Amber's War with the Neighbors Part One: Universalism and Environmentalism

As soon as I am done with Severance, I will ruin your life.

Note to reader: Don't worry. If you don't enjoy reading self-righteous accounts of my personal grievances, this transitions into a "we live in a society," as my essays usually do, whether I want them to or not.

A few days ago, a woman knocked on our door. My boyfriend answered, while I hid on the far end of the couch, just out of her line of sight. I was watching the second season of Severance, and I really didn’t want to talk to anyone.¹ Nate later told me she was an ordinary-looking Silver Lake woman in her early 30s.² I only really heard his side of the conversation, but you can tell when someone’s muffled tone is timid and amiable. I anticipated a friendly notification that she would be having a party and there might be some noise; here's my number and let me know if we get too loud, etc. It's a pretty common courtesy in the neighborhood.

Their talk was brief, but it ended with my boyfriend saying, "Oh, my name is Nate, by the way." She said something in reply.

"What was that?" I asked after he closed the door. He was smirking a little.

"She lives behind us. She asked if she could cut down the redwood," he said.

It was "blocking her view," he said.

She even said she would hire someone to do it "for us," he said.

He had cut her off by telling her that he would have to discuss it with me, sparing me the interaction, but he gave her his number. I'm pretty sure he anticipated my response, which was something to the effect of:

“This. Fucking. Bitch.”³

After some flames-on-my-face Googling, I learned the house had been for sale about nine months ago, and I found no listings for recent rentals of the property. On top of that, she said she was going to hire a tree doctor, which would be a super-weird thing for a renter to do.

So, the all-but-assured scenario is that this woman purchased this three-bedroom house in an adorable neighborhood for over $2,000,000 about nine months ago, a house where she is able to step right outside her door and enjoy views of the beautiful hills of Silver Lake, featuring the observatory, lush greenery, and even nicer houses of the stylish mid-century modern variety in the distance. AND she purchased this large and expensive house knowing full well that her back yard had a beautiful view of a California Redwood--the state tree of California, I might add--which would provide her with shade and beauty and exposure to wildlife, like an ethereal fucking glade in a SoCal Lothlórien.⁴

But, she wants to see the San Gabriel Mountains behind the tree… from one of her three balconies. I will admit, the mountains are beautiful, but, tragically for her, they are not the particular beautiful thing she decided she deserved as a reward for being a homeowner. Obviously this entitles her to request that other people remove beautiful things from their own yards.

“But Amber,” you say, “ isn’t it possible she rented this recently acquired house through a private listing?”

Well, dear reader, I choose to be generous and assume that is not true, because if she’s asking someone to cut down a tree behind a home she’s renting, just for her temporary view, she should be carefully observed by professionals for signs of violent sociopathy.⁵

I was angrily narrating all of this—punctuated with such queeny, dramatic outbursts like "That bitch better learn to enjoy that tree, because it's not going anywhere"— to my sympathetic and supportive boyfriend, while he threw logs on the fire by dissecting her approach:

The first time this woman ever introduced herself to us—her neighbors as of nine months ago—was to ask for a "favor."⁶ Except, as he pointed out, she didn't introduce herself. When someone introduces themselves, they say their name, and they ask for yours. She came to our door with intentions towards our tree, and when she didn't get the immediate yes that she appeared to be expecting (???), she had to be reminded to ask for his name and tell him hers.

She didn’t come to us nine months earlier, while she was looking at the house, asking if the tree was negotiable. We still would have said "no," but we would have understood that she was weighing options and desirable features while house-hunting.

No, she waited until well after she had moved in before coming to us for an outlandishly inappropriate request, all for the sake of her view. Except she didn't even treat it like a request, she acted if she was doing us a favor by "offering" to pay for it. How generous.

I will add here that we rent, from an absentee landlord who has been living in her second house in Hawaii for decades, where she teaches bad art at a community college and paints the sort of beachside landscapes I have never seen outside of a Myrtle Beach Motel,⁷ and uses a property management company to block any and all attempts we can make to interact with her and ask her to fix anything, except one time, when she replaced vintage 1960s bathroom tile with the cheapest vinyl click-lock flooring Home Depot sells, usually to slumlords, Airbnb renovators and tasteless heterosexual Persian men who flip historic houses into hideous crimes against beauty that somehow cost 15% more than they did when Armin bought them. But I digress.

My landlord and everyone else who doesn't deserve a second house (or even the right to renovate their first one) are best saved for another post.

