I moved into a huge estate that I shared with a bunch of twenty somethings, who had fantastic parties almost every night I rented a large storage building on the property for my stuff and I lived in my RV parked in the spacious backyard. I got to be friends with one of the neighbors across the fence, and he told me horror stories about the neighbor next to him who also was adjacent to my backyard space. The guy would routinely throw his trimmed tree branches and other trash over the fence into other people’s yards. He would walk around naked in his backyard, and when another neighbor went over to his place to politely ask him to put some clothes on because his young kids could see him from their second story windows, the asshole neighbor flew into a rage and screamed at him. Apparently he was quite emotionally excitable and he was very large too, so he must have been accustomed to bullying people to get his way, and he wouldn’t stop running around naked. He would cut peepholes through my friendly neighbor’s hedges so that he could look through them into the bathroom of my friendly neighbor’s sister in law (they had two houses on their property). This was a quite upscale neighborhood out West where even some very wealthy local celebrities lived, not some scruffy trailer park in Florida!

One day I found that the asshole neighbor had trimmed back the tree branches over the property line of our yard almost three feet, apparently to improve his view of the frequent parties we used to have, attended by many gorgeous young women. By ‘trimmed back’ I mean that he had cut branches that were between two and three inches in diameter! I was preparing for an extended trip out of town, and wanted to nip that behavior in the bud, so I cut about a 3.5 x 3 foot piece of plywood and spray painted on it, “HEY ASSHOLE, don’t cut any more limbs and branches on this property!” and I screwed it firmly, reinforced with fender washers, to the cut ends of the branches he had cut on our property. Then I left on my trip.

Several months later when I returned, I found that the mofo had cut down the “HEY ASSHOLE” sign and vandalized my RV and several cars parked in the backyard too, two of which were mine and one belonged to one of my estate/mates. He had apparently crossed the fence and smashed a bunch of windows with a hammer and punctured the sidewalls of three of my RV’s tires! He was a hothead, alright.

So I had a conversation with the friendly neighbor about the situation, and we brainstormed a bit about an appropriate response. The police wouldn’t do anything about it, calling it a ‘civil matter’ and telling me to take the creep to court, and besides, what evidence did I have? Not much actually, but I knew it was him. The brainstorming with the friendly neighbor didn’t go very far right away, so one night I took a walk around the block to check out the guy’s place. He had a very large front yard that was immaculately landscaped, with what looked like a small orchard of very young fruit and nut trees, and across the front of his property stood thirteen quite majestic Italian cypresses in a line, at least 40 to 50 feet tall, making his property the most prominent and impressive on his street. So I went back the next day to the friendly neighbor and asked him if the creep hired landscapers to do all that work, or did he do it himself? “Oh no, he spends hours every day working on his yard” he told me, and then I knew what to do, but I didn’t know how. I was going to do what I could to destroy the fruits of his labors, of course. Confronting him directly would be pointless and might get me killed, so that was out of the question. The friendly neighbor suggested RoundUp, that toxic chemical made by the corporate psychopaths at Monsanto. Aha, I had a plan.

However, I bided my time. Repaired the damage to my RV glass and got new tires on it at no small expense, sold the damaged cars, and helped my estate-mate get rid of his too. About a year and a half passed until I was ready to move across the country, which had been long in the planning, from even before I moved to that place. About four days before I was ready to leave, I had acquired everything I needed: a gallon of concentrated RoundUp, a battery-powered Super Soaker squirt gun with a backpack fluid reservoir, and an all-black Ninja-style stealth outfit. It was a cool moist night when I went over to his place after midnight and drenched everything in his front yard with full strength 41% RoundUp. He had really put a lot of work into that landscaping, with his young orchard trees surrounded by mulch that was held in and made to look pretty by that black plastic border barrier stuff and so forth.

A few days later I was ready to leave, but it takes some time for RoundUp to work so I didn’t even bother to check it before I left. I figured the asshole might just be beginning to notice the effects, at best. I spent several weeks crossing the country, and since then have used Google’s Street View to check on progress. Rather quickly all the smaller trees and shrubs, and one quite large deciduous tree, all lost their leaves and were removed, but a few of them were more resistant. Those Italian cypresses were tough and survived the longest. Now almost ten years later, over half of those huge majestic Italian cypresses are gone and the remainders look ratty as hell; they will eventually be gone too. I hadn’t planned it that way, thinking initially that they’d all be gone pretty promptly, but having it slowly drawn out over time for the asshole was even better. What was once the most impressive property on that street is now the ugliest, and that hotheaded mofo has had almost ten years to see all his labor slowly slip through his fingers and be replaced with cleanup work. Sometimes Google has shown me his trash containers stuffed to overflowing with cut vegetable matter! I do regret killing so many trees and so much shrubbery, but as an instrument of Lady Karma’s I know justice was served. Take that, asshole, and think first before you mess with any of your neighbors again.