night, around midnight, the sounds of a power tool, possibly a drill. They don't look particularly handy, there's junk strewn everywhere in the yard, obscured by the fence-growth. That little white bench could be easily fixed..why don't you at least pick up and stack the masonry littered about? I don't understand these people. If they would just walk their dogs, I wouldn't care...maybe fix those blinds on the second level, they look terrible all askew like that. It's the teenagers room, I bet.