When Adam and I resided in Melbourne last year, we truly understood the value of great neighbours. Up until then, we’d had a great run of near-silent people living around us. In Melbourne, though, we were dragged down into the real world by an apartment full of nerds who worked from home - exclusively between midnight and 8am - and were religiously inspired by radio war documentaries. All night long, all we could hear was soldiers’ stories from Iraq and Nam bellowing through our walls.

I mean, fair cop to war documentaries. It’s just that, truth be told, I prefer to view them on telly at my leisure; not blasted into my house on some scary higher sonic wavelength that I’ve never experienced before.

Thankfully, such petty problems can be resolved after learning from the simple mantra that “information is power” (in other words, we broke into their mailbox to see how we could fuck their lives up). Was quite fun, actually.

Having returned back to Sydney, I’m now realising that the truly deadly neighbour is the Stealthy Yuppie. Seemingly innocent and mostly quiet, but possessing some brutally powerful ways to annoy me.

Initially, I suspected it was a gay guy and his fag hag - Adam since deduced that they’re actually a straight couple, and he’s one of those straight guys who wear pastel pink polo shirts with faux-street stencil artwork (DIE!! DIE!!!!! People like you are the reason I can’t find any friggin’ decently priced t-shirts anymore).

On a daily basis, I’ll hear this guy twatting around outside with his baritone silver-spoon lisp, usually entertaining some of his other friends. There’ll be an unbearable smattering of laughter, then an announcement.

‘Y’all,’ Pink Shirt will announce, undoubtedly with a sassy hand on hip.

Some more tittering.

‘This blancmange is divine,’ he will boom. This is when I sprint inside and scream into a sofa cushion with violent, volcanic rage; absolutely sobbing with hatred.

All these seemingly simple comments - they drive me absolutely crazy. Lately, even just hearing someone in the street conclude a phone call with “ciao” is all it takes for me to inflict my patented Hardly-Hurt™ brand of combat on them.

What particularly irks me is his taste in music: that awful nu-jazz lounge music with vague dance beats which yuppie 30somethings are obsessed with, mostly because they’re reassuring themselves that this truly is “dance music” and they’re still “with it”. All day long we hear fucking goddamn “cruisy” saxophones and Diet Ibizia beats.

When he does display some rogue musical taste, it’s always about three or four years behind everyone else. He’s been disabled with some sort of new music echo disorder. Two weeks ago, I was treated to an endless cacophony of Dido’s ‘Hunter’ on repeat for hours. After a while, Pink Shirt steps outside to water his metrosexual camelias, and calls to his friends inside:

‘Oh my, this champagne, it’s marvellous.’ (Tittering). ‘This album is tres fantastic, don’t you think? She’s so my new favourite artist.’

(Calling from inside). ‘Who is it?’

‘Her name is Day-do,’ he calls back. Inside our apartment, I overhear this through our front window and obliterate two small appliances in our kitchen.

‘I downloaded it from the internet,’ Pink Shirt continues. ‘I got this fantastic program which lets you download any song, ever. The program’s called Kayza-Ayza, you really should try it, it’s superb.’

This is when I descend into a thundering whirlpool of hate and black out.

It looks like I’m going to be the first man in the world to goddamn Cafe Del Mar someone up the arse. I’m not even sure what that involves, but I know I’m slowly being driven to it, and it sure won’t be “cruisy”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 1:25 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.