The point is, the house I live in—which has a lot of beautiful features worth preserving—is falling apart due to negligence, oftentimes making it hell to live in. There’s asbestos and lead paint (which is legal to keep in a rental property, provided you alert the tenant in the lease). The gutters are bent towards the house, meaning that in heavy rains, the water hits the windows and leaks in to cover half the living room floor unless you continually barricade it with towels, regularly replacing them as they soak through. The dishwasher doesn’t really work. There’s no water pressure in the kitchen (I never use warm water; it feels like being pissed on). The wiring is a death trap and the breaker has to be flipped constantly when the lights go out. Plaster is always falling from the ceiling, especially when there’s an earthquake. The plastic baseboards on the click-lock flooring in the bathroom peeled off almost immediately, and since the floor was installed without a moisture barrier, the bathroom frequently smells like moldy laundry that was forgotten in the washer over a long summer vacation.

Nice little things, like the view of that tree through (rotting) sliding french doors (that you have to be careful opening because the track is broken), are why we put up with this.

We agreed that Nate would be the better diplomat for this kind of thing. For one, he's just better versed in the professional middle class etiquette that these situations call for. Second, I was stomping around the house and hissing malicious threats like Joan Crawford at a PepsiCo board meeting to a person who wasn’t even there. And, I am often overly and/or prematurely retaliatory (I’m working on it).

I think he did a good job.

Shortly after the neighborly visit, Nate told a friend about it, who immediately snapped "What a cunt," incredulous that anyone would think their view was reasonable grounds for asking someone to severely alter a major feature of another person's yard, a person they had not bothered to form any relationship with prior to this, and to act as if they were being generous in "offering" to pay for said desecration.

I wasn't there for the exchange, so I drilled Nate on exactly what the friend said, the affirmation of one's righteous anger being one of the most delicious things in the world. "That's bullshit," said in genuine vicarious umbrage, especially when the speaker is nowhere near you when they say it (and therefore are not being prompted or socially accommodating), is on par with "I love you" when it comes to phrases that assure you of your worth as a human being. No one can tell me this is not a universal emotion.

A lot of stuff is universal, or at least close.

For example…

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Trees and nature and whatnot are broadly popular, and not merely for their value as a scenic vista in the far distance. To most people, nature is more than just a pretty postcard to enjoy from indoors (or one of your three balconies), and unless you're an aberration like my neighbor, you have a basic understanding that you're not the only person who feels that way.

Maybe this woman is an anomaly, sure, but as much as we talk about the politically, psychologically, and socially corrosive simulacrum of human contact that is the internet, I’ve noticed a lot of parallel behaviors lately—especially since Covid—in the actual, physical world.

And it’s not just me. I’ve heard a lot people mention similar interactions and observations, unprompted. They talk about the listlessness of the customers they serve, the vacant stares of children they teach, the malaise of fellow parents they chat with at their kids’ Little League games. Sometimes it’s just the people they share the road or sidewalk or public space with. People seem to drive, walk and ride bikes more carelessly, as if in a daze. They don’t know how to stand in line, or notice the people waiting in line behind them, even when they themselves were grimacing and muttering with impatience just seconds ago. Their minds are elsewhere. And wherever it is, they’re there alone.

And it all begs the question, is there something in the air these days that prevents us from seeing each other? Have Americans become worse at recognizing themselves in others? Are we so blind to near-universal values and experiences that we have no idea how to treat each other? Are we becoming increasingly oblivious to other people, until we want something from them?

Are we all just standing on our neighbors’ doorsteps, showing our asses, because we forgot how to act?

Maybe you’d say no. Maybe you’d say I’m jamming a personal grievance into a “reflection,” or worse, tacking a “reflection” onto a personal grievance, just to justify my bitching. That’s fine. It’s still worth reminding ourselves that other people are also people, and that some things are universal, within a tiny margin of error.

Though expressions and definitions may differ, appreciation of “nature” is universal; you can tell, because it transcends culture wars. Appearances to the contrary are nearly always cosmetic.

For example, despite the ironically cosmopolitan connotations of “hiking,” your rural Trump voter usually spends a lot more time in the woods than the liberals most associated with protecting them. This is obviously largely by virtue of geographic proximity; sometimes rednecks—even the ones with money—live in the woods. But the aesthetic contrast—Fjällräven vs. Carhartt—is just a distinction without a difference. It’s still hiking. Most people just call it “walking in the woods.”

Animal welfare concerns are also largely attributed to bourgie liberals, but that is neither historically nor currently true. Go to any shitty trailer park of generically conservative lumpen and tell them about a guy nearby who beat a harmless dog to death. They will ask you where he lives.

