Today, Rob bribed me into going to the video store to rent the first season of “Six Feet Under.” The bribe was a dinner of turkey meatloaf with crusty biscuit topping and mashed cauliflower. Yum! Before I left, I snuck into the kitchen and stole a handful of the crusty biscuit-topping dough, remolding the remainder to look as if nothing was missing. (I’m tricky that way.) But in my haste to escape from the scene of the crime, I neglected to run upstairs to grab my glasses.

As I walked through the blurry world, licking the yummy biscuit dough off my fingers, I noted a commotion on the street. A teenager riding his bike on the far end of my block suddenly toppled over onto the pavement. Good heavens, I thought, prepared to rush to his aid. He was up again in an instant, riding toward me, and he fell again! He is really quite clumsy, I thought, prepared to rush to his aid. Then someone said, “One more time,” and the teenager, unhurt, stood up again and toppled over on cue. Only then did I notice the young woman with the camcorder recording every stumble for her brilliant and meaningful student film. On the way back from the video store, I didn’t bat an eye when I saw them running the actor over with a car.

Then something really tragic happened: despite my blurry vision, I noticed that our new neighbors had put a flower box in their window and had put out new planters filled with lovely blooms! Before this, Rob and I had been the only ones on the block with a pretty flower box! These new people think they can outshine us with their little homey touches, but they’re wrong. Rob and I have planters with scraggly, half-dead evergreens left over from the previous owners of the house. Based on the irrefutable logic that ugly things shouldn’t be allowed to live, I have been wanting to hack them to pieces and get rid of them, but Rob wouldn’t let me. But obviously the stakes have risen.

I’m going to wait until Rob goes out of town later this week and then pay those students to run the scraggly evergreens over with their car.

They can even film it if they want to. Hubba hubba!