Continued from here
I was in a business meeting when the dogs erupted. Lou Ann McNugget was knocking under this sign.
"John, it's your neighbor Lou Ann," she yelled through the door, as if this somehow made me more likely to answer it.
I opened the door. "I'm not going to come in," declined the lying trash I would never, ever, under any circumstances invite into my home. Bizarrely, she then read a letter from her husband, who was asking me for permission to park a bucket-ladder truck on my property so that they could remove more trees. "Trees some-times fall," he/she explained in the slow, halting cadence of someone who rarely reads. "Like the one a-cross the street re-cent-ly. We are only wor-ried a-bout your fence."
Right. Of course. You're only worried about my fence. Just like you were only worried about danger trees, you were only worried about weed control, blah blah blah.
"Do what you want. They're your trees," I said. "But let's not pretend you're doing this for me. I would prefer the trees remain."
Lou Ann is one of those obviously uneducated, vomitously stupid people who get angry when you don't buy into the nonsense they expected you to believe. Don't you realize how rude it is not to eat the steaming plate of bullshit I just served you? they seem to think. You're such an asshole.
And get angry she did. She repeated the part about the fence, since I clearly didn't understand her the first time. "Nah. It's pretty clear you just hate the trees," I replied.
"Oh. So you're a tree-hugger," she snorted, as if I had just fallen into her carefully executed trap and confirmed what she'd suspected all along. As if one has to be a tree-hugger to prefer looking at trees to looking at her. As if those who actually know me and go through my trash to count recycling fouls weren't about to double-over laughing at the "tree hugger" thing.
A Bertrand Russell quote flitted through my mind:
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."Nope. I just hate looking at your lot."
"John, we're trying to make it look better!"
"Oh, so you're tearing down the aluminum garage?" I asked sweetly.
"What's wrong with that?"
"It's ugly. Especially compared to trees."
"Well, John, there's lots of things about your house that I don't like," said the person who has spent thousands of dollars to get a better view of my house, to the person who has spent thousands to get a worse view of hers. Said the person standing on my deck, uninvited and unwelcome. Said the person asking for a favor.
"Well then stop tearing down trees to get a better view of my house!" I yelled, no longer able to humor her sneering idiocy. "In fact, get off my property. We're done." And I slammed my door in her face.
Tomorrow: the McNuggets worry about my fence.