Garbage woes.

Yet again, just like on the 2nd of April, someone's apparently trying to send me a message through the garbage cans out back.

Yet again, yesterday, someone else's garbage wound up in my garbage can. This morning, my garbage can was tipped over, along with my recycling bin. But only mine, not the downstairs neighbour's. (The downstairs neighbor is the one who was getting blackmailed the other day by a young African-American gentleman who blamed the downstairs neighbor's pet Chihuahua, who is indeed decidedly feisty, for having caused him to break the screen on his cell phone.)

I hesitate, for obvious reasons, to cast aspersions in any direction; and yet figure it can't hurt to simply observe the fact that people come and go from the back door of 113 North Broad Street rather frequently carrying black garbage bags filled with no one knows exactly what. I have seen several people do it, and then walk across the parking lot in the direction of dumpsters the next block over, though I certainly have not seen anyone from there bring their garbage to my can, such are the sightlines involved from my modest (and yet comfortable) sniper's nest of an apartment.

The voluminous amounts of kitchen waste do certainly seem to indicate a very large and very busy household, not unlike, perhaps, the family now living at 113.

In all other regards, as far as I can tell, they are near-perfect neighbours. Maybe that's the point of neighbourliness, though: none of us are, in fact, perfect in others' eyes; thus it's a constant dance negotiating what can change with what must stay the same, what is negotiable with what is not.

What's non-negotiable in my view, here, is my exclusive use of the garbage can attached to the apartment for which I have paid rent since January, 2015. Having admittedly used other people's dumpsters from time to time for my own garbage, I am frankly inclined to overlook entirely an isolated case of someone dumping their garbage in my trash can. What I am not prepared to overlook, however, is a repeated pattern and practice of so doing to the point that I cannot use it for my own trash, let alone when combined with the petty vandalism of knocking the garbage can over. (Are we not even adults anymore?)

For that reason, and that reason alone, I did in fact venture to call 311 this morning, where I left a detailed message on the situation following up from the last time I talked to the city (at which time an officer called me back and told me what I had experienced was called "theft of services") on April 2nd.

I do not like to call police on anybody, ever. I've had it done to me, and know damn well that even at its best, it isn't fun. But yes, I do presume to continue believing that the social fabric has not been so rent asunder in recent years that we can not make use of public resources to serve the very day-to-day needs of our shared civility.

I trust the situation will resolve itself, before too long, to everyone's satisfaction. The fact of the matter is that we do have to live, not exactly with each other, but certainly nearby each other. Our various lives cannot help intersecting now and then in ways that some of us would prefer they did not.

We very simply do things differently. We come from different cultures, from different backgrounds, with very largely different cultural notions of what's appropriate, and what is not.

Still, I would frankly much prefer my neighbours stay the same, unlike the five or so beligerent young men who'd previously flown the Confederate flag and stockpiled ammunition at the same exact house. Regardless who the trash is coming from, I feel comfortable around the family living there now in ways I certainly did not with the young men who'd follow me through the alley yelling epithets attempting to get me to notice them. Unlike my prior neighbours, my current ones do in fact say hello to me from time to time and comment on the weather. That, in my opinion, is more how things really should be.

And no, I'd really rather not be on the front lines of a race war any more than I would like to be the scout and herald of the juggernaut of gentrification. Or any more, for that matter, than I'd like to live on the heavily trafficked Mother Road, behind a long-closed Wimpy Burger with silversmithing Navajo next-door neighbours attached in prior years to the adjacent Bell Trading Post.

You want to know what a "misunderstanding" is? Try making sense of the Navajo neighbour's brother's common law wife's Pueblo of Santo Domingo usage of gender with cats and chickens. That can indeed get confusing, to say nothing of counting on your fingers in Keresan. But so it goes — we all have to expand our minds at least a little and put forth some modicum of effort, yet the results are, in my opinion, well worth the effort.