2007-08-27

Noise Pollution

With less than a week to go in our current abode, I am finding more and more things to hate about this neighborhood.

The houseboy and I went into the crummy little convenience store on the corner last night. It's rather misleading to refer to this establishment as a "convenience" store; it's really only convenient if you're a drunk, and need to buy a half-pint of something -- that could conceivably double as paint remover -- at nine o'clock in the morning (I know because I used to do this, and boy howdy was that ever convenient). It's basically a liquor store, with a few shelves of sorry-looking canned goods caked with dust stuck in there as sort of an afterthought. But we needed toilet paper, so in we went, and as we waited in line to pay, one of the "local characters" stumbled in and, tottering and weaving, loudly announced that he had MONEY, and none of us had better have a PROBLEM WI' DAT.

Then, as we rounded the corner and made our way back to our house, I became aware of the CACOPHONOUS FUCKING DIN that is our street at any given moment. In addition to the trills and blats exploding from the "BSO House" next door (I believe that the French Horn player's lips are permanently affixed to his mouthpiece by means of some NASA-developed polymer, thereby rendering him incapable of STOPPING HIS CEASELESS SCALES....sort of like "The Red Shoes," only there's no kindly woodsman with an axe to separate his mouth from his horn), we've recently acquired new neighbors across the street, who seem to believe that positioning their stereo in front of their open window, and exposing the entire street to the finer offerings from the Atlantic catalog, falls under the rubric of "neighborly behavior." Look, I like Aretha Franklin, too...but I also like to be able to CHOOSE when to listen to her music.

So I sat there in our nearly-empty living room, listening to Mr. French Horn make mating calls to some distant female water buffalo while Aretha instructed me to think, think about what I'm tryin' to do to her. And then some low-flying small aircraft sputtered into the picture, and I just lost it. Just completely lost my shit.

The houseboy craned his neck out the window and said, "My God....there's a BANNER attached to that plane! It says: 'Did you know that you can HIRE someone to MOVE YOUR STUFF?'"

lisamcc at 11:27 a.m.



0 comments so far

previous | next