Last night we had nice weather so while my older son played legos with the neighbor boy upstairs, my 3yo boy and I had snacks outside in the sun while my daughter Vivian plucked the base line from my favorite taylor swift song on the starter guitar I bought myself in 1999 and never upgraded from.
She took sudden interest in the guitar a month ago and I taught her a version of the base line from Hurricane (you know: here I am! Rock me like a hurricane!), which is on the Trolls world tour soundtrack, and then she had said she wanted another song so I taught her a version of the Taylor Swift one from a song called “I think he knows.”
She has been practicing until her fingers are more than sore, playing a right handed guitar as a lefty, and outside she was plucking away trying to get the movements on the neck of the guitar to keep up with tempo of the song, when the most annoying person I’ve met this year emerged from their apartment.
This person self identifies as gender non-binary, but projects eccentric masculinity. When I remember, which is rare, I try to refer them in the nongendered “them.” They are the most self centered person I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. They have acknowledged to me they are a kleptomaniac (can’t stop themselves from stealing things), I have witnessed them lying over time about the actual circumstances of their recent firing from a retail job, which they successfully got unemployment for in spite of being fired for like, bad behavior, meaning that yes, since March, they’ve been hanging out unemployed and making more money than me the whole time thanks to the $600 per week from the pandemic stimulus.
He’s got a daughter my kid’s age who one time came down to play with us in the snow wearing slippers until I sent her inside to get her shoes on; she came back down asking to have her shoes tied, with a scarf and no coat, at which point I asked finally where her dad was. It was like 10:30 am and her dad only has her maybe 20% of the time, maybe, less than me in a kind of noticeable way, and again he’s like as unemployed as one can be, and it was the only snowy morning of the year, so yeah, as a noncustodial dad one ought to be throwing snow with ones kids, regardless of gender ID. I think it’s a serious parental responsibility when you get at best a once a year a snow morning like that to be the melodramatic target at which your kids throw ice balls; without you they’ll just absolutely ruin their little brother, first, and second, they won’t figure out how to shove their frozen fingers in their armpits, not without your help, as it’s a shocking procedure. “He’s asleep on the couch and won’t wake up,” she had said. The girl, age 6 ish, suggested she could run down the street to get her coat at her mom’s, who, her mom, had been described to me as someone attempting to use court proceedings to cut dad’s parenting time unfairly. And she was described to me thus in a totally self referential attempt by neighbor dad at relating to some complaint I must have made verbally about my scenario. When that had happened I’d resolved to stop giving neighbordad a chance to weave our narratives together, as I saw some essential differences in our parenting philosophies and felt I could mount a better defense of my custodial accolades solo. And all of that before they turned out to be a snow throw no show.
So yesterday neighbordad stopped on the way out the door to go to, I can guess, 7-11 to buy, I can guess, American spirits and boneless chicken wings, which come in a large red 7-11 sleeve that always ends up blown into my corner of the courtyard after being left at one of the courtyard tables.
Neighbordad took one look at Vivian practicing the guitar and was diverted entirely from the 7-11 objectives that I expect were at hand. Popping back up to apartment D, neighbordad returned with a miniature electric bass and began teaching Vivian how to play: “every string vibrates, and makes its own what we call a Sine wave, which is picked up by these things here.” Neighbordad spent the next hour pulling progressively unhelpful instruments from his apartment for her to ostensibly learn something from, starting with an electric guitar, and a computer on which to look up cords, at which point I realized neighbordad doesn’t know how to play the guitar.
All of this I watched from about 2 meters away, somewhere between amused and annoyed, while Stetson tipped over all the chairs in the courtyard besides the one in which I was sitting and roared.
I spoke up—till now it could have been like I was invisible, as neighbordad i think believes they’ve got a way communicating with children that acknowledging their parents would like, pollute—and suggested that cords would probably be a little hard to learn and that’s why i have been teaching Vivian baselines and getting her familiar with moving around the neck of the guitar. This comment was rejected, but not to me, to Vivian: “oh no no no, see, the lovely thing about the guitar is that it plays these things called cords when you strum the whole thing,” and neighbordad, putting together a D cord with some serious effort and the Internet for reference, strummed soundlessly on the electric guitar.
Neighbordad tried explaining to Vivian which frets to press on with which fingers and she succeeded in muting the relevant strings and making a percussive thunk as she strummed with the pick, while the top strings rang out a mildly discordant E-A.
“I think you should try an E minor,” I suggested, but to no avail.
They soon moved on Because the actual purpose of this whole weird thing had now been enabled: neighbordad had just downloaded a ridiculously complicated electronic sound generating thingy on the computer That now lay before us and was able to transition to showing off the new software for the next half an hour, interrupted only by neighbordad occasionally losing his mind in Andrew (who’d recently joined us from upstairs) and Stetson’s direction (“Gentlemen! When you yell so loUDLY WHILE A FIRETRUCK IS ALSO GOING BY, THEN I ALSO HAVE TO RAISE MY VOICE TO BE HEARD!!!”)
Vivian paid deep attention the whole time. I literally broke this whole thing up when the sun went down.
Neighbordad suggested that tomorrow (today) Vivian could go hang out at his daughter’s best friend at the best friend’s house, and I said the thing is, I can’t send her off to a place with a group of folks I don’t know. He then suggested that he could watch the boys for half an hour while I took Vivian over to scope it out, and I couldn’t imagine which terrified me more—my two boys in neighbordad’s home or klepto neighbordad in my home, but then I remembered the red chicken sleeves in my corner of the courtyard and That neighbordad doesn’t generally even remember to pick up the chicken sleeve when the chicken has been eaten, and that there’s almost zero chance any of this will be recalled tomorrow, and so I said, let’s touch base tomorrow.
It’s nearly 5 and as of now, base hasn’t been touched.