Rear Window

The thing about growing up is that eventually you have to move out of your house and start living on your own. It’s not that big of a deal really, except that, unless you have millions of dollars and are able to live in seclusion, you’re going to end up as someone’s neighbour. I have a pretty weird impression of neighbours because when I work in my company’s call centre, I deal with a lot of calls about people ratting out their neighbours trying to get their cars towed or ticketed. They can give me detailed information about how long that car has parked there for, how often the person does it, as well as how fast my people should get there by in order to catch the driver. Thing is, I don’t dispatch those calls since that’s the police’s job to ticket cars, but the amount of calls I get that deal with those situations is pretty ludicrous. Neighbours are some sneaky bitches.

And it’s not often the neighbour that lives beside you too. These people you can trust and I’ve been fortunate enough to get some pretty cool people living beside me ever since I moved in. It’s usually the people who live across the street or on the other end of your street that tend to be the pesky ones. The ones who live close enough for you to see on a daily basis, but far enough so that you can’t talk to them regularly, so you end up filling the spaces in between what you see, and what you think you know about them. My neighbour, in a conversation with my mom, told us that he doesn’t like the neighbours down the street because the kid wore dreadlocks and “back home in Jamaica, those guys always smoke the marijuana.” That kid is 10 years old! And from what I’ve seen is much too hyper to be high. No one that’s high would ride their bikes like a demon down the street while trying to dribble a basketball. Hell, I don’t think high people get on bicycles.

Then there’s this other neighbour that lives at the end of my street. My dad’s been telling me for years that these people own a grow-op because:

1) There’s always new, expensive cars visiting their house.
2) They always have the most lights on during Christmas.
3) They have cameras in their garden.
4) No one ever sees them, yet cars are always visiting.

It does look awfully suspicious now doesn’t it? I mean, every day there’s a new expensive car parked outside the house, but I remember hearing a long time ago that these people were hair stylists. I guess if they’re attracting a specific clientele it could explain why there’s so many nice cars out there on a regular basis. Grow-Ops apparently use lots of electricity for their hydroponic farms as well, so they try to disguise this during the Christmas season by decking their house with shitloads of lights. This house is usually the first one up with Christmas lights, and I mean early too. By mid-late November they’ve got it all decked out, but then, how do they hide their electricity use the other days of the year?

I can’t explain the cameras for the life of me, but then I guess if you’re attracting customers that drive Mercedes SLK model cars and BMW 7 Series, then I suppose you should have some cameras for protection. No one ever sees them too, in my 10 years on this street I’ve maybe run into them once or twice and that was back when their daughter went to school, yet their grass is always cut and their driveway is always shoveled. One day I hope to run into them and strike up a conversation (preferably with the daughter), but until then it’ll be the neighbours speaking for them, filling in the gaps.

It’s why I love the Simpsons episode so much, because it parodies Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. As much as I can appreciate Hitchcock’s body of work, I like the parody more because your worst suspicions about your neighbours are often unfounded and there is usually a logical explanation for everything. I don’t know what prompts us to think the worst of our neighbours, or to come up with the most exciting explanation for everything, but I guess living in the boring suburbs takes its toll on people so they invent these fantastical stories to liven it up. Even if it’s probably crazy.