Noisy Neighbors




There GoestheNeighborhood!By Jason Love

There GoestheNeighborhood!By Jason Love

A group of kids moved in next door. It was actually a big party that got out of hand one night, and everyone just decided to live there afterward. Last week, I saw them unloading a sound studio from their truck. They’ve been testing it around the clock for five days. It’s gansta rap. They must be the oppressed yuppie faction from the south side of Agoura.


The oldest of my new neighbors is about 20; the youngest, 16. None of them has graduated from high school mentality. They’re the kids who get in fights with their parents and decide to move away to Never-Never Land, the house next-door to mine.


These kids don’t keep the hours of working people. They wake up around noon to a breakfast of coffee and cigarettes and develop momentum as the day goes on. It begins at Party Defcon 5 around two in the afternoon, the "quiet" mode when you can hear every word they say. For the record, Sarah is having problems with Jack because he can’t lay off the pipe, and Dave is going to kick Bill’s ass for sleeping with his girlfriend. And all the while, the rap rages on.


q At dusk, they enter Party Defcon 2, and by midnight they are dancing on the tables again. Around three in the morning, the stoned laughter begins to fade off, and the party dies of exhaustion.


I’m writing because I don’t know what else to do. I have to open my window at night because it’s 150 degrees in the daytime, and my window points right at Never-Never Land. I’ve tried those squishy ear things to muffle the noise, but the beat is so loud that they just become mini-woofers inside my ear.


My wife forbids me to visit the house in person due to my poor record with diplomacy. I have a very slight threshold for morons. My life is a slalom course where it’s all I can do to steer clear of idiots. When we collide, it usually gets ugly. For instance, if I were to invest reason and logic in these kids and they were to say something like, "Chill, dude," that would be a collision.


At the risk of sounding like myself, I must say that it’s unfair for us to live side-by-side with people whose parents had no business breeding in the first place. You’ll find them doing 50 on the freeway, talking at full volume on their cell phones in waiting rooms, and partying at one in the morning on Wednesday night ON A PATIO 15 FEET AWAY! I wish we could place them all on an island and let them fend for themselves like in Escape From New York. Anacapa Island should work nicely; it’s already covered in guano.


Most nights, I lay in bed fanaticizing about techniques of killing the neighbors. It’s like the "Glad Game" in reverse. It may sound like an unhealthy process, but it scratches an itch on my soul, and I’m allowed to think whatever I want. When I meet a prudish person, for instance, I picture them naked because there’s nothing they can do about it.


Lying in bed with squishy woofers in my ears, I have hired a surgeon to sneak into the neighbors’ house and give them all frontal lobotomies; I have stuffed the neighbors with candy and served them as piñatas to unknowing children; and, just recently, I tied them to a 300-foot speaker and played the music so loudly that they all went deaf and began to talk like that lady on public t.v. who was always trying to teach us sign language: "banana"… "banana"… bye for now.


The part that hurts most is that there is nothing I can do about their living here. They are legal squatters on the public peace. I called the homeowners association, and they told me to call the police. I called the police, and they asked if I had tried "shooshing" them. When the police do come out, it’s a feather in the cap of today’s teen.


Dude, we had a double-kegger, and the police had to break it up…


I am further soured by the philosophical connotations: That these kids, who haven’t yet developed the concept of Other, are dictating my thoughts even in the slightest is an injustice of nauseating proportions. What right do they have to force their words into my mind? They might as well run into my living room and scream at the top of their lungs. Maybe that’s next. I feel entitled to a little justice, a law that allows me to pee on their doorstep every time they are noisy after midnight…


q Yes, I remember what it was like to be 16 and, contrary to the findings of Copernicus, have the universe revolve around me. The only difference is that I was holed up in a room in my parents’ house, where I only drove my family nuts. I didn’t have a patio that fit sixteen ungracious voices.


Just as there needs to be a parenting license to save us from the spoiled fruit of our loins, our zoning laws should address the needs of common courtesy. If you move into a neighborhood, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have neighbors, so you should be screened accordingly. Are you fit to have neighbors, or would it be better for you to live on Anacapa Island? I’m not asking that these kids tip-toe around for fear of disturbing Jason; I’m just saying that the world could do without teenagers.


If you have a teenager of your own, please don’t let ’em move out until they’ve learned the basics of how sound travels and the deleterious effects of pot on one’s laughter. Every time these kids "get their own pad," there is some poor soul next door praying that they move the hell back home.


And you never know what vengeful plots are hatching in his mind . . . –


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