I THINK MY BRAIN IS FULL

…but who has them?

According to a popular Australian myth, everybody needs good neighbours. My neighbour is a dick. Not just a dick, but a short, withered dick with a serious attitude problem. When I first moved in, on my second day in the flat, he weakly knocked on the door and asked me, without even introducing himself, to move some cardboard boxes that I had put in the alley up the side of the building. I’d had no intention of leaving them there permanently. He then fitted a lock on the gate, once I’d removed them.

What a dick, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Not only that, but just last week, I came home from a hard day’s work, to be called by my landlord. Apparently someone had complained about some rubbish that had been left on the little forecourt outside my front window. They believed that I had dumped some old curtain rails and a tire out there. There was also a load of wood stacked up outside my window. Of course, this was nothing to do with me. Turns out it was in fact someone who had moved out. But my dick of a neighbour assumed it was me, probably because of the cardboard box incident. Eventually it became clear, like, after I told him, that the person that had just moved out, who I am sure he had seen moving out, was the errant leaver of trash.

And it turns out that the pile of wood he had complained about and attributed to me was actually his. What a dick.

At Christmas, he’d left a deeply sarcastic note with regards to a 3ft tall Christmas tree I had left outside the house. A note that must have taken ten minutes to write. Instead of writing a note to me about how I could have put the tree in the bin, he could have just put the fucking tree in the bin himself. But no, he preferred to write a patronising and insulting note which resulted in my girlfriend reciprocating with a fairly vicious and damning little essay.

I left him a note last week, along the same lines, in an attempt to show him just how petty this sort of action can be. My building has a communal hallway, and each time I see a piece of paper blu-tacked to the wall, I get a feeling of ill-ease and my heart sinks. I have little faith in humanity at the best of times, but this sort of thing makes me sad.

Upon finding said note, he once again knocked meekly at my door, explained he had made the complaint and went on to apologise for the false accusation, going so far as to invite me into his flat to show me the work going on in his garden, which had led to the pile of wood on my forecourt.

This is what is known as a moral victory. I am the winner, withered little Tory dick-boy is the loser.

And he always will be.