Them: Stop being a weirdo. Just be yourself.

Me: Make up your mind.

I'm randomly reminded that the other day there was a very loud boom. It didn't sound like thunder and there didn't seem to be any lightning. It had the frequency spectrum of an explosion, very full with a long tail, not a crack but really a boom with a long rumbling aftershock.

I have no idea what it was. We didn't hear anything about it in the local news, such as it is. My hope that it might have been the city records building exploding and canceling my property tax bill and various pending annoyances about permits was dashed. I suppose it could have been demolition of some kind, but it was a weekend afternoon. There were no sirens or signs of trouble.

In my neighborhood, we play a game we like to call "Gunshot or Firework???" This was more like "Bomb or Thunder???!!!???"

The other fun noises we've occasionally had:

We've had several car crashes. Those are easy to identify. Sound seems to carry down the street a fair distance, so it's not always clear where the car crash has taken place. But the way people drive in this neighborhood, it's inevitable. A car crash down the block sounds remarkably like it does in movies. Glass breaking, metal shearing and crumpling, and there's usually sharp tire squeals which lead into the actual crash medley, though sometimes I guess no one hit the brakes. There is an impact noise but either the collisions I've heard have been low enough speed that the actual impact has been drowned out by the higher-pitched noises of zones crumpling and so forth, or most car crashes don't have distinct impact sounds.

We get car stereo systems with subwoofers powerful enough to vibrate my house with enough severity to set off the burglar alarm. I don't get it, I really don't. Thankfully they've become rarer since COVID for some reason.

There are occasionally motorcycles traveling at approximately the speed of light circling the area, apparently in the belief that they can pull a Superman and return the neighborhood to the prehistoric past when apparently motorcycles ruled the Earth? Or maybe the drivers of the motorcycles are velociraptors?

There's infrequent construction noise, which I would accept as a matter of course save for the fact that it takes place before dawn sometimes. I can't get a contractor to return my calls, but apparently someone in the neighborhood is holding their loved ones hostage to get that kind of service from them.

One time, a transformer blew up on a pole just down the street. That was kind of neat, really. It was loud and slightly terrifying, but it was a very sharp crack, no tail at all. And then it looked a bit like Frankenstein was trying to animate something down the block for a while until the emergency crews got the power shut off, I guess. We didn't even lose power. Go fig. We've lost power because a squirrel sneezed seven blocks away, but a bona fide explosion didn't touch our power supply.

There is yelling. So much yelling. People in this neighborhood communicate everything by yelling at the top of their lungs. If anyone ever proposes to their inamorata on my block, it'll go like this:

Person 1: "FUCK! I REALLY FUCKING LOVE FUCKING BEING WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER!"
Person 2: "THAT'S SO FUCKING SWEET! I FUCKING LOVE YOU TOO! OH HOLY FUCK, ARE YOU? ARE YOU FUCKING GETTING DOWN ON YOUR MOTHERFUCKING KNEE? OH FUCK!"
1: "CLARDELLA, WILL YOU MAKE ME THE HAPPIEST FUCKING ASSHOLE IN THE FUCKING WORLD RIGHT NOW?"
2: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT! OH MY FUCKING GOD RIGHT NOW! FUCKING FUCK YES I FUCKING WILL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!"
The crowd: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT THEY FUCKING SAID YES! FUCKING AWWW! FUCK!"

But at a climactic moment like that, one could almost understand why the yelling would be necessary. Nothing like that ever happens though. What does happen is that one person will have a screaming argument with themselves, apparently, on the subject of god only knows. Or they'll have a shouting contest with a person with whom they are on the telephone, on speaker while holding it to their chins like they fully expect to sense the other party's depth of feeling by how their goatee vibrates. Or they'll walk down the street together shouting about the grocery list. Any and all occasions are perfect for yelling the word "FUCK" at the top of your lungs in this neighborhood.