Is this the most productive way to deal with animal cruelty? No. But I’ve heard it argued that this kind of vigilante justice response is usually just a pretext for someone who was already itching to commit violence. That might be true, sometimes, at least partially. But is it so hard to believe that violent, vengeful actions can also be motivated by sincere moral outrage, a righteous sense of justice, and compassion for another living creature? Besides, if you really want to fuck someone up in a sketchy trailer park, you don’t really have to bother with a compassionate justification.

My friend Felix and I often half-joke that PETA is an op funded by the meat lobbies to make people so annoyed and disgusted with animal rights activists that they demand factory farming. It gets a little tinfoil hat at times, and I'm a big believer that most "ops" aren't actually aware of their participation in the service of evil,so much as they are suggestible. You don’t need “double agents” when there’s a high supply of self-righteous morons that will do just as well.

But I do think it's significant that the one animal PETA-founder Ingrid Newkirk has called for the eradication of—meaning both a ban on breeding and automatic euthanasia—is the pitbull, the most common breed category found in the genetic makeup of any dog in America. Just going by the numbers, “bully breeds” and related mutts are the dogs of the American working class—whether rural, urban suburban, black, white, latino, man, woman, family etc.

There may be regional exceptions—possibly chihuahuas in Los Angeles, though I'd say it’s still pretty close—but pitbulls are the pet of the proletariat, for quite a few reasons (but that's another post).

So, if you wanted to portray the concern for animal welfare as an attack on the common man, what would you have an animal rights activist/provocateur say?

These days, they are kept for protection by almost every drug dealer and pimp in every major city and beyond. You can drive into any depressed area and see them being used as cheap burglar alarms, wearing heavy logging chains around their necks (they easily break regular collars and harnesses), attached to a stake or metal drum or rundown doghouse without a floor and with holes in the roof. Bored juveniles sic them on cats, neighbors' small dogs and even children.

Aside from the fever dream mythology of pitbull super-strength, the nonsensical, chicken-and-egg conflation of cruelty towards an animal with some kind of innate cruelty within the animal, the racist dog whistles and her general hatred for the poor, this lady—who’s calling you an animal abusing monster—this horse-faced Englishwoman wants to kill your dog.

Also... Newkirk's father immigrated from the UK to design bombing systems for planes and ships during Vietnam... Jussayin'.

But it’s not just about pets! Factory farming is also ethically and viscerally repellent to every Republican and cultural conservative I know. That might be a poor sample size for a meaningful statistic, but there’s no shortage of right-wing anti-industrial agriculture influencers on Instagram and TikTok. Aside from the aforementioned big business skepticism—especially those other pharmaceutical companies, the ones making the hormones and pesticides ingested by the giant suffering mutants we torture and eat—people know that it's fucked up that animals live painful, unnatural lives in disgusting, terrifying conditions. Conservatives are also frequently—though not always—the same people who work in those slaughterhouses and processing plants, where the barbaric conditions extend to employees who are often seriously injured, permanently mutilated, and left with devastating PTSD.

My Papaw said that "everything you eat deserves to die without hurt or fear," meaning that not only should death be painless, they shouldn't even see it coming. He also believed that Jesus was coming back, “any day now.” These are not mutually exclusive positions.

But the broadest, most fish-in-a-barrel opportunity—the most obvious “bleeding heart” issue that libs always seem to relegate to their own special purview, despite the obvious bi-partisan appeal—is "the environment."

That’s the weird thing about conservatives. Sometimes they actually want to conserve things worth conserving.

STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO: A SURVEY AND BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM… ⁸

ALSO MY NEIGHBOR TEXTED US BACK.

1. Great show. Amazing cast. God, Irving is such a beautiful character. It's all Turturro. It would be so easy to play Irving as a pompous buffoon, but Turturro treats him with depth and compassion, giving him a complex humanity.

2. I saw John Turturro on the street once, and despite my total inability to recognize celebrities in the wild, I clocked that beautiful crossbite immediately. What a fucking face. You won't see another one of those on screen for a long time.

3. Oh my god, and Patricia Arquette? Cannot get over the voice, the eyes, the way she carries herself. SO fucking major.

4. And the art direction? I remember someone once saying something about how contemporary futurism was generally very clean and Apple Store-ish, but took that Kubrick space station aesthetic to heart way too much and now everyone imagines the future as colorless. I think there’s something to that; we definitely see less color, but like in the Lumen offices, you see aggressive blocks of jewel tones for plausible deniability; “we’re not oppressively soulless, see? Look at the carpet!”

5. Some people hated the Waffle Party scene. No one I respect, but some people. Baffling.

6. Ricken should be an insufferable blowhard, but the fact that he’s honest to a fault, he genuinely wants Mark’s approval, that he’s a good father and husband… it’s just endearing.

7. Optics and Design would never. There is zero Kier in that shit.

8. And I finished Severance.