Love thy neighbor? Lord knows I'm trying.

I hadn't expected this particular topic to be my first blog, but, so be it. Let me tell you about my neighbor, Greg*. If you describe my street as being shaped like a dog-leg, then my house is at the bend, and his house is at the top of the leg. I noticed Greg months ago because he was sitting in his front yard on an old chair that you see in vintage pool halls and old seafood restaurants that haven't passed a health inspection in 20 years. Ya know, the ones with the A-shaped backs and puffy vinyl backings? Yup, those. And because he's almost always there. Doing what? Nobody knows. I recently noticed Greg hanging out at my next-door neighbor's house, tinkering with cars, inspecting lawn mowers, and doing whatever else unemployed middle-aged men do.

And then one day I got a knock on my door.

It was Saturday morning, and Greg had watched me drive past his house a few minutes earlier and decided to walk over to my house to introduce himself. He already knew my name, though (thanks to my next-door neighbor -- ahem), and proceeded to have a halfway lucid conversation with me. The most surprising thing about this interaction is that he *smelled* sober, but you could definitely tell that his synapses were either misfiring or at least stalled in second gear. (Sidenote: a few friends reminded me that many drugs don't actually generate any odors.)

But the most interesting thing about our interaction was this: Greg had walked over to my house with a cup of coffee, and held it in his right hand the entire time we talked. But before he shook my hand to say his goodbyes and walk back home, he switched his coffee cup from his right hand to his left. I watched him as he did this, and noticed that the coffee sloshed out of his cup and onto his left hand. BUT. When he shook my right hand with his right hand, he almost immediately made a face, withdrew his hand from mine, and made a hissing noise by inhaling air through his teeth and tongue, as if he had just touched something hot. And he apologized for burning me. [Pause for effect.] But what he didn't realize was that he had actually burned himself -- his other hand -- and not mine. But like I said, with those synapses stalled in second gear and/or misfiring, his brain told him that he had burned *me*, and not that he had actually burned himself.

Interesting, indeed.


*Names have not been changed to protect the guilty.