Apartment
My current place is not big, but it’s just the right size for me given my scant possessions. I’ve never been interested in owning a lot of things. I don’t like being obligated to clean stuff, or to replace it, or maintain it, or repair it, or upgrade it, or store it, or walk around it when I can’t store it, or worry about it being stolen.
All that is why I won't own a house. Even if I came into a substantial sum of money, I’d buy a nice condo instead. I’d give it a minimalist touch with the furniture and decorations, and I’d hire a cleaning service.
One advantage to owning a home; however, is that the property gives you a bit of a cushion between yourself and your neighbors.
This touches upon the matter of upstairs neighbors, so often the nemeses of apartment dwellers. Walls in apartment complexes can be thick or thin; sound-dampening or conducive to noise, but apartment ceilings always seem to be made from the thinnest gong metal and the tops of brand-new snare drums.
My upstairs neighbor is a young man who has recently taken up the ukulele, in much the same way as the Hindenburg took up passengers. Now, I’m not a musician, but I’ve heard music before, and if the thing he’s trying to play is actually not a viciously untuned ukulele, then it can only be the type of acoustic guitar that's been designed strictly for enhanced interrogations.
As an added treat, he sings. His apparent songs are invariably seven-minute-long emo catastrophes. And his voice: Imagine Biz Marquee trying to sing backup harmony on the Jar of Flies EP.
The above was an old man reference, I suppose. And here’s another: The young man upstairs makes the kind of sounds that make people throw their slippers at tomcats in the middle of the night.
Here’s the crazy thing: I think he’s actually streaming it. He’s streaming his awful music and singing…to someone out there on the Internet. In between songs, I can hear him talking to someone, and no one else is up there, and it sounds like he's making various attempts at between-songs banter.
Now who would listen to that? His stuff is really bad, but only merely bad, not bad enough to be so epically bad that it’s good, not like the Shaggs.
I’ve seen my neighbor a few times, and he’s a good-enough looking guy, so an uncharitable part of me posits that his streaming audience is just a handful of guys putting up with his sonic rubbish on the prospect that he might be an available twink, and subject to flattery, same as straight guys will do with admiring a profoundly untalented and good-looking girl streamer.
My issue in this spot is—and I’m not asking for advice here, I’m just venting—he’s not loud; the decibel level is fine, and it never approaches a level that would justify a noise complaint from me. He’s just unsparingly awful, and for a while he was carrying on for two or three hours a night. Me: I work hard all day; the last thing I want to come home to is several hours of out-of-tune emo ukulele caterwauling.
So last week, I started giving him an hour each night to get it out of his system, then after that point I started heckling him between songs. I felt that it was a fair compromise between doing nothing and making a frivolous noise complaint. I waited for a pause between songs, then I alternated between loudly and firmly stating “BOO!” and “YOU SUCK!”
So this week, he's kept his nightly practices down to less than an hour, and that’s been an improvement.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 11-11-2021 at 09:23 PM.