myNeighborhood

Dear Readers,

Here’s another installment from my series of fictional screeds. myNeighborhood is the ranting of the block captain of an online neighborhood platform. Just like Tammy’s List, it has its origins in a series of unhinged letters I began in 2020. I think this guy and Tammy would be good friends — or archenemies. Love it or hate it, please don’t report me to corporate.

Neighbors!

This is your block captain! I mean it figuratively, because myNeighborhood exists only online. Besides, can you imagine trying to host a block party with this unruly crowd? No telling which orifice the jello shots would end up being licked from! Also, in these unprecedented times, rarely do we meet these days in person. I know we’re relatively new to this online neighborhood platform, and I appreciate the enthusiasm on a number of topics ranging from where to find the best blowout to systemic racism! But some of what I’m seeing alarms me. My mother would have called some of your language uncouth. Do you know what that means? It means rude and trashy, though my mother never would have used the latter. She was couth. So this is just a reminder to follow the myNeighborhood community guidelines when posting or reacting to a public post. You’ll find them pinned to our block’s homepage right up there at the top by my name. My name has a checkmark by it because I’m the captain!

Actually, you may remember that I’m also the licensee of this platform. It was much cheaper than those others more nationally recognized platforms you may have heard of or used in more prestigious neighborhoods. But we’re rogue! We do things differently here. We’ve only been live a few weeks after getting some of the bugs and kinks worked out (more on kinks later ), but I already feel compelled to reiterate one of our core codes of conduct I’m seeing flagrantly violated more and more these days. That is, no profanity, please! We are a civil and respectable neighborhood! Calling your neighbor who just planted those stinky ginkgos, whose rotting buds reek of ass, a fucking motherfucker is a serious infraction and warrants your being booted permanently off the platform. If I had things my way, you’d also be put under police surveillance at your own expense. I had to get special permission to allow me to use those filthy words, but I had a point to make. I wanted you to see the horror of what certain members were actually saying. So if you get booted off for good, how would ever know when Marcy W. gives away her latest, somewhat pathetic attempt at decorating with yet another set of IKEA stackable (read: broken) bathroom shelves? What a deal! How do you beat free? Or how will you know next Fourth of July if you are hearing harmless, legal fireworks celebrating our nationhood in the parking lot of Home Depot or stray gunshots resulting in multiple fatalities? Big difference. If you really want to let someone have it for, say, being offended that they didn’t take your advice on how to get rid of palmetto bugs in your horrid, dank garden studio basement apartment, merely slide a nasty word or two into their inbox. As my teenager says, “DM ‘em!”

But back to helping Tuxedo the Cat. You don’t remember him? Tuxedo the Cat, supposedly an indoor kitty who is always roaming the streets with no collar or even so much as a microchip embedded somewhere into that scrawny neck of his, needs your vigilant eyes! He keeps straying far from home. What do you except from a curious cat when you leave your back door wide open, leaving your puss completely unchaperoned? Puss is not a dirty word, thank you very much. For now, thankfully, Tuxedo has been returned to his rightful spot (indoors, I might add!) no fewer than thirteen times this past month alone thanks to the nosy peeping toms of myNeighborhood! Just kidding! Y’all are performing a much needed public service. And seriously, Tuxedo needs you. I mean, he’s half black and half white (duh) and so he’s hard to see out there in the darkened streets, which, mind you, despite our status as an All-Star American City for the fortieth consecutive year, are also full of vagrants and homeless. And believe me you, you can kiss Tuxedo goodbye if he gets out on Halloween! Don’t you know what can happen to a black cat on Halloween? Are you stupid? We have wicca around here! That’s what we all get for being so liberal and tolerant! But mainly I need to stop reading about Tuxedo. For my own mental health, I need to stop living and breathing his drama. I’m a block captain for Chrissakes! (That wasn’t cursing in case you were asking. I checked with corporate.) Tuxedo is life-draining. I should specify that his owners, Marci W. And Nathan G., are soul sucking with their whining. If you don’t want your precious but scraggly Tuxedo to leave, can’t you just for the love of God keep him inside? Like normal people living in a dangerous, crime-ridden, coyote infested city? Didn’t you read the recent post from William K. about the coyotes? I don’t mean Wile E. from the cartoons, but real, honest-to-God coyotes! They’re in the vacant lot next to William! I like to say “KAI-yotes” to make it feel like I’m in a Western. Like I don’t live here or am not a block captain for a second-rate online neighborhood platform. When I say words like “KAI-yote,” I can almost hear the saloon doors swinging open on their creaky hinges and see the tumbleweed dancing aimlessly down the dusty sidewalk. I hear that scary dew dew dew dew music, like in a tense scene of “Tombstone” or some crap. See what you’d be missing? So quit your f-ing cursing!