The best part is that these people don't seem to live here. They come from other areas to shout outside my windows. Which is very civic-minded of them, of course; how else will I learn the news of the day or be treated to the edifying Greek chorus of the symphony of the city? It's like getting free poetry slam tickets stapled to my forehead by a guy who is doing primal scream therapy for his drug problem.

We also regularly have people wander through the neighborhood singing unrecognizable tunes at the top of their lungs, to give us a break from the obscenities. There's one person who is pretty good, actually. I respect the hustle, there. If you've got the balls to wander through my neighborhood singing along to whatever is playing on your mp3 player or whatever, kudos to you. I like your moxie. Sometimes I worry that maybe you don't have an mp3 player and the music may be coming from your untreated mental illness, but if that's what it takes, shine on you crazy diamond. I've been there, only I didn't handle it as well.

We have lots and lots of drugs, but they don't make much noise. We've had two occasions where someone who was having an extremely bad time of it spent an hour or so wailing on the street. I'm not judging. They were clearly in crisis. Others handled it, but it took a lot of wailing, and of course, since it was this neighborhood, everyone who was attempting to handle the situation were forced by municipal code to communicate with each other via yelling obscenities. I suppose I could have joined in, but I reserve my yelling of obscenities on steet corners for my birthday.

Our next door neighbors who aren't the dead are regularly raided by the police. I have no idea who actually lives there anymore. There used to be a couple who had a yappy dog and the wife had a voice that could cut glass. She communicated, as one might guess, entirely in Shakespearean sonnet. I am, of course, lying through my teeth: she communicated entirely in yelled obscenities that etched my kitchen windows and made the baby Jesus weep.

I haven't heard her in a while though, probably because, based on what little we've been told about happenings transpiring, she and her son had turned the garden shed into a drug warehouse. Fortunately for us all, it seems to have been opioids rather than meth, otherwise I would have assumed that any loud booms were the meth lab next door blowing up, if I had time to assume anything before my death by Pyrex shrapnel. She and her son were picked up in the first raid, which was noisy as one might expect. There have been subsequent raids, but nothing ever seems to come of them and they're much quieter, to the point where I almost hesitate to call them raids. They seem more like the police coming to the door and asking politely if any more drugs have shown up. I don't understand the criminal mind though, so who knows?

Our dead neighbors are very quiet, although during the summer months their caretakers are a bit noisy what with gas powered implements of lawn-care and so forth. And to be honest, most of the drug addicts keep pretty quiet too. It doesn't seem to be the addicts who are the ones who yell. In this neighborhood, who knows who the addicts are though.

Lastly and also leastly, at 3am or so on trash days, the city sanitation workers do their best to be quiet, by which I mean that they drive an incredibly loud truck incredibly slowly down the street, engaging incredibly loud hydraulic machinery every few feet to test the integrity of the garbage cans provided to us by the city, cans which I'm fairly certain were designed solely for the purpose of magnifying sound. The hydraulic machinery performs these tests by beating the cans like the bass drum in Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin, only less rhythmically. I'm not sure what happens to the garbage. Maybe they use the sound waves generated by the forceful striking of the cans to vibrate the constituent molecules of the garbage out of alignment with our spacetime, phasing them into another dimension and harvesting the resultant energy to mine cryptocurrency. Who can say?

Anyway, the hydraulic machinery replaces the cans on the street, or in most cases in the middle of the street, with a delicacy usually reserved for annexations of rival principalities by cadres of stormtroopers riding giant warthogs. Having generated the same sonic energy as the entirety of the Battle of the Somme, the garbage truck, which it must be remembered is so quiet in itself that its every internal combustion is only audible as close as the surface of Venus in a methane storm, moves three or four feet, an action which is accompanied by a noise comparable to the sound you might hear right before you go deaf while observing an erupting volcano, and then the process begins anew. Sleeping though this auditory onslaught is possible, but powerful drugs are involved and I've had terrible trouble sourcing them ever since my neighbors got busted.

So you can see why I found what sounded like a nuclear explosion in the next county to be worthy of remark. Or not. I'm not your mother.