The wife and I love our condo. In fact, we've dropped dozens of thinly-veiled hints that we'd like to buy it, but no dice. One of the things we love is that we're on the ground floor, with backdoor access to the lovely deck and the lovely pool and the lovely barbecue. We've come to think of it as our own, really, and in the rainy months, it practically is our own--who else would want to invade a concrete rainland and a chilly pool?

This illusion is, of course, utterly destroyed in the summer months. This is when we realize that, no, this is not all ours: it belongs to everyone in the building, and anyone else that anyone else in the building cares to invite over. And it's our rear back set of windows that gets walked by as they march happily to our deck, our pool, our barbecue.

This was all made horribly clear on this Fourth of July weekend, when the usual suspects came strolling out, along with several dozen of previously unknown suspects, many of whom had shockingly ugly children in tow. Into the pool they dove, screaming like tortured revenants, like sausages dumped into boiling water. EEEEEEEEEEEE!! And the children and their parents were also stunningly frank about staring at us through our windows, as if we were paramecia frantically wriggling for their entertainment. I took a good deal of entertainment out of 1. wriggling like a paramecium, just to be disturbing--I must say that Bloc Party is good wriggling music-- and 2. when, in finest Seattle tradition, it rained like hell on their barbecue party. If there's one thing you can count on in this ridiculous city, it is that it will unfailingly rain on the Fourth of July. Cry, children, cry! Cry as you are hauled out of the pool like Belugas! Enjoy your unappealing, moistly bunned hot dogs!

I think it's clear that I hate people. But more specifically, I hate the invaders of our--yes, I have come to consider the entire deck and pool area "ours"--back yard. They come in a few categories.

THE TRUST FUNDS

Let me say right now that all of these judgments are completely unfounded and also are completely set in the uneasy concrete of my mind. But there is something fundamentally irritating about kids in their early twenties who have nothing better to do than sit around the pool all day, every day, and worst of all, drink cans of Miller High Life. They clearly have money--they have complicated, spiky haircuts, and the girls they hang out with are unfailingly slim and adorn themselves with obviously expensive little hankies--and yet they delight in swill like Miller High Life. In cans. Their leader--who I guess is the trust fund leader, and there's been some delightful dish going around the condo about a certain someone's fund running low--sports a chest whose concavity is truly inspiring to chess players everywhere. It seems to be defined by negative space, a less-than-nothing defined by the landmarks around it, like his sloping shoulders and weak chin.

That said, his girlfriend is alarmingly hot, and will certainly set new land speed records when his funds run out. We're sort of hoping that we can buy his condo.

THE NEO-YUPPIES

These folks are more our age, but we only really see the gal. She's an impossibly leggy thing with a trim body and the kind of hair that says "I pay over a hundred dollars for this kind of carelessness." She will lay out for hours, courting melanomas, while he only shows up occasionally for brief bouts of exposing his awful, hairy gut to Yellow Face before scratching himself uncomfortably and retreating inside: I have him pegged for a lawyer. I say this on flimsy evidence, but let me just say that he is clearly incapable of moving farther than five feet from his cell phone, which rings at every ten-minute mark, and is also prone to barking into it: "What? What? No! What? No! Yes! Fuck that! I'll call you back!" Then he jiggle-bellies out of the pool area while Legs turns over languorously to bake her back and see what Star magazine has to offer.

I hate them. Although since we encountered them--well, her--I no longer need a calendar. "What day of the week is it?" "I don't know. What's Star magazine wearing?" "Some kind of stomach-lining color . . . pink or grey?" "Thursday."

OZZIE GUILLENS

Our next-door neighboor, a social dynamo, has this thing for company. Specifically, working-class Latino gay company. He threw a Fourth of July party as well this weekend--again, it was awesome watching these poor people hunch under party umbrellas--and it was not much different than his weekly visitors: an endless parade of gone-to-seed Latino men in Speedos wandering around proudly with tiny, groucHy penises encased in polyethylene, all screaming things like "No bueno!" and, in one memorable case, "C'est chaud!" (Our freezing pool was too hot? Was our friend from the Latin Quarter? So confusing.) I wouldn't even mind the Ozzie Guillens that much--they're certainly less irritating then the Trust Fund Kids' penchant for boring tribal tattoos--except for their penchant for astounding, water-assisted flatulence. The wife and I have been woken up more than once, wondering if were undergoing attack by sentient lawnmowers.

THE SCUM

So yeah, here we get to the nitty. I don't have ANY IDEA who these nutfucks are, but they terrify me. But they are clearly scum. They are some driftwood horrors that occasionally filter down to our pool, and nobody--including me--has the balls to chase them off. They are three of them, and they all look like things that you'd pass over in the produce aisle: one has a horrible, greasy beard; another has tattoos with legends like "REJECTED BY THE EU," and the last one is a sexually indeterminate thing with alarming lumps in all the wrong places, like it had been surgically modified by Penthouse editors from a galaxy without gravity.

As if I need to make it clear, the pool area clears of visitors once the Scum come to visit. Mr. Belly swats at his abdomen like it owes him money, while greasebeard admires his tats, and the unidentifiable thing improbably smears his/her armpits with what one desperately hopes in deodorant. The whole picture is impossible to take, much like any episode of CSI: Miami. We close the blinds.

I try to think clearly about everything I've seen, and come up short. The Scum have destroyed anything like that. I imagine them not only as the rednecks who shoot Peter Fonda at the end of the monumentally awful Easy Rider, but then I happily also imagine them as the victims.

In the end, I imagine the Scum as blowing off their own faces with shotguns.

I can some day be happy.