On Late Night LOUD NOISES
I used to be a devout night owl. Back then, I would routinely stay up until two, three, or four in the morning. Sometimes I was productive, sometimes I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole, learning about some obscure baseball player who had an unbelievable two-month stretch in 1996 and then was never good again (shout out to Brady Anderson who once randomly showed up to our high school baseball practice just to scream at us for three hours…but that’s a story for another essay). Now, however, my night owl nights are mostly behind me. I find myself yawning and looking at the clock at 10pm and thinking, is it too early for bed? It’s mostly great! I have a much more consistent sleeping pattern and don’t wake up at 11 am (often) anymore. The downside, though, is the world doesn’t give a shit and sometimes it’s LOUD AS HECK in the middle of the night!
Living in a thriving metropolis like Los Angeles there are those nights when there’s a car chase in your neighborhood and a helicopter hovering what sounds like six inches above your bed. Then there are those nights when a neighbor decides, “You know what? I DO feel like lighting off several thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks in the middle of the night on a random Wednesday in April.” And yes, there are those nights when some dipshit with a souped-up car and no muffler blazes through the streets so loudly that it sets off car alarms.
Those instances, however, are mostly random and don’t make me that mad (well the car guy definitely does). It’s the price you pay for having 15 coffee shops within walking distance of your apartment. No, the loud noises that inspired this essay come from a very sweet neighbor and their late-night phone calls. I don’t think they read these essays, but if you do and you know who you are, hello!
It happens like this: they work in the restaurant industry so a few days a week, they work late. Unfortunately for us, their parking spot just so happens to be under our bedroom window. Normally, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem. A car pulling in, some doors opening and closing? No big deal.
This neighbor, though, likes to have loooong phone calls, through their car’s speakers, at one in the morning, at a volume SO high that even with their windows closed, our windows closed, 10 feet of vertical space between us, and rain-sounds playing in our bedroom, we can almost perfectly hear their conversation… and it’s LOUD. What blows my mind, is if it’s loud for us, on the other side of two sets of windows, I almost literally can’t imagine how loud it must be IN the car! It has to sound like someone screaming at you with a bullhorn six inches from your face.
Will I talk to this neighbor about it? Probably not. Will I bitch about it on the internet? I just did!
So, what about you? Does your neighborhood have one late-night noise in particular that drives you crazy?
I feel your pain. Several nights a week, a group of motorcylcists compete to see whose bike is the loudest. They’re on the street, I’m nineteen floors above. It’s still so loud that I have to pause my television until the bikers move on. God forbid, the traffic light is red because, of course, the racket doesn’t abate until the light changes. I'm told shooting them would be wrong. Any other ideas?
Unfortunately, most of the annoying late-night noises that are heard in my house emanate from me.