The Home Owners Association

…and I’d like to add that I will be a model neighbor. I live in a model home. I will obey and abide. I will keep the HOA Sabbath, bylaws and covenants.  I will chisel them into stone tablets, carry them about, proclaiming in my bathrobe and beard.  I will host every meeting for every committee, I will be earnest, put away the maps of Axis Europe, stow the Nazi armbands. No more torch-lit basement rooms or fervent Teutonic outbursts. 

I will represent and defend the sanctioned color palette. The house, garage and tree fort, the car, the cat, the clothes, the visible tattoos-- all whole wheat brown, crushed stone gray, and bungalow taupe.   My dwelling will be a whole wheat brown, crushed stone grey and bungalow taupe mirror of your house.  I will force all color defiant neighbors to wear a bungalow taupe triangle patch. I will confiscate all wind-chimes, all clotheslines, all folksy lawn statuary, all poorly carved lopsided non-standard pumpkins.

I will collect all delinquent fees provided that you don’t ask how and, yes, your little boy Ethan does happen to be in my garbage which doubles as a medieval dentistry museum. He is trying to grab the phone. He is gurgling something about some fee? I will be eerily pleasant despite being the absolute epicenter of all communal hatred and resentment.  I will power trip, be a power tourist. I will move to Power and remain there like a taupe leech.

I will have the model yard. I will mulch and aerate. Hire the Knights of Columbus to river dance the front yard in aeration shoes.  I will force them into bungalow taupe. I will prune and tweezer. The grass will be emerald green upon green upon green. There will be no question of greenness. Green as can be. I will pluck dead leaves from the trees, prevent the snow from falling in my yard by sheer force of will. I napalm my neighbors lawns to stop cross contamination, spatchcock your incontinent spaniel if he even looks at my grass.  

I will have a sapphire pond with prehistoric koi, a cascading bridal veil waterfall,  live Swedish mermaid. No more lolling obscenely in a partially inflated Walmart pool spouting  Whitman. I will hire a crew of Japanese gardeners, have a bonsai forest twenty-feet tall. The folks at Augusta National Golf Club with weep and quit, go back to Georgia and put down surface parking. No more wind-activated giant pornographic boxwood topiary. I will sell the house to pay for the yard, do my actual living in a motel by the interstate.