White (trash) Christmas

Well, hello there! Yes, I am still around, although lurking in the shadows instead of posting.. This Christmas morning, however, I got shocked just enough to post.

The first thing I saw upon walking outside with my dog at 9 a.m. today was an open plastic bread bag, loosely packed with huge fish bones, lying right next to the pile of snow at my front gate. There were more huge fish bones scattered about the middle of the street several yards away. I cannot fathom what made someone eat their traditional Christmas Eve fish dish yesterday night, then carefully pack all the bones in an empty bread bag and - instead of placing that bag in their garbage container - take the trouble to actually carry it outside and dump in the street by next morning, and on the single most important holiday in the year. It's not that it wouldn't fit in their garbage because the volume of the bones was quite small. The mess they became when scattered on the road is much bigger. Danger to animals  - there are homeless dogs and cats in the neighborhood - you bet.

I will never know if the cause was someone's stupidity or spite - perhaps they wanted to harm my cats, perhaps they wanted me to clean up after them, perhaps they didn't want their own cat to be able tofish them out of their garbage All I know is that many in this neighborhood are pure bred white trash.

Those are people who drink at night, wake up past 4 a.m., climb their old bicycles and ride around the neighborhood, going through city trash cans - filling them with their home garbage and retrieving cans which they can sell to the recycling company. The woman two houses down the street who yelled at me at three different times for walking my 12lb dog next to her fence, while she walks her 80lb German shepherd next to my fence every single morning at 5:25, even though she could walk it along the lawn on the other side of the street where it would not be peeing agaist anybody's fence. My neighbor who sweeps leaves from her front lawn onto my lawn and cuts back the ranches reachig from my into her property several feet into my property even though legally she is only allowed to cut flush with the property line. My other neighbors who for years had been dumping garbage agaist the fence at the back of my property - the spot invisible from my house because of the trees. The passers by who climb over my 7 foot fence to steal flowers from my garden, and the passers by who belch loudly and throw empty beer cas and bottles into my garden. The "gardeners" from the fenced apartmet complex across the street who dump refuse from their tiny plots simply over the fence into the surrouding residential area. And the best of them all, a leather-clad, platium dyed diva of that apartment complex who takes her golden retriever outside the complex to comb his fur and, no less, carefully spread the fur from the comb on the pulic lawn, one bunch next to another, covering about a square yard, and heads home, leaving the fur to fly around in the wind.

I sincerely wish all those unfortunate transplants from remote rural areas towards the Eastern border of the country - because that's who they are - returned where they came from, never to be seen again. Of course, that's not going to happen. Let's then hope Karma takes care of them. Please.