“We had mass carnage at the turkey farm yesterday…Dave and I went out early in the morning to walk the dog and feed the turkeys and found a gruesome scene. Something got into the turkey pen. No clue as to what or how the hell it got in. At least 8 turkeys dead, three more badly wounded, one of whom died overnight. We’re still finding turkey parts all over.”

Ahh, country life. So bucolic, when it isn’t drenched in blood.

And for more rural fun, here’s a picture of our neighbor’s cows. Moo.

I sort of admire that level of crazy. I’m damn glad they’re gone. But I’m impressed, nonetheless.

The fine gentleman who called the cops finally got fed up with them cranking their car stereo in the middle of the street. Their car was cranked up and the bass was shaking the neighborhood, so my portly senior citizen of a neighbor goes outside and shouts over the racket, “You need to turn that down!”

The response from Crystal Meth Boy: “We’re just testing the stereo!”

Senior Citizen: “It works! Shut it off.”

Crystal Meth Boy: “What’s your problem old man? I can kick your ass!” (familiar refrain?)

Senior Citizen walks back to his house, with Crystal Meth Boy trailing, shouting epithets. Senior Citizen gets onto his own property and closes chain link gate behind him. Crystal Meth Boy continues to rant about how he “can kick your ass, old man.” Then ups the ante to, “I can kill you!”

The Senior Citizen faces Crystal Meth Boy and says, “I’m a crazy Vietnam vet. If you come on my property, I’ll blow you away.”

Crystal Meth Boy is momentarily shocked to silence and backs off.

Meanwhile, the crazy Vietnam vet’s wife is inside, calling the cops.

I’ve come to the conclusion that civil societies depend on active participation. We do plenty of flag-waving about protecting our rights and freedoms, but when is the last time you called in a noise complaint on a party, or reported a neighbor for letting their dog run loose in your neighborhood?

I’m beginning to think that ratting your neighbor to the cops for the above sorts of infractions is the line in the sand you draw so that other, more anti-social behaviors don’t take root.

If a society doesn’t collectively demand that its citizens be civil, and doesn’t define a core code of behavior that everyone is aware of and has to adhere to, then it’s basically like raising your kid without any time-outs. Crystal Meth Boy has obviously grown up in a society where most people are either too polite, or too afraid to confront him. So, like the spoiled brat that he is, he tramples other people’s rights.

More and more, it feels like American society is losing its grasp on what common decencies its citizens should expect from one another. Everything seems to be up for grabs. And when no one is quite clear what the rules are, it means that the people who are the most insensitive and loutish will dominate the civil space.

Crystal Meth House now dominates the cultural landscape of my neighborhood. The fifteen other houses on the block that are quiet and unassuming don’t define the space. They don’t even stand out. They hunker down and quiver while the one bad actor redefines the codes of behavior. We’re slowly coming to grips with this fact and trying to change it, but it’s worrisome how a few bad actors can absolutely define your world. And if everyone else on the block doesn’t work together and set aside their fears of repercussions and push back hard, some very bad actors win the day.

The only times I used to see the wife was when she would emerge to smoke cigarettes on the porch, pale and skinny, blinking in the sunlight like some kind of cave rat, before disappearing back into her blackout home. They always gave off a weird vibe. Even before I got into conflict with them. Fertile ground for all sorts of unfair speculations.

It turns out the owner of the house used to be both a crystal meth addict *and* a cocaine addict. His wife as well. Not only that, his brother is serving three years in prison for selling meth to eight different towns in a 200 mile loop of Western Colorado. I feel so vindicated in my stereotypes.

How do I know this? Because after the whole pit-bull jumping on me and my kid thing, the owner of the house decided he needed to make nice and apologize, so he came over to talk, and he shared. How often do you meet someone, who, within five minutes of starting the conversation, allows it to veer to his various addictions and how hard it is to stay clean when he’s trying to make a positive and responsible impression?

I suppose the fact that he claims that he and his wife are clean now, means that when his wife was smoking and drinking her way through her second pregnancy (I watched her out on her porch, yes, I know, I clearly don’t have enough to do) that she was actually doing her fetus a favor. She was showing honest-to-god restraint.

Thank goodness for family values.

I responded, “If your dog is off your property, it’s a problem.”

He said, “My dog’s a good dog! You don’t go kicking it! I’ll kick your ass!”

I repeated, still holding my son, “If your dog is off your property, it’s a problem.”

At which point the psycho’s friend interceded and apologized, and explained how he was trying to get a fence built and was sorry for the problem, etc. etc.

This is the first time I’ve met someone who’s default setting is to threaten physical harm as their first negotiating tactic.

I forget that some people really can be born thugs. It’s a good thing to remember as a writer, but hard to actually deliver on the page. Certain characters really should have a completely different view of the world, and a completely different set of reactions to stimuli than what you might call rational.

There’s a whole chain of responsibility failures and responses that led into my conflict with the coal miner and his dogs: not to fence the dogs, not to leash the dogs, not to train the dogs, not to accept that dogs jumping on strangers is not okay, not to accept that strangers may not love your dogs as much as you do, not to know any other way to defend your dogs other than by screaming physical threats. I would call all of those decisions negligent, stupid, or insane, but he wouldn’t. The trick is to communicate that onto the page without being either condescending, or creating a caricature.

The trick is to love him and his dog and his struggles. The trick is to hate the yuppie newcomer bastards down the block who are always giving him dirty looks about his car stereo blasting. He works damn hard at the coal mine (do those yuppies even know what it’s like to really work?) and he’s off on his seven-day break and what’s wrong with having a party out in the warm spring air after doing seven 12-hour days underground in a row? All these fucking yuppie newcomers make it feel like the town’s in a straitjacket, and he knows, just knows, that every time they look at him, they’re thinking “white trash.” He grew up here, and now he’s got neighbors who spend all their time looking down on him. What happened to his hometown? Who gave them the right to take over?

This is my neighbor. We are in major conflict.