Good Neighbor

I heard about a guy who traded a paperclip for a house on eBay or some shit—like, he started with nothing but the paperclip and then he’s got maybe a potato chip that looks like a dead president and then FDR’s fast food likeness turns into a bar of exotic soap and that hatches into a model airplane and on and on up the e-chain, like the stupid chain mail in my inbox every morning that’s usually got some fake woman’s name as the sender and a subject like want fuck??????? and you can clearly see that the message has gone to 6 billion other dudes and when you click on the link it shuffles through five URLs before landing you on the same damn sexymeetup.biz where there’s breasts plastered onto the screen and I try to look just at the words because it’s clear that whoever made the site didn’t finish elementary or I guess maybe they’re from someplace else. I wonder who has the original paperclip. Maybe it’s worth a lot of money or maybe the person didn’t even realize he had it and just threw it away like, What the fuck? This is waaayyy smaller than I thought from the picture, or probably there’s a bunch of people faking having it and trying to sell it. Maybe I have it. I mean there’s been weirder shit. Like take sexymeetup.biz for instance. I could swear one of the floppy-breasted girls is my neighbor Rita. But it would be kinda creepy to just ask her. Like she’s getting her mail I’m just there waving and pointing to my phone screen mouthing, Is this you? and she walks over and I imagine she’s organized and fastens her mail with a green clip to keep her letters together because her mom probably always told her to mind her p’s and q’s, but then conversation gets really weird really fast. I wonder if her letterclip is the original one. Or maybe I’ve already missed it. Maybe it’s already come and gone out of my house like when I’m taking Bark out to pee and I look away for a second or six too long at the neighbors’ windows and then I don’t know if he’s gone yet. What else am I missing? Once I actually filled out the sexymeetup.biz survey that they give you at the beginning where they promise you that hundreds of women in your area are waiting to fuck, which is stupid I think, and I’m laughing at the misspellings like feetish (for which I answer toes, since I think they’re feetish-worthy AND fetish-worthy), but I can’t stop my eyes wandering back to fleshy-pink-maybe-Rita not even because I like seeing her naked or want to watch her porn if she has any, but because I just have to know if maybe she’s led this weird double life where she’s on the run from the porn industry which I’ve heard is a lot of greasy dudes behind cameras making bookoo bucks, and I almost pull open my curtains to see if some creepy dude is stalking her apartment, but I’m scared that nothing will be there. I’ve actually never even talked to Rita but I bet even if I couldn’t start out with questions about porn I could tell her about the paperclip, and maybe she’d want to come in my house to look for it and we’d see that I have a bunch of them so it would take a while, like the paperclip that holds my important documents together on the bookshelf and the jar of them on the white desk that I haven’t sat at in a long time and then all the ones I’ve unbent when I’m bored that are kinda strewn about and Bark finds them now and then and brings them to me and I try to bend them back into shape, but really when you do that it just looks like a cartoon of a paperclip and it’s never really the same ever again. I guess broken paperclips have their uses, too, though. Like once, when I was little, I used one to pick the lock of the basement door my parents always kept glued shut and for a long time I just got to roam through the shadows that held up the whole house.