Howdy, Neighbor

Illustration by Bob AulSend anonymous thanks, confessions or accusations —changing or deleting the names of the guilty and innocent—to "Hey, You!" c/o OC Weekly, P.O. Box 10788, Costa Mesa, CA 92627-0247, or e-mail us at letters@ocweekly.com.

I'm not sure why I'm writing because I'm almost sure a moron like you can't read. But if you do read, congratulations! You're about to get what Robert Burns said we all need: the chance to see ourselves as others do. You're a self-absorbed, mean, stupid, narrow-minded, selfish, oafish, slothful, arrogant, gluttonous, filthy, hog-faced, pea-brained, rank, unprincipled little git. It goes without saying that you are single and probably always will be. You smell. When you moved into our apartment complex, we tried to make you feel welcome—everyone from the young couple at one end of the hall to the elderly gay man at the other. You—with your backward ballcap, wifebeater T-shirt and rock-star ambitions—told them all to fuck off. Your teeth are unbrushed, and your hair is unwashed. You leave your trash in the hallway outside your door and play your stereo all night. Once, you carried on a shouted conversation with a stripper we all now refer to as the "fucking whore" (as in "fuckingwhorefuckingwhorefuckingwhore"), wrestled with police who came merely (and politely) to ask you to hold down your tuneless guitar playing at 2:15 a.m., and crashed into a neighbor's car and tried to lie about it. You walk around barefoot. Could it be you're a meth addict? Or could it be something in the national culture? I am a liberal, but you are what our conservative forebears warned us would come during a period of extended national prosperity and peace: a small man. You're fat, you smoke, and you have bad posture. In earlier times, a venal little doofus like you might have been drafted and, with any luck, killed in a senseless foreign war. These days, you thrive like an aggressive cancer on the national colon. We don't know how you live with yourself. We can barely handle living next to you.