There’s a Monster Outside My Window

This morning, this was the view from my kitchen window.

I can now put this at the top of the short list of extraordinary things I’ve seen while standing next to my dishwasher. (Sorry horde of dead termites, you’ve been bumped down a peg.)

They finally tore down the cute house next door. The only thing that’s good about it is that I got to meet the guy who owns the property. It was nice to discover that they are building this condo complex as an investment for themselves. It’s not going to be owned by a huge property company. At least not for a while anyway. And he’s a local. He lives right near here.

Here he is with his family, posing for a picture in front of the destruction.

He seems like a nice enough guy. His son was very excited about seeing a house being bit in half by a giant mechanical ogre.

Maybe a little too excited?

More than once, I was afraid that I’d witness a child get turned into a fine paste. But he made it out alive. No thanks to himself.

I also learned that the guy I met was the one who rented the house out to the dicks that used to live there. So I got to vent my spleen a little. He had no idea that the renters were such asses. One of them was supposedly a mortgage broker. They lived like frat-house rejects, so I guess that makes sense.

I told the owner all about his renters. About their “band,” about their late night porch concerts… He was surprised. I also told him that I was unhappy about the house being torn down. He said that they had bought it as a fixer-upper. His wife wanted to do that. But this guy’s in construction, he said he doesn’t do anything small.

Great.

Now we get condos. Now I get to live with the constant noise of construction going on 5 feet from my window. Why couldn’t he just do this one thing small? Is it too much to ask to have someone not take advantage of an opportunity? Come on. I do it all the time. It’s really easy.

So now it’s begun. Construction hell. The dust is already killing me. And even though the foreman is a very nice guy and was horribly concerned about bothering the neighbors every morning at 7am (more than one he said how happy he was that Tanya and I were early risers), it’ll probably put a serious cramp on the Christmas Album this year. So much so that there might not be one. Not even a small one. But, oh well. I should focus my energies on something that might actually pay the rent anyway, right?

But don’t despair. Let’s not get all down. Here, enjoy this picture I took of the front window being shattered into a thousand small pieces.

That’s pretty cool. It even got applause (the event, not the picture, although, feel free to clap for the photo too). And, I also learned that the owner’s wife is a literary agent for William Morris. And the owner told me that he’d put us at the top of the list to buy one of the new condos.

Okay, here is my plan. I get his wife to represent me, she sells many of my screenplays (100 or 150, I haven’t decided how many yet), we make a lot of money ($3 billion or so) and then we can afford to buy one of the new, and I’m sure overpriced, LA condos. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed. It’s a great plan, huh?

Yep. Great plan. Not one single hitch.

William Morris will look at partial screenplays, right? Oh, what am I saying…of course they will.

That new condo is as good as mine, baby.


Fun Fact: The modern bulldozer was invented by J. Earl McLeod and Jim Cummings around 1923.

Man, I’m glad I didn’t live next to them. The only thing more annoying than a noisy bulldozer is a noisy bulldozer being driven by a dude who is really excited about driving his noisy bulldozer.