My Next Door Neighbor

Journal Entry: June 15th, 2017

I have some pretty weird neighbors. Well, most neighbors are weird, I suppose. Or maybe that’s just me. Last time I remembered, most people don’t have neighbors as weird as mine. I’m pretty sure aliens would be more normal than some of these people.

My first weird neighbor is this lady named Shanty. She lives right next door to the left. I think she’s at least forty-five years old, and she has around twelve cats, or possibly more. Her hair is always a mess, and she really hates dogs. She has no kids, and I don’t think she’s ever married or even dated. Yeah, she’s the crazy cat lady. Think of a stereotypical cat lady and multiply it by ten—that’s Shanty for you. Whenever I see her go outside, she always has a cat on her shoulder. It’s almost like she can’t live without at least one cat touching her. Her pants always have scratches on them, too, as if her legs are the cats’ scratching posts.

Another weird neighbor is the one who lives right across the street from me. His name is Ronald, and I think he’s about fifty years old. He has decorations all over his yard. When I say all over, I mean it. He’s got an entire collection of garden gnomes surrounding his doorstep, and he still has decorations from Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter, even though it’s the middle of June. He’s got inflatable decorations and light decorations, and he’s also got antique decorations. Does Ronald ever take his decorations down? He needs a serious spring cleaning.

Another weird neighbor of mine is one who lives two houses down to the left—the house on the other side of Shanty’s. The woman who lives there is some kind of fortune-teller. Her name is Ramona, and she claims to have telepathic powers and shit. I think she’s about forty years old. The crazier thing is, I’ve seen people actually go into her house, probably to get psychic readings or some part of their future told. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was clinically insane.

I’ll talk about one more weird neighbor. Actually, they’re a pair. These neighbors live two houses down to the right. Their names are Alan and Alta. They’re a married couple, and they look like they’re in their mid-thirties. For some reason, they always make the most bizarre choices when it comes to clothing. Some of the clothes they wear look like they came right out of a bad fashion show. They wear clothes that aren’t even supposed to go together. For example, I once saw Alan wearing a tight business top along with baggy pajama pants, and I saw Alta wearing overalls over a dress. To make matters worse, I’ve seen them wear neon socks with plain brown sandals. I could say with certainty that a first grader has a better sense of fashion than those two.

Those are all the weird neighbors I have—at least that I know of. However, there is one normal neighbor, maybe the only one who’s normal. He lives one house to the right, and he’s unlucky enough to live right next to Alan and Alta. The other house next to him would be my house, obviously. His name is Randy. Randy Johnson. The name couldn’t be any more average. He has a wife named Sally, and they don’t have any kids. They’re a normal couple, and they have a normal life. Randy even has the look of a normal guy. He’s in his early thirties, and he has blue eyes and blond hair with split bangs. He wears a lot of polo shirts, and he’s almost always wearing denim jeans. I usually see him when he’s taking out the trash, getting in his car to go to work, or having barbecue grill-outs in his backyard. Sally looks like a normal woman as much as Randy looks like a normal man. She has short blonde hair and brown eyes, and she’s a few years younger than Randy. Whenever I see her, she’s almost always wearing some shade of lipstick, usually red.

I actually have to see Randy more than you might think. My mom knows him really well, so he’s at our house sometimes. Randy will talk to my mom about how Sally is and how his life is going. The conversations are bland, to say the least. In turn, my mom tells Randy how her life is going, and she usually talks about her job as a nurse. Every once in a while, she’ll mention me, and then, Randy will want to see me, and then, I’ll have to go downstairs and talk to him. I’ll have to tell him how my life is going, which there’s nothing to talk about—at least not with him. He’s my neighbor, not my best friend. I don’t have to tell him my life stories.

My best friend would actually be Miranda Powell. She lives a few streets down from me, and we’ve been friends since we were twelve years old. We’re both sixteen now, and she already has her driver’s license. I haven’t even been to driver’s school yet. My mom is always telling me I’ll have to pay for my own driver’s school, but the thing is, she expects me to get a job. The thing about getting a job around here, the lame little town of Orangedale, Massachusetts, is that you have to have experience for almost all of them, which I have none. I have nothing to give.

Anyway, Randy is a normal guy. He’s a nice guy, sometimes a little too nice. Sometimes, I feel as if he’s a little bit too normal. Is there such a thing as too normal? If so, Randy would definitely fit into that category. In my opinion, he’s so normal it’s weird. Oxymoronic, isn’t it? Maybe I feel that way because all my other neighbors are so strange. As far as neighbors go, that’s all I know.