Are My Neighbors Totally Nuts?
Self-helpy AF!
Welcome to an advice column by me, Sara Benincasa, a person with opinions. This column will not diagnose or cure anything. Perhaps reading it will entertain and comfort you! Send questions to saratoninnewsletter@gmail.com. If I use your question, I’ll keep you anonymous.
Dear Sara,
We get along pretty well with our neighbors. We see them relatively rarely. However, whenever an election comes around, they cover their yard in yard signs. I mean COVER. Not just one sign, or even two. If they are trying to get folks to vote on a particular proposal, they will cover the front yard with signs for that proposal. Not different signs, either — the same sign.
Imagine a cemetery with rows of identical headstones, all saying the same thing. It is like this, but somehow spookier. Of course, in a presidential election year, there are so many more signs to choose from, and if you think they haven’t started in with that stuff yet, you are wrong.
This is probably where you will ask me if I am irked because I disagree with their politics. In fact, just the opposite: I seem to agree with their stances on 99% of ballot measures, local candidates, national candidates, social issues, economic issues, infrastructural issues, and everything else we can vote on in our town.
But if I were an undecided voter and passed this weird front yard, I’d probably do the opposite of whatever the million signs were telling me to do. Do they think they’re actually helping their cause?
We love our house. We do not want to move, and do not plan to. I just want to know why they do this. — Baffled in Suburbia
Dear BIS,
Have you asked them why they do this? I am assuming not, which is fine, because I love imagining their yard in 2020 being full of those IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE signs, just endlessly shivering in the breeze. Did it sound like a giant harp? Do the signs sing to you at night?
Maybe your neighbors just love a wacky aesthetic and community participation. Yard signs are free decoration for the civically insane as well as for very extremely entirely normal persons like everyone who writes and reads here at Wonkette. Here, Rebecca is adding her own (previous, 2020) Montana yard to my post, for you to admire!
I understand your confusion and annoyance, but damn — they sound pretty nice, they stay out of your way, and this is their one quirk? Let us be glad!
If the signs had a violent or deliberately insulting message, I would be more concerned. But this sounds benignly weird to me at the moment. I just hope they recycle them or make strange sculptures out of them when the elections are done. Ooh, or use them in an elaborate nude interpretive dance ritual in the BACKyard this time, around a fire pit, while somebody plays one of those old Putumayo world music CDs you could get at Borders or whatever. Mmm, erotique.
Anyway, it could be much worse!
Dear Sara,
Do you give love advice? — A Person Who Did Not Get More Specific
Dear APWDNGMS,
Yes. Please read the italicized disclaimer with which each advice column commences and send forth your inquiry. And please remember that, like most advice columnists, I am actually an expert on nothing and all advice should be taken with a grain of salt gleaned from a shaker full of everything bagel seasoning. I am just some random lady who will tell you things that maybe your friend who loves you would not tell you.
Enjoy your day and/or night … lover.
I am that lady with the signs.
As someone that lives in the land of Ozark dog houses let me assure there are much worse things.