While I’m at it, I’ve heard enough about the missing books from all your “cute” Little Free Libraries. Those little wooden boxes at certain holier-than-thou residents’ curbs that contain their cast off, low-life paperbacks to the public in a feigned act of goodwill, generosity, and elitism.

Isn’t that the [expletive deleted by platform moderator] point of a library is for people to TAKE BOOKS FROM THEM? They have the word “free” right on them! Hahaha, it sounds like I’m mad at you for complaining that someone took your free books that were designated for the taking! Well, I am. It just doesn’t add up. Don’t we have larger issues in the world than someone swiping your musty collection of Harlequin romances from a pathetically little painted box on your curb? Do I really think it’s cute that you’ve painted your library to look like a toadstool house? Well guess what? I don’t! Another one I saw had all the Harry Potter houses painted on them, like I gave a [shoot] what house you thought you belonged to. Like I give a rat’s patooti if you’re a Slytherin or Hopscotch or whatever. It’s not magic, it’s a box full of your dust-mite ridden books. But anyway, I saw that copy of George W.’s biography in Todd G.’s Little Free Library, the one that looks like the White House, and I almost took it upon myself to abscond with it and burn it in my Weber! At least it wasn’t an autobiography. Can you imagine? What would that be, some garbage scrawled in crayon? Paint by number? Ghostwritten by Laura? At lest she really was a librarian! Remember when he held the picture book upside down at that school on 9/11? Embarrassing. But I’m getting way too political as block captain. Also, as I contemplated emptying Todd G.’s box of his right-wing filth, I remembered the recent spate of criminals and hooligans various ones of you caught on all your high-tech and overly sensitive Ring cameras trained on every square inch of tarnation and I thought better of my decision. Thanks to Burl K.’s incessant surveillance, I’ve seen those mp4s or whatever they’re called of Martha K.’s dog crapping on Sonya T.’s begonias. Disgusting. But so is ratting out your neighbors for all the world to see on myNeighbor! Again, just DM the [expletive deleted]! No admin will ever read it, I promise! I’m an admin so I should know. That time I scud-missled my neighbor with a nasty-gram for trampling on my beauty bush, I regretted sending it once I hit send. Let’s just say I called her something that sounds like runt. And it’s not Bundt! I don’t even bake. I sweated that one out overnight. I thought Johnny B., the platform’s decency overseer, the language übermensch if you will, would read my crass message about my trampled bush and delete me into oblivion! Or at least report me to corporate. They need to know how their franchises are doing with implementing and enforcing their community guidelines. He doesn’t miss anything, that Johnny B.! So I’m here to say, keep it clean in public, and do whatever the fuck you want behind closed doors. Oops, I guess Johnny let that f-bomb slide! He must have a crush on me. Kidding! He’s a happily married man. Or at least that’s what his myNeighborhood profile says. I guess Wanda L. could be his beard. They look cute in a bland, flabby suburban way sunbathing by their above-ground pool. Look at the way she’s looking at him, like, how the [f] did I end up here, having to fend myself off from these overgrown toenails every single night until I end up in the grave. You know what? They don’t even have the same last name. And I don’t even really think it’s because they’re modern. I’m pretty sure Wanda grew up Baptist.

While I’m at it, does anyone else want to take over as block captain? I’m on beta- blockers and I just don’t think this is good for me. I don’t really know exactly what those pills do, but it sounds serious. I get too emotionally involved in all this, whether it’s the whereabouts of Tuxedo the Cat, a fireworks vs. fatality debate, or even talking about my own trampled bush. I’m not coping well! I know I’ve held it together pretty well these past few months that our site has finally been live (no thanks to Johnny B. Just kidding, he’s amazing. And that thing about his toenails, totally not true! When we went camping, just the two of us, they were trimmed down real neat and I didn’t even notice when he rubbed them against my inner thigh when we had to share a sleeping bag, both of us in the buff for fear of “hypothermia”), but I’m just not sure I’m suited to intercepting all this [feces] any longer. Maybe Burl K. would be a better choice? Did I mention his stupendous array of audio-visual spy equipment? Someone like him would be much better to snoop on — I mean monitor — our little corner of heaven, KAI-yotes and all.

So, to my original point. No public cursing, OK? Show myNeighborhood some respect.

For Chrissakes.