This note, unearthed by The Bold Italic, is pretty much the most perfect passive-aggressive note one can receive in their mailbox from a neighbor. It’s got everything: humor, pathos, an antichrist symbol left on a doorstep, and a screaming match with a poodle. It’s basically a Stephen Sondheim musical waiting to happen. Is Bernadette Peters working? Because have I got a role for her.
The tragic missive, left in the mailbox of every resident on a street in Oakland, California details the anonymous plight of a person so pushed to their limit that they’re willing to admit that they were once attacked by an army poodle. Is that a thing? Because if it isn’t the army should get right on that. Most fashionable hound unit in the west.
In 2011, the dog in [Address A] started barking at my apartment almost every day. I ignored it until 2012, when I started saying no to it under the assumption that it and its owners were kind. It was running up to the property line and blasting my ground level apartment with sound without provocation. The dog gained the ability to disrupt my thought process. I yelled at it, at the top of my lungs, once. In 2013, I tried to communicate with its owners on two occasions, to introduce my self politely, and husband told me the dog never goes outside, doesn’t bark, and wasn’t barking at me at all. I visited again after being woken up at night, and the husband attacked me with it, 19 pound “all army” poodle, and screamed in my face for 3-10 minutes as I tried to get off his property. The dog now barks at me at night, very regularly, exactly as I am trying to go to sleep. Someone dumped Powerbait onto a load of wash when I moved into [Address B], and recently after swearing at the poodle’s owner over the fence, a mirror with the letters REDRUM and an antichrist symbol were left outside my door. I am a mostly raw vegan pacifist martial artist.
I get it. I have neighbors who keep me up at night sometimes. The ones who live next door are either actual monsters who fuck a lot or really like dubstep (how can you tell the difference?). And the people who live across the yard from me have a dog that likes to joyously say hello to the world at all hours of the night, it’s just so happy to be alive.
Several times I have stumbled to my window at 3am, opened it wide and screamed “shut the fuck up, MARKS ARE SLEEPING IN HERE” at the pooch (which my partner says only encourages it), but I have never considered leaving a note, including all my qualifications, for any of my neighbors. Mainly because I think that would encourage them to both steer clear of and torment me more in retaliation.
Perhaps this poor soul hasn’t found a way to learn to live with the angry dog who keeps leaving REDRUM mirrors on its doorstep, but this note certainly isn’t going to help matters. No, if anything, it will only raise the question of why, when the dog yells at this pacifist martial artist, it’s not met with the sight (not the experience of, just the sight) of some killer moves from a respectable distance. I bet then the dog would leave you alone. Or you know, you could always call some governing body that deals with this kind of issue. That sounds just a smidge more reasonable, if not less quaint, than swearing over a fence.
Image via Reddit