ode to neil nice

Once upon a time, there lived across the hall from us a man named Neil. To his friends and DJ-promoters, he was Neil Nice.

Last month he left, and with him went an unpredictable dose of hilarity that our Hopkins Street apartment didn't know that it had until it was gone.

Sure, his six-foot tall stack of DJ magazines is still in the hall, and of course we'll have the memories, which include his biweekly pass-out in bed with his door open to the building's hallway, so all of the upstairs families that walked by had to see his naked backside until his 2pm wake-up; and his arguments concerning the band UB40 being dope beyond the popularity their hit single Red, Red Wine, (during which he would use Red, Red Wine as the example of this dopeness.)

And even after the magazines are drunkenly pushed down the stairs by me (hopefully this weekend,) and we can't quite remember who it was that stumbled into our room at 6AM, wearing only boxer-briefs and a fitted baseball hat, and asking if we've seen his Blackberry; we'll always have this video of him in a typical outfit, trying to kill a bee with a mop: