american nerd survey

What's the strangest thing you've ever witnessed from the window of your house/apartment?

Rebecca Collins: 1. When I was growing up, I lived in rural Wisconsin. Our road had its share of houses but a large section was wooded, dead quiet, winding and almost completely without lights at night. One summer, I witnessed the Opera Biker several times from my bedroom window. You'd hear him coming from about a mile away, working his way down the road in the pitch black, singing opera at the top of his lungs. He was not a bad singer. Even as a child, his voice made me feel lonely and desperate and afraid, which might all be emotions that trained opera singers wish to evoke at various points in their performances - which is to say the guy wasn't bad. He'd wake me up with his singing before he reached our house and sometimes I'd get out of bed, stand at the window and wait for him to go by. The lack of street lights made it almost impossible to see anything. I could only confirm that he was a man on a bike. He rode by several times that summer and then he disappeared.

2. One night shortly before we moved out of our apartment on West 37th in Minneapolis I looked out the window as a cab pulled up. I heard clunking coming down the stairs and then three women emerged from the building and hustled into the cab. They all walked kind of funny and were dressed like the woman in the current Subway commercial who sings, "I don't want no burger..." which is to say like the 1980s exploded all over them. I didn't know such ugly women lived in our apartment building - there were only five apartments and I thought I knew all the occupants by sight. Then I figured out it was the guys upstairs - the ones with the enormous pick-up trucks with Nebraska plates who talked to no one and wore flannel shirts - out for a night on the town as their true selves. Incidentally, this was our last night in that apartment and shortly after the cab pulled away, while we were still up packing, our downstairs neighbor started to blare "Everybody Dance Now" by C+C Music Factory, drunk off his ass along with his mysterious friend who looked just like Robert Plant. At that moment, we knew we made the right decision to move.

Joel Jensen: It's a toss-up. Either its seeing my otherwise button-down neighbor burning something unknown in the box culvert next to my apartment, or seeing a different neighbor roast a pig larger than myself in the parking lot in the middle of the night.

Mark Kalar: I'm not sure if "strange" is exactly the right word, but at my apartment in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood in Minneapolis, I was frequently treated to the couple below me having monumental arguments out in the parking lot under my window. They would scream at each other, half in Spanish, half in English for a half hour or so. This would happen once a week. I was in grad school at the time, and when I'd come from from the Architecture Building at 4am, my neighbor would swing by with a sixer of Olde English. Good times...

Stephen McClurg: A man wearing a doo-rag and a wetsuit, unzipped to the navel, leaf blowing his yard.

Keith Pille: Several hours after my wife and I went to bed on September 10, 2001, my wife and I were awakened by police sirens outside of of apartment in south Minneapolis. That wasn't so unusual, but they were followed by a really loud crash as a car smashed into something. Then there were shouts and slamming car doors and squealing tires and barking dogs. I got up, ran to the front of the apartment, and saw several cop cars stopped half a block away around a crashed car; cops were running towards our building and down the alley next to us.

We ran to the kitchen in the back of the apartment and looked out the window. Our neighbor had a really high fence, and all of the action was in their yard, so we couldn't see much except the light from more cop-car rollers and some really freaky, frightening shadows. But we could hear lots of things, and they were all deeply disturbing-- thumps, dog growls, a man begging that the cops stop kicking him and call off the dogs, and angry/tired cops hissing that they'd heard it all before and he'd just brought it on himself.

It went on forever, it seemed like, and we just sat there in the kitchen and felt shitty. The whole time was very, very surreal; I couldn't believe we were seeing and hearing this, but I didn't feel like I could do anything but just sit there and feel awful. It was an hour or two before we were able to go back to bed and try to get to sleep. I woke up the next morning, still feeling really shitty just for having heard all of that, and thought, "well, there's no way this day can get worse."

Don Pizarro: A twelve-year old girl playing in the rain with nothing but a t-shirt and what I thought were just panties on underneath. I stared the whole time she was out there. Man, I had the biggest crush--

I'm being told, just now, to point out that I was also twelve years old at the time. What does that have to do with anything? Editors. I tell you...

Jonathan Shipley: The peeping Tom staring into my window at three in the morning. Upon seeing that I was seeing HIM, he jumped (I lived over a Happy Teriyaki), and ran across the park.

Amethyst Vineyard: Once, I saw the man across the street, who I like to call "Cool Mo D,” weed-whack his borders wearing baggy denim sorts, a doo-rag, and a wetsuit.

Grant Weeks: The beating of a 6-year-old kid at 2:30 in the morning. Then the cops coming to the house and leaving with no one.