Thursday's Feature: City Life

As a work-from-home type person, I often feel like I don't get enough of a chance to really experience DC as often as I would like. Sometimes, this can be a blessing, like when a used cooking oil truck leaks all over 14th street during the hottest day of the year, closing down the area and giving it an air of stale fried foods. and vomit, apparently.

So, I may have dodged a bullet by not experiencing that.

Of course, most of the time I don't have to leave the block to get a little taste. Example, you ask? I'll give you two. The first involves my next door neighbors and their love/hate relationship with mattresses. In the 18 months I have lived here, our fair neighbors have discarded approximately 345 mattresses/boxspring combinations. And for once, I don't think I am prone to hyperbole.

You see, first, they stack them up on their back patio, then, at night, they transfer them to the alley behind their house, which clogs the alley and doesn't allow the city to make the weekly trash pickup. Which forces their neighbors to call the city and have someone remove them. The highwater point of these shenanigans came yesterday. As I was finishing up my daily loop with the Wonder Dog, I noticed that not only were there four mattresses in the alley, but the folks also decided to stack a couple of box springs on their front porch. Yeah, I called the city to have them removed, as it was my turn in the neighbor rotation to do so (the rest of us have taken to writing the schedule on a white board that we hang on a street lamp so as to eliminate duplicate phone calls).

I think that they must manufacture mattresses in the house. There is no other explanation that supports the physical evidence. I am not aware of any national "Homespun Mattress Manufacturers Association", or else I would report them and have their membership put under review. And, in case you think this is just a DC cottage industry, read this brave soul's report from deep in the heart of Texas: Undercover Investigation: Houston Heights Mattress Addicts.

Not sure if that makes me feel better or not.

I promised a second example, didn't I? Let me take you in the George Michael Sports Machine back to DC yesterday. During halftime of the Spain/Germany match, there was a knock at the door. There stood a guy with a cooler. "Good afternoon, sir," said the man, "I'm with a local meat company, and we have a surplus of meat after the July 4th holiday. Would you like to purchase some steak?".

I looked out towards our street, hoping to spy a truck with a reputable steak/meat company logo on it, but could not see one. Nope: it's official: this guy was carrying steaks in a cooler door-to-door. I know, there are lots of people who would have been like, "SCORE! Cheap meat!" I am not one of these people. I kindly refused his generous offer, and like that, he picked up his cooler and moved to my neighbors house, where he proceeded to set his cooler down on one of their box springs. You can't make this shit up.