Just wanna share this with everyone
Sleepless in EL PASO
by: Leo N. Miletich
Stephen Foster's words to "Beautiful Dreamer," "Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day/Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away," belong in another time. On a recent evening, unlulled by the moonlight, the city streets department ripped up nine blocks of pavement around my apartment building between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. Compared with what I usually hear at night, the steady roar of heavy equipment was actually soothing.
Night noise to Stephen Foster was an occasional steamboat whistle, or the rattle of a passing buckboard; "life's busy throng" came to a halt for him after dark. Of that I'm envious: Foster didn't have my neighbors. The world has grown
ruder.
I've had to share common apartment walls with numerous people for most of my life. The experience has often left me feeling that if the human race were a club, I'd turn in my membership.
Some neighbors use car horns in lieu of doorbells; other residents have barking dogs. A number of people can't seem to hear music unless the beat is vibrating the walls and rattling the windows; and there are those dysfunctional
couples who debate by smashing crockery against the walls (passing observation: small apartments contribute to domestic discord). There are helpful souls who keep their televisions so loud that I have no need to use the sound on mine if
we're on the same channel.
Growing up, I had to keep my voice down, use an earphone for the radio and stereo, place the TV away from any shared wall, step lightly on the stairs and ease the door closed, all in an effort not to disturb the neighbors. And the neigh
bors did the same. It was a cardinal rule of apartment living. It was called courtesy and consideration—the neighborly thing to do. What ever happened to that?Do parents ever say, "Don't slam that door" to their children anymore?
My next-door neighbors slam doors at all hours of the day or night. These are heavy iron-framed security screen doors that when slammed reverberate through my place like cannon shots. The kids slam them. Their parents slam.
People who visit slam them. I find this crashing incomprehensible.
There's a college kid down the block with a boom car. When he cranks it up,the bass alone sounds like there's a rumbling Sherman tank in my bathroom, a rolling thunderstorm overhead. When he adds music (and "Beautiful Dreamer" is not on his playlist), it can be heard for three blocks in any direction, especially at midnight. The vibrations alone have been known to set off car alarms as he drives past. I hope his ears bleed at night.
In the next building is a 13-year-old girl who likes to blast her stereo at a pulse-pounding level so that it's clearly audible in my place even with the doors and windows closed. I knocked on her front door late one night and found myself facing not a bunch of drugged-out crazoids, as I'd feared, but her middle-aged parents. They seemed distressed and intimidated. They said they couldn't do a thing about the rock music pounding away in the next room, that the girl
efused to use her earphones. I was getting a headache just standing at the door. Always in favor of compromise, I suggested unplugging the stereo and tossing it in the dumpster. Instead, the mother pulled me inside the sonic maelstrom. pleading with me to reason with the girl. At my approach, the teenager bolted down the hallway, locked herself in the bathroom (slamming the door) and screamed at us for disturbing her.
And friends wonder why I never wanted children.
I've tried seeing things in a wider perspective. I'm sure the people in my paternal grandparents' war-torn, ancestral homeland of Croatia would love to exchange the sound of artillery and snipers for the sound of stereos and televisions,
just as people in squalid public-housing areas would cheer the sound of music and sitcoms over the sounds of screams, gunfire and sirens in the street. To the hearing impaired, I'm a fortunate man. But intellectualizing this problem doesn't
prevent my yawning all day and nodding off on the bus.
The people currently sharing a thin, hollow bedroom wall with me have been disrupting my sleep for nearly three years through simple, inconsiderate acts that have the cumulative effect of being profoundly irritating. Apart from the door
slamming, I have music throbbing through the wall (which, like a drum, seems to amplify low-frequency sounds). Voices chatter throughout the night. If some thing needs fixing or building in the apartment, no neighborly inhibitions prevail
because of the hour. I've been awakened at 1 A.M. by hammering and sawing.
I've tried explaining, in a friendly manner, how thin the wall is and how I have this peculiar habit of needing to sleep at night. I've also tried the time-honored method of noise reduction by pounding on the wall when the decibels
reach impossible limits. The return response from next door is to pound right back and increase the volume. I've tried earplugs and sound machines that simulate rain, trains and waves. Nothing can drown out the late-night conversation
or the sudden thumps, bumps and rattles in the middle of the night. I might as well be living next to poltergeists.
When I mentioned to my landlord that professional torturers use sleep deprivation as a way to break people, he was unfazed; after all, he doesn't live here. One day, in response to my last complaint, the landlord's son uttered what must be the defining attitude for this closing decade of the 20th century: "It's the '90s: People don't give as----- ."
That, I thought, should be on a T shirt or a bumper sticker. Or maybe it should be the title of Newt's next book.
Bob Dole and the Christian Coalition might think about giving up their fruitless attack on sex and violence in our pop culture and start concentrating on the real-world aural terrorists who stress out our nights. Make consideration a
campaign issue, rudeness an etiquette crime. If presidential candidates have a need for a campaign promise that's sure to win votes, they should forget the chicken-in-every pot cliche (or is it now a gun in every car?). Guarantee every
one in America a good night's sleep on a regular basis.
住戶編號:642332
檢舉原因
心情: 
