Borderline. Feels Like I'm Going to Lose My Mind.

Our next door neighbor has lost something.    

We can't be sure what it is, but we've narrowed it down.  

It's definitely one of the following:

• her iPod
• her hearing
• her marbles

We know one of the above is gone, because for the past three weeks, she has been playing the Classic Rock Station.  All day.  Very loudly. On a boom box outside her house.  Aimed our way.

Don't get me wrong.  We all love a little Classic Rock.  But it turns out, that's all there is.  A little.  So they keep playing the same songs over and over again.

It's like a having our very own Guantanamo, right across the garden gate.

If I hear The Last Train to Clarksville one more time, Cheez observed, I am going to take the next train to Gresham.

It turns out it's never the last train to Clarksville.  Because sometime in the next six hours, there's going to be another one blasting by.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, and what's wrong with that?  Let's just say, if Paul McCartney really wants to know, I'd be happy to express it to him.

What's most amazing about this whole phenomenon is that our next door neighbor is not the Camaro driving, pot-smoking, mullet-sporting dude you might imagine, when you are hearing Mungo Jerry's In the Summer Time for the seventieth time.

Our next door neighbor is a retired lesbian school teacher from Montana.  

And yet she is blasting the most heterosexist, misogynist music I've heard since I had a fling with that sweat-pant and t-shirt clad bad boy in my high school.  The one who went on to pledge DKE, get expelled from college, and become a hedge fund manager.

As a hormone-harried adolescent, it seemed so romantic when he gave me a cassette tape with lyrics o' longing like

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

Then we wouldn't have to wait so long

And wouldn't it be nice to live together

Who knew older could mean "retired on my PERS pension with no reason to leave the house today"?  

That what we wouldn't have to wait for was hearing the same two damn Credence songs over and over and over and over again?  

And that live together would actually refer to living in separate buildings yet in close enough proximity that I can here every twangy microtone of the theremin, even with my windows closed?