The Neighbor Upstairs

I began and abandoned this draft back in January (as I think Blogger will actually date this entry - it is actually February 10th & I'm not going to correct it). The situation has since deteriorated. I'm going to chronicle it here, reasoning that it may be funny and that I probably wouldn't otherwise write any of it down. So without further bullshit, welcome to my nightmare. More soon. Seriously.

The guy upstairs is apparently one of the many Katrina victims still scattered across the country almost a year and a half later. I don't know if he waded his way out of New Orleans or fled before the city flooded, but the man is a mess. You can almost hear the psychological damage in his voice. It's horrible. The poor bastard seems absolutely stripped down to just a sliver of any kind of spirit left. To make matters worse, he's also really creepy.
At any hour, day or night, we can hear the vacuum running. His compulsions also require constant bathing or showering. Constantly we hear the thumpings of dropped items emanate from our ceiling. None of this is too much for us - we've lived next to noisy half-sane neighbors before, and indeed it wasn't a big deal for a while.
The layouts of our apartments are the same. When I found a flower pot and a dead plant outside of our patio, all indications were that it came from upstairs. This is Oklahoma City though, one of the windiest damned cities in America, so I figured it had blown off his rail. Only he never tried to retrieve it. This was no big deal until I found a crumpled up magazine full of naked men right next to it. As the father of a seven year old, I was a bit less understanding of such trash laying around waiting for anyone to find it, as was his mother. We called and complained and the apartment complex sent a fellow to take care of it. "It's probably just some girls who enjoy looking at penises," he smilingly assured us - offering no more proof than we had that it came from the guy upstairs (and indeed, we didn't offer any theories or accusations). The next day I found a page torn from the same or a similiar porn magazine floating in the breezeway of our front door.