Chucky in the Neighborhood

The other day I was driving back home from the Home Depot (what? I can do manly things sometimes...) and since I live on a busy street (a stupidly busy street really) I like to take little side streets to avoid the main bulk of the stupid humans that always seem to be in my way (what's up with that anyway? Get out of my way already. I've got shit to do). There's one intersection in particular that is just a clusterfuck. It's just a 4-way stop but there's a convenience store on one corner and a chinese food place on the other. Throw in a couple of bus stops and it can take FOR-E-VER to get through there. And then there's the added bonus of bad tempered thuggish teenagers milling around the store. Oh, and I've personally watched 2 different accidents where someone waiting at the light is broadsided by some complete tool backing up from a parking spot in the convenience store parking lot. That, my Internet peeps, takes a special kind of stupid. Lynn has these people in abundance.

I have a few choices to bail on this intersection when it looks like I won't make the green light. All I have to do is go down the little side street and the bang a left which will dump me right back onto my stupid street. On the day in question I did just that. I pulled up behind the car in front of me at the stop sign and waited for them to grow a pair and take the right already. As I'm sitting there wondering if I should have just sucked it up and gone to the intersection anyway (this guy was clearly terrified of driving and/or couldn't figure out that the pedal way over on the right will make the car go VROOOM!), I looked up and across the street at this shitty blue house (unkempt lawn? check. crazy out-of-control bushes? check. peeling paint and general disrepair? check and checkmate). As I was sitting there wishing that my neighborhood wasn't so crappy I looked up at one of the bedroom windows and what do you think was staring back at me? Chucky. Yes, THAT Chucky.

I honestly let out a gasp (there goes my manliness cred again). This doll was splayed in the window Jesus style and just glaring down at me. Look, I understand. It's a doll and it can't "get me" but it sure as hell spooked me. I've never seen Child's Play and I never, ever will. Why is that? Well, I'm a timid woodland creature and cannot deal with horror movies no matter how campy they might be. I think the not liking horror movies thing stems from the fact that my parents took me to see Jaws when it came out. I was five. FIVE! That ain't cool.

Yea, so I'm looking at Chucky and he's looking right back at me when I realize that whoever lives there is my neighbor. Awesome. I got to wondering how long this thing has been lowering property values in my neighborhood (hmmm...perhaps this is one of the reasons I had such a hard time trying to sell my house a few years ago) so I went to Google maps to check out the street map. They did that "Street View" mapping thing last summer over here so I moved the little camera down to this house and made the camera pan upwards to the window. Sure enough, there was Chucky. A little blurry, but he was there. So tonight on our way home from work, the Wiff and I went back down that same side street and stopped the car in front of that same house. I snapped the picture below so that you, my faithful reader, could get a sense of the lovely sight that greeted me. And to those living in this house: please don't murder me. Thanks!

click on the pic to super-size this creepy mofo