Homeland Defense
In which the grinding mundanity of daily life is explored, online-journal-style.
The upstairs neighbors came down last night. They told us that they’d be having an all-night party on Saturday. They said they had the landlord’s blessing (The landlords live below us. They’re never home on weekends. They love our upstairs neighbors terribly, in the way that a certain sort of indulgent parent favors the “creative” and thoroughly ill-behaved child) and that they hoped we didn’t mind. It wasn’t at all clear that we were being given a choice. Our landlord hasn't returned our call.
Our upstairs neighbor runs a record label out of his house. He is a genial, outgoing sort, with lots and lots and lots of friends. He is a “cool guy.” He lives what might be said to to be the ideal lifestyle for a 25-year-old man. He shares the apartment with his younger sister. They have a sort of vibrant, friendly colony of hipster buddies. They like to hang out, make big dinners on Friday night, watch ball games, have people over to dance. You can tell that everybody likes him.
We are perhaps the only people in the world who do not like him. We feel about him the way we feel about certain kinds of extremely popular R & B music, the kind which features a lot of super-melismatic singing a la Mariah Carey: would that we could get into it. But we cannot. Our world – our quiet, increasingly boring world – is subject to our neighbor’s world of Happy Noise. Our neighbors walk loudly, laugh loudly, drink life to the lees, and suggest that the glory of living in a brownstone house is that we all cheerfully share in one another’s disorderly lives, a communal vision of felicity such as that represented by the Madness video for “Our House.” We walk softly on our dutifully laid carpets, ask our guests to keep it down in the hallways, and never invite people over for brunch before noon. We lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the crash of furniture being rearranged. We call. Volume is adjusted. We feel half-satisfied. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
The last time the neighbors had this kind of a party, we had lots of warning. Ms. Claire was out of town, and I decided to stick it out. It lasted until five. I couldn’t have slept without borrowing some roofies off of one of the guests. This year, we’re not up for an all-nighter – at least not one of passive suffering. We don’t know quite what we’re going to do this weekend. Maybe the Four Seasons, with the bill forwarded to our landlords. Maybe we’ll just be getting to know the guys down at the precinct house really well; I’ll stock up on doughnuts and coffee for the various teams which will respond to our increasingly hysterical calls.
Posted by B T at December 13, 2001 01:31 PM