Alpha to Omega

My upstairs neighbour is a bit of a freak. That is, I really don’t like him. You may wonder why I would choose to devote any amount of time to him considering this fact, but the truth of the matter is that you are kind of a pious cunt for making a remark like that in the first place. See, it’s like this: he’s up there in his bathtub several times a day (no exaggeration), thumping around and presumably throwing soap or attempting to bathe with crutches or fake limbs and that’s bloody well fascinating. I don’t like him, but he’s interesting. The way Napoleon Dynamite is interesting—don’t tell me you would have been friends with him, you wouldn’t have.

I happen to know that my upstairs neighbour doesn’t have any fake limbs and isn’t in need of crutches. This is because I encountered him one day as I was leaving my apartment. He was carrying his bike-thingy up the stairs looking very serious and meaty (oh, to defy middle age) in spandex and helmet and I smiled at him, as if to say “Hey neighbour, how’s about a friendly hello?” Well, there would be none of that. I couldn’t help but be taken aback and bemused when he replied with…well, he didn’t. Nothing. Not a smile, not a frown, Just Space. It was like staring at a passport photo. He also has a sticker on another bike that says “One less car!” and that kind of annoys me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic that you’re putting forth effort and doing your part and that your heart is in the right place, but don’t you think the need to advertise it kind of reeks of desperation the same way it reeks of desperation when people need to advertise their sexual encounters?
“Wow, I’ve been having way too much sex lately”
“That’s nice….what’s your name again?”
Yup, and I have great tits. Hey, just throwing that out there.

I might have been able to dismiss my upstairs neighbour as an isolated jerk, but there’s more to it than that. There are these joggers who come into work all the time. They go for their run and then they stop in to pump themselves with more unnatural substances (no, I don’t deal, I sell coffee) before heading home to whatever they head home to. The interesting thing is that you can tell what they head home to by their interactions with me. The majority of the joggers are women and they’re all approximately 35 to 45. Some of them are unnecessarily evil. I mean evil, hostile, inappropriately bitchy. Case in point: Woman orders “A Latte”. I make the Latte. I hand over the Latte. She responds with “I thought this was iced. I want it iced.” So maybe she’s a complete moron, right? Wrong. She’s ordered many a latte (the hot kind) after many a run before. Now, that’s just uncalled for. Let's face it lady, if I were psychic, I'd have my own show. So, there’s that, and I know it sounds trite and redundant and completely childish to diagnose like this, but I think they’re threatened by me. I’ve never wanted to believe that people are so ridiculous that they would be jealous of a random stranger, despite the insistence of my male companions that I get glared at constantly, but I’ve begun to give this theory some merit. Because you can tell that the joggers who are polite to me are happy with themselves and their lives and that the ones who are bitches probably like to talk (lie) about their sex lives and the schools their kids go to. I finally got bored of the joggers and I summed it up thus: for people who are supposedly so fucking high on life, they sure are a miserable bunch.

I’ve decided, dear readers, that I’m going to devote the next couple of entries to fascinating (or just plain absurd) people such as my active friends. Characters. It’s a series I’m going to call "Portraits".