Praise be, last night was quiet. After we squabbled with Maggie over the hose into our carport on the alley, she slyly arranged another hose to drip into our front yard. We left it where it was. Calvin and I know we are headed into mental illness soup, but we don’t want to rush in.

We spend too much time thinking about how we might act if there wasn’t a hostile crazy person next door, and last night I instituted a drink on the deck.

We sat on our deck, which is a floor above the alley, and about 20 feet down and over Maggie sat in her car with the windows and doors open smoking and listening to very loud music. I had a glass of wine, Calvin had a beer, and the kids had Cokes. Suddenly a Chuck Berry song came on from Maggie’s car. It was lovely to hear him.

Sadly the next song was Twist and Shout by the Beatles, so we had to talk some shit about the Beatles. I never imagined that I would be a 50-year-old person with a searing hatred for the Beatles, but here I am. When Maggie is not in a manic phase, she radiates a smug beatitude about her taste. She claims to meditate, to be a yoga master, to know everyone, to have impeccable taste in anything.

I remember her Facebook posts years back were often about kale and quinoa and how much her family loved her food. I knew there was more pizza and Chinese deliveries than real cooking, and I marveled at the disconnect. I don’t lie on social media, although I definitely play up the admirable and ignore the bad. I longed to do an overly truthful post, like “Calvin is a pain in the ass and Wyatt can not get his pee INTO the toilet,” but I’m not a fool. But if I’m not cooking kale—and I would never willingly cook kale—I’m not posting about cooking it.

One of the neighbors on the other side of our house was stretching after a run in the alley. “It was so quiet for a few days,” she said. I told her we were interviewing lawyers and she promised to get some names to us.

There’s a family of Greek people on the top of the alley, and their oldest daughter, who looks to be around eight years old, was learning to roller-blade, so we cheered her on. The alley slants downhill and she was very safely winding turns down it. How did we all embrace roller blades in the nineties? They are so dangerous. When the kid headed uphill, it was clear she had mastered all the moves and was working just on braking.

Today Maggie will be emailed a cease and desist letter from a lawyer. The letter will also be mailed to her in hard copy. Her birthday that she shares with Paul McCartney is tomorrow, and it’s a safe bet that it will trigger some strange behavior.

Maggie tweets a lot of upsetting videos. Her so-called birthday video was shot on her phone inside her refrigerator, where she lovingly panned over two jars of kimchi and a single flip flop sandal. She also called herself Asian in that tweet. In another tweet she claimed to be 82 years old and unable to walk.

A lovely calm night of sleep was had by all of us last night.