Slightly Psycho Neighbors

So, neighbor Kevin and I have, over the course of the summer, struck up an unlikely friendly association.

I blame it on the patio furniture. I bought it a little over a month ago, while I was taking time off from the old job and looking for a new, seeing how I was spending vast amounts of time in idleness and tired of languishing about the apartment. No matter how much you love your abode, it starts to feel a little cramped in gorgeous weather.

So I bought a cheap plastic table and two cheap plastic chairs, that I could languish in idleness out of doors, tucked away on the porch looking over the yard. Kevin returned from a trip to visit property he owns in Costa Rica, and he spends a lot of time on the porch as well. We began chatting.

It's basically the first time we've attempted much to interact since he tried browbeating me last summer into giving him information about Colette. Of course he failed miserably (there's a post in the archives somewhere), since I respond to browbeating in a predictably me fashion. Because, I'm guessing, that's his usual mode of interaction with people, particularly women, he didn't bother talking to me for about a year, which suited me splendidly.

But over the summer our mutual presence on the porch, our loosely disguised loneliness in the largely indifferent city of South Bend, landlord gripes, and some apparent internal adjustment on his part have rendered friendly conversation possible. He hasn't attempted to browbeat. We don't discuss Colette. If he makes suggestions as to life impovements I could make, I shrug them off or laugh at them, and he leaves me alone.

We have quite different "worldviews" and a few drastic differences in lifestyles (he's what my landlord likes to call "earthy," and I get along well with earthy, though I eat meat and shop at Wal-Mart and am horrendously bad at recycling), but rather similar approaches to things like different perspectives. (Although I suspect his approach to my different perspectives on, say, the Second Amendment would be more overbearing if it would work, which it won't; I've had my mind made up on that topic since I was nine years old, and I have lengthy lists of logical support.) So we've had interesting discussions on politics, religion, society, ethics, grammar, reading, etc. and, having spent much of the summer conversing with myself, I've been enjoying them.

Kevin is also a virtuoso on the guitar. For some reason he knows I like to sing (maybe I'm louder in the shower than I realize), and before leaving for Costa Rica he gave me a mix of Gillian Welch songs which he encouraged me to learn so that we could perform at an open mic at the Fiddler's sometime.

Me, I've felt the music swelling in me almost as intense as words, the need to sing like the need to write. It's been unbearable lately, in all honesty. I used to sing in church at home, fairly frequently in the summers when I was on break from college. Though I'll have to say the need to sing now is stronger than I ever remember it. My voice is getting better, and I've finally found the genre that suits it: folk.

My summer has been filled with folk artists and folk-influenced artists -- Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter, Sufjan Stevens, even Bright Eyes. And I'm starving for more.

So last night after I came home from dinner with the intrepid MP, Kevin dug out the guitar and played while I sang "Miss Ohio." He introduced me to Edie Brickell's "I Do," which I'm learning.

So it's been fun. Lightly, surprisingly fun.

He suggested I learn to play the guitar so that I could be my own act. It's a thought. He also said that I should start doing stuff with singing. He was highly complimentary of my voice.

And of course I love compliments, even though they sometimes embarrass the hell out of me.