CRASH: My Neighbor, Joe Gaza--A Parable

The first thing you have to understand about my neighbor is he's crazy.  I don't mean funny crazy; Joe Gaza wants to kill me.  He really wants to kill me.  He tries just about every day.

We live right next to each other.  His little place and mine are cheek-by-jowl.  We share a fence, which, as you might imagine, I keep in pretty good repair.  Still, ol' Joe tries just about every day to see if he can sneak over here.

But that is just the beginning.  Joe shoots at my house.  A lot.  If I have people over, he is shooting at them, too.  They might be perfect strangers; it does not matter at all to Joe.  I have women and kids over here.  They are targets, too.

Now, all Joe has is a musket, which isn't very accurate.  Some of our neighbors act like that makes Joe shooting at me just no big deal.  None of them have been hit by a randon 1/2" musket ball, though.  They will kill, as tens of  thousands of Civil War soldiers knew.  And Joe has fired at my place thousands of times.  He hasn't killed me, but that ain't for lack of diligence.

He knows I could shoot back, and sometimes I do.  Mostly, though, Joe stands right in front of his house when he shoots at me; his house is always right behind him.  He knows I know that he has kids and women in the house, and that I will often hold fire.  I am worried about hitting his family, and Joe knows that otherwise I could take him out with no great effort.

Joe keeps his family locked up in that place.  They live pretty hard, and I know Joe is teaching them to hate me, too...to want to kill me, also...some of them.  Some of them just want to get away.

Now, Joe has friends and relations in this area, and he tells them a lot of lies about who I am, what I do, and how he's the victim here.  Some of those folks get down on me, because I have modern weapons, and all Joe has is his musket.  They don't care about the truth.

The other day, I saw a UPS truck drive up to Joe's gate.  I know he's been trying to buy a modern sniper rifle, and I know what he'd do with it the minute he could get it out of the box.  So, before the UPS guy could get the gate open, I stopped him out on the road.  Joe was right on me though, and we got into a tussle.  We both got banged up, but the cops blamed me.  The neighbors blamed me, too.  But I stopped the UPS guy.  I'll be doing it again, too, because if I let him, Joe is going to kill me, and I'm the only one who will stop him.

One of us wants to kill the other, and he works on it every day.  It's all he thinks about.  It ain't me, because I could wipe out Joe in a heartbeat if that is what I wanted.  Funny thing...I'm the guy people blame for Joe and his family being poor.