Sunday, September 4, 2011

encountering the neighbors

We have these upstairs neighbors. I don't know anything about them, because they don't seem interested in chatting. It also seems like there's a leaseholder and some amount of rotation in other residents: consistently, two Asian guys with near-identical polished black Infinitis (a G35 and a G37), and then an unpredictable assortment of other guys and girls.

They stomp around pretty gracelessly, and the building transmits a lot of sound, so I started calling them the Elephants, which was cute until they started playing techno with a subwoofer, first during J's bedtime and then later in the 12-4 AM stretch, especially on weekends. They woke us up Friday night around 1, and Anna went and talked to them for what was probably the fourth time. I think they started to dismiss her as an Oversensitive Female, so after the techno made it impossible to nap in our bedroom this afternoon, I thought maybe an Angry Male might be a useful addition.

I had some wine at the dojo party, to go with my bizarro ex-girlfriend conversation, and went to bed a little amped-up, so I didn't blame them when I woke up two hours later to their laughing. As I lay awake in bed, the talking and occasional bass snippets actually seemed pretty reasonable, and Anna woke up briefly but got back to sleep pretty easily.

Then came the techno. At 1:40 AM. Enough.

A couple eventually cracked open the door I'd been pounding on, to discover a very cranky man they didn't know, saying "It's two in the fucking morning and someone is playing thumpy fucking subwoofer music in the back room. Turn it off. Or just turn the bass down." Note that despite the profanity, I didn't actually accuse them of anything, not knowing if it was them.

And behold, silence. I'm taking some time to settle down, but I think a message was delivered and the thumping will not wake up Anna tonight. Probably I should have added that I'm just going to call the cops next time, but next time I'll probably just call the cops. It's a little weird because in their room the sound is probably fairly moderate. In our room it sounds like someone hitting the frame of the building with a large mallet over and over.

I wonder what those two people saw, how they interpreted it, what their response was. I wonder if they'll take it differently than they did Anna's polite engagement. This is a strange role for me to play.

I wonder what their names are.

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