I’ve been here in the new place for five weeks now and I’m starting to become a little concerned that the buiding might actually be a mental hospital.

I was out hunting the homeless this morning as I do most Sundays and had quite a surprise when the elevator door opened on my floor. Now before all the bleeding hearts start to write to me and complain that the homeless are people and they have a right to live under a dumpster and bother tourists and the elderly let me stop you. First off, I practise catch and release and secondly very few suffer any permanent effects of a fire extinguisher unloaded in their face. I abide by accepted standards and always maintain an arms length distance from my quarry.

Back to the elevator. When the door opened there was a girl standing there. I think she had a pink dress on or perhaps she was naked, I really couldn’t tell you. What I noticed was that her lips were freakishly huge. Not big, not voluptuous and certainly not sexy. I just stood there and stared at her lips, making no attempt to exit the elevator as I mentally calculated what could have caused her disfigurment. “I bet she just took a dried up ball of Play-Doh square in the mouth” Snapping out of it, I left the elevator while she eyed me suspiciously. Or at least I think she did ’cause I was still staring at her lips.

The crazy middle eastern dude above me seems to have settled down a little. No crazy music and no screaming into his phone as he stands in his window and flicks his cigarette ashes all over my window and the cedar bush. He did crack one night last week when he screamed “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!”. I don’t know what his problem was. I hadn’t heard anything previous to that and when I stood up to see what was going on I saw nothing but other bewildered humans looking out their windows.

Today I was doing my laundry and an elderly woman came in. We exchanged pleasantries as I folded my clothes and she loaded the washers. Naturally the conversation turned to ‘laundry sucks’ as it often will when two strangers meet in a laundry room. She ended the conversation rather abruptly when she said “Too bad we have to wear clothes…”

Now I ask you, what kind of person says something like that? What is going through their mind when they think of all the possible things that they could say and they come up with that? It’s not just that she was old enough to be my grandmother, that fat lip chick would have gotten the same reaction (and I have yet to establish that she was in fact wearing clothes). I dunno… maybe I’m finding out why the rent is so cheap.

So I guess my neighbours are whacked. If nothing else, I would at least seem to have an endless supply of blogworthy topics.