the gate crashers

This is the gate to my new house -- and a bunch of junk that was removed from the house, there in a pile on the left. Oops. Gotta get that cleaned up, boys. In yet another immaculate stroke of absurdity, I have been informed of the ground floor neighbors’ insistence that, before the top two floors are reoccupied, a new gate be installed, to the left of the current gate, for the upstairs tenants’ use. I hope the picture makes clear that the distance between the two gates would be all of one meter, or less. A second gate would serve no purpose at all except to reinforce the idea that they were there first, and that we are the interlopers. All of that exterior space is communal property. Just because they put their fancy garden furniture and a few trees there doesn’t make that space theirs.

All this hostility… and we’ve never even met.