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Ah, what a Diverse and Astonishing world it is, to be sure!

The other afternoon a young scroungy looking couple came up my stairs and started pounding on the neighbor's door. I know for a fact that Invisible Chinese Man never has guests, not once, No Not Never in the 12 years I've lived in this apartment so I thought I would kindly inform them that they had the wrong door. The wrong apartment. The wrong stairwell.

Scroungy Dude was affable and charming in a boggled, stoned sort of way as he headed down the stairs but Scroungy Chick was surly, non responsive and perhaps not quite a sentient being? as she stood 2 inches from my screen door with her back to me the entire time the Dude and I were conversing.

When the doorbell rang at 2:15 AM this morning I was therefore not surprised to see the Return of the Scroungers. When I peeped through the spyhole and asked who was there, the Dude said in a cheery, WIDE AWAKE voice, "Oh, we rang your doorbell by mistake! Don't worry about it!"

I again repeated the sage advice that they were in the wrong stairwell and went back to bed.

I know that all human beings come auto-equipped with a self-correcting device. It collects data and registers ones whereabouts so that one can more easily return home without having to consult a map each time. It's how rats find Cheese in a maze. It's how Sheep return from far pastures to the barn. It's how lemmings find the sea.

I would think that 20-something scroungers could find their own doorstep, but maybe their genetic coding has been compromised by all the Meth?

The people, and I use that term laxly, that the Scrounger Kids belong with are a loose collective of dykes who live upstairs on the other side from me. I don't have anything against dykes except maybe their haircuts, but you really don't want them living next door to you! It's the fights, the beer brawls, the cursing and spitting, the cigarette butts flung into the shrubberies. In short, it's like living with a passel of filthy dragoons. Or perhaps a low-born horde of salty sailors on shore leave. Or maybe even a bevy of foul-mouthed truck drivers endlessly congregating in a honky tonk down South.

It's 4:45 am now, and I never did make it back to bed. Too much torment and angst coming from next door. It's not really a party, per se, more like a gathering of fierce young heroines and their chosen hero. There has been quite a debate going on, and from what I gather, one of the gentler dykes is ready to be bred. She wants a baby and she wants it now. She is quite seriously haranguing Scrounger Dude to see things her way. He is holding firm to his ground, but the combination of being directionally impaired and just so stoned he can't stand upright without swaying to an imaginary samba beat, is causing that ground to turn to quicksand.

Her powers of persuasion are greater than his befuddled senses can withstand; his muttered and slurred proclamation of "I'm not ready to be a father!" was quickly voted down. She said:

It's not a FATHER it's a DONATION!