I walked outside this morning, and the first thing I saw was this folding chair being watered on my neighbor’s lawn. I’m sure there’s a reasonable and totally mundane explanation for it, but I like to think that it was last night’s cuck chair. I won’t elaborate.

At the beginning of summer, that neighbor got a dog, a puppy, actually, and he spent the summer trying to teach it to self-soothe. He would put it in a cage on his back lawn and leave it there to bark for hours on end. I looked over one afternoon, and he was just a few feet away in his pool, and his wife was sitting nearby on the patio. “Do they like the barking?” I asked Bonnie. How could they stand it?

After weeks of listening to the dog bark, I wanted to grab him by the throat, shake him, and scream in his face, “It’s a pack animal! It wants to be with its pack! That’s you, asshole! It’s a fucking dog! It’s never going to bark itself to sleep!”

I will give him credit, though. While it hasn’t completely stopped, the barking has diminished significantly. I can’t say the same thing about my other neighbors, though. They have a shitty fucking French Bulldog that never shuts up.

Last summer, Bonnie and I were in our kitchen, talking, when we noticed the dog started barking. It sounded like it was in our backyard. I went out to see and saw two little bulldog ears sticking up over the wall. The neighbors had a bunch of plastic totes stacked up against the wall that made the perfect stage for this piece of shit dog to make himself heard. I thought I was crazy, but it seemed like it started barking because it heard us talking. Over the course of the next few days, however, I confirmed that it was, in fact, barking because it heard us.

I noticed that anytime we made any kind of noise, but especially when talking, the dog would start barking, and it regularly climbed up onto the boxes to do it. It was annoying enough that he was barking at us, but once he got going, he wouldn’t quit. He would bark all fucking day.

After weeks of this, I happened to be scrolling through my camera roll, looking for a video, when I came across a video I recorded in my backyard when my family was visiting, and the dog was barking through the whole clip. TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO!

This February, I paved the area around my firepit. I documented the whole thing in this blog, so I’m sure I mentioned the stupid fucking French Bulldog because it barked all fucking day while I was out there working. I had to listen to the stupid thing all day, every day for the whole month of February.

When is enough, enough? I know the horrible people who refuse to train the stupid thing can’t stand the barking either because I hear them open the window and tell the dog to shut up. Not in any sort of authoritative voice, though, but just above a whisper.

So, tonight, while Bonnie and I were sitting out back trying to enjoy the beautiful late summer weather, the stupid fucking piece of shit French Bulldog started barking. The neigborhood was dead silent until then. I walked over to the wall and saw it standing on top of a stack of storage totes.

I got the neighbor’s to come outside, and while the dog stood at their feet barking at me, they looked me dead in the eye and said it wasn’t their dog that was barking, it was the other neighbor’s dog, the one I mentioned earlier. They straight up gaslit me to my face. 😂

Now, I have to admit, I didn’t expect them to take responsibility for having such a shitty dog, so there was no surprise there. I did, however, expect them to turn it around and blame me. I figured they would tell me I should stay out of my own yard or something, so I was relieved to find out that they’re not that psycho. Still, it’s disheartening to know I live nextdoor to someone who can’t admit their dog is barking while it’s barking. C’est la vie. 🤷‍♂️ This ain’t my first rodeo with shitty neighbor’s and I didn’t win the Poweball jackpot tonight, so it’s not likely to be the last.