Spying neighbors, leaking garbage bags, problems with quotas… @Farmaenfurecida, the influencer apothecary, has innocently asked in X “What is the wildest thing you have seen or heard done at a neighborhood community meeting?” and, waiting for scenes from Here there is no one who lives, he has encountered La Comunidad by Álex de la Iglesia and some obscure character from Delicatessen, by Jean Pierre Jeunet.
Lists on the networks are a success at Christmas. Gifts, books, salmon canapés and, now, the minutes of almost 500 stories from neighborhood meetings. Body to ground!
If there is a defaulter, the possibility of “beating him up (…) was considered and it was recorded that it was not accepted in the minute book.” To avoid the spill from the façade works, it is proposed to “buy tenths of the Christmas lottery with the money in the box, to see if it is enough.” And if someone wants to have guests in the pool, they are put to a Got Talent style access vote.
Surveillance video cameras are a genre in themselves: “We feel insecure, we want to install security cameras. / Installation day: Old Lady 1: Where are they going to put the screens? / Old lady 2: I’ve already made room in my kitchen… / Worker: Ladies, this doesn’t work like that… / Next meeting: We want to remove the cameras, they’re of no use.” Some enjoy the peepholes and others demand to preserve the privacy of the portal: “Without words and without cameras” they were left in a community when a neighbor said that “if she wanted to fuck in the portal we were going to see her.”
On the stairs you see, you hear and you regulate yourself: “The old woman with the curtain and meapiles wanted to set a schedule on Sundays in which they couldn’t make love because it was mass time.” In another community “they distributed a list of topics of conversation and actions allowed and prohibited in homes in order to avoid arguments and cause inconvenience to other neighbors.”
There is always a solicitous neighbor who does a move at 4 in the morning “so as not to disturb during the day. The table did not fit through the elevator, and he was sawing the legs.” And who fights against progress: “he opposed the installation of city gas in the block because ‘they had already deceived him by removing the wood stove’ to put in the butane one and thus the food tasted like nothing.”
The property administrators intervene in the unleashed debate: “I could write a trilogy.” And after reading all the comments, you stick to the peephole on the door. You don’t see anyone or hear anything. You smile: How lucky I am! Or